玫瑰的浪漫芬芳从何而来?如何减少中风后的心脏损伤?奶牛感染流感,那牛奶还能喝吗?| Nature Podcast
本期Nature Podcast为您带来,提高光基计算机的能效、让玫瑰如此芬芳的基因、如何减少中风后的心脏损伤、对奶牛感染H5N1流感的了解、海底的金属结核可能是神秘的“暗氧”的来源,欢迎收听本期内容!
本集精选内容
In this episode
00:45 提高光基计算机的能效
最新研究发现,基于专用LED的计算机组件可以降低对能源比较“饥渴”的AI系统的能耗。与使用数字电子元件的人工智能芯片相比,使用光计算元件的人工智能芯片能更高效地运行,但这些基于光的系统通常使用笨重且难以控制的激光。为了克服这些障碍,一个团队开发出了一种用LED代替激光的方法,因为LED更便宜,运行效率更高。虽然这只是一个概念验证,但他们证明了他们的系统可以像激光计算机一样执行某些任务。
Nature
Partial coherence enhances parallelized photonic computing
News and Views
Cheap light sources could make AI more energy efficient
08:51 研究亮点
让玫瑰如此芬芳的基因
绽放的玫瑰所散发出的浪漫气味部分源于一种名为萜烯的挥发性化合物。武汉华中农业大学的研究人员确定了玫瑰是如何制造一种关键萜烯的:香茅醇,它能产生青草和柠檬的香味。这项工作可以帮助科学家们培育出其他能够生产玫瑰精油的植物,并最终确定这些“玫瑰”是否也同样香甜。
玫瑰的香气来自挥发性化学物质的复杂混合,其中包括萜烯。图片来源:Getty
Research Highlight
How the rose got its iconic fragrance
如何减少中风后的心脏损伤——阻断炎症
一项在小鼠身上进行的研究表明,脑卒中会引发心脏炎症——但阻断某些免疫反应可以减少损害。中风会暂时阻断大脑中的氧气流动,但也会对身体其他部位造成长期损害。为了找出原因,研究人员测定了中风一个月后小鼠免疫细胞中哪些基因处于活跃状态。他们发现,中风会导致多个器官发炎,尤其是心脏。中风后,一种名为IL-1β的免疫蛋白激增。IL-1β改变了单核细胞DNA上的标记,并“训练”细胞促进炎症。当研究人员使用抗体中和IL-1β或使用药物阻止被训练的单核细胞迁移到心脏时,动物的心脏功能得到了改善。作者说,类似的治疗方法可能有助于中风患者的健康进一步恶化。
脑卒中会伤害其他器官,包括心脏。图片来源:Zephyr/Science Photo Library
Research Highlight
Strokes can damage the heart — but reining in the immune system might help
13:02 奶牛感染H5N1流感——我们了解多少?
高致病禽流感H5N1于2024年3月首次在美国牛群中发现,目前已在美国多个牛群中被检测到。我们汇总了研究人员目前对这一传播的了解、可采取的预防措施以及这一疫情可能对人类造成的风险。(参见:H5N1禽流感或引发人类大流行:这些国家如何应对?)
对美国九个州的奶牛进行的H5N1流感病毒检测呈阳性,但巴氏杀菌牛奶中未发现传染性病毒。图片来源:Justin Sullivan/Getty
Nature
Pathogenicity and transmissibility of bovine H5N1 influenza virus
Nature News
Could bird flu in cows lead to a human outbreak? Slow response worries scientists
Nature News
Huge amounts of bird-flu virus found in raw milk of infected cows
Nature News
Can H5N1 spread through cow sneezes? Experiment offers clues
20:06 简单聊聊
除了光合作用,海底还有神秘的“暗氧”来源
化学反应可能通过分解水分子产生氧气,但其能量来源仍然未知。在太平洋海底,完全缺乏阳光无法进行光合作用的地方,有一些未知的事物正在释放大量氧气。这种现象是在一个遍布古老的多金属结核的地区发现的,这些结核可能通过催化水分子的分解而在氧气生产中发挥了作用。这项研究结果发表在《自然-地球科学》(Nature Geoscience)上。研究人员表示:"除了光合作用之外,我们在地球上还有另一个氧气来源。这些发现可能对理解生命起源有重要意义,也有助于理解该地区深海采矿可能产生的影响。”
海底发现了“暗氧”的来源。图片来源:Cavan/Getty
Nature News
Mystery oxygen source discovered on the sea floor — bewildering scientists
Nature Geoscience
Evidence of dark oxygen production at the abyssal seafloor
播客文字版TRANSCRIPT
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Lizzie Gibney
Welcome back to the Nature Podcast, this week: How light could lower AIs power requirements…
Benjamin Thompson
...and why scientists are concerned about bird flu's spread in cows…I'm Benjamin Thompson.
Lizzie Gibney
And I'm Lizzie Gibney.
Lizzie Gibney
AI is everywhere in science. But as AI models get bigger and more sophisticated, the computing power needed to run them is rocketing. Estimates suggest that training a large language model creates about twice the amount of CO2 that an American would produce over their entire lifetime. This increased thirst for power has led teams around the world to investigate ways to make AI chips that run more efficiently and sustainably, and one way is to get some components to compute using light, rather than electronics…
Known as photonic computers, these systems can be quicker and much more efficient. And they’re analogue rather than digital, so instead of having to convert information into binary 1s and 0s, they transmit raw numbers in the properties of light — such as the amplitude, or brightness of a super-precise laser. Photonic chips are particularly suited to running some AI algorithms. But their lasers can be bulky and fiddly to control. This week, a team demonstrates something rather counterintuitive — that by using a different, and — in some senses — worse light source, they can make photonic computers even more efficient and easier to run. I called up one of the paper’s authors, Dong Bowei to find out more, and he explained some of the advantages photonic computers have over their digital counterparts.
Dong Bowei
I think there are three major advantages. One is you can provide much higher computing bandwidth. This means it can send data at much faster data rate. For example, if you use electronics to perform computing, you can send data at a rate of few gigahertz. By the way, few gigahertz means you send 1 billion of data in one second. And if you use photonics, you can send data at tens of gigahertz or hundreds of gigahertz. That is much faster than electronics. The second advantage is that photonic computing can compute at much higher energy efficiency. Light just put through an optical fiber, you don't lose that amount of energy that dissipate as heat.
Lizzie Gibney
So why in particular is photonic computing being seen as good for AI calculations?
Dong Bowei
This is because, at the heart of AI computing, the major computing step is called ‘matrix vector multiplication’. It's nothing more than just a massive amount of additions and multiplication. And photonics is just very suitable to do that. And the size of these AI models are actually growing exponentially. So according to research from OpenAI, the size of the AI models is doubled every 3.5 months, and that consumes enormous energy to perform AI. Photonic computing is very energy efficient and very fast. That means it can process AI models much faster at a lower energy consumption.
Lizzie Gibney
So how do photonic processing units — kind of the heart of the computer — usually work?
Dong Bowei
So let's assume you have a vector. So vector is an array of data. You send each entry of this array to multiple channels who represent these data, and you use lasers to send these. Lasers are basically very coherent light — coherence means these lights are very well defined in terms of wavelength and phase. And you send these lights into the photonic processor, and they are processed, and because you need to do addition in the processor that means light from different channels, they need to meet each other. The fact that you are using lasers means that you have to use different colours at each channel, because otherwise, if they have the same colour, or, say the same wavelengths, they will interfere. You can think of the light as a sine wave. Then when the peak meets the peak, you get a bright signal, and if it's a peak meet a trough, you'll get a very dark signal, so that in the system, there will be perturbations, and that gives you noise and error. So that you have to use different colours to avoid this interference to happen.
Lizzie Gibney
Tell me a bit more about what you did in your research. You didn't use lasers?
Dong Bowei
Yeah. So, we actually find a way to completely eliminate these interference problem. So consequently, we can use light in the same colour to enter all different channels. That means we only need one light to process all the information, we use a super luminescence LED, S-LED that has a broader bandwidth than the laser. By broader bandwidth, I mean, we have increased the number of wavelengths a little bit so it's less coherent or sometimes people say it's a worse light source that solves this interference issue.
Lizzie Gibney
And how come it doesn't interfere like the lasers?
Dong Bowei
So since we cover a broader range of wavelength, at some wavelength light interfere constructively — give you a bright output. At some wavelength light interfere destructively — give you a very dark output. And because we have many of these wavelengths, some gives you dark, some give you bright, the result is actually an average of them, you get a very stable output.
Lizzie Gibney
So rather than trying to avoid any interference entirely by having these lasers that are of completely different wavelengths, you instead have just a kind of much messier light and then you get lots of cancelations and lots of adding up, but on average, your signal stays the same.
Dong Bowei
Yeah, that's the trick.
Lizzie Gibney
Okay, so it sounds really counterintuitive, because people have spent years trying to make lasers better and better for this kind of application and for others. And now you're saying, actually, it's a good idea to make your light in some ways a bit worse.
Dong Bowei
Yes.
Lizzie Gibney
Where did this idea come from?
Dong Bowei
It's actually a coincidence. So we were trying to solve this interference issue. And we begin with thinking about, is there anything we can do about the photonic processor to avoid this? And one day, it turns out, the system just becomes so nice, it does not interfere. The output is so stable, and we cannot figure out why, but it's a good sign. So we try to figure out what is happening, and we realize that it's because of the experiment of a previous colleague. He changed the light source to a worse one, I would say, in that word, and he solved the problem. So we were very surprised about this. So I would say it's completely a coincidence.
Lizzie Gibney
Sometimes serendipity does wonders in science. So this kind of processing unit that uses these like LEDs rather than lasers, what advantages does that have?
Dong Bowei
One is that controlling an LED is much simpler than controlling a laser, because the laser you have to control its wavelength, control its phase very precisely. You need to input many power to do this, so that by controlling an LED, you actually put in less energy to control it. This is the first point, and the second point is that now you can use one single LED to send light into many channels, and that just make your system compute at much broader bandwidth. The third aspect that is the system becomes so easy to control.
Lizzie Gibney
And is this just a prototype or an idea that you have, or have you actually used it to run some algorithms?
Dong Bowei
We indeed use this system to run some algorithm. So in our recent study, we view this prototype and use it in the machine-learning algorithm to analyse the working gait of Parkinson's disease patients collected by a force sensor. And our chip can analyse the gait signal from these Parkinson's disease patients and identify their status.
Lizzie Gibney
And how successful was it?
Dong Bowei
Oh, it gives a very high accuracy. So in the experiment, we can identify 10 Parkinson's diseases patient at an accuracy of 92%.
Lizzie Gibney
Where you see this research going now, it seems like the promise of being more efficient and running on less energy there are real positives. Do you think all photonic computers in the future are going to use this system?
Dong Bowei
The fact that you can use one S-LED to replace multiple lasers is a very promising solution. It saves your effort in control, it saves energy, increase your bandwidth, it gives all the advantages. So we do hope that this method can be adopted in larger photonic computing system.
Lizzie Gibney
What do you think your colleagues, your fellow physicists, will think of the idea of chucking out the lasers that they've been honing and refining for so many years?
Dong Bowei
In this work, we are demonstrating that in photonic computing, using less coherent light source might be a better option, but actually in many other applications, lasers are still the must. For example, if you want to use light to do ranging, which is called LIDAR, you must use laser for that. So we're not saying lasers are bad. Lasers are still good and they are the must for certain applications. But we just want to emphasise that for different applications, simply chasing higher coherence might not be the optimal way. Sometimes less coherent might give you better performance.
Lizzie Gibney
So for AI computing, maybe a messier beam is better.
Dong Bowei
Yeah, that's what we think.
Lizzie Gibney
That was Dong Bowei, now at A*STAR Singapore. To read his paper, look out for a link in the show notes.
Benjamin Thompson
Coming up, what research looking at the spread of H5N1 influenza between cows is telling scientists. Right now, though, it’s time for the Research Highlights, with Dan Fox.
Dan Fox
The grassy, lemony scent that wafts from some rose stems comes from a compound called citronellol. Now researchers know how the flowers produce it. To understand how citronellol is made in roses, researchers pieced together genomes for two flowers, one which produces citronellol and one that doesn't. This data along with sequences from nearly 40 other rose species, revealed that roses contain extra copies of three key genes involved in the production of terpenes — a group of volatile aromatic compounds of which citronellol is a member. After working out the genes needed for terpene synthesis in roses, the team inserted them into flowering tobacco, producing a plant that could make citronellol. The work could help produce more fragrant roses and generate new plants that can produce rose essential oil. Sniff out that research in Current Biology.
A stroke in the brain can inflame the heart — but blocking some immune responses could limit the damage, according to a new mouse study. Strokes temporarily block the flow of oxygen to the brain, but they can cause long term damage to other areas of the body as well. To understand why, researchers investigated which genes were active in mouse immune cells one month after a stroke. They found that strokes caused inflammation in multiple organs, particularly the heart. Production of an immune protein called IL-1β spiked after a stroke. This protein altered the DNA of immune cells called monocytes, in a sense, ‘training’ them to promote inflammation, which in turn damaged the heart. Mitigating the effects of this protein caused the animal's cardiac function to improve. The authors say that similar treatments might prevent further health problems in people who have had a stroke. You can read that research in full in Cell.
Benjamin Thompson
Next up on the show, reporter Nick Petrić Howe has been finding out about the latest bird flu research.
Nick Petrić Howe
A particularly pathogenic strain of H5N1, known commonly as bird flu, has been devastating bird populations across the globe. Increasingly, it seems that it is able to spread in mammals too, with even some human cases reported. Recently, Nature has published a paper investigating the spread of H5N1 influenza in cattle, something that could increase the risk of human transmission. Smriti Mallapaty, a Senior Reporter for Nature has been covering this topic and joins me now to discuss the paper, what else researchers know about the virus and what can be done as it spreads. Smriti, hi.
Smriti Mallapaty
Hi Nick, I'm happy to be here.
Nick Petrić Howe
Well, it's good to have you here to sort of discuss through this. So I thought a good place to start is just to have a little bit of a roundup of what we know about it. So I think H5N1 has been around for a while. So what's different about this particular strain?
Smriti Mallapaty
Yeah, so what we're talking about is a highly pathogenic strain of H5N1, and why we're talking about it now is because it has been identified in cattle in the United States. So in March, the United States first identified this particular strain of H5N1in cattle in Texas, and it has since spread to more than 100 farms across the country, in multiple states and maybe a handful of people have been infected from that strain of H5N1. Also, cattle are mammals like us, and so that kind of increases the risk profile of these viruses potentially jumping to people.
Nick Petrić Howe
And so I wanted to talk to you about the paper that's come out in Nature. What does this tell us about this sort of spread in cattle?
Smriti Mallapaty
Yes, the study was a preprint before it was published in Nature. So a colleague of ours, Max Kozlov, has reported on it previously when it was a preprint. So one of the big questions that researchers are trying to understand is how the virus is spreading between cattle. So in this paper, the researchers got samples from some of the farms in the United States that were first infected with this virus, and they collected different samples from these cows that were infected, including blood samples and tissue samples and milk samples. And they also studied the genomic sequences of the virus that they isolated from these animals. And what they find is that the virus is probably spreading from cow to cow, which is something that they had to establish. And they also find that there is a really high amount of infectious virus in the milk, and a key target of this virus in the infected cows is the mammary glands. And so it suggests that this virus is probably spreading via the udder route. So you know, via infected milk, which makes it potentially simpler to control, because it's probably spreading via the milking equipment so you can just manage contamination that way. The risk that researchers are really concerned about is if it was airborne, so if this virus could spread via the respiratory route, then that would increase the risk of it potentially spreading to people that are exposed to cows.
Nick Petrić Howe
Yeah, you've reported before that there was some evidence to suggest that perhaps cattle could be infected through inhalation, through sort of airborne particles, right?
Smriti Mallapaty
Yeah, there's another preprint that came out a few weeks ago. So the previous study that we were talking about, you know, researchers took samples from cows who were infected at actual farms. In this newer preprint, which hasn't been peer reviewed, researchers experimentally infected cows. So they did a challenge study with cattle, and they experimentally infected them in two ways. One of them was via the respiratory route, and another one was via the udder, and they found that the cows could get infected via both routes. So it's possible that cows can get infected via the respiratory route, but it does still seem that the mammary glands and the udder are a key target of this virus.
Nick Petrić Howe
So do these new studies, these preprints, do they give researchers any more concerns about this virus?
Smriti Mallapaty
Yeah, I think the big concern for researchers is that if this virus continues to spread in cattle, it increases the risk or exposure to people. And so there's one concern that you know, then this virus, as it continues to spread in cattle, it could evolve to better infect mammals, and therefore evolve to better infect people. But the other risk is that as it continues to spread in cattle, it increases the exposure to people, and then that access creates more opportunities for the virus to jump to people.
Nick Petrić Howe
So we've talked a lot about how this is spreading in cattle, but there have been a smattering of human cases as well, right?
Smriti Mallapaty
Yeah. So there have been, I think, a handful of cases that are linked directly to the cattle outbreak in the United States, but then recently, there were also some cases in poultry farms that have been potentially linked to the cattle outbreak. And from those farms, some people have been infected from poultry and so it hasn't been a lot of people. It's not clear whether all of the cases in people have been detected. You know that's linked to being able to test all the people, but of the cases that we know that have been detected, there's maybe less than a dozen people. So it's not a huge amount of people, and the risk to people remains quite low at this stage, at least from what researchers are saying.
Nick Petrić Howe
Yeah, there doesn't seem to be any sort of human-to-human transmission, which I guess would be real alarm bells for researchers.
Smriti Mallapaty
Yeah, definitely no evidence of human-to-human transmission.
Nick Petrić Howe
So you've been speaking to researchers about this. What are the sort of strategies that are being proposed to help control this outbreak?
Smriti Mallapaty
Researchers are really concerned, and so many countries are already starting to prepare for the possibility of a pandemic. I mean, we have to be clear, at this stage, the risk to people remains quite low. But you know, some researchers have said to me that, you know, with influenza viruses, you just have to be on alert because the virus can change in a way that could make it better at infecting people, and that is a concern. And so many countries are ramping up surveillance to monitor cattle and other animals so that they can detect an outbreak when it does happen quickly, some countries have started purchasing vaccines against this particular strain of H5N1, which so far, the vaccines that are available do seem to still work against this strain of the virus. And another thing that researchers are doing is they're trying to study the sequences of this virus to look for whether this virus is evolving in ways that would potentially increase the risk to people.
Nick Petrić Howe
And, you know, we all live in, I guess, the memory of 2020. Have lessons been learned from the previous pandemic? Do researchers believe we're better prepared this time around?
Smriti Mallapaty
I think there are two things. One of them from the pandemic is that we saw this new vaccine, the mRNA technology, being used. So some researchers are already starting to develop mRNA vaccines for influenza viruses, and some companies are already working on that. And so these could be potentially a way to manufacture influenza vaccines against specific strains quicker. And another thing that the world has learned is the huge inequality in the way that vaccines were distributed. So I spoke with an individual at CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and they are really trying to ensure that any kind of response that involves vaccines is equitable. They want to ensure that low- and middle-income countries aren't left behind when it comes to being able to access vaccines, and that's one of the things that we have learned from the COVID-19 pandemic that could be a potential problem if this does become a pandemic, although at this stage, it's not looking like it at the moment.
Nick Petrić Howe
Well, let's hope that those lessons have been learned from 2020 and we'll continue to monitor this on the podcast as this situation develops. But for now, Smriti, thank you so much for joining me.
Smriti Mallapaty
Thank you.
Benjamin Thompson
That was Smriti Mallapaty chatting with Nick Petrić Howe. For more on this story, check out the show notes for some links.
Lizzie Gibney
Finally on the show, it’s time for the Briefing Chat, where we discuss a couple of articles that have been highlighted in the Nature Briefing. Why don’t I go first this week. I've got a story that, as a massive space nerd, is totally exciting, or hopefully very exciting. This was in Space.com but to be honest, it was absolutely everywhere. This is a very exciting rock that's been found by the NASA rover Perseverance on Mars. So I think I would describe it as probably, like the best evidence yet of ancient life on Mars. So this is one of the big goals is like, you know, we think that probably at some point in Mars's history there was water, there was potentially some kind of microbial life and Perseverance is one of the missions that has, you know, been looking for it and there are future ones planned.
Benjamin Thompson
We often joke in our production meetings, ‘Is it aliens?’ and I think the answer here is, well, probably not. But maybe.
Lizzie Gibney
So we're talking about ancient life here, right. So we're talking about probably microbes and living probably billions of years ago. So this rock was in a place called Cheyava Falls, and it's got three very cool things about it. So number one, it's got organic compounds, you know, which we know are in a lot of living things you need to make living things. And it's got veins of calcium sulphate running through it. Now that's a mineral that gets deposited when water runs through rocks. So again, it's suggested that there was once water there. And finally, there are these leopard spots, which are like millimetre-sized splotches, and they're ringed with black. So they really do look like little spots on a leopard, and the rings contain iron and phosphate. So Perseverance, saw this rock has zapped it with a load of X-rays and lasers to get all of this information and some of these things have been seen before, but never these three things like that all together. So those kind of leopard spots is something that's been seen on Earth as a result of chemical reactions by microbes that are like living in the substrate of the rock. So it's very, very promising. But of course, there is always a possibility that that's not the explanation.
Benjamin Thompson
Right. Well, of course. I mean, I guess Perseverance can only do certain experiments and provide this evidence then for something that is potentially analogous to something seen here on Earth. But the through line between the two, there's a lot of gaps to be filled in, I'm sure.
Lizzie Gibney
Absolutely. And you know, we are studying a completely different world to our own that's only been seen in this remote way through rovers in the past. So the kind of mechanisms that were at play there billions of years ago, we are very much, you know, speculating about. So maybe some kind of volcanic activity could have baked these markings into the rock somehow. Maybe it's a coincidence that that's where water used to be. It's possible. And Perseverance really has done everything it can. There was a lovely quote in the press release that the NASA team put out saying, you know, Perseverance has reached the end of what it can do here. It's thrown everything at this rock, and that means the only thing left to do is bring a little bit of the rock back to Earth so we can do much more extensive studies here. And that is ultimately the plan, but it's a rather long-term plan.
Benjamin Thompson
An expensive plan as well.
Lizzie Gibney
Very expensive. So Perseverance has taken a sample. It's got a whole raft of samples now that it's collected on Mars and NASA ultimately wants, potentially with ESA, to bring these samples back. The plan has gone up and up and up in cost. So I think it's now looking about $11 billion which is a lot of money, but NASA's now exploring alternative plans. So is there a cheaper way that it could try to bring these samples back? So if anybody out there, you know, dear listener if you've got any ideas, send them on a postcard to NASA. But yeah, so it might be that NASA has discovered ancient life on Mars, but we might only have it confirmed in about 10, 20 years’ time.
Benjamin Thompson
So a tantalizing potential that life could have existed on Mars, but the flip side of it is it could just be a strange rock, and it's going to be a long time till we find out.
Lizzie Gibney
It could be. But scientists really excited about this, this is exactly the kind of thing that they went looking for. This is probably one of the best examples that a rover could hope to find and analyse. You know, there isn't much more that they can do, so I think it's quite a big win. And, yeah, something to look forward to getting those samples back eventually.
Benjamin Thompson
Well, I'm not sure Lizzie, how I'm going to top that in this week's Briefing Chat, but there is a through line to my story, actually. It's not an outer-space mystery, but it is an under-the-sea mystery. And I know the old adage that, you know, the surface of the Moon is better studied than the ocean floor, but something is going on in the ocean floor. And it seems that oxygen is being made there. And how this is happening is kind of baffling scientists. Now, something is pumping out large amounts of the stuff, but what it is is currently kind of a shrug, but some researchers have published what they hypothesize is going on in Nature Geoscience.
Lizzie Gibney
So let's back up a bit. So oxygen needs what to be produced?
Benjamin Thompson
Well, typically we think about oxygen being produced by photosynthesis, right. Like that's how it gets made, algae in water or plants on the land. But what's weird about this one is that it's at the very base of the Pacific, like 1,000s of meters down where there is no light, so it can't be photosynthesis, right. And this story has got a bit of a backstory, I suppose. In 2013 researchers were studying ecosystems in this area in the Pacific, between Hawaii and Mexico, right. And they drop these probes that kind of sink to the sea floor, right, and they run these automated experiments. They're kind of essentially, maybe an upside-down glass bowl, maybe right. So they trap some sea water inside, and oxygen usually gets into ecosystems, certainly deep down, via kind of surface currents spreading it around, right. And you'd expect oxygen levels in this kind of trapped bit of sea water to drop as it's used up, not in this case — it went up. And the researchers understandably very confused and thought their sensors were wrong. I read in one place that they sent it back like several times, saying there must be something wrong with this equipment, can you have another look at it? And they kept on getting this result and different techniques showed it too. So one of the researchers here is quoted as saying, like he'd been ignoring a potential new process for making oxygen for years, because, I guess he thought it was a mistake. So I know the question you're about to ask is, what on earth is going on then? Right. And hopefully I can help out.
Lizzie Gibney
Yeah, what are the theories?
Benjamin Thompson
Well, the current hypothesis is that this oxygen is being produced thanks to these things called polymetallic nodules. Okay. They're about the size of a plum, our colleague Davide describes them as in a Nature article he's written about this work, or maybe a potato as well. You know that sort of thing. So quite small. They're a bunch of different sorts of metals, maybe nickel, maybe lithium, copper, cobalt, all these kind of things, right. And they've been laid down over millions of years, right. Dissolved metals in seawater have collected around something, maybe a fragment of shell. So they've gathered around this thing. And the way that it's been described in a bunch of places, and I'm going to use heavy inverted commas here, they're kind of acting like “batteries”. Maybe.
Lizzie Gibney
Wow
Benjamin Thompson
Okay, so if you think, if you drop a battery in water, don't try this at home, team, obviously. But like sometimes, you have enough voltage to split water, and you get oxygen out, and that's maybe what's going on here. So the researchers did a bunch of tests, and as I understand it, these little nodules on their own don't create enough voltage, but if you place them side by side–
Lizzie Gibney
–mm, hm–
Benjamin Thompson
–like you might do in a torch, for example, or a flashlight, I suppose, that would give you enough voltage to split seawater. Now this is a hypothesis, okay, there are lots of questions to answer about what's going on, right. If this is a chemical reaction, presumably the chemicals would have depleted a long time ago. So what's going on is sort of shrug, but what's interesting as well is that it raises a bunch of other questions about how we could make use of this potentially, right. Because if this is indeed what's going on, perhaps there's a way to use this chemistry up here on dry land to make better catalysts, all right. But also, these nodules are being investigated by various mining companies as a source of these metals, right. Lithium, we need lithium for stuff–
Lizzie Gibney
–that’s the first thing I thought, when you mentioned those metals, I was like well, that sounds valuable.
Benjamin Thompson
Well, exactly, right. And so they are valuable metals, but if they are in some way related to being the source of this oxygen, taking them out could damage the ecosystems on the sea floor. So there's an ecology aspect to this too. But I did say there was a through line to your story here, Lizzie, and it's kind of an interesting one that I hadn't considered until I read about it in the article. And it's that if we're looking for extraterrestrial life, in many cases, researchers are looking for the signature of oxygen on exoplanets, right. And I think it's fair to say that, you know, we might assume that this oxygen is made by organic life. It's biologically made. But here, if this is what's going on, there's potentially no biological aspect to this at all. It is just an underwater“battery”. So we need to be even more cautious when thinking about what the signatures of life might be out there in the wider universe.
Lizzie Gibney
Gosh, yes, that is such a challenge. And has this just been seen in one place on the seabed, or are there potentially other sources of dark oxygen that haven't been found yet?
Benjamin Thompson
Well, this is the first time this has been sort of described from this area in the Pacific. But I think what's really interesting is it shows that there is another source of oxygen that isn't photosynthesis. And it's so interesting that there's loads of chemistry out there that is yet to be discovered. We cover it all the time, like nobody knew this until now, and so your fingers crossed that you know, researchers can get to the bottom of this and what may be going on.
Lizzie Gibney
Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Ben. And for more on those stories, and for where you can sign up to the Nature Briefing to get more like them, check out the show notes for some links.
Benjamin Thompson
That’s all for this week, as always you can keep in touch with us on X, we’re @NaturePodcast, or you can send an email to [email protected].
Lizzie Gibney
And if you fancy leaving us a review, you can do so wherever you get your podcasts, I'm Lizzie Gibney.
Benjamin Thompson
And I'm Benjamin Thompson. Thanks for listening.
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Doi: 10.1038/d41586-024-02517-z
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