Mysterious signal and a mysterious place
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ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. It's surprising to some of us that a gigantic signal of some upheaval can be spotted here on Earth, not out in the cosmos. And it takes a year, no less, to solve the mystery, even with all the high tech at our disposal. What could it be? The Science Show rides again. MUSIC

Before that mystery, we have another winner to recognise. And also in today's science show, a trip to Oxford and a great museum. Then some intimate news about mongooses. And finally, two walks in forests, one of which you'll never guess.

OK, our prize winner. Yes, we've had lots in the science show, as most prize givings we've listed have been crammed to the end of the year because of COVID. But here's the Bragg Prize student winner, Rina. And do note, she writes and speaks about the importance of the science and how it makes a difference.

Hi, my name is Rina Du and I'm a Yatent student at Abbotsley. So when I was younger, if you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said I wanted to be a butterfly.

So when I saw the prompt for this year's UNSW Student Prize for Science Writing, I decided to write it on butterflies, almost specifically butterfly counts. So when I was Googling, I found Brisbane's Big Butterfly Count, which is a major count, which is in Australia, which is really close to us. And along with their website and other sources, I wrote my essay mainly on the benefits of butterfly counts and why we do these.

So one of the benefits I mentioned on my essay was how it allowed scientists to detect changes in the environment. Because butterflies are very sensitive to change and they're also part of the food chain, it allows scientists to detect changes in the climate, predator levels and also levels of pollution, which can help them find issues in our environment and figure out how we can improve these issues.

Another benefit was well-being. Because many of these researchers are actually citizens, it means that even though they're not part of the scientific industry, they are still able to help out with research and benefiting our community and the environment.

And so because many of this research is conducted outdoors through like nature in forests or fields, this increases their connection to nature, increasing their wellbeing. And that's like an overview. And thank you for allowing me to be here. And thank you. Yay.

Amazing, Reena. Thank you for that overview. Sven Rogg, Dean of Science at the University of New South Wales, with Bragg Junior Prize winner Reena Do, which brings me to that mystery finally solved. Here's Carl Smith, who, by coincidence, is one of the editors of Best Australian Science Writing 2024. In September 2023, seismographs around the world went ping. BING!

They used by seismologists to spot earthquakes, explosions and other major rumbles but this looked different and a few hours later it happened again and then again and again every few hours for nine days.

But the closer they looked into this signal, the more bizarre it seemed. And now, after a year-long investigation, dozens of scientists working together have cracked this seismic mystery, and they've published their work in the journal Science. I spoke with Dr Stephen Hicks from University College London, one of the authors of this paper.

Yeah, so I guess it was first spotted by a few scientists in what are called dedicated seismic observatories, monitoring stations around the world, which are the highest quality. They're normally deep inside mountains or deep below the ground. So my colleagues first spotted this unusual seismic signal first, and then they got in touch with each other and they saw between Europe, one of the observatories in Europe, one in the US, they both saw the same thing. So then we

We got more seismologists involved and then one day after the event we kept seeing this signal coming in and every few hours we were refreshing the data and it was still there and we kept doing this and it lasted for nine days which is completely unprecedented. The signal looked nothing like an earthquake so completely unusual. We called it initially an unidentified seismic object because we didn't know what to attribute it to but then over the coming weeks and months we then thankfully got to the bottom of it.

And was there much concern in the early stages? I mean, if seismologists all around the world start detecting this bizarre signal, they get repeating for days on end. I imagine there would have been some confusion, but perhaps also some concern. One of the first results we had was to show that this signal was coming from East Greenland. So thankfully, it's a tectonically stable region. There's no earthquakes or volcanic eruptions there. So we could rule out, I guess, some sort of deeper, more malign source.

Having said that, at the same time as we discovered the seismic signal, we had Danish colleagues who have done lots of fieldwork in Greenland and they received reports of a tsunami in the area. So then we joined forces with the people who were looking at the event in Greenland. So then we could

relatively quickly identify a hypothesis as to where the signal was coming from. So given that there was a tsunami, there was a smoking gun. We're talking about tsunamis in fjords. Was anyone hurt? Was there any damage when this happened?

No, fortunately not. There's an island further out of the fjord called Ella Island and there's a research base there and that was hit by the tsunami and equipment was damaged there but fortunately no scientists were on the research base at the time so yeah it seems that no one was injured in this which is wonderful. There's some sort of archaeological heritage where there used to be some settlements in the fjord. Those old settlements were also damaged by the tsunami. Again those were long abandoned settlements

but that really shows that an event of this magnitude hadn't occurred for at least 200 years so it's a completely unprecedented event but there are also tourist cruise ships often traveling up into these particular fjords and thankfully at the time there were no cruise ships in the area otherwise the results could have been far more devastating

And so what happened? What caused this tsunami in a distant fjord in Greenland? And why did that set off the world seismographs? In the end, we realized working with our Danish colleagues that there'd been a huge landslide. So a mountain had collapsed down a glacier and into a fjord. And that mountain collapsed because this glacier at the base of it had been thinning by about up to 30 meters over the last couple of decades.

and so that mountain just wasn't able to be supported anymore. We call this a mechanism of glacial debuttracin. So that glacier had been thinning due to climate change. So climate change is the long-term factor which contributed to this. So anyway, so the mountain collapsed and then it

all that material, that debris then slid down this steep 45 degree glacier which is only 10 to maybe 100 meters wide. It's a really narrow gully but it's plunging into the fuel at a 45 degree angle and so that landslide was just able to pick up more momentum, more material from the ice and then make a giant splash into the water. A bit like giving your bathtub a bit of a hit on the water surface creating that giant splash

up to 200 meters high. So that was the initial tsunami and so that caused quite a bit of damage in the field itself. So then the mystery was, okay, we know a tsunami has happened, but why is this seismic signal still persisting for nine days? Tsunamis normally die away within minutes to hours.

So then it really took a detailed model, a detailed simulation of how that tsunami evolved. And to do that, we needed to understand the detail, the makeup, the geography, the water depth in the fjord. We had to have a really fine scale knowledge of that. And then we were able to reproduce the fact that when that tsunami wave initially spread out, then you had the waves crashing on the opposite side of the fjord. This fjord is only a few hundred meters wide.

so you have the landslide going in sort of perpendicular at 90 degrees to the long axis of the fjord and then it sends a wave outwards and most of that energy gets reflected off the other shoreline and then it bounces back and forth and this is what we call it a standing wave in the fjord and that really lasted for nine days traveling back and forth every 90 seconds or so

A wave 200 meters high. Just imagine. Dr. Stephen Hicks, research fellow in computational seismology at the University College London with Carl Smith. So many strange things happening with climate change. Moving mountains. So catching up with seismology and next another field we've neglected. Dating protocols in mongooses. They can't go online. So what can they do for love?

David Lartey from the City University of New York has been studying lots of different species to see how they affect native populations when introduced. He's with Paulie Newman. Yes, another animal that I'm looking at is the mongoose, the small Indian mongoose.

Looks a bit like a ferret. Yes. They were introduced to Australia to try to control the overpopulated rabbits there, but they failed to establish. They aren't in Australia, but they're in areas around Indonesia and the islands north of Australia and then on the mainland of South Asia. All introduced?

Well, on the mainland of South Asia, that's where they evolved. But they've been introduced by people to control rats in lots of tropical islands all over the world. So they go down into the rat's burrows, do they, and just kill them? Yes. And they have been successful at reducing rat populations in various places, like in some offshore Japanese islands and in Jamaica, Mauritius, other Caribbean islands besides Jamaica as well.

the US and British Virgin Islands, for instance. However, they've also been decimating local populations of endemic birds and reptiles. So it's not really a good thing. And so now all around the world, there are attempts to try to kill off the mongooses in various places. But you're looking at the evolution with mongooses. So what's going on? Well, I'm interested in how males and females interact in the mongoose because...

In Asia, which is their ancestral population, they're quite rare, and so they don't encounter each other very often. And so they have these specialized adaptations to be able to communicate with each other. So they have a scent gland where the males can put a mark in a particular place, and then the female will know where the male hangs out, and so that they can arrange to meet at some point.

And when they do meet, they mate right away. So the female does not exert very much choice like most mammals do. So most mammals, a female will choose whether she wants to mate with one male or another male. But when you have a very rare species, that doesn't work out very well because if she exerts some sort of choice and decides not to mate with a male, she may never run into another male again. And so it'd be better for her just to mate with the first male she comes across. And that's what they do.

So my question was, okay, just like the rabbits in Australia, everywhere they've been introduced, where they have established populations, they're wildly overpopulated. Presumably they don't have any predators. Right. They don't have predators. They don't have a lot of competitors the way they do in their ancestral environment. So places where humans are dumping lots of food, for instance, and these lush tropical islands.

They're extremely overpopulated. So my question is, what happens to their sexual system, their mating system now? Number one, if you meet individuals face-to-face, you don't need this long-distance communication of the scent marking anymore, right? So I always tell my students, if you in my lab were the only people I know and we live together, I don't need a phone. So their scent gland is basically like their phone, right?

And so I would predict that they would lose it. Then secondly, if females run up against lots of different males, they might actually start exerting some choice over who they mate with. And also to get pretty explicit here, if females are not exerting choice, then males are going to be mating with many females. And so their testes should get bigger. So you can predict that

Based on the mating system, you can predict how large the testes of a male mammal. And so I would expect that they would increase in size from South Asia, where they're rare, to all these tropical islands. And is that what you found? Yes, it is. So two of the three predictions came true.

Number one, their testes got larger. Number two, their anal glands, their scent marking organ became vestigial. They don't need to signal. There's so many females around. Yeah. And a matter of fact, in many places, they have become unusable. They've not only stopped scent marking, but they don't even have...

fully functional gland in order to do that. And that happened in the last 150 years. So they were first introduced to Jamaica, for instance, in 1872. And we have gone to Jamaica and to Hawaii and Mauritius and St. Croix in the Virgin Islands. And it's the same story. They were all introduced there from Asia and they have lost the size of their scent glands and the

function of it and their testes have increased in size. Now the one thing that we predicted that didn't happen is the females are not exerting choice.

And actually, I think that makes a lot of sense because a mammal brain is an extremely complex and integrated thing. It's very difficult for a new behavior to evolve, like female choice, for instance. Most likely, animals that exert choice over their mates

It may have taken even tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years for that choice to evolve. And so I wouldn't necessarily expect that to happen in just 150 years. Because in some ways you'd think, well, that's the first thing that would evolve because if they've got choice of doing anything, well, they've surely got choice of choosing a mate. Yes. So we as humans are remarkably plastic.

all we would have to do is decide to start making choices about things and we could just do it on the fly. But even though mammals are very intelligent and very plastic in general, they don't usually exhibit behaviors that have not evolved for the particular function that they're using it for. And so if you need a

a new behavior like females choosing among males, you're going to need a whole new neurological pathway for that. And it's going to take a long time to evolve that. Do these findings hold up for other animals? I mean, can you look at the size of the testes in animals? Yes. So you would predict that basically animals where either females aren't exhibiting a lot of choice, they're not choosing who to mate with, or

males are coercing females, like for instance in mallard ducks or in orangutans, you would expect males to have larger testes. For instance, let's take bats. So there are two main kinds of bats, megabats and microbats we often call them. But if you look at the mating system of bats, monogamous bats have smaller testes and polygamous bats have larger testes. And that makes sense because

If a male is mating only with one female, he doesn't need huge testes. Whereas if a male is mating with many females, then he does need larger testes. What a fun topic. Are you going to move on to other animals or is this going to be your life from now on? I haven't decided whether I want to find another one of these stories. I mean, I do love those stories of evolution in the historical time period. So I can't imagine that I'm not going to find something, but I just don't...

have the idea quite yet. We just got finished with the mongoose study in the last couple of years. So I'm still thinking about mongooses all the time and weaver birds, but we'll see what the future holds. Come back and tell me when you find out. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Thanks, Pauline. And we'll hear about those weaver birds next week. David Lassie from New York with Pauline Newman. Next, Oxford. ♪

The History of Science Museum in Oxford is turning 100 and it's really worth the visit because it has strong associations with Australia. Let's look around, guided by Canadian Dr Sumner-Brown.

What brought you to Oxford? Study. I came to Oxford in 2015 to study a Master's in Medieval Studies and I continued on for a PhD here as well. So it may be surprising to find a medieval historian in a history of science museum, but there is a connection, I promise. Science didn't just exist in the 19th and 20th centuries. It has a long history that stretches back, well, since humans started thinking, I would argue.

Where are we? It says lots about time in this, the entrance to the wonderful building, which is on Broad Street, in other words, next to the Sheldonian, right in the centre of

of classical Oxford? Well we are in a building that was first known as the old Ashmolean building. It's now the History of Science Museum after the Ashmolean collection moved out. But since 1683 when it was opened formally, it has really been the home for science in Oxford. It was built to be the centre of the new experimental science methodology

So we have a 17th century laboratory in our basement. The gallery that we're standing in right now was used for lectures, and the gallery up above us was used to contain specimens of natural history for people to study. I love the classical pillars. It's almost Greek on the inside, isn't it? It does. I have to say, those are not actually original to the building, but we are trying to evoke our classical heritage.

And what about time? What are we doing here? So this is a fantastic new display of the original collection that was donated to the museum. It was given by a man named Lewis Evans, who was an independent scholar and a businessman. He was a chair of a papermaking company.

and was fascinated by all the different ways that people had devised to measure and keep time. So we've got a wonderful display here of sundials, astrolabes, celestial globes, astronomical compendia. You can tell with

the time with these instruments using suns, stars, even the moon in some cases. And so it's a fantastic exploration about time that we also thought this being 2024 and a hundred years since Lewis donated this wonderful collection to us to tell his story.

Yes, I'll come to what your plans are for the next hundred years, but it's quite interesting the way that technology affected the way we deal with time, because when you had puffer trains, in other words, railway services, even though people had their own local time...

Well, if you were trying to catch the 345 to Waterloo in London, you had to know the time pretty well. So that did influence things, did it not? As well as, of course, sailing. Oh, absolutely. And with the railways, of course, that's the great standardization of time because it's far too confusing for everybody to keep it in their own locality and still make the trains.

Some of our instruments here, if I bring you a bit closer, I'm pointing right now at this beautiful portable sundial that has all of these mini sundials within it.

The reason for all of those is that they give you the time according to different hour systems. So when this was made in the 17th century, if you were in Italy, you might measure time from the hours of the day, let's say, from the start of sunset, and you would count forward from there. But if you were in England, maybe you would measure daylight hours, and you would count your time based on when the sun rises and when it sets.

And so all of these different hour systems meant that it was very confusing to travel across. And so on the dials, these ingenious makers found a way such that you could measure time according to these different systems and take it with you wherever you went. Yes, indeed. On the other hand, if you were to use one or two of these sundials on a day like today and took them outside...

What would happen? Well, I think you would have to use your own internal clock on a day like today. We have a very typically English day, misting, probably visibility, can't see more than a kilometre, I don't know. Yes, so what's been the public reaction to these sorts of things? Do the young people think, God, how weird, walk on, or are

Are they fascinated to find out how other generations actually told the time? Well, if I'm being honest, the reaction is mixed, of course.

I think we've had a very positive reaction to it. What we've done differently with this display of the instruments is we've placed them in this beautiful case that really lets you appreciate the beauty of them. These are very striking instruments that I wanted, or we wanted, I should say, people to come in and look at it and say just what you've just said. Oh, that's so strange. That's so beautiful. What is it? What does it do?

And so the purpose of this display is to draw you in and give you that moment of encounter. Because frankly, how these instruments work is actually quite complex and it introduces you to an entirely new world of science, of time, of thought. But you need to first have that moment of interest. And I do think people have come and found that moment of encounter and interest quite exciting. Splendid. Where are you taking me next?

Well, why don't I take you right across the room to our collecting COVID display. Collecting COVID? Oh, I see. Yes. Well, don't worry. We're not collecting the disease itself. Instead, what I'm showing you here is the third installment of a fantastic long-running project that we've had since almost the beginning of the pandemic to collect the material culture that has been produced by the pandemic.

And so this is the third phase, which is more forward-looking as what is our future in a post-COVID world. But it's been an amazing project in which our fantastic curator has been collecting everything from, you know, the famous Barbie doll of a professor named Sarah Gilbert, who led the search for a vaccine here. And she was the one who was applauded in Wimbledon when everyone gave a standing ovation. Exactly.

Exactly. And we have some of her story that she generously shared with us. We also have some of the actual pieces of tech that were produced in order to find the vaccine and which are also having future lives in the search for cures for other diseases.

And so it's been a community project that has shown really science in everyday life, but also that we are making history as we go through. It's not something that happened that we can look back on. We're living it. Indeed. And now? And now I am bringing you over to our beautiful model of our vision for the next 100 years at the museum. So I mentioned that we're celebrating 100 years.

In 1924, the university officially recognized a Museum of the History of Science

From that moment on, we have been a hub for many different collections, some of which, like the Lewis Evans Collection, have been focused on time and astronomy, but we also have an incredible collection of microscopes. And we have been the center, really, for the study of history of science in Oxford, which is a fantastic legacy to have. And going forward for the next 100 years, we want to build on that.

And I mean that literally and figuratively. As you can see in this wonderful model,

We are in a beautiful historic building, which is a fantastic place to introduce the history of science itself. However, it's not a very accessible space, and we really want to be open not just to scholars and students of the history of science, but to the general public. And so a barrier to access is a huge problem for us. And so we have this bold new vision of transforming our space

while absolutely preserving the incredible heritage that we have in the building, but making subtle and elegant transformations that mean that more people will be able to enjoy this and will have an even richer 100 years in front of us.

And so we've got plans for a lift, for a new welcome space, new staff areas, and we're very, very excited about this new prospect for us. I'll tell you one little story because we're referring to named Sarah Gilbert. I'm very, very keen on having public get to know who the scientists are. But one I brought here was the original boffin and his name is Robert Hanbury Browne.

And he came from actually round Hove and Brighton. And he normally just sailed on to Cambridge and did classics and did all that sort of predictable stuff. But unfortunately, a stepfather turned up who did away with the family's money. And he had to go to Brighton Tech to do electronics.

Fortunately, being a wonderful man and creative person, he was able, as war approached, to be part of the radar team. And from that, when he came to Australia for various reasons, because many of the radar team went to Australia to work on radar, he then turned to astronomy and was the professor of astronomy at the University of Sydney for 27 years.

But when he was, during the war, working on radar, there was a famous incident when Churchill turned up. Churchill walked into this vast sort of warehouse type, huge area where they were developing stuff. And suddenly, Hanbury Brown, barely in his late 20s, said...

Prime Minister, would you please put out that bloody cigar? Haven't you seen the petrol cans? I'm terribly sorry. So I think it was Churchill and possibly one of the top people in the RAF dubbed him the boffin, and that was his autobiography. So we got the original boffin, and when he came here into this museum, the staff knew and almost knew

genuflected and looking at this wonderful man anyway where next i want to see a bedpan you want to see a bedpan i'm very keen on seeing a bedpan by the way hambury brown is um was he's dead part of the family of sir bernard lovell and general bank so you have to keep dropping names otherwise right downstairs and i'm passing something that my son would be very interested in the

Evolution of the camera. Photographing Alice. Oh gosh. Well, that's a clue, of course, to the question I'm about to ask you. Who the mathematician was who worked out the numbers of analyzing elections. In other words, the maths of voting. A professor of maths here. Do you remember? Is that the man known to most of us as Lewis Carroll? Exactly.

Charles Dodson was his professional name as a mathematician at Christ Church. And he was very fond of photography. And there's a picture of him. But Alice Riddell, who was the original Alice in Wonderland. And of course, so he also developed, as we say, sophology. In other words, the science of voting in Wonderland, as it's always been. Take me further. Oh, sanitation and hygiene. We're getting close. And over here...

Yes. There we go. Here we have our famous bedpans from the William Dunn School of Pathology that were involved in the great effort to create penicillin as a viable drug for treatment in the Second World War. And they were doing it during a time, as you implied then, when there was practically no apparatus. You had to make do, you had to cope. And so if you were making from the mould...

the penicillin that was going to be used as a medicine, they made it in bedpans, great containers, which of course wouldn't leak particularly. But there we have the picture of the great Australian Howard Florey, who helped invent the Australian National University as well as doing the work on penicillin. And Ernst Chain,

Flory and Chain got the Nobel Prize. And I once interviewed what you've got down here, very, very good, Norman Heetle. Now, Norman had been vaguely ignored, but he was the genius who took the bedpans and various other bits of technology so that you could make this. It was a technology thing, not just a science thing. And eventually, the University of Oxford gave Norman a special award.

Doctor of Science degree, didn't they? Well, that was very good of them. The least they could do, I would think. A bit late in the day, but nonetheless. But nonetheless, better late than never, I guess. Yes, and so in this display, we have some of the original bedpans, including one of the original cultures of...

I thought you just hadn't washed the dishes. Alexander Fleming, I mean, he clearly had a strong stomach to look at a bunch of mould and think, aha. He was a bit of a lazy bugger, actually. I don't think he should have got the Nobel Prize for the rest of them.

Well, I can't comment on that. But that's one of the original cultures. One of the original cultures that was used by the team in developing penicillin as the wonder drug or miracle drug, as it was then known. And so we have a few different types of pen, which really show the ingenuity at the time. You have to use what's available. But also, if you can look at some of these beautiful photographs of

of the penicillin girls who were responsible as lab technicians for developing the cultures, you needed an awful lot of them. And I believe when it was in its early stages, for example, they needed about 2,000 liters of culture fluid to treat one case of sepsis.

And so it wasn't just about finding the magical, seemingly magical properties of the drug. It was about manufacturing it in a way that could be scaled up to genuinely treat hundreds, thousands of people desperately in need of something like this. And also in the display here, you have a picture of one of my heroes. And it illustrates Howard Florey and the ways in which he set up

this most fantastic outfit because the people who joined him, including Dorothy Hodgkin, she got the Nobel Prize, you know, as he did. And she did some wonderful work on analysing structures. And it says here, Dorothy Crowford Hodgkin led a separate Oxford team which determined the structure of penicillin in 1945. Her work on penicillin and large organic molecules was rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964-1965.

And then she went to teach Margaret Thatcher here. She did. Apparently, Margaret Thatcher kept a portrait of her. I mean, that is... But I have heard it said a few times. I don't know how Dorothy would have felt about that. I'm not sure because the politics weren't matched exactly. When I interviewed Dorothy Hodgkin, it was on her farm in North Oxford.

And the farm was full of refugees from what was once called Czechoslovakia. She was giving them sakka, in other words, a place to go to be safe against the authoritarians. But yeah, it's amazing. Military medicine, public health. Oh, that's interesting. Typhoid, travel medicine. A rising threat, tackling typhoid now.

and testing in Oxford the danger of infection. A great big range from telescopes and telling time to looking at disease and public health. Absolutely. One of our missions is to collect the science that is ongoing in Oxford. And as the university continues to grow as a centre for discovery, it means that we get to be right there when it happens, when these fantastic new developments occur. And if we're very lucky, we're able to pinch a few of...

the materials that they are using. And so it's a hugely exciting place to be. And so being at this wonderful place as a history of science museum, I think it's a fantastic opportunity to tell not only a very long history, but also a very forward-looking history. As I said, we're living through it right now, and we need to remember that people hundreds of years from now are going to want to learn about what it is that we know. Yes, the exhibition is so personal. And over here,

Are those eyeballs or ping pong balls? No, ducks. Floaty ducks. Come on. What are they? Well, I mean, no museum is complete without a gift shop. So we have very casually strolled over to our fantastic gift shop where you can find many...

many a souvenir to do with science and our displays, including little rubber duckies in the form of Albert Einstein, astronauts, and so on. And if you can picture in your mind's eye a wonderful blackboard hanging on a blank wall right there, we do have Einstein's blackboard that he wrote on during a lecture delivered in 1931, I believe.

Really, we have two blackboards. One has writing on it and one, unfortunately, remains blank. Not to demonstrate a black hole, unfortunately. Sometime in its longest history... The cleaner came in and wiped it. It did. They did. But it's an important story nonetheless. And we can only imagine what might have been written on that blank blackboard. Presumably, you get lots of

visitors from Australia and we also have listeners in the United States, all over the world, Canada, where the Science Show began. And so what they can do is just rock up and see you're open seven days a week. We are open Tuesday to Sunday in the afternoons. Entry is free and everyone is welcome. Brilliant. Thank you very much. My pleasure. Thank you for joining us. Dr. Sumner-Brown, helping celebrate the 100th birthday of the History of the Science Museum in Oxford.

And that name I mispronounced, having just got off the plane from Sydney only two hours before, was Dr Norman Heakley, the other genius behind penicillin, along with flory and chain. Now let's leap from Oxford to Hobart and meet Simon Grove, who's often at the museum there and at the University of Tasmania. His new book is a delight. And Simon, what's the full title?

The book is called Seasons in the South, a Tasmanian naturalist's journey of discovery and recovery. Wonderful title for a book. And Simon, I was out last night discovering with a group of people led by somebody called Gershwin, Lisa Ann Gershwin, whom you know, one of the world experts on jellyfish. But she was, in fact, during the night, shining UV light into the trees to show up what possums and other creatures looked like.

in a different aspect. Now, the reason I mention that is this fine detail of looking at something with care to see what you normally just don't glance at or notice. Has this been your kind of approach in Discovering Tasmania? That's a beautiful segue, Robin. That's exactly my approach to Discovering Tasmania. And I like to think that's how I've written about it in my book. I think one aspect of nature is it's fractal.

So if you imagine one of those Mandelbrot diagrams that you can sort of dive into on a computer screen, and the deeper you go, the more whole new worlds open up in front of you. I find that nature's like that. So getting up close and personal with nature, especially the little creatures, really broadens your mind, but also brings great peace and a feeling of connectedness with nature. And I think something that a lot of us could do if only they took that next step and got out there and had a look. Now, I remember the mathematicians boasting about fractals and showing how

tiny bits they had this demonstrated you actually see them on websites where little bits on the margin then produce other bits and so it grows on and when you look at something like a small island of Tasmania which people just get a one or two glimpses of perhaps from the mainland when did you get here 2001 just after 9 11 as it happens

Yeah, so I've been here, what is it, 23 years now? Where from? Did my PhD in North Queensland, James Cook University, but prior to that originally from the UK. So why come to Tassie? I came for a job actually. After my PhD I got a job at Forestry Tasmania as a conservation biologist, a research position looking at ways to better manage the forests, I guess. And was your advice effective? Did they take notice? No.

So I think sustainability is a journey, shall we say. But the elements I was looking at were largely around native forests and how the ecology of those forests works and is affected by disturbance and how we can better emulate those processes in management. And what do you think the state of the forest is now after what David Lindenmeier of the ANU in his book called The Forest Wars? I think the best place to work out the state of the forest is to look at the State of the Forest Report.

Because that's full of actual statistics of how things really are across Tasmania and across Australia. And what's your opinion? There's always improvement, but as I say, I think sustainability is a journey of continuous improvement. I would not say we're doing things all completely wrong. You should be in politics, you know. What is your speciality apart from trees? Is it mollusks? Invertebrates more generally, so insects is probably more so than mollusks, but I do dabble in both of those groups. Look, the mollusks are in the water.

And most of the insects are flying through the air. That's a huge responsibility to be looking at all of that together. We were talking about fine detail of observation before. And there are various writers who talk about that. Dylan Thomas, for example, writing a most wonderful work.

well, it's called Under Milk Wood, about one little village and the people therein and this fine detail and daughter of the amazing John Clark, similarly observing in fine detail. How do you do it?

I think when I talked about nature being fractal, you can focus on one little thing, but then you realize there's other little things to focus on and you can shift your focus. And there's always something to not just look at, but you can shift your senses as well. So if you use all your senses, that's what I love about nature immersion. You can use your sight, you can use your sense of hearing, sense of smell, sense of touch.

Just immerse yourself in nature and there's always something, even in your garden, there's something to look at. And if you go out into Tasmanian nature, which is so rich, so diverse, you'll never be bored again. Where do you go? I love the mountaintops, especially in the summer. I don't really care for them when they're covered in snow. You can't see any of the creatures that live there. What do you find up there in the summer?

There are all sorts of species whose life cycles are attuned to the fact that the summer is pretty short on the mountaintops, so they've really got to get their act together and everything's happening around about December, January. You get the endemic mountain cicadas zizzing away,

You get flightless grasshoppers. The idea is that if you've got wings and you're a grasshopper and you're on a mountaintop, you might very well get blown off. So a lot of species on mountains have evolved to be flightless, perhaps for that reason, perhaps because it's also energetically hard to produce wings. And if you're on a meagre diet that can only eat for a few months of the year,

That's one reason. There's lots of flightless insects. There are endemic earwigs that live under the stones on the very tops of mountains. There are jewel beetles. You think of jewel beetles as bright denizens of heathlands and maybe the tropical rainforests, but even on the mountaintops there are jewel beetles and some of these are endemic. There are many visitors, and I'm reminded of the shearwaters, the birds who come from a long, long way away.

and choose this place and arrive here if the winds are kind. On the other hand, if there are fierce southerlies, you find them, sadly,

dead-on southern beaches of Victoria and New South Wales. But if they do arrive, they go down various burrows and they produce little chicks. Have you looked at them? I haven't looked at those chicks, but you know what? There's a whole ecosystem down there, including quite a few insects that live in the burrows of birds, live in the burrows of wombats. There's a thing called a wombat fly that presumably feeds on wombat poo.

And some of those chicks don't make it. If they die in the burrow, then they're going to form carcasses, which are focal points for a whole new ecosystem of recyclers. Your book looks at not just the seasons, but each month. Why did you choose to do that? I wanted to have a seasonal approach because it really does help to

ground you if you know what's going on around you at a particular time of year and effectively months make nice 12 nice round chapters. How's that? Of course, it makes a very simple way of doing it, but I just wondered...

Were you thinking of the person, the reader, who wants to go out at a particular time to explore, and there's a guide in your book for each part of the year? That is the case. It's interesting how some people devour the book from beginning to end, and others just dip in. They have it and say, OK, it's now August, I'm going to read August. And they'll wait until September before they read September. So yes, it has got those seasonal vignettes, which...

certainly help ground me and give me a strong sense of place. And I'm hoping that's what they'll do for the readers as well. What's special about Tasmania for people on the mainland who've not been here? So much. I think the wildness, for one. And as a naturalist and, yeah, lover of nature, I think it's the sense of deep time you get through being in Tasmania and loving the nature.

learning the backstories of the creatures that live here whether it's the rainforest trees or the little creatures that live in these places. There's a little thing called a moss bug. Tiny little creature, you wouldn't spot it. I find it very hard to spot as well. They're only two or three millimetres long, they live in moss.

But they've been doing that since the days of Gondwana. They can't fly, so you get moss bugs in Tasmania and in southernmost parts of South America, which were once all connected in the same continent, Gondwana. They've been doing their thing, just hopping from one moss clump to the next, as Gondwana split up and the continents went their separate ways. So they're now divided by the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, yet at one stage they were

living alongside each other and that's all they do. So that sense of deep time that you get through knowing Tasmania well, really grounding. Really grounding indeed, literally. And you've got the continent of what's now called Australia and you had South America. I remember when we went to Chile, the botanists were allowed, after the regime changed,

to look around to see various native plants, actually, to see which ones were matching those in Australia. What about Antarctica? Was that attached to us as well? Antarctica was attached to us, yes. That was really the stepping stone between South America and Australia back in Gondwana days. So until about, it's thought about 35 million years ago is when we finally discovered

So yes, Antarctica was once not ice-covered at all, and that's probably the ancestral home of a lot of the creatures that currently live in Tasmania and the southern parts of South America. Simon Grove, his book is called Seasons in the South, a Tasmanian naturalist's journey of discovery. And another name I nearly mentioned with that skill of observation was, and is, Lauren Clark, whose series Fitzroy Diaries on Radio National was such a triumph a couple of years ago.

A little more from Simon next week, but let's end this time on another exploration of wilderness. And I bet you a fortune you won't guess, unless you already know where this forest walk is situated. Here goes. She woke early on her birthday. The birds were calling in the garden as dawn crept around the blinds. He snored on beside her, his soft, whinnying snore.

As she lay in bed, in the warmth of nothing to do, she was thinking of mortality. Not so surprising on a birthday, another year on the clock. Mortality, eternity, infinity have ever voided the mind, she reflected. Time and space without end challenge logic and reason, just as humanity knew it faced the obverse. A finite span, punctuated by death, non-existence.

People had tried to make sense of it as best they could, of course, she knew, creating religions and philosophies and forming scientific theories of time and space, even of parallel universes and realities, although somehow these didn't help much when you were stuck in the one you were in.

And yet, she considered as she lay there, had not mortality marked humanity as different from its gods, even superior in a way, as human follies passed into time while those of the fickle, irascible gods were eternal. She slipped on her robe and went barefoot from the room. There was an early stillness through the house that she loved in the muted fall of foot as if on trimmed turf.

The glass wall of the living room gave its green and pleasant vista of the woods behind. She picked out her favourite tree, the Japanese maple, in full leaf, perfection of form and balance. She tucked her feet up under her on the sofa and gazed out and wondered if the purpose of her existence was to admire this tree, in which case, what did it mean if she outlived it?

she put the kettle on for tea there was a congenial ritual to its preparation that was considered beneficial it framed the day as did meals and drinks the kettle was a vintage whistler that she liked she warmed the pot and put in two teaspoons in case he woke and wanted a cup

She poured in the boiling water, the vapour twitching her nose, found the tea cosy she had knitted with the big ruby strawberries on top, cloaked the pot and waited for the tea to draw. She took her time. It was her birthday after all and there was no need to hurry. Not that there ever really was anyway.

She poured the tea into her favourite cup, the cornflower blue one, delicate as a nautilus shell, with the white seaside daisy pattern on it, added a dash of milk, and went outside.

It was a wonderfully cool morning in the hills. Rags of mist lay forgotten in the crooks of valleys. The treetops were stills, and above them, in the hazy early light, the clouds curled in dreaming pillows. Gems of dew adorned pine needles. The steam from her cup rose and drifted off like half a question.

There was so much time for everything, for the steam to dissipate before her eyes and to watch each tendril fade. She sipped, the cup warming her hand. When she finished, she set it down on the garden table where they had their wine at dusk

and walked down the garden. She reached out to the maple and touched its trunk as one might the cheek of a lover. How could something so old still be so sapling smooth as if it could be young forever? Her trailing fingers left it and she meandered on along the narrow path with the forest thick and lush by either shoulder

She felt the humus and soft shreds of bark beneath her toes and thought this was how it was to love. As she strolled, she wondered how they filled up all the hours. There was an endless horizon of them, days, years, decades. What did they do with all that? They ate, read, walked in the woods, watched films. She wrote poems and he took photographs.

They devoted a lot of time to selecting wines and pored over vintage recipes. They read, they played squash and swam in the pool. They worked in the garden and watched the roses bud, bloom and shrivel to hips. They mulched, composted, grafted and pruned. They enjoyed their own potatoes, tomatoes and plums.

Sometimes they made love, other times they went on picnics. They travelled all over the planet, even ascended Olympus Mons. They visited friends across the valley or in town, and sometimes friends came to dinner and they were talking to the small hours of politics and authors and joke about some silly new fad in art.

Later the two of them would sit and pick over it all. It was engaging, nice, and past the time. There was time for it all, and all in time. Nothing was ever early or late. Things happened, and the time passed. But there was so much of it, with unimaginably more to come.

She followed the pathway down through the woods. Animals, including leopards, dingoes, bears and wolves, were increasing in numbers and could well be about, not that that was any real concern. They delighted in their presence and duly reported their sightings. She threw back her head and looked up.

If you peered very closely, you could see the ultra-fine membrane of their region's biodome. Beyond it, two tiny moons whirled around their planet. Winding to the bottom of the valley, the path led to their little stream and she lingered by it. She touched the moss on a log. It was so soft it tingled her fingertips.

She dangled her toes in the stream and giggled at how icy it was. As she did, the encrypted message she had been expecting came in from the society. Her gift was on its way. Happy birthday, the chair said. Where, pray, was that forest? I'll give the answer next week. It was read by the author just then. Suggestions most welcome.

We'll also go to the zoo and hear, just in time for Christmas, about lots more poo. Beware, by the way, of incontinent reindeer overhead. Productions for The Science Show by David Fisher. And thanks as ever to Roy Huberman, Timothy Nicastri, Bella Troppiano and Simon Branthwaite. 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.