The Naked Scientists in New Zealand

Classic David Bowie song or legitimate scientific question? Many believe Mars may have, at some point in time, harboured life, and one of those people searching is Steve Pointing, director of the Institute for Applied Ecology at AUT, who explained why we're looking for life on Mars. 

Steve -  Mars is our closest neighbour and to understand why it's worth looking there, it's more than just proximity and getting there easily.  It's also about understanding a concept.  That concept is known as the habitable zone.  So essentially for any star like our sun, there is a very small zone around that star that is able to support planets that can harbour life.  it's really a confluence of two functions.  Number one, the planet needs to be just the right distance from that star to allow water to exist as a liquid.  So, if it's too far away, the water is cold and frozen.  If it's too close, the water is evaporated and not available.  And the second thing is the planet has to have enough mass to retain an atmosphere, such that gases that are useful to life like carbon dioxide, like oxygen are retained, but heavier and more toxic gases are not retained.

Chris -   Do you know they were going to build a nightclub on Mars, but they said it was crap because there's no atmosphere?

Steve -   Great!  Parking would be an issue anyway.  Yeah, it's interesting.  Funny enough, going on from that though, there's actually a Dutch TV company who've been advertising for a bunch of individuals to take a one way trip up to Mars for a reality show.

Chris -   But they're all old people when they said old people only because they didn't want anyone who was going to come back.  They said, a.) it would affect the budget and b.) there was danger of radiation exposure because NASA did with the Curiosity rover that landed almost two years ago this weekend.  It's going to be 2 years of Curiosity rover that came down.

Steve -   It's 2 years this week, yes.

Chris -   They use the radiation sensor on Curiosity to measure the incident radiation exposure that it got during the - because over half a billion kilometres of travel to Mars, isn't it?

Steve -   That's right.  Six months in a cramped spaceship.

Chris -   Equated to basically an astronaut's entire working lifetime sort of radiation exposure just making that journey.

Steve -   Absolutely and that's largely because there is no atmosphere to block out those harmful incoming rays.  So yeah, it would be absolutely unimaginably large task to get people living up there permanently.  But you know, we have to aim big.  The simple truth is that when one considers our star, it has a finite lifespan and we're a single-planet species at the moment.  And so really, philosophically, we have to ask ourselves, do were really want to admit that once planet Earth becomes uninhabitable that we're going to die out.  So, that's really - from my mind - is the philosophy behind exploring Mars.

Chris -   What makes you think that Mars might have life on it at all?

Steve -   Well, it's a good question.  The sort of life we'd be looking for - let me be clear - is not little green men.  I don't think we're expecting.  We're not really looking at that.  the reason is this - I've got a bit of show and tell for the people listening.  I'm holding up a rock at the moment which has a rather smudgy green line just beneath the surface.  This is the surface of the rock here and this green line is about 20 mm below the surface and this is the sort of life that we expect to encounter on Mars.  This particular rock is actually from Antarctica but Antarctica is what we call a Mars analogue.  It's the closest thing on Earth that we have to Mars surface.  It's very cold, it's very dry, and it's relatively high radiation levels there because the atmosphere is thinner at the poles.  This sort of life, although it's green, it's not a green man or a green woman, it's actually cyanobacteria which are very, very primitive plants.  They're single-celled microbial plants essentially.  That's the sort of thing we're expecting to find.

Chris -   Just to be clear, they can actually thrive in the temperatures.  They're actually viable at the sorts of temperature you see in Antarctica.

Steve -   Well, they're not viable at surface temperature.  The temperature on Mars can be anything down to minus 110 degrees which biological reactions just won't occur there.  But these organisms are just below the surface.  The reason is that in Antarctica for example, they're exploiting very marginal gains in temperature and humidity that occur below the surface.  And so, the reason Curiosity for example has a drill on it is that NASA's aim is to drill into the rock and thereby, try to identify whether life is either present or has been present in the past which is probably our best bet.

Chris -   Have they found anything yet?

Steve -   No.  Curiosity doesn't have a primary aim to search for life.  Curiosity actually is looking for the chemical conditions that could've supported life.  So for example, how sustained was the presence of water on the surface. But in 2020, there is a sort of an amped up version of Curiosity going to be launched which will have a slightly adjusted payload and that will have a direct aim to search for life.  that is a good segue to our previous speaker because it's actually using lasers.  In this case, a Raman spectroscopy laser to try and identify compounds that are specific to life and in particular, these green life forms, the cyanobacteria.

Chris -   So, you've looked in rocks from Antarctica and then presupposed that if life does exist on Mars, it's probably going to be sort of similar or have similar chemistry to the life we see in extreme environments here on Earth that are sort of similar.  So, if we therefore go looking for those same sorts of chemical hallmarks on Mars, that's the best place to go looking.

Steve -   Yeah.  I mean, there are arguments for and against this strategy.  I mean, some people could argue why would life be DNA-based for example as all life on Earth is.  But the simple truth is that chemistry has arrived at the most parsimonious solution for life.  The simplest solutions were often the best.  And so, we know that there are certain compounds in life that are very good indicators and in particular, not necessarily DNA, but actually, compounds such as chlorophyll for example, a potentially very good indicator for life.

Simon -   So this habitable zone, Mars is basically the convenient option.

Steve -   It is a convenient option.

Simon -   Six months, I mean, that makes your trip through the violet pretty easy, isn't it?  You were whinging about that.

Chris -   What?  My trip down here?

Simon -   Yeah.

Steve -   Yeah.  I'm not sure what the land should be like.  But the great thing about Mars is looking at Mars' immediate past.  Probably as little as 5 million years ago, Mars very possibly was pretty much like maritime Antarctica is now.  It was much warm and much wetter and quite conceivably could've supported life.  and that's largely a result of the obliquity of the planet, having changed quite radically.

Chris -   Why do you think that's happened?  Why so recently?

Steve -   Well, this is down to astronomers, but quite simply, the angle of tilt for the planet Mars has changed from about 45 degrees to about 23 degrees which is more or less identical to Earth.  It's just in the last 5 million years.  Of course, the poles, with that much more exposed to the sun and most of the waters at the poles ergo there would've been much more water.  That's really the basic prerequisite for life.

Chris -   Because it's very recent, isn't it that it's undergone such a dramatic shift.

Steve -   Yeah, I mean, it is an estimate of course but those that know in the astronomy field stick by that.

Chris -   So, do we think then because life got started on Earth very quickly by 3.9 billion years ago and the planet is only 4.5 billion years old.  We've got evidence that there were little cells already here going about their business on Earth.  Do we think that probably the same thing was happening in parallel on Mars then?

Steve -   Well, a lot of people believe so.  I mean, life on Earth, there are traces for life on Earth pretty soon after the lunar cataclysm and life could've even conceivably originated before then, but being wiped out by the - as you may know, there was a very large impact of planet Theia that proto planet Theia that impacted early Earth.  The mess that resulted as ejected into space form our moon.  So, nothing really survived.  But very soon after as you say, life evolved.  But a lot of people believed that life could've evolved on Mars because Mars, although it's slightly outside the perfect habitable zone now was actually once in that zone, and will actually enter that zone again in the future.  So yeah, a lot of people believe life could've co-occurred on two planets.  Of course, that brings up some really amazing philosophical questions.

Chris -   Do you think that if there is life on Mars now, do you think that it could be in a sort of stasis, sitting, waiting, so that when the sun gets a bit warm and swells up a bit as it ages, that life could come back to life as it were?

Steve -   Yeah, it's quite possible.  I mean, one of the things about microbes that's really remarkable is their ability to essentially go dormant for very, very long periods.  We've retrieved bacteria from ice cores thousands of years old that are viable.  So, it's as quite conceivable.

Traditionally, counselling sessions have involved fact to face meetings between patients and doctors or therapists but they didn't suit everybody and it wasn't always convenient to go and sit down for an hour to meet somebody.  But now, Sally Merry who is at the University of Auckland has developed an online solution to the problem using an eTherapy video game that she calls Sparx. She explains why they came up with this idea...

Sally  -  It does seem obvious although I think that there are a number of steps along the way.  So, I have been met with a great deal of scepticism by therapists who say, "How on Earth can you replace face to face therapy?"

Chris -   Do you think they might have a vested interest?

Sally -   They could, possibly.  But I think they also do make a good point in that, interactions between two people are quite complex and there are a lot of subtleties within that.  And how do you actually get a computer which is basically metal and plastic and so on, and get an interaction that somewhat mimics what you might actually do in that therapy session.  I think what we'd actually done in Sparx is, we've actually taken both afantasy game format  but also, some of the eLearning theories where you actually think about how do people interact with computers and what are the things that make it compelling.  What keep people in there and how might you actually - what we're actually trying to do here is change habitual ways of thinking and deliver basically a cognitive behavioural therapy through the medium of an interaction online.

Chris -   Or if you link it to 888 Poker or online bingo you'd be sorted, wouldn't you?

Sally -   Yes, I think that might be some slightly some for interaction of course.

Chris -   But I mean, what sorts of conditions could you treat with this?

Sally -   Well, I think we're just at the start of exploring what might be done here.  So, what we've actually done is, this is actually targeted to depression in young people and the cognitive behavioural therapy model that we've actually used is one that's being proven in fact to face therapy.  I think one of the things that makes it one of the easier things to perhaps put online is that we've actually got quite a clear theory behind it where the whole idea that your feelings just happen to you is not actually true.  What you actually think about things and what you actually do impact on your feelings.  You don't just have to be passive recipient.  We can extend that very easily to anxiety disorders and there are effective eTherapies for anxiety disorders as well.  We're thinking about where can we go next.  So, might we use it to help substance use disorders or can we help parenting, and can we teach people social skills, and should we and can we be using some of the social media to create therapeutic communities online and so on.  So, I think there's a huge number of things that we can do.  There's quite a lot of things where we could perhaps link into some of the biology.  So, if you're stressed, your heart rate variability goes down.  Generally speaking, your heart rate fluctuates and if you're not stressed out then there's quite a big fluctuation with how you breathe.  If you are stressed out then your heart rate variability goes down because your heart rate is at a higher level.  You can actually measure this obviously using pulse things and there are actually some games as - there's a lovely game called "Journey to the Wild Divine" and it's played with clips on people's fingertips.  You clip in and then you just do it with your mind.  So, you can go into this game and you can spin wheels, you can shoot arrows, you can balance rocks, and you have to do it, just with how you're thinking.

Chris -   So, if you think yourself into a calm mental demeanour thinking, you make a programme so that the success in the programme is linked to somebody adopting the right sort of physiology, the right level of calmness.  And this, without them even realising it, their thinking themselves into a calm place.  And so, your sort of app would approach this in the same sort of way?

Sally -   Sparx doesn't do this.  This is actually looking to where we might be going.  Sparx is actually very active.  So here, when we were developing it, a lot of people have taken cognitive behavioural therapy, they put onto box and then putting it onto lines.  Lots of people have put, what I think about as manuals online.  So, there's lots of writing and this stuff that tells you what you can be doing.  And we tried some of this approach with young people some of our early iterations.  The nice thing about working with young people is they do give you very honest feedback.  They say, "This is really boring.  It sucks.  We don't want to do this.  We don't want to read anything.  We want to do stuff."  Particularly, the boys wanted to shoot stuff.  This is a game or an intervention for depression so we didn't want anybody to die.  So, we had to think about what we're going to do.  So, we created a story in every bit of cognitive behavioural therapy that we could think of, we tried to think about, what could you do in a fantasy game format?  So, one of the things that we actually did was, we had to deal with a shooting issue.  So, in the game the idea is that the world has been infested with nets which are gloomy negative automatic thoughts.  And so, we decided that's actually quite a good thing that you could shoot.  So, we shoot this.

Chris -   On a swat?

Sally -   Yeah.

Chris -   Splat with a swatter.

Sally -   That's right, but you also want to convert them and think about how you can actually change things.  People are prone to depression, tend to take a bit of a negative view on life and then interpret the world in a negative way.  How can you actually change that and how can you transform that?  So, we have swamp province which is infested with nets and the nets come flying at you and they say awful things like, "You're a loser" and then you have to work out, "What kind of a net is this?"  If you can classify it correctly, you get nice little Sparx.  The Sparx sends with smart, positive, active, realistic X-factor thoughts.  So, if you can classify your net properly then out comes the spark that tells you, "You're not a loser at all.  You're just giving it a good go and you need to think about yourself in a different way."  So, it's actually changing things and trying to help, that's called cognitive restructuring people to do that.

Simon -   Does it actually work?  Have you been able to measure its success and how effective this is versus face to face because...?

Chris -   I thought you're going to say versus Facebook.

Sally -   There's a whole another story.  Yeah, it does work.  We've done a big trial in New Zealand.  We tested it with 187 young people in New Zealand.  We randomised them to have their treatment as usual which is mostly face to face counselling with mostly very good counsellors and Sparx was as good as the face to face therapy.

Chris -   I think it also is popular or effective because people do it on their terms when they want to do it whereas if you say to someone, "You've got to turn up to this appointment at this time."  if someone is not in the mood for whatever reason for going and engaging in that appointment at that time, it's not going to work as well.

Sally -   Absolutely and in fact, I'm a child and adolescent psychiatrist.  I don't find that young people are necessarily beating their way to my door.  So yes, this means that people can do it anywhere anytime in privacy.  Mental illness still carries quite a stigma to it.  But the other thing is, we don't have enough therapists.  Depressive disorder is one of the most common and most expensive illnesses in the world.  About three quarters of young people with depressive disorder will never get any help for it.

Mat Goddard, senior lecturer at the School of Biological Sciences at Auckland University, has just discovered evidence of mutualism in microbes. He starts by explaining just what mutualism is...

Mat -   Most organisms interact with other organisms in some way.  Sometimes that's not very good.  Parasites for example interact with other organisms to the detriment of the other.  Sometimes however, both organisms benefit from that interaction.  Both gain and that is simply a mutualism.  So, think about insects pollinating plants, the insect gains, it might get nectar, and the plant gains because it gets pollinated - mutualism.

Chris -   That sounds pretty straightforward.  What are you actually trying to find out then?

Mat -   Well, whilst we've known about mutualisms for a long time, the way that they might become established in the first place is unknown.  There's not general rule to help us understand how two organisms might come together for the benefit of each other.

Chris -   So, like yeast and human - beer, we drink it.

Mat -   Yeah, that's a special kind of mutualism.

Chris -   It's very special in my case, yeah.  Some very special mutualism going on in the pub last night between me and Simon.  And so, what you're saying is, that there's got to be a special sort of evolutionary niche there where there's a gap made and something can fall into it to help something else and one scratches the other's back.

Mat -   Yes, hard to imagine how that would become immediately established, how both partners can immediately benefit.  It's hard to imagine how those things can suddenly come to be.

Chris -   But why because I would think that there's lots of opportunities in nature for many rolls of the dice and it's just chance that this thing happens to have something the other thing wants and vice versa, and they get together?

Mat -   Yes, that's right.  But at the moment, we have no general rule to describe that.  the only general rule that we have is that both partners must leave more descendants by interacting with one another.  But there's no general rule to understand how that would become established in the first place.

Chris - Isn't the first sort of really fancy example of this, that if we go right back to the sort of the history of the beginning of life on Earth, where you see the cells we're all made of coming into being in the sense that you get bacterial type organisms snuggling up with more advanced cells like ours, the two then establish a relationship and we still this sort of bacterial cells living in every single one of our cells now in the form of these things we call mitochondria.

Mat -   Indeed and that's a stunning mutualism.  You could take any other of the myriad of mutualisms in the biological world, and individually, you could explain how that came to be.  But the question is, is there a general rule that allows you to explain how mutualisms comes to be.

Chris -   So, do you think there is a rule?

Mat -   We set about trying to test one of these rules.  And so, there's another central theme in evolution and ecology which is called niche constructional ecosystem engineering and this simply says that organisms, by their own actions modify their environment to some extent, from simply consuming food and making waste to more elaborate ideas like beavers constructing dams.  And so, this suggests that maybe an organism has a hand on its own evolutionary trajectory because if an organism is modifying its own environment and it's modifying the environment to which it's exposed to and thus, its selection pressures.

Simon -   Wow!  So, the scenario there is, I've got a cat.  I put a cat flap in at home.  Now for me, that's a modification of my environment.  I get a bit of a draft and the cat flap, it's a bit of a hassle.  But the cat can come and go.  They can have a crack at the local mice.  I'm living in a rodent-free environment.  When the plague comes, I'm going to survive.

Mat -   I take your point, yes.

Simon -   I modified a niche though.

Chris -   Also, is it not fair enough to say there's another kind of mutualism going on between cat and your kid's sandpit?

Simon -   True and that modification is something that I really don't enjoy especially when you scrape it off.  But your discovery is specifically looking at microbes.  That's been the niche modification.

Mat -   So, we put together both of these ideas.  This idea of the evolutionary mutualisms and this ecosystem engineering and asked the question whether this ability of organisms to modify their environment, whether that could be a general instigator for the evolution of mutualisms.  So, another thing that yeast kick out and there's a bunch of volatile compounds.  So, these are the things that make beer on wine taste and smell nice to us.  But clearly, yeast didn't make these compounds for us.  There must be a biological reason that yeast kick out these volatiles and that was unknown.  So, one idea is that they in fact kick out these volatiles as chemical lures for insects.  Imagine a funny little microbe sitting on a bunch of grapes, it can't move.  When that bunch of grapes is eaten or fall to the ground in rots, that microbe dies with it.  So, the only way this microbe is going to persist in evolutionary and ecological time is, if it escapes.  How is it going to escape if it can't move?  Well, maybe attract something to move it for it.  Maybe attracts a vector.  Maybe it lures in something that it can get stuck to and then gets moved through the environment.  So, the idea is that these volatiles that yeast kick out during fermentation are there to attract insects.  And so, we tested this directly in the lab.  we found that to be the case.  We found that fruit flies are differentially attracted to different types of yeast.  And that those yeast that are more attractive, in fact get dispersed more in the environment, both in the lab.  and then we went to the vineyard and did the same thing.