Host: Benjamin Thompson
Welcome back to the Nature Podcast. This week, the effects of radiation on quantum computer chips…
Host: Nick Howe
And attempts to execute ageing computer code. I'm Nick Howe.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
And I'm Benjamin Thompson.
[Jingle]
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Once again, this week, we'll be bringing you our coronavirus-specific segment, Coronapod, later on in the podcast. As ever, if you're here just for that, have a look at the timings in this week's show notes so you can skip straight to it. Otherwise, stick around for lots more non-corona science.
Host: Nick Howe
That's right. In fact, first up, we've got a story about quantum computers – something we cover quite a lot. And that's because it's always hoped that someday these machines will harness the weirdness of quantum physics to do all sorts of calculations that would be impossible on so-called ‘classical’ computers. At the heart of these machines are quantum bits, or qubits, and these can be made in different ways. For example, superconductors are being used by big tech firms like Google in their quantum computers. At incredibly low temperatures, electrons can pair up to form what are known as Cooper pairs, and these allow a material to conduct electricity without resistance, known as superconductivity. Quantum properties of superconductors can then be harnessed to ultimately make qubits. Now, in order to perform quantum calculations, you need multiple qubits talking to each other. But these things are notoriously sensitive, and if one gets disrupted it can cause the whole calculation to break down. This week in Nature, a team of researchers has been looking at one of these sources of disruption and what can be done about it. One of the members of the team is Antti Vepsäläinen from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US. Reporter Lizzie Gibney gave him a call to find out more and began by asking what kinds of things can upset these delicate qubits?
Interviewee: Antti Vepsäläinen
Basically, anything can cause these disruptions. The most common sources of errors, for example in our types of qubits, is fluctuating magnetic fields. Then there can be some charges in the superconducting material. For example, broken Cooper pairs that form quasiparticles, they can cause all kinds of disruptions in the delicate quantum state, and the result of the computation is wrong.
Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney
With things like magnetic fields, presumably in a lab, you can account for that. You could have some kind of shielding. But the quasiparticles, do we have any idea of what might be causing them?
Interviewee: Antti Vepsäläinen
There has been a long-lasting issue of there being way more quasiparticles than one would think there exists. There have been some suggestions in the literature that ionising radiation from the environment could create quasiparticles and other disruptions in the system.
Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney
So, where does this kind of radiation come from?
Interviewee: Antti Vepsäläinen
So, there are many sources of ionising radiation in the environment. For example, there can be nuclear decays in any materials around us. I mean, it's usually not harmful to people, but it can be strong enough to cause errors in qubits. So, just impurities in concrete can cause ionising radiation. And there are also cosmic rays, so those are very high energetic particles coming mostly from the Sun.
Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney
And what would it do when those particles hit the qubit then? What does it do to the superconducting material?
Interviewee: Antti Vepsäläinen
So, our qubits are formed usually from two materials – aluminium and silicon. And when a high-energy particle from concrete hits this silicon chip, it causes a lot of absorption of energy. That energy propagates through the chip. It's like a shockwave in the lattice of atoms. And then it finally makes its way to the aluminium where the qubits are located, and that energy is enough to break those Cooper pairs that formed a superconducting material and form quasiparticles.
Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney
So, there's a good theory for why radiation might impact qubits. How did you go about testing this experimentally?
Interviewee: Antti Vepsäläinen
In order to see how strongly this radiation affects actual qubits and their coherence – that's basically their lifetime – we inserted a radioactive sample made of copper-64 right on top of the qubits we had in the chip. And then we cooled down these qubits and started measuring their coherence. In the beginning, the coherence time of these qubits was very short. That was because the radiation from our source was very strong. However, after several weeks, the radiation from the source had become much weaker, and then we could measure that the coherence times of the qubits had increased dramatically.
Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney
And what about for cosmic rays? Was there anything you could do to test how they affected your qubits?
Interviewee: Antti Vepsäläinen
The problem with the cosmic rays is it's not easy to artificially generate them. However, we can measure the intensity of those cosmic rays quite easily in the laboratory. And then using a simulation, we could simulate both the effects of copper-64 and the cosmic rays, and from there we could deduce how big an effect should cosmic rays have on the qubits.
Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney
So how big an effect did you predict the ionising radiation would have? So, if things like temperature changes in the magnetic fields were not an issue, how long would the qubits live if radiation were their only problem?
Interviewee: Antti Vepsäläinen
In our qubits, approximately, their lifetime is limited to four milliseconds. Now, that's quite a long time compared to the best coherence time, so contemporary devices which is approximately 500 microseconds, but it's sure that these lifetimes need to increase.
Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney
So, currently, it's other kinds of sources of error that are limiting the quantum computers, but in the future, it could be radiation. So, do you think this is something that quantum computing scientists are going to have to take into account. Are we going to see quantum computers all in big lead boxes, for instance?
Interviewee: Antti Vepsäläinen
Well, that's definitely a possibility. In our experiment, we showed that you can reduce ionising radiation from the nuclear decays in the laboratory by building a lead shield, and we showed that it had a statistically significant effect on the lifetime of the qubits. However, cosmic rays are highly penetrating. With them, it's harder to mitigate them by just shielding. You would need to go underground mines, for example, to do your experiment. Fortunately, there are also some ways to change the designs of the qubits so we can also try to use engineering to go around this problem now that we know and now that we have shown that it exists.
Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney
Given that concrete is a rather ubiquitous building material, that has got to be quite a pain if you want to actually build a quantum computer in the future, no?
Interviewee: Antti Vepsäläinen
Oh, yeah, that's true. I mean, it's possible to filter this radiation building a lead shield. Of course, the other option is to start using wood, for example, for your laboratories, which don't have these heavy impurities which can then go through nuclear decays and cause radiation.
Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney
It's just another thing that people have to think about making when they’re making quantum computers.
Interviewee: Antti Vepsäläinen
There are many things and many more small details. We definitely think this ionising radiation is one of them which you nearly need to take care of in the future.
Host: Nick Howe
That was Antti Vepsäläinen. You can find a link to his paper in the show notes.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Time, now, for Coronapod, but if you want to skip ahead to the non-corona content then take a look in the show notes for the timings of everything that's coming up. Right now, though, I'm joined by Noah Baker and Amy Maxmen to discuss the latest COVID-19 updates. Hello to you both.
Amy Maxmen
Hi.
Noah Baker
Hi there.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
This week, we're going to be talking about something we've touched on several times on Coronapod and that is convalescent plasma. Now, last week there were rumours that the US Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, was going to authorise this treatment for emergency use. And it turns out that this is something that actually has come to pass. Amy, could you maybe just quickly talk us through what that means and the timeline of what's happened.
Amy Maxmen
Right, so the FDA gave emergency use authorisation to convalescent plasma this past weekend, so that means that patients can now request it and doctors can give it to people –similar to compassionate use. This isn't yet an approved therapy, but it's authorised. You can use it because of this emergency. Now, this is kind of a tricky one for me because, as we talked about when I did my story way back in March, this is a therapy that holds some promise and also, there's some nice benefits about it. We don't talk about pharmaceutical manufacturing. That means it's lower cost. It means it's abundant. It means countries that may not have access to things like remdesivir could have it. So, there's lots of reasons to be positive about convalescent plasma, which is why I was interested in it. But I was really upset about the way in which it happened.
Noah Baker
So, convalescent plasma has been being used in certain states, so this isn't saying it can now be used. There have already been allowances made for it to be used in the context of clinical trials, for example, and that's what we talked about way back in March.
Amy Maxmen
Yeah, some hospitals have been using it in Texas and New York, and it was kind of presided over by researchers. And a lot of this was not in a clinical trial, but at least it was a study context, so they were really observing closely what happened and keeping track of the data. The reason they did all this was hoping for an emergency use authorisation so that they could look at the results, which now they've done, and say something. So, one thing that came out of what we know so far is it seems to be relatively safe, so that, I think, is fairly well understood.
Noah Baker
But this first stage of approval for emergency use has ruffled feathers of a lot of scientists and a lot of science journalists. Why?
Amy Maxmen
Because of the way in which it was done. So, I noticed this this weekend. First, on Saturday, Trump accused the FDA as being part of the deep state for how slow they've been to accept and authorise new treatments and push forward vaccines. So, that was a pretty remarkable thing to say. It really undermines this agency whose job is to make sure that there are safeguards in place and that we look at the evidence and that the many drug companies out there can't make false claims. So, that's their job is to be really careful with this. So, first, he did that, and it sort of felt like this was a big push on the FDA to do this. And then with his announcement, let's see, Trump called it a ‘huge breakthrough’. Alex Azar, who's the head of Health and Human Services, he gave a speech calling it a ‘major advance’. And the FDA commissioner sort of said, ‘This is remarkable. It's a breakthrough.’ And they all cited this statistic saying, ‘35% reduction in mortality’. And I think for most people, including me, I would have thought something like 35 out of 100 people who might have died of COVID, now aren't dying, so that does sound like a major breakthrough. But I know enough from keeping track of convalescent plasma that that's simply not a known number. So, I think that was what is so upsetting to me, this narrative that, ‘Yay, we've got a breakthrough,’ because I think that's a political narrative that the administration wants to say and that's sort of what motivated it.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Yes, this number then, it does seem to have caused a lot of controversy from a lot of people in terms of just where has it come from? So, what do we know about this 35% then?
Amy Maxmen
You would ideally get a number like this from a clinical trial that had a placebo group that you could compare it to. But clinical trials have been really small, and most of them that are running aren't finished, and WHO put out a statement saying that it's too soon to make a pronouncement. So, the numbers that people are using, a lot of it is from the various studies around the world where people have been transfused, and they're kind of doing statistics around these studies that were not placebo controlled to try and say, ‘Does this seem to have a benefit?’ There was one report that came out. It's a preprint so that means it's not peer reviewed. It came out by the researchers that I covered in my story who have really kind of pushed this forward in the US. And they looked at 35,000 patients that were transfused, and that’s a big diverse group of patients with different characteristics, different stages of disease. So, they crunched all of this data and they picked it apart after the fact. But even in that paper, if you look at the results, and of course, everything has to be couched very carefully, which they did. So, they did do a fair job with the paper. It doesn't, at any point, say that there's a 35% reduction in mortality. It says things like, for patients who get plasma with high IgG levels – that's those antibodies we think are protective – the seven-day mortality rate is 8.9% versus for recipients of low IgG plasma, the mortality rate is 13.7%. So, they did these kinds of comparisons like this, and then they'll compare the groups to each other. But at no point is it 35% and, in fact, there's a New York Times piece where they went back to these authors of the study, and they asked, ‘Where's the 35% from?’ And the authors of the study said, ‘We have no idea where the 35% is from.’ So, FDA is saying they also have other data they're looking at, but none of that's published. So, that was sort of upsetting that the FDA commission has since put out a statement saying he was talking about relative risk and not absolute risk, but that still doesn't really get at this 35% number.
Noah Baker
Throughout this pandemic, we've talked a lot about how numbers can be represented and how numbers can be misleading and statistics can be misleading, and the importance of making sure that data is transparent and is from a place that can be verified. And now, there's this number that's floating around and no one quite knows where it's from, and someone like Donald Trump or a politician, they may not have the training to get those stats right. But I think there's a lot of heat on Stephen Hahn, who is the director of the FDA, because he's an oncologist, like he should know this, which I think is a big part of why there's been so much pressure on the FDA and so many sort of accusations of political interference here because this seems like something that he would not get wrong.
Amy Maxmen
If the FDA said, ‘let's issue an authorisation to use convalescent plasma,’ but they did so saying, ‘There's signals that it could be effective. It looks fairly safe. Let's collect more data.’ Had they said that, I would have been fine with it. But to use numbers, it gives this sense that there's some science behind this. And that clarification of, ‘I'm talking about relative risk versus absolute risk,’ that really doesn't do anything for the lay public or even for me to tell me what that number is. And sort of the super sad thing here is convalescent plasma could be really promising. And my big fear here is they hype this up, they call this a breakthrough. If I'm a patient, and I'm really worried about dying from COVID, I might not want to be in a clinical trial where I could get placebo, I want this breakthrough treatment, and therefore there won't be a clinical trial and therefore we will never really know if it was at all helpful or not. And that data could be so important. I mean, we've had so many cases. Wouldn't it be nice to have some answers? We're not going to get them with this kind of hype.
Noah Baker
Right, and I think that's one of the big problems at the moment is that although there are many reasons that authorising this use could be a positive move, if it was authorised a little bit later on then it might have given these clinical trials a little bit more of a fighting chance to actually get some results that we could work with.
Amy Maxmen
It causes so much harm, and it's just worrisome on so many levels. There's a reporter called Adam Feuerstein at STAT, and he had a piece where he said something like, ‘I've spent 20 years listening to biotech CEOs making nonsensical, inflated claims about the benefit of their drugs, so it's weird and disconcerting to actually hear the FDA commissioner do the same.’ Like if this was a biotech company doing this, you might understand, but to have the FDA, whose sole purpose is really to look at the evidence critically, do the same is really nerve-wracking, and I think the bigger picture fear is Russia was pushing forward a vaccine that had hardly been tested, and it's sort of worrisome that is this what is going to look like in the months leading up to the election? Are we going to start seeing even a vaccine with very little data get pushed?
Noah Baker
And that's another really important question that I know has got people worried. Vaccines are another step beyond treatments, right, because vaccines are given to healthy people versus treatments are often given to people that are very sick in the first place. And so, it's kind of a different ethical situation to potentially rush through a vaccine. And I think as it stands, I don't know if anyone has any clear understanding of how the Trump administration could push through a vaccine because there are a lot of other regulators as well as just the FDA that are involved in that, and there's also corporate responsibility of the kind of biotech that will create these vaccines and it would be very bad for them to go ahead too soon for their future. But I do think it's a worry that really is very present. In the tweet that Trump sent at the FDA about convalescent plasma where he accused them of being part of the deep state – this sort of conspiracy theory about cronyism – he accuses the FDA of hindering the drug companies and holding up the development of new drugs and he mentions vaccines in that treatment as well. And he says that it’s clear that the FDA are trying to delay answers until after 3 November. So, in that one tweet, he mentions vaccines, he implies that he thinks the FDA is politically motivated. There's a lot of danger in one tweet there, and you can see where people are getting worried.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Just today actually, as we're recording this, it's been reported that Anthony Fauci, the head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of course, has suggested caution that we don't rush these things through, that it could hurt other vaccine trials as well. If one gets approved maybe ahead of its time, it means that the no one's going to want to volunteer for these other trials, and it could really, really hinder the process of making anything that we know to be efficacious in the future.
Amy Maxmen
It really makes him stand out to me. I feel like he's one of the sole scientists working with the administration who's actually daring to step up and say these things.
Noah Baker
Yeah, I totally see what you mean. And I can imagine as well that the FDA, we can talk about the commissioner, but the FDA is a large group have a lot of scientists, right. The number I've got in my head is 18,000 scientists that work for the FDA. And Trump accused them of trying to hold up public health, which is the polar opposite of what the FDA exists to do. And the only reason they might hold up a drugs company is to make sure that what they're producing is safe. And even if he's saying, ‘They're too slow, they need to be working hard or doing more,’ they might be a bit annoyed about that, but like that's a reasonable thing to suggest. But to suggest that they are actively trying to, in a politically motivated way, change outcomes, that's a that's a whole different kettle of fish.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Well, both, let's call it for another edition of Coronapod. But we're going to end this week on a slightly bittersweet note and, Amy, that is that you're going to be sort of leaving us for a while to head off for some adventures. What's going on with you?
Amy Maxmen
I've got an MIT Knight Journalism Fellowship. It's usually a year. This time, it's just four months, and it can be done remotely. I'm getting this wonderful, amazing opportunity to sort of step back from the news for a minute and think big picture about outbreaks in a way that the news doesn't always allow me to do, and also, I can be a little bit more comparative and see what can I learn about politics by seeing them through this lens. And then I'll be back. The other great thing is that Nature is going to let me have this time and then I can come back and jump back in.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Well, we shall miss you, Amy, and I know the listeners will too. But it's good to hear you'll be back again at some point in the not too distant future. So, for today's Coronapod, Amy and Noah, thank you so much for joining me.
Amy Maxmen
Thank you.
Noah Baker
Thanks, Ben.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Noah and Amy, there. Coming up, we'll be hearing about a competition for scientists to replicate the results of their old computer code. Before that, though, Dan Fox is here with this week's Research Highlights.
[Jingle]
Dan Fox
An elephant might never forget, but a forgotten species of elephant shrew has been found after almost half a century. The Somali sengi, or Somali elephant shrew, has been considered a lost species with no new specimens reported since the early 1970s. In fact, almost everything known about this creature has been derived from studies of anatomical specimens or by reviewing museum collection notes. But the Somali sengi wasn't lost at all, as a new population has been found, not in Somalia but in the neighbouring republic of Djibouti. A team of research successfully trapped eight Somali sengis and believe that there may be further populations in Ethiopia and Somalia. Remember to find that research over at PeerJ – the Journal of Life & Environmental Sciences.
[Jingle]
Dan Fox
Palaeontologists examining the five-metre-long fossil of an ancient sea creature called an ichthyosaur were stunned to discover the headless remains of a four-metre-long reptile in its stomach. The remains belong to a large example of a marine reptile called a thalattosaur. The condition of the unfortunate creature’s bones led the team to think the animal wasn't scavenged but hunted, lending weight to the theory that ichthyosaurs were top predators. The thalattosaur’s intact tail was also recovered from nearby sediments, suggesting the ichthyosaur attacked it using a grip and tear strategy similar to that used by modern killer whales. Hunt down that research at iScience.
[Jingle]
Host: Nick Howe
Many fields of research are facing what's known as the reproducibility crisis. We've covered it before in psychology where it's proved hard in some cases to replicate important results. In this next story, reporter Ali Jennings has been investigating how reproducibility issues might affect scientists’ computer code. Researchers have been taking part in a challenge to try and replicate past results using the code they wrote, in some cases, decades ago. Ali caught up with one of the organisers of the challenge, Nicolas Rougier, to find out how the competitors got on.
Interviewer: Ali Jennings
So, tell me about the challenge. What were you challenging people to do?
Interviewee: Nicolas Rougier
So, the idea was to try to run your own code that is at least ten years old. So, the condition was that the code was linked with a research paper. So, you take the article, and you try to get the same results. But even if you are the original author, it's not that easy.
Interviewer: Ali Jennings
What was the reason for choosing this kind of challenge in the first place?
Interviewee: Nicolas Rougier
The idea was to find a way to think about all the computational results we are publishing. Can you still use them ten years from now because the source code will be only runnable for a short period of time? At some point, it will die.
Interviewer: Ali Jennings
And just to play devil's advocate, what's the worst that can happen if we can't run that old code? Does it really matter?
Interviewee: Nicolas Rougier
Let's suppose your article is about, let's say, I don't know, a new model or a new deep learning algorithm where you get a fantastic result, but you can't run the code. Okay, you describe something partly inside your code, but is it really useful if nobody can run the code?
Interviewer: Ali Jennings
But so many changes happen over that ten-year span. How useful is it to be able to go back to a model that you made 15 years ago? Is that even going to be relevant to what you're doing now?
Interviewee: Nicolas Rougier
It depends on the domain. So, of course, if you're into, for example, deep learning, today, one month is already quite old. For some other domain, maybe, I don't know, you will rediscover old results and you say, ‘Oh, this is interesting, because now I can make the link with this new theory or this new model and so I need to run this code.’
Interviewer: Ali Jennings
You can't just copy and paste it back into a program that you're using now, ten years later?
Interviewee: Nicolas Rougier
You can try to do that but it probably won't work. So, for example, if you wrote your program in Python ten years ago, probably it was version 2. So, now, there is only version 3. Okay, you will install an old version of Python, but then you have to also fix all the dependencies. So, for example, if you are using a specific numerical library, you will have to also install it on your system. So, in the end, it’s not a matter of copy and pasting code because you want to run this code and this is where the older programs talked.
Interviewer: Ali Jennings
And did you try the challenge yourself?
Interviewee: Nicolas Rougier
Yeah, so I tried with my very first published program. It was in a magazine for Apple II, 32 years ago. I don't remember all the commands, so you look at what you have to type and you have no idea how to enter that into the computer. It took me like one month of investigation into Apple II and, in the end, I even managed to run it on the actual physical Apple II in my office. I had to find some floppy disks on Amazon, and it was really, really slow, but working. It was a lot of fun.
Interviewer: Ali Jennings
And what about your other entries? Did they run into the same kinds of problems?
Interviewee: Nicolas Rougier
One other failed because he kept the source code on an old kind of tape and, of course, if you don't have the reader, well, you cannot read it. Some people were careful enough ten years ago to do everything properly. One of the oldest entries was a paper that was published 28 years ago, but he kept everything, even a receipt with the exact price because at some point, I asked him, ‘How do you know the prices are much higher?’ Because he kept the receipt. Yeah, no, it was all kinds of different programs for different people. We were happy because we had a lot of participants and it helped to put a light on this reproducibility problem.
Interviewer: Ali Jennings
And now that it's done, do you think that's it for the competition?
Interviewee: Nicolas Rougier
So, the goal is maybe to try to do it ten years from now, and we'll see if it will be as successful as it was for this edition because now there’s an increase in the rate of modification of computer systems. So, I don't know in ten years from now if it will be more difficult or less difficult to redo the challenge.
Interviewer: Ali Jennings
But are we at least trying to do something to tackle the problem?
Interviewee: Nicolas Rougier
So, there are some initiatives by journals to say, ‘Oh, you have to release your code,’ and people will make their code available. Currently, you have a GitHub but, of course, GitHub is a private company, so they can decide from one day to the other to say, ‘Okay, we close everything.’ So, the alternative is Software Heritage and, mostly, they will keep all the open source code on the planet, and it's funded by a lot of different academic entities. So, at least we have some guarantee with that that we will be able to find those source codes. Of course, it does not guarantee that you will be able to run it, but at least if you can have the source code, it's huge progress.
Host: Nick Howe
That was Nicolas Rougier at the National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology and the Institute of Neurodegenerative Diseases, both in France. For more about the ten years reproducibility challenge, you can find a link to the feature in the show notes.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Finally on the show, it's time for the weekly Briefing chat. Now, the Nature Briefing is having a brief summer break but, Nick, you and I have had a look back at some of the stories from it that might have been missed. What's caught your eye?
Host: Nick Howe
Well, with Shamini away this week, I thought someone had to take up the mantle and cover some weird animal story, so I found a story about a dinosaur that appeared to have cancer.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Well, which I imagine is a pretty difficult thing to try and ascertain. What do we know about this dinosaur then?
Host: Nick Howe
Well, you're right in that you have to look back at fossil records from a long time ago and figure out that it was cancer. So, what they did in this research is they found a partial part of a fibula, so a leg bone, and it looked very strange, but originally, they thought maybe it's just a fracture that hasn't healed properly. But then the scientists compared it to a human fibula that had been affected by a disease known as osteosarcoma, and it looked very similar. And then they did some molecular analyses and looked at it under the microscope, and it appeared that in fact this dinosaur had also suffered from osteosarcoma, this type of bone cancer.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
I mean, I have several questions straight off the bat here, Nick, but the first one is, they've really managed to kind of zoom right in then to the sort of type of cancer and, of course, as we know, there are many, many different versions of it.
Host: Nick Howe
Yeah, well, I think the only versions that have been picked up by scientists, millions of years after the fact are ones are going to be affecting the bones and are going to be fossilised. Other cancers in soft tissues and things are unlikely to be fossilised. And in this case, the bone was from a dinosaur known as a Centrosaurus, which was around 76 million years ago, so it would have to be something quite significant for scientists to still pick up a trace of the disease millions of years after the fact.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
I mean, is this ultimately what did for this dinosaur do we know?
Host: Nick Howe
Well, the scientists think it's unlikely because it was actually found amongst a bunch of other Centrosaurus, so it looks like it was actually killed by a flood. But in humans, this disease is normally fatal, so they think it may well have done for the dinosaur, but not in this particular case.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Okay, and what sort of will this open up then? Is this a whole new field of ancient disease identification, do you think?
Host: Nick Howe
Well, it's not the first time that a cancer has been found in a dinosaur. So, there have been tumours found in a T. rex before but they were benign. This is the first time that a malignant, like, still growing cancer has been found, and the researchers think that it may stimulate a closer look at previous bone fossils that have been considered to just have fractures or just looking strange, and maybe they're actually the tell-tale signs of disease instead.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Well, Nick, I’ve brought something in this week as well for our Briefing chat, and it's a careers story, but it's quite close to my heart, and it's about brewing and fermenting, and I've just been recently gifted a home beer brewing kit which I'm sure will make a sticky mess all over the floor. But there are a bunch of researchers who have been doing better than that and sort of learning things from their enterprises.
Host: Nick Howe
So, these are researchers who are just brewing in their spare time or are they people who researching this sort of thing and then doing it as a business? What’s going on here?
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Well, actually, you're right in many cases. Some of them sort of started as hobbyists and then moved on to other careers and, in many cases, they say that they've learned skills from academia that have really been transferable to the fermented food and drink based businesses they've come up with. For example, there's one chap who started brewing kombucha tea. Now, I don’t know if you’ve tried this, Nick, but it's a fermented tea, and it is delicious, I will say, and he started fermenting it after he did an internship at NASA's Johnson Space Centre and while he was doing his PhD.
Host: Nick Howe
And so, what sort of skills are transferable from the academic world to the brewing world?
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Well, in this case, the guy and his wife set up a company to sell this tea, in his case, at the same time as finishing his PhD and now at the same time as being an assistant professor. So, he's obviously clearly very busy. But the skills that he said were kind of transferable between these disparate worlds of fermented tea and academia were things like time management, he mentioned. Clearly, a lot of juggling that goes on, whether you're doing the accounts and sort of doing your fermenting or whether you're filling in a grant proposal and trying to teach or finish a paper or what have you. So, he said that that was quite a core thing that he could take. And he also said that the presentation skills that he learned at graduate school were really, really useful for a business competition he entered to try and get some seed funding, which actually ultimately got his kind of business up and running.
Host: Nick Howe
Great, so there's all sorts of things you can take from academia. Are there any other examples? Are we seeing a whole host of people leaving academia for the brewing world now?
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Well, there are actually a bunch of examples in this article and I thoroughly recommend giving it a read. One of the interesting ones that stood out to me is a woman, a J. Nikol Jackson-Beckham. Now, she, while she was working as an academic, she was really, really interested in the lack of diversity in many areas of craft beer production, and this is something that she's done a bunch of work on, and this year she ultimately left her role as a professor of communication studies and has started a non-profit to champion inclusion, equity and justice, she says, in the craft brewing industry, and I've got a great quote from her here about that kind of transition. ‘When people ask me what it’s like to no longer be an academic, I always say I’m definitely an academic, I just left the academy.’ And she goes through and lists some of the things that are kind of similar. She does data collection for her work, she does a lot of teaching and talking, giving seminars and what have you. So, maybe, surprisingly, there does seem to be some parallels between fermentation and academia.
Host: Nick Howe
Well, all I’ll say is cheers to that, and thanks, Benjamin. Listeners, if you'd like more stories like these then make sure you check out the Nature Briefing – Nature’s pick of science news and stories. We'll put a link of where to sign up, along with links to the stories we covered, in this week's show notes.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
That's about it for this week. But before we go, just time to highlight a new video on our YouTube channel all about tiny robots.
Host: Nick Howe
And just how tiny are we talking about?
Host: Benjamin Thompson
When I say tiny, I mean they can't be seen with the naked eye tiny. Head over to youtube.com/NatureVideoChannel to find out how they work and to see them in action.
Host: Nick Howe
And if you want to tell us what you think about those tiny robots or anything else we've talked about, then you can get in touch with us. You can reach us on Twitter – we're @NaturePodcast – or send us an email – we’re podcast@nature.com. I'm Nick Howe.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
And I'm Benjamin Thompson. See you next time.