0:00

Hello, explorer! Welcome along to a

0:02

brand new adventure around the universe.

0:04

We are leaving planet Earth for

0:06

just half an hour or so.

0:09

Let's learn some secrets, eh? It's the

0:11

Fun Kids Science Weekly. My

0:15

name is Dan, and this week in the

0:17

greatest podcast in the universe, we

0:20

will stare into the night sky, finding

0:22

the sweeps of colors that streak across

0:24

it and learn all about the northern

0:26

lights. Shh! And when

0:28

those particles within the solar wind are

0:30

pushed down into the atmosphere and they collide with

0:32

the oxygen atoms, they make the oxygen atoms glow,

0:34

they give them energy. It's a bit like heating

0:37

them up, but what they really do is they

0:39

give them a little bit of energy and those

0:41

atoms give the energy back and they give it

0:43

back as light. Shh! Also in

0:45

our quest to find the best

0:48

science ever, you can hear about

0:50

making medicines. Shh! The

0:52

job of a structural biologist within that is

0:54

to think about how a new potential drug

0:57

is binding the protein that it will eventually

0:59

target in the cell and feed it back

1:01

to a chemist to help the chemist make

1:03

a new piece of chemistry which can then

1:06

be tested, which will hopefully be an even

1:08

better drug. Shh! And we've

1:10

got a big African fish swimming onto our

1:12

dangerous Dan list. Stay clear, it might bite

1:14

you. It's all on the way in a

1:16

brand new Fun Kids Science Weekly. Shh!

1:24

Let's start with your science in the news then.

1:26

An incredibly rare bridled turn and

1:29

golden puffin have been spotted within

1:31

days of each other. A north

1:34

east island just off the coast

1:36

of the UK, both sightings were

1:38

near Cockett Island, which

1:41

is off the Northumberland coast,

1:44

where people are banned from treading. It's thought

1:46

that this bridle turn, which is normally found

1:48

in warm tropical waters, was maybe blown off

1:50

course. And check this out, the island is

1:53

home to 40,000 breeding

1:55

sea birds and these two

1:57

have stood out and you can't set foot on the island,

2:00

it's just there for wildlife. How brilliant is it

2:02

that us humans, we are now so

2:05

aware of our impact on

2:08

wildlife and the ecosystem that we

2:10

are giving creatures their own space.

2:12

That's fantastic. Also firefighters

2:14

are battling wildfires in Brazil's

2:16

Pantanal. It's the world's largest

2:18

tropical wetland. The Pantanal is

2:21

home to jaguars, giant

2:23

anteaters and giant river otters too.

2:25

Close to 32,000 hectares have already

2:27

been destroyed by the fires in

2:30

the state of Mato Grosso do

2:32

Sol, which is what local media

2:34

are saying. Climate experts

2:36

say that this year's wildfire season

2:38

has started earlier and is more

2:41

intense than in previous years. And

2:43

that is due to our warming world

2:46

and the climate crisis, so it makes

2:48

you think of the impact of what

2:50

we do and what it has all

2:52

around the world. And our last story

2:54

this week, the earliest and most distant

2:56

galaxy ever observed has been spotted by

2:58

the James Webb Space Telescope. It's

3:01

called Jade's GSZ14-0. Let's find

3:03

out more

3:05

with Kevin Henglein from the University

3:07

of Arizona's Stuart Observatory. Kevin, thank

3:09

you so much for being there.

3:11

Just before we get on to

3:13

how this was found with our

3:15

good friend the James Webb Space

3:17

Telescope, let's just talk about the

3:19

name Jade's GSZ14-0. It's not

3:22

too catchy. What does everything mean in that?

3:24

Yeah, so when astronomers name

3:27

things, sometimes they name them after,

3:29

you know, themselves or their pets or

3:31

something, but oftentimes we name them things that are

3:33

very helpful for us to find them, like an

3:35

address. So if you were named after your address

3:37

or your phone number, people could find you pretty

3:39

easily. And for us, we want to

3:41

find it so we know that it's in the

3:44

Jade's survey, which is what Jade stands for. And

3:46

it's a GS, which means it's in a very

3:48

particular part of the sky, a really small

3:50

part of the sky that you could only see

3:52

if you're on the south part of the

3:54

world. Z14 or Z14, I should say, shows us

3:58

its distance away. which is a

4:01

number astronomers use called Redshift. And zero

4:03

means it's the first one, because astronomers

4:05

number things starting with zero, because we're

4:07

very weird. And

4:10

this was the discovery of the James

4:12

Webb Space Telescope, who we have

4:15

to give a lot of credit to. It's doing incredible work

4:17

since it's been up there for a couple of years or

4:19

so. How was this

4:21

discovery made by the telescope and then

4:23

by experts down here finding it? Yeah,

4:25

so Jade is a group of scientists

4:27

that work around the world, and what

4:30

we're using the telescope to do is

4:32

take a series of pictures that are

4:34

incredibly, incredibly deep, meaning we just open

4:36

up the telescope and let it capture

4:38

as much light as possible for hundreds of

4:40

hours. And as part

4:43

of that, I've been working on the

4:45

team. Last year, I was looking through

4:47

what we got back from our survey, which

4:49

is hundreds of thousands of galaxies, all

4:51

little smudges in this image, or some very

4:54

pretty spirals, but most of them really tiny

4:56

little smudges from very far away. And I

4:58

poured through all these to look for individual

5:00

objects that, from their pictures alone,

5:02

we could maybe predict this might

5:04

be super far away. And last

5:06

year, we found Jade's GSZ14-0 as

5:09

one of the hundreds of thousands.

5:11

And then earlier this year, we

5:13

took another observation and spread its

5:15

light out through a prism and

5:17

confirmed it was as far away

5:19

as we had hoped it was.

5:21

And it's in fact the farthest

5:23

thing that humans have ever seen.

5:25

So how far away is it?

5:27

So it's so far away that astronomers

5:29

don't think about it in terms of

5:31

like miles away or kilometers away. We

5:34

think about it because time has passed

5:36

since the light left it coming

5:38

to us. So we're seeing not what it looks like

5:40

right now, but what it looked like

5:42

when the light left, which is a long

5:44

time ago. In fact, we're seeing it when

5:47

the universe itself was only 290 million years

5:49

old. It's

5:52

very, very far away. If you

5:54

were sitting in space right now, it'd probably be

5:56

about 33 billion light years away. But we don't

5:58

know if that's true. it is because we

6:01

see it not as it is right now but

6:03

as it was a long time ago and we're

6:05

seeing it when the universe was essentially a baby.

6:07

Does that mean further

6:09

onwards than that if you keep looking

6:11

if you managed to go past it

6:13

you would find the origin point the bit

6:15

of the middle of the universe? We do think

6:17

that if you were to go farther back you

6:20

know look farther back you'd see earlier and

6:22

earlier but the problem is that the universe

6:24

has kind of a stopping point because

6:27

it about a couple hundred thousand years after

6:29

the big bang you know for that period

6:31

of time the universe was too hot for

6:34

light to move very far so eventually it'd

6:36

be like looking into fog and we've seen

6:38

that fog already it's called the cosmic microwave

6:40

background and it is the absolute farthest we

6:43

could ever see but we don't think we'll

6:45

ever see galaxies there because it took time

6:47

for galaxies to form so we're actually with

6:49

JWST and surveys

6:52

like Jade's we're actually seeing the first

6:54

galaxies you know some of the earliest

6:56

galaxies we're ever going to see. And

6:58

you said earlier that you you have

7:00

been pouring over pictures from

7:03

the telescope you've been searching for

7:05

things that might be old

7:07

and really far away what

7:09

does that mean what are you looking at and

7:11

how on earth can you predict how

7:14

old a galaxy might be simply

7:17

from a picture on

7:19

a screen without doing any tests? We

7:21

have to be very very clever about

7:23

doing this because when we take our

7:25

pictures we're not taking color pictures like

7:27

you know even with a picture like

7:29

that you might take with a phone

7:31

or something that's actually a set of

7:33

pictures in different filters a red picture

7:35

a blue filter and a green filter

7:37

and with with jade's and many other

7:39

surveys there's many filters those little filters

7:41

take pictures at very particular colors and

7:44

what that does is allows us to

7:46

get a very rough view of what

7:48

the galaxy's light is like at different colors

7:50

and when we can use that we can

7:52

be very clever and look at some of

7:54

the ways in which the galaxy's bright in

7:56

some colors and faint in some colors and

7:58

that tells us kind of how fast it's

8:00

moving away from us, which is its redshift.

8:02

And then we know

8:05

that the larger something's redshift is, the faster

8:07

it is away. So what I'm looking for

8:09

are essentially objects that are red in a

8:11

very particular way, red and

8:14

tend to be not super, super bright. And

8:17

so I found about 1,000 objects across

8:19

our whole survey last year that probably were

8:21

some of the farthest galaxies. But many of

8:23

them probably were tricking me. They looked red

8:26

for other reasons. And we can go and

8:28

confirm, like we did with Jade's GSC 14-0,

8:31

whether or not my prediction was correct. And

8:33

in this case, it was spot on, which

8:35

is really exciting. It's been a real mind-blowing

8:37

delight to chat to you. Kevin Hainline from

8:39

the University of Arizona, thank you so much

8:41

for joining us. You're welcome. Thanks for having

8:43

me on. Thank you so much to Kevin

8:45

Hainline. It's always brilliant hearing about the fantastic

8:48

work of the James Webb Space Telescope. And

8:50

I guarantee this will not be the last

8:52

time we hear about it. Let's

8:54

get to your questions, shall we? If there

8:56

is ever anything you want answered on this

8:58

show, best way is by

9:00

leaving it as a voice note for me on the

9:02

free Fun Kids app or at funkidslive.com because then you

9:04

can star in the thing. I love to hear who

9:07

you are and how excited you are to get these

9:09

questions done. You could also drop

9:11

it as a message to me at

9:13

funkidslive.com too. That's what Alice

9:15

has done. Alice, thank you for this. You

9:17

want to know, how does your body fight

9:19

off viruses? Well, it does it in a

9:21

few ways. One is by using special white

9:23

blood cells. These are called T-cells and

9:26

they act like the police cars for

9:28

your body, really. They're constantly scanning

9:31

to make sure the other cells that you have are

9:34

what they say they are. They are what they

9:36

should be. And no sneaky

9:38

viruses have disguised themselves and have got

9:40

in. So these T-cells, if

9:42

they spot a virus, they get to

9:44

work by breaking apart those virus cells

9:46

using enzymes which kill off the virus.

9:49

Or also you can get vaccines. And

9:52

these are really important for breaking off

9:54

viruses because it

9:56

lets your body know what it should be

9:58

looking out for. there

10:00

is a new disease and your body

10:02

isn't used to it, a virus

10:05

will give a tiny amount of the disease

10:07

or something that looks like it, it will

10:09

put it into your body so your white

10:11

blood cells can become aware of

10:14

what the virus is, what they need to be watching

10:16

out for, how they need to fight against it so

10:18

they can get into action, make the right protein and

10:20

have the enzymes to take care of it. If it

10:22

ever affects you, you can be

10:25

there, you can be ready to act.

10:27

And that is how our body fights

10:29

off viruses, Alice. Thank you so much

10:31

for the question. And our second

10:33

question this week is from Tiffany who has

10:35

sent this to me at funkidslive.com. Thank You

10:37

Tiffany. You want to know how were the

10:39

Northern Lights formed? Well if you live in

10:41

the UK, you might have

10:44

really surprisingly seen them swoop

10:46

over the sky. Let's find out how

10:48

those Northern Lights are formed with the

10:50

astronomer Tom Curse who joins us. Tom,

10:52

thank you for being there. So how

10:55

are the Northern Lights formed? The Northern Lights

10:57

begin their journey at the Sun, the star

10:59

that lights our world and makes our daylight

11:01

visible. And so it's something

11:03

that we can take as an opportunity

11:06

to experience the Sun during the night.

11:08

So what's happening here? Well the

11:10

Sun produces a very strange

11:13

phenomenon that astronomers call solar

11:15

wind. And this is like a

11:17

stream of particles that flood out

11:19

through the solar system, they travel away from

11:21

the Sun, filling all of the space between

11:23

the planets. So some of

11:25

those particles eventually find their way to

11:27

the Earth. And something very interesting happens

11:29

when they reach planet Earth. We have

11:31

a magnetic field around our planet. The

11:33

Earth is like a giant magnet in

11:35

space and that magnetic field protects us

11:38

from the solar wind. The solar wind could be

11:40

quite harmful to us here on the surface of

11:42

the Earth if we didn't have that magnetic field.

11:45

But the magnetic field also catches

11:47

some of that solar wind, a bit like a net

11:49

or a sieve. It catches some of

11:51

it and traps it. And that

11:54

solar wind is accelerated by the energy

11:56

of the magnetic field and it becomes

11:58

very fast bouncing from one tiger

18:00

fish leaping, snapping at you with its

18:02

jutting teeth and they are hungry. They're

18:05

known to eat a lot, they eat

18:07

pretty much all the time. They need

18:09

it to have the energy for their

18:12

massive bodies and I love

18:14

when we just get a really devastating

18:16

beast like the Goliath tiger fish and

18:18

it can go straight onto our dangerous

18:20

Dan list. This

18:24

week on Battle of the Sciences where

18:26

we try and find the greatest science

18:29

of them all, we get experts to

18:31

prove why their field should come first.

18:34

We are looking at things that go

18:36

inside your body that try to make you better with

18:39

Charlotte Dodson from the University of Bath.

18:41

It's all about structural biology today. Charlotte

18:43

you start with 60 seconds to tell

18:46

us why. Your work as

18:48

a structural biologist is the best.

18:50

It starts in three, two, one,

18:52

you can begin. Okay so our

18:54

bodies are made up of cells and these are

18:56

really really small so they're just small big enough

18:58

to see under a microscope. Inside

19:00

the cells are lots of molecules and one of

19:02

these is quite famous and it's called DNA and

19:04

we think of it as the instruction book for

19:06

the cell but other molecules called proteins

19:09

are the ones that actually carry out all the

19:11

work and when I say carry out the work

19:13

I mean things like sensing what's outside the cell,

19:16

making new molecules, deciding whether a cell should

19:18

grow or stop growing and each

19:20

job done within the cell is done by a

19:22

different type of protein and many

19:24

medicines work by essentially having a piece

19:26

of chemistry that binds a protein involved

19:28

in disease and stops it from doing

19:31

its job and the science

19:33

I'm interested in is making new drugs to

19:35

treat disease and the job of

19:37

a structural biologist within that is to think

19:39

about and work out how a new potential

19:41

drug is binding the protein that it will

19:43

eventually target in the cell and

19:45

then to take this information and feed it

19:47

back to a drug discovery chemist to help

19:50

the chemist make a new piece of chemistry

19:52

which can then be tested which will

19:54

hopefully be an even better drug and

19:56

why is this the best science? Well personally I

19:58

think it's really cool But also it's

20:00

got the potential to impact on the health and

20:02

the quality of life of a huge number of

20:05

people. There we go, there's your minute Charlotte. Listen,

20:07

thank you for that. It's inspired ideas.

20:09

So let me take you back right to the

20:11

start of what you do. When

20:14

there is an illness, when we need medicine,

20:16

be that a drug or a vaccine, something to

20:18

help us feel better. What's

20:20

the very first thing that you're looking

20:23

for? How do you know how to

20:25

target what might be trying

20:27

to cause us harm? Drug discovery is

20:29

a huge process and it involves a

20:31

lot of scientists of different specialities working

20:33

together as a big team. So working

20:35

out exactly what it is that we

20:37

want to target, there's a whole group

20:39

of, I'm gonna call them disease biologists,

20:41

who spend a long time working out

20:43

exactly which molecule in the cell or

20:45

which type of molecule in the cell

20:48

is the one that would be best to target with

20:50

a piece of chemistry. So the one that we best

20:52

to develop a drug against. And

20:54

they do this by doing lots

20:56

of biology, by doing test compounds to

20:58

try and remove that protein and seeing

21:01

how that affects the cell. And

21:03

coming up with something that they're pretty sure that

21:05

if we could develop a really good bit of

21:07

chemistry against it would have the effect in disease

21:10

that we want. And you mentioned how

21:12

drugs bind onto targets.

21:15

How is that happening deep down in the

21:17

cell? What are they latching onto? How do

21:20

they know what they should

21:22

target themselves? A lot of this is done by

21:24

shape. And I think there's a way we can

21:26

think about it. Imagine you've got

21:28

a special new set of Lego, but

21:31

this is even better than normal Lego

21:33

because the bricks aren't just based on squares

21:35

and rectangles, they're based on all shapes. So

21:37

they can be any shape. So

21:39

somebody has built a large model from

21:42

this Lego. And that is essentially the

21:44

protein in the cell that you're trying

21:46

to target. So the job of

21:48

a chemist is to take just a handful of

21:50

bricks and put them together and

21:52

build something that will fit into a particular

21:54

part of this model. But it's

21:56

not just about fitting it, making it the right

21:58

shape. You've also got... to have the bumps and

22:01

the holes in all the right places so that

22:03

everything lines up, so that this new piece of

22:05

chemistry Lego, this new potential drug,

22:07

actually sticks into this big Lego

22:10

model that someone else has built.

22:12

That's really quite tricky. And

22:14

the job of the structural biologist is to check

22:16

that the chemists have actually done what they hope

22:18

that they've done, and to give them the information

22:20

to be able to improve it next time and

22:23

have another go and go round and round that

22:25

process until they've got something that binds

22:27

really tightly and really well in just the right

22:29

place. This is big ideas about something

22:32

tiny, like the smallest, smallest parts

22:34

of our body. In the, I

22:37

don't know, hundreds, hundreds of years

22:39

of discovery that we've known about what's

22:43

inside ourselves and how we can help

22:45

them, what's something amazing that you've

22:48

learned about our discoveries? I

22:50

think for me, one thing that's really amazing

22:52

is what we can do. Because

22:54

from my side, we're actually, we're living in

22:57

one of the best parts of history because

22:59

right now we can cure more disease and

23:01

help more people than at any other point

23:03

in history before that. And so

23:06

it's really exciting what we can do. It's quite

23:08

sad that there's an awful lot of things that

23:10

we can't do, but thinking about where

23:12

we are now, it is the best point in

23:14

history to live as far as

23:17

medicine and drug discovery is. And

23:19

my last question, Charlotte, let me throw

23:21

you forward, say 40, 50

23:24

years, whenever it is you hang up your

23:26

lab coat and you call time on your

23:28

job, what's the one thing that you really

23:31

want to know? What's the one question in

23:33

your science that you really want answered? One

23:35

is that, you know, I would like more medicines

23:37

out there that can either treat new diseases or

23:40

treat old diseases better. And maybe by doing this

23:42

things in a slightly different way to the way

23:44

that we do them now. But personally,

23:46

I'm really interested in how we can

23:48

get motion in there. So at the

23:50

moment, everything is static. It's like taking

23:53

a photograph of things. And

23:55

actually, in real life, everything is moving around. So

23:57

what I'd like us to be able to do

23:59

is not just to take a photograph of

24:01

what's going on but to make a video to

24:03

see how that motion fits in there because I

24:05

think that that will help us in the end

24:07

come to that conclusion of why

24:10

of making more medicines so that we

24:12

can treat new diseases. That's

24:14

why maybe structural biology

24:16

drug discovery should be

24:18

right at the top of our battle of the

24:20

sciences. Charlotte Dodson thank you for joining us. Thank

24:22

you. Thank you to Charlotte Dodson for telling

24:25

us why structural biology might be the best kind of

24:27

science. What do you think? Is it near the top

24:29

of our battle of the sciences leaderboard? I

24:32

wonder. Well it's got

24:34

me inspired about biology and about

24:36

medicine so let's find out

24:38

more shall we and get an episode from

24:40

our brilliant professor hallux series. This is miraculous

24:43

medicines because there's lots of

24:45

ingredients in every single medicine and

24:47

professor hallux with his sidekick nurse

24:50

nanobot will find out what

24:52

goes into medicines and the best ways for

24:54

them to be taken from pills to potions

24:56

injections to inhalers there's a lot of

24:58

decisions to be made. Professor

25:02

hallux's miraculous medicines.

25:04

Professor hallux is continuing work on

25:07

his new improved elixir and this

25:09

gets hallux and nurse nanobot thinking

25:11

about ingredients. What do pharmacists medical

25:13

professionals who create and administer medicines

25:16

put in the drugs we take?

25:21

Just measuring out precisely the right amount of this a little

25:23

of that. Oh

25:30

okay maybe not too much

25:32

of that. Nurse can you get the fire extinguisher?

25:34

Blumenick it looks like an explosion in a sweet shop in

25:36

here. You're still working on the right mix

25:40

of ingredients for your new medicine. Yep and trying to figure out

25:42

what's going on. Yep

25:47

and trying to figure out what shape

25:49

it should come in. Should my marvelous

25:51

new creation be a pill? They're handy

25:53

because you always get the same dose.

25:59

Yes you're right.