Was the original schedule using the ring Nigel's time period this has since before I was mazes the socks thing this tipped you over the Scott Mills and Chris Stark Saturday morning from 9 b.c.e. Radius 5. Sunday Brett 1st round 6 with Sarah Brett and Jeff Lloyd 1st though it's 5 signs it's approved go to programs to please don't call or text. Hello welcome to 5 Live Science I'm Chris Smith from The Naked Scientist in today's program scientists fix a genetic fault to grow new skin in a dish water 40000 year old cave painting can reveal about how our ancestors thought about their world a new insights into our son's bizarre magnetic field plus when you're in there you have no idea which way is up or down so even if you had the ability. To try and dig yourself out you would know which way to go what causes avalanches and how do you survive them that make it scientists are 5 Live 1st this week imagine if your skin was so fragile that even the slightest knock caused it to blister and tear. This is unfortunately the reality for people with a condition called epidermal Lysis bullosa it occurs when a person inherits 40 copies of the genes that might be a crucial skin protein collagen but help may not be a hand Columbia University researcher Joanna jack off has found a way to edit the faulty genes in stem cells and use the repaired cells to grow new healthy skin it's the 1st step toward skin replacements for patients with the source of genetic skin diseases patients have extensive The biggest error in this Kiran because they born with this mutation the skin the started to blister right after the birth is blisters could only quorums that and not healed and this chronic warrants convert to extensive scattering and finally you with increasing age the patients get skin cancer called squamous cell carcinoma and what's the approach you've taken to try to put this right using this model then it exists Iris cord to despair we can fix this mutation in a cell scored induced early but then stem cells which are sounds that we can generate from patients on cells because this says have a potential of differentiation to any set type we want in our case we can devil our skin excede violence which we called grafts and this can equivalents can be grafted on the wound that area of the skin so you saying make some stem cells fix the gene problem in those stem cells and then grow new rafts of skin from the fixed stem cells so that you've got a new skin to put on to the individuals with the condition it's correct how do you go though from those fixed skin cells into actually making skin. Yes we take the right and the right sound snow and putting them together or in a matter of college and and the cells so we'll grow into a normal skin that we caught a skin equivalents and they and the skin it feeble and can be grafted on their patients have you tested this though in the sense that you've got these patches of skin equivalent do they survive in the long term and for instance if you put them on to an animal in place of its own skin do they work yes we used for this immune deficient mouse model which is the model which doesn't having mune system and will not reject this grafts and we've been testing and the survival of this grafts 2 months plus grafting and we could demonstrate that the grafts survived and produce did this put a lot in that was missing in previously in the patient skin in other words the implication is were you to do this in a patient because it would be their own cells there wouldn't be an immune problem so you could just put these skin patches on in place of the individual's injured skin and it should take over the function of their injured skin and give them a healthy working skin exactly that's exactly what is the concept of our strategy big problem though when you consider how big a person is I mean the surface area of a human that's you know me to squared of skin isn't it so is it feasible to actually do this on the scale of the entire body because you'd have to replace all the skin when you. Yes this is an excellent questions and we've been already thinking of this so are we would like to 1st covered that larger ones of the patients body and we hope that because we had deriving this skin equivalence for all cataract you know side in that hopefully have also a population of stem cell event to add this graft can take over and convert the whole body of the patient thing is skin isn't just skin. Producing cells is it there's hair follicles in there there are more complicated structures like sweat glands as well those are going to be present in the graphs you make our way. That's what we have thinking as a next step to make more complex skin including all of this very important components as you mention have for legal and sweat glands this is what we keep in mind in the future and let's hope it works Joanna jack off there and that what was published in p.m.s. Deep inside a cave on the island of slow easy in Indonesia may lie the oldest ever cave art depiction of our ancestors hunting plenty more than 40000 years ago it gives us a rare glimpse into how early humans may have thought and acted named Barney asked Kobol specialist Alice Sampson who was in herself involved in the work to date the painting for her reaction to the discovery. This cave is quite hard to access it's quite out of the way the rock art is in a cave the opening of which ease out from the back of another cave it's like 7 meters up in a cave where we have to scramble up there in the rocket itself is like 3 meters above the level. The art is actually really interesting and really quite beautiful and what we see is quite dynamic scene of kind of multiple animals that seemingly have sort of like galloping across the walls and then a whole bunch of smaller figures which the authors in the paper called Harry and tropes which is basically a long word which means that if they see this with combinations of human and animal features and these kind of human animal the mini thing is chasing all scampering around after a lot of larger beasts. These are kind of drawn in what looks like a kind of red over curry the sort of pigment to paint on the limestone walls of the cave incredible So they're also saying that this is the oldest hunting's. When that has ever been found what do you think they're hunting What's the significance to be honest we don't know what the original art actually means Ok but the significance of it in terms of understanding human evolution and human cognition and thought processes that's where its significance lies I think because it's showing that far back as like 40000 years ago people were depicting kind of abstract thoughts and ideas in and of artistic form on for example walls or in small carvings it's pretty exciting this paper that these archaeologists have done have attained really early dates for for this rock art which kind of predates by several 1000 years stuff that's found in the area and also early Paleolithic rock art in in Europe although the dates themselves it's not actually a direct stating of the rock out what I've done is use a technique called Ukrainian Thorin dating which dates flow stone the way they kind of start mice and start types form on top of the rock out and so they've got a date for that material that's formed on top of the rock out and that basically gives you a date before which the rocket must have been made so that the flow stone is dated to around 40000 years ago and the art underneath is then earlier than that how do you kind of link to the migration of man from Africa for example there were taken in Southeast Asia much earlier than this than this rock art but this rock heart represents some of the earliest signs of evidence for symbolic thought and abstract thinking by anatomically modern humans briefly back to the rock art itself these hunters they have animal heads any comments about that this is a really common feature of any rock are taking off and depicts humans and animals and human animal e things we're obsessed in art and of modern scientific approach to the world in attacks on to me the difference between a particular different species and humans being stepper. Different entities from from animals and plants and things like that but this is a this is a particularly kind of in 1000 men and one of modern and rational scientific way of conceiving the world and we cannot make the same assumptions that about the past and about the ways that in which people in the past saw their world so yes it does look like a hunting scene the authors have sort of pointed to the presence of maybe ropes or spears and the fact that these little figures the little animal human figures are chasing maybe or corralling or certainly interacting with these animals so it certainly looks like it could be a hunting scene but weather is just a sort of straightforward depiction of an everyday activity or whether it is something more sort of complex than that I think is hard to say I would say that is actually speaking about kind of much bigger topics about the relationship between humans and animals and their environments you know this is not a casual activity I imagine the actual sort of painting on the rock art itself was a very sort of significant and ritual practice rather than just a kind of casual doodle. Alice Sampson from the University of Leicester commenting on that study was published in Nature. You're listening to 5 Live Science with me Chris Smith still to come a new way to help problem drinkers to cut down and we look at the science of avalanches including talking to someone who survived being buried by one but before we discuss snow and ice Adam if he's been sunning himself with some of the latest news from the center of our solar system. In August of 2018 NASA launched the Parker solar probe and sent it hurtling off towards the sun to further our understanding of the source of our sun like the probe is about the size of a car with a heat shield covering one side so that it can withstand the enormously high temperatures the other side has a suite of instruments on it like magnetic field detectors to help us probe into the sun the probe is currently orbiting the sun getting closer and closer to its atmosphere which is known as the corona now as it approaches its discovered something unusual in the sun's magnetic field which may help to explain some of the deepest mysteries about the sun like how the atmosphere around it is hundreds of times hotter than the surface I heard how from Christopher Chan a Queen Mary University in London who was involved with Inter bring the data from one of the solar probes instruments we found several new and unexpected discoveries so one of these is the fact that we found these big folds in the magnetic field so the spacecraft has a record it would sense and what it found was that within a period of a few seconds the Mechanix field flips direction entirely so woman is pointing away from the sun and then in a few seconds later it flips to be pointing towards the sun and then it slips again and is pointing away from the sun again And this is sort of unexpected it's not been seen further out and we don't know exactly what is causing these large slips in the field and that kind of thing doesn't happen here on earth does it in the solar wind that there are large and that you. Will but these but certainly not as clear and pronounced as we're seeing up close to the Sun It looks like a different type of structure that's occurred. And as it's getting closer is it changing those slips or is how static are they so they are getting more intimate and more bursty what is seen is that as we're going closer to the sun there are there are these periods where the solar wind is very very quiet and the market thought is not slipping at all but then there are these periods where it's flipping all over the place rapidly and all kinds of time scales as well so some of these so we call them switchbacks some of these switchbacks last for just a couple seconds some of them last for 4 minutes so it's really much more busty and much more sort of complex and dynamic up close to the sun given how big the sun is given the scale of it the idea that the magnetic field can flip over the course of seconds seems really really intense to me yes so it's so when I say the market feels flipping it's not the entire magnitude of the sun but it's the magnetic field in the solar wind where the spacecraft is measuring So if you think of the market field around the Sun It's not a simple shape that you get from a bar magnet but it's actually a really complex intricate structure so there's loops of magnetic field on the sun there are these long story Asians of magnetic field lines that stretch far out into the solar wind so it's really the flips within this structure of the magnetic field as it as it points away from the sun and what other kind of things is the solar promise ring So for example there's an instrument which measures the solar wind velocity as it travels away from the sun and what that found was that as we going in closer the solar wind is not flowing just radially away from the sun in a straight line the solar wind is spinning around in a circle as it's traveling away from the sun but this beat of the spin is much faster than we expected from our models so we say that things that are spinning have angular momentum and the solar wind is something which can transport angular momentum away from the sun so what that's really causing is the sun to be spinning at us slower rate than it otherwise would be so the solar wind is is carrying away the spin from the sun and what implications do these results have for our understanding of this on. So there really sort of changing our view of what's happening one of the big mysteries of the sun and so the physics is something known as the Coronal heating problem so the corona is at a temperature of more than a 1000000 degrees whereas the surface of the sun is at a few 1000 degrees so it's really that the atmosphere of the sun is hundreds of times hotter than its surface and this is been a longstanding mystery in so the physics so one of the things we're finding is that amplitude of the fluctuations are getting much larger as we're going in closer so as I said we have these big folds in the magnetic field and they contain a lot of energy in them so with thinking that these are involved somehow in the process which is causing the corona to be heated to such high temperatures and another thing is is the existence of the solar wind itself the solar wind by the time it gets to the Earth is traveling at around a 1000000 miles per hour and is again another open question as to how the solar wind comes to be traveling so fast we think again that these large aptitude fluctuations in this sort of complex chaotic dynamic environment is providing the energy to push the solar wind and cause it to be accelerated to be launched these lastly what's next for the solar probe what's what they're going to start measuring now. So over the next few years it's going to be getting closer and closer to the sun and one thing that we expect to happen within NASA next year or 2 is it to cross within the sort of her inner self so it has not got within the current yet but we're expecting it to do so within the next few years and then it's really going to be in a in a completely new unexplored area of space right up close to the Sun Thanks very much to Christa Chan there for shedding some light on what the park is so inappropriate been discovering he spaced Acqui Mary University of London and those findings have been published across 3 papers in the journal Nature. Alcohol is one of the most commonly abuse substances in 2018 there were almost 600000 dependent drinkers just in England now researchers at University College London have shown that a single dose of the amas that it drug ketamine can be used to weaken memories associated with addictive behaviors and to help users to cut down for many months explaining to Nadeem Kabbani how they made the discovery Ravi Das they were drinking at least 40 u.k. Units per week on average at the start of a study David drinking 17 units which is the equivalent of about 40 points of beer a week. For hazard a string as so many not addicted to alcohol and they were looking for treatment for an alcohol addiction but if you look at the levels that they're actually drinking out they're pretty high and they're the kind of drinking levels that would cause people you know physical damage and higher risk of things like liver damage assessment types of cancer stroke so what we do is get people to retrieve their memories of drinking by button a glass of beer in front of them and telling them that they're going to drink it after brazing a few images of beer for their help present they find them they have been Supreme Court associate with wanting to drink and then they actually don't get to drink the beer so the reward that they are expecting after looking at those cues they don't get the reward and that seems to be the key thing for getting a memory to be stabilized. So the specific memories recall crew strong association with addiction and then stabilized through an element of surprise Ravi now goes on to tell us about how these associations are weak and the thing that weakens them in the period while they're on stable is giving them a drug orgasm in which we gave them intravenously directly into the bloodstream and get cement blocks and receptor that is critical to making memories stable again some kind of priest or in them so if you block out the scepter you can prevent memories re story and and directly weaken those memory traces formed memories can therefore be weakened whilst they're being recalled but does this interfere with all of your memories so it's only when made some kind of new information regarding the memory or some kind of surprise as to the outcome that the memories become unstable so if addictions are learned they're stored in memory and if they're stored in memory they are more likely to influence our behavior how can you kick an addiction if it's stored as a memory the aim of the study is really to break down those memory traces the way we do that is to capitalize on this process that's called Memory reconsolidation and that is a process whereby your memories but you formed when you recall them under certain circumstances they can become briefly unstable and if you can interfere with the memories while they're on stable and stop them restabilizing then you should be able to sort of directly weaken these memories and if you can do that with the kind of problematic memories that you could prevent then wanted to drink so much and reduce that drinking that was that we were really surprised by the fact he could do this this kind of single intervention if you if you just look at you know the memory retrieval and cats and then procedure itself the whole thing lasts kind of under an hour and yet you kept this really quite substantial reduction in the amount of that people were drinking over the course of 9 months. Stream interesting knows Ravi Das from u.c.l. He study came out in the journal Nature Communications Scientists have created a d.n.a. Sequence containing the computer code for 3 d. Printing a plastic rabbit. Bizarre you might say but in an even more cunning twist they've developed a way to enclose that d.n.a. Message inside tiny microscopic glass beads that can themselves be mixed into the plastic that used to print the rabbit so in this way just like biology in Taoiseach body cells with the molecular recipe for human every part of the plastic rabbit contains the d.n.a. Code that you need to make a replica and by chipping off a little bit of its ear extracting the d.n.a. And decoding the instructions it was possible to 3 d. Print 5 generations more of these robberies Amala Thomas heard from the study's author Robert grass how they did it so what we've done is that we have shown that we can store digital information in everyday objects and reuse d.n.a. As a data storage medium to do that what you mean by d.n.a. Do you actually mean what's inside our bodies exactly so we use exactly the same molecule biology uses to store our own blueprints but we don't use natural d.n.a. But we have the d.n.a. Scam a case into sized in the sequence really we designed it for how much information can be stored in d.n.a. So terror ethically you can store tremendous amounts of information and you know probably all the information we have in there was it would fit into a few grams of d.n.a. What we do we put that in a 2 objects and you could put really really large amounts of digital information into everyday items so how did you do this what technique did you apply to store information d.n.a. In an everyday object to do this we have to 1st translate the information to d.n.a. For that we have a encoder that was developed by my collaborate. He's an expert in doing this translation of digital information to the to d.n.a. Sequences we don't have to 50 anything to sized by a company that makes the unit but you can't just mix it with. Elements because d.n.a. Doesn't mix with polymers the d.n.a. Would not be faced able to get their own stores problems their d.n.a. We encapsulate it it's a small glass capsules which are just $100.00 nanometers inside when we put the d.n.a. In this last cup that is protected from the cave and we can mix it easy with polymer solutions so once we have to d.n.a. Nice particles we mix the particles with the polymer solution solidified polymer and then the polymer contains the particles containing the d.n.a. Containing the digital file could you give us an example of the examples we really did is a 3 d. Printed object which contained their own building instruction or blueprint within this really pretty diatom So one of the most common 3 d. Printed part people make is called the Stanford bunny so we have this 3 d. Information of the bunny as a digital file which we use to print a bunny but at the same time we take that digital file we translated to d.n.a. And infuse that d.n.a. Into the polymer from which we printed the bunny so that the bunny then contained it's building instructions us d.n.a. In the final item and so what you can do or you can take a piece of the bunny read the 3 d. 5 from which was made from the d.n.a. And use that to make more clones of that original bunny so far we've done 5 generations but we could go to a significantly more Bunny generations and they would still be perfect clones of the original bunny we had made an amazing story Robert grasses or e.t.h. Zurich in Switzerland and that was just published in Nature by technology and on that note it's time now for the news a sport but do stay with us because we're going to be back right afterwards to find out how you can survive an avalanche on digital b.b.c. Some subsidies from c.c.c. Radius. I don't have my group of the b.b.c. On 5 live only for 28 and a scented robbery in Argentina has left a British man dead and his son injured the 15 year olds were both shot and so to heads held in Buenos Aires after Labour's worst election defeat since the 1930 s. Jeremy Corbin's apologised and says he takes responsibility in the Sunday Mirror he calls the result a body blow but has also told The Observer he successfully rescind the terms of political debate and one's been charged with murdering a 15 year old boy in a village in Cheshire Alex wrongdoers found dead in Ashley on Friday morning but the Mason has from the knots for the areas during courts more and check before you travel if you want to catch a train today there's a new winter train timetable in force with major changes the plans for journey times to be cut services increased a new route started across the country. News Katie has a sport level caps in Jordan Henderson says the team need to continue to show their strength in depth after losing another key player through injury midfielder Gini one album was forced off with a muscle injury in that you know when I've watched that the club now move 10 points clear at the top of the Premier League. And scored a lot of course one of them really well we're going to need everybody from now till the end of the season so we need to keep our core not consistency when everybody. Knows everybody else and that's always the case cross train and really high level and it makes it easier so we just got to continue on that run well boss Eoghan Clarke was also vocal after ideas to expand the Champions League he says games need to be cuts not added Liverpool will have played 31 games in the current season by the New Year Meanwhile Brendan Rodgers admits Leicester may have dropped crucial points in the title race their 8 game Premier League winning run came to an end with a 11 draw against Norwich the players been absolutely brilliant and when you are on one and run you believe that you can win every single game. Of course it's very very difficult but which is weren't quite the level that we would need to be today against say there are no During the bottom or you know heart of threats and like I say they defended very very well Chris Wilder believes Sheffield United performances is starting to change perceptions about his side of the latest fix or a lifted them up to faith in the table to 2nd half goals from John Flack against Aston Villa and the players back to back Premier League wins for the 1st time since 2006 we've enjoyed it but we've got to play well and we are playing well we are 25 points 7 saying games coming out anymore we're enjoying life in the Premier League but we know that we have to keep our standards old try and be on top of the players every every moment elsewhere they will also wins the Bournemouth Burnley and West Ham West Brom a saying top of the Championship this weekend a 32 win over Birmingham put them to poise clear of Leeds who blew a 3 goal lead to drew him to Cardiff in the Scottish Premiership Daniel stand though says reviving hearts will be more hard work than expected they lost one nil to suggest and in his 1st game in charge to rugby union then an Saracens defense of the European Champions Cup is still on that softer they'd be months to $156.00 it means both sides can still make the quarter finals the game descended into a mass brawl in the 2nd half though sorry sorry to Robi mamma cools as it was set off by a verbal exchange involving who could Jamie George as far as I know their medical teams had something to do. For the luggage. Is Nickajack. By 6 friends to 5 to set up a meeting with Mark Selby in the Scottish Open final a marathon world record holder will pick up the world sport star of the Year award at the b.b.c. Sports Personality of the year Woods later the Kenyan became the 1st person to run a mouth and in under 2 hours earlier this year he was voted the win ahead of other global greats including Tiger Woods Simone Biles and Meghan Rypien and that's the latest from b.b.c. Sport b.b.c. Sounds music radio. Podcast. If you need a pick me up for the Christmas doing right by his Christmas gifts in disguise this is a music mix with all the trimmings stuff is tacky to my face thank you thank. You. I'm winding down the treadmill says yes to family mixed in this place has something for everyone to chill out to some of my favor on the tracks I listen to around Christmas. Music mixes listen I'll be busy sounds this Christmas. Welcome back to 5 Live Science I'm Chris Smith from The Naked scientists and for the next half an hour Phil Sanson and I looking at the science of avalanches We'll find out why they happen how to avoid them and if you're unlucky enough to be caught in one how you might be able to survive avalanches are most common in the northern hemisphere between now and March so if you live in a mountainous area or if you're going to one soon on holiday it's important to stay vigilant and someone who knows that better than most is Lawrence Jones who 20 years ago was caught in an avalanche and lived to tell the tale. Was with a group of friends who were in a resort which is in the French Alps it's got a mountain called peak blong it's known for having the longest black run in the world and it's a fierce mountain it's a fierce background I open the shutters next morning and it was cloud and I came downstairs pretending have all the bravado are really looking for today chaps you know but I actually was terrified. But they said oh don't worry we'll just we'll head up to the Mountain Rescue and see what they have to say about it and even though the lifts were closed they managed to talk the lefties into opening both left off we went off we were going up to the top and sure enough all the signs for every single run closed everything fell my family and we traversed across the very top of the. Ridge where the are lots of signs that centrally in French were reading only idiots go past this point and it was amazing there's no 2 ways about it and when we stopped I said this is the most amazing experience of our I said I will never ski on peace to ever again it is so good. We went one of the time I think I was the 2nd to last was the penultimate person and there was a moment where Danny overtook me and as he went past me dug me in the ribs messing around and I fell off my snipers going very slowly at this point anyway and so I unclip the bindings and I stood up and I waved I saw all the boys over in the distance waving a waving waving what now I understand was they were frantically waving and I just thought I mean enthusiastic and so I enthusiastically waved back and I didn't hear anything to this day I don't remember anything. The next thing I realized was I was suddenly invalid in this force of nature was being pushed and pulled and dragged and I tumbled down the mountain being sucked under the snow and something I'm above it and I'm under the whole mountain just picked me up and the whole mountain went down together. Absolutely terrifying thing that will find out what happened next to Lawrence later in the program but in the meantime we've got with us Mark Diggins now He's the coordinator of the Scottish Avalanche Information Service and also with us is Jim McElwain who's Professor of geo hazards at Durham University and they going to help us to unpack what happened to Lawrence now Mark you're in charge of producing the avalanche hazard forecast for Scotland Why might there have been a high avalanche risk on the day the Lawrence winds. There are 5 typical problems wind the wind destroys grains and makes a sort of compact small grain layer there's something called a persistent weak layer you have a layer of grains or crystals underneath the surface and you actually have no idea that they may exist but what's happening is they may be developing and weaker and weaker and then the next is a new snow of course if you get lots of new snow logically that's going to load a slope and slide away and then wet snow which is obviously. Rain which will make the snow turn into a sort of slurry gliding snow which is spring effect where you get big cracks and slowly the snow is creeping down the mountainside and then finally what we have and other countries have is a problem which is a Cornish which overhangs a sort of a slope and if it collapses that can produce a big trigger but the 2 key ones are the wind slab and the persistent weak layer underneath the surface which in it sounds from Lawrence's case that this may well have been one of the culprits Jim does that jibe with your sort of research into avalanches do you do you look at the same factors Yeah exactly I mean it's precisely how Mark described it I'm the sort of more theoretical end of it but it's all these factors if the load from gravity in the snow pack exceeds the weakest layer then the avalanche will occur. And Mark the fact that you describe those are things that you know you can tell without having to actually potentially go on to the slope you could potentially observe those medicines can you actually if you go and look at a patch of snow tell you that's a big avalanche risk one can if one is aware of what you need to do when you're going into into the mountains and that's the real challenge for recreation is people going skiing or climbing is the boundary between having a fantastic time in sunshine and having some terrible event occur is unseen and so what you really need to know is is what's going on so you need to know the history of the snowpack you can't just turn up and expect to know the complete picture you need to have a some understanding of what's going on before in the days before well let's find out how she will happen next to Lawrence to Swedish guys who'd followed us up taking a higher traverse the us and as they stopped those 2 triggered the thing off they just saw this thing obviously crack at the top and then just gather momentum gather and gather and gather and gather and then just hit me like a thunderbolt as a younger man I played a lot of rugby and there's that there are moments not very often but there's a moment every now and again where you get caught up in a scrum or a rock of some sort where you are literally lifted off the ground and there's nothing you can do about it and you may as well just stop fighting and you realise I'll save my energy to lie I'm an old and I can get back out again it was like that but a 1000 times more I was sucked underneath all the snow and and then the lights were out and the thing I remember most about that is the eeriness this terrifying silence. Jim when Lawrence just said there that the avalanche got triggered what exactly does that mean like Mark was saying is most likely it was a slab avalanche So you got hard Richard snow and it's on top of a weak player and if you put extra load on it it can cause a weak layer to fail and then the fracture can propagate extremely quickly so this is what the trigger was most likely the Swedish people They overstressed the weak layer and started it and Mark would you concur with that it's basically putting more mass on the slope above where the group of Lowrance were it may not be as clear is that so it could be that when Lawrence went off a snowboard and was on it on his feet he may have penetrated the snow so if you imagine when you're traveling along a snow slope you have a globe of effect underneath your feet and if that globe coincides with a weak layer you get a collapse underneath that we claim that then can propagate and it can propagate great distances and that's relative to the density of the surface layer so if it's harder it'll propagate great distances if it's not so hard it won't travel as far but it could well be that Lawrence by coming off a snowboard he kind of initially weaken the slope and then the final straw if you like was another pair of skiis on that slope could have made it release again just quickly producer Amalia Thomas has an experiment that she'd like to demonstrate so I put my baking tray flat on the table and on it I spread evenly as I can course Celt on top of the Celts I put the corn meal again another thin layer of corn meal cooked so now I put the plain flour on top of the yellow corn you can and I'm going to slowly tell that it's until all my ingredients are not. So this experiment is interesting for a couple of reasons 1st of all because the combination of salt and flour avalanches at the same angle between 35 and 38 degrees snow does in real mountains and secondly the way that the elements of salt and flour happened resembles the way snow has break off the side of the mountain as well thank you very much to Ramallah Jim how representative of real life though is that experiment but what you've got here is 2 sets of particles with different properties of the salt particles a large and they're behaving like what we would call a dry granular medium so that's like dry grains of sand the only force between them is friction there's no cohesion so they're quite weakly bonded and they can easily move where the flowers much smaller so you get electrostatic effects and effects in the humidity that makes a particle stick together so they have a lot more strength to have this mixture of the different flowers I think the confluence makes it even stronger so you've got a lot of strength in the slab like layer on top of this week layer and then as you increase the slope angle this simulates increasing the load to this could be like a skin moving over the top or fresh snow falling on top and then the weak layer fails when the force of gravity down the slope overcomes the friction in between the salt particles. Can the same science be used to explain any other natural phenomena or is this purely something related to avalanches well that failure mechanism is purely related to avalanches but they're very much like all sorts of other natural disasters geophysical flows like power clastic flows debris flows walk slides and we used to say mathematical models really for all of these different types of events so do you have effectively a computer simulation that you can plug in all of the premises of say snow fall or an environment and work out what the likely risks are and what the likely outcomes would be if things went wrong well that's the aim of the work that I do but we're not there yet and I would say at the moment our models are not that predictive so we can fix parameters to agree with past events but we can't really say what's going to happen in the future is a question to ask impossible to answer why is it going wrong. What part of the problem is until recently there's been very little will be good data about how these things flow and what's going on because normally you have a big powder cloud on top so you can really see what was going on but now we have all sorts of great data a lot of it from Switzerland where we artificially trigger avalanches so this can really give us insight as to what is happening and help us develop better models can you actually put things into the snow so that when an avalanche does happen they're carried along and you can monitor what happens that's a great idea and the avalanche people in Austria are working very hard on that the big problem is then how to collect these things afterwards and get the data back out of them because the radio waves and things don't travel they well through solid snow so you can't really get the data out easily while the avalanche is happening and it's how to find these things afterwards is the tricky problem at the moment Jim thanks very much and now let's go briefly back to Lawrence who had just been dragged away by the avalanche and was buried in snow I think I was something like 8 or 10 feet down about 12 minutes on the other so quite a long time was up. Down as well so when the family I was in the position of John Travolta staying alive you know that dance move he does with his arm one arm in the air was like Superman pointing downwards which again wasn't very helpful when they're trying to dig me out the 1st thing to do is find the boots when you're in that you have no idea which way is up or down so even if you had the ability to to try and dig yourself out you wouldn't know which way to go. Sounds absolutely terrifying So Mark when this happens how do you go hunting for people well firstly I think Lawrence's very lucky to survive because statistics show that after 10 minutes you've got a 10 percent chance of survival so he is very lucky to have survived that depth and for that length of time it's absolutely critical then that the people on the surface have equipment that enables them to find somebody that's buried so everybody carries these transceivers and they both transmit and receive a signal so when you're skiing around they were transmitting But then if someone gets buried those people on the surface will have to turn the machines to receive so they can find somebody so they will take you to a sort of an area probably of us meet a square or so on the surface but of course if someone is very deeply then on the surface the signal might be the same in a larger area so then what you really need is an avalanche probe and these are 3 meters so you push those into the snow and they're actually quite sensitive so you can sort of tell when you've got something that yielding and then as soon as you find somebody you leave the probe in and then you have to dig down and the digging down is also extremely tiring because you're talking about weight of 600 kilos bicubic metre You know it's an enormous amount of weight they have to move very quickly Jim I want to ask you I've also heard you can get these backpacks with airbags them for if you're free skiing for example that you can activate in the event of an avalanche Why would that help at all. They have several effects one of which is just a shill g. Form impacts which can often do an awful lot of damage but their main effect is through something called segregation so they help you end up on the top of the snow stat means you're less likely to be damaged you're more likely to fail to breathe than you're more likely to be seen now why is it that they help you stay on the top of the snow well it's the same reason that if you have a box of cereal and you shake it around that the large lumps of cereal end up on the top and this is so in effect called Kinetic savings if you have a large particle with lots of small particles moving around it they can fall through the gaps in between and their fact if we force a large particle up to the top and in an avalanche if you put an airbag on you are acting like a very large particle in amongst the smallest snow grains or blocks of snow so you could have a much higher chance of ending up on the top of the snow does that difference then between your normal size as a human shape versus with their big swollen airbag is that enough increase size to actually bring you way up in the avalanche Yeah a friend of mine actually did that for their Ph d. They put a load of dummies on a slope half with air bags and half without and then they blasted the slope and all of the dummies with the airbags had some part of them on the surface that was visible whereas I think half of the dummies that didn't have airbags ended up buried deep down in the snow sounds like a good opportunity to ask you Mark do you actually detonate avalanches because I know I know in some ski resorts they do do that in order to reduce the risk Yes So in many avalanche services they control the avalanche situation by if they leave the snow to build up then you get huge avalanches that may come down and be totally really destructive saw they have a process whereby they control them so they will fire charges into start zones so they release inches bit by bit so you don't get a whole mass coming down but you get smaller avalanches coming down and Jim Why would a charge like a shockwave from sound trigger an awful. Surprisingly difficult to actually trigger avalanches with explosives normally you want the explosion actually to go off in the air for fire a shockwave into the surface and it really can trigger them for the same reason that skiers do it's just additional loading over an area but it can take quite a lot of explosives because I think I've heard it also I've seen on James Bond so it must be true when the baddie fires a gun and unfortunately that shock is enough to dislodge an avalanche is that is that possible or is that just is an artistic license because it's going up and that's artistic license the energy in sound waves is so low that they're never going to trigger an avalanche Jim I'm disappointed it's a disappointing aren't. The science is the science and just returning tomorrow when a person's actually buried because Lawrence alluded to the fact you don't know what directions up or what directions are but also you've got this enormous amount of weight bearing down on you you must effectively just be locked in position you're completely at the mercy of the snow and anyone who comes to dig you out presumably yes you are totally locked in you cannot move a millimeter So if you're twisted or in a really awkward position you're held in that super awkward position and also as you're breathing then you slowly encased the snow in front to your face with ice and so that starts to inhibit your ability to breathe cell this is a bit of a grim prospect. Mark thank you very much when we last left Lawrence he had been trapped for 12 minutes upside down and buried deep in a snow drift and luckily his companions had brought along some of the crucial kit the trans uses played an important part in everything and obviously locating me mind obviously was left on and the guide staff and he kept his on and I think you flip into another mode which is to search for the one that is lost and everybody else has to switch that off and then what they do is they get a very very long pole almost like a tent pole one of these modern temples that's quite bendy and they'll go around prodding looking for me well 2 things I brought on that trip that I would never go anywhere off piste over again one was a heart surgeon and the other was a casualty doctor they were dealing with snowboards in their hands and the 2 doctors were giving out instructions exactly what was going to happen what everyone was doing when there were to find me because obviously I was completely unconscious and needed to be resuscitated the helicopter came picked up and when it did arrive they came out with a stretcher. Headache you could ever imagine and Danny was explained to me because my brain will have expanded with the lack of oxygen I would have been touching the outskirts of my skull Chris based on your medical knowledge is that true yeah the brain has the highest metabolic rate of pretty much any tissue in your body and as soon as you start to deprive it of oxygen either because you're not breathing enough oxygen or because your circulator system stops then the brain cells become more excited than they should do and as a result they swell and they swell because they take on water out of the bloodstream for various reasons and that swelling because the the skull is a closed space if your fingers swell as your finger swells into the air of the room if your brain swells there's nowhere for it to go because it's enclosed within your your skull and so you do end up with a higher interest cranial pressure at least for a short while and that's probably why Lawrence had a bad headache a part of the fight it also been. A hit by 600 tons of snow which probably didn't help you know that and that might do it is that something that the paramedics need to treat or is that just a side effect of Well I mean we had to have Mark just now the fact that when you are deprived of oxygen then this is a serious threat to your health because people will have brain damage because of the lack of oxygen rich in the brain if this goes on for a period a sissy different period of time but lowering the temperature can help as we've mentioned And equally if people are resuscitated promptly and you can restore circulation then actually usually the outcome can be pretty good but it does rely on you being found quickly in resuscitated effectively and quickly and then obviously there's a chance that that's not going to happen and so that's why as as Mark and Jim were saying the outcome often is dismal for people because they get buried and it takes a long while to find the it is an incredible story from Lawrence It sounds like he's very lucky Mark Have have you ever dealt with a case like this. Yes unfortunately it was not a good outcome because the victims were buried 2 quite a significant depth and it was a longer period of time of extraction but in terms of hearing of people have been resuscitated after being buried for 10 minutes or so then they were revived concurs of what was just said now is that they actually had a really significant rash on their forum which was a sign that obviously the brain had been swelling through lack of oxygen it's very hard to always talk about the grim aspects of going into the mountains and hopefully try and talk about the positive things as well and Jim any thoughts further on what we heard from Lawrence Well it sounds like you were skiing in a group of all guys so the safest way to avoid avalanche is to ski with a lot of women because they have almost no accidents your job there's a lot of No no absolutely Well the most dangerous group is a group of all guys with one or 2 women there's a lot of emphasis now on on safety in group safety while other than on the physics and it's a question of communication and how decisions are made and it's like Lawrence says he was feeling scared but felt he should go anyway because of his friends and they were probably all feeling the same and the guys were not wanting to discuss their concerns and their worries about their avalanche safety by the sounds of it and that's a classic pattern of why these things occur Jim Bakker went from the university dorm thank you very much and also thanks to Mark Dickens who's a pro mountain guide up in Scotland now who has reached the end of Lawrence's story and I'm sure you've realized it does have a happy ending he's still with us and has become a very successful businessman but that's not always the case because avalanches kill plenty of people in fact around about $100.00 people every year die in just the Alps so we mustn't forget that these are joined forces of nature and they do have humongous destructive power but with that destruction seems to come new creation because research from Swiss scientists shows that whole ecosystems may in fact rely on avalanches Christian bricks and told him Ali Thomas how he compared biodiversity outside. This is inside an avalanche zone and our plant study we we found in the dark a forest next to the Avalanche tracks about 10 different plant species and in the central zone with the highest disturbance of the avalanche tracks with the with the frequency of an avalanche every year we had around 30 plant species. That's 3 times the number of plant species in a place where avalanches a killer regularly but how can there be higher by diversity where an avalanche has been you would think that they wipe out the ground as well as plants and animals in their path the effect is not that disastrous all soil would be cleared it's simply that the continued disturbance by avalanches keeps out. Competitive taller plants like trees and also taller shrubs so from a tree perspective an avalanche is clearly a disaster however for the smaller less competitive plants there's more space more room on light to grow and that was also in more species higher biodiversity and avalanche tracks so where the avalanches happen around once a year only the taller plants are uprooted without really disturbing the soil and knowing a wider variety of short the plants to flourish instead so the plants that grow in avalanche tracks very different ones you also have some high alpine specialists which would normally only grow at high elevation because with the snow you can also have seeds and parts of plants going downhill and then possibly growing and terminating at lower elevation again simply because there's space. And a wide variety of plants means a more healthy and very diets for animals that live in these ecosystems several species of animals including bears and deer think that those delicious plants salads in the tracks are worth the risk of getting caught in an avalanche where you have a lot of plants growing that is also interesting for food for animals so for example in the Rocky Mountains mountain caribou feed an avalanche tracks and that not only in summer but also in winter so when the snow goes downhill. Clear patches of grass and the animals need to find food so they go to these grassy patches where they can eat so that's a good thing for them in winter however that also comes at a certain risk so while feeding in the Atlanta state could be a new avalanche starting and taking the caribou down and 10 to 15 percent of melted caribou feeding in this avalanche tracks might in the end become victim of avalanches themselves but what is bad news for the herbivores like the Caribbean may be good news for other animals for example the elusive and rare Wolverine a predator or a scavenger actually spends a lot of time in avalanche tracks searching for carcasses and probably much of the sued in winter for the Wall the rain comes from that animals and island strikes that is obviously a disaster for the individual caribou pitot ecosystem it is a very important process and an important natural disturbance. Absolutely fascinating on of a look at avalanches the same way again that was Christian Mixon he's from the Institute for snow an avalanche research in Davos Finally let's return to Lawrence Jones 20 years after he survived an avalanche he still go skiing with his family every year here he is one more time reflecting on what the experience has taught him it does. With the. People go of peace and the casual way it's approached. We as human beings we like to plan things that we will say what will do this on this day or this day on that day that's probably not the best way of doing it and when not to go is a really really important thing to consider. People should stop and think and take a responsible look at their own ability and don't feel that you need to do anything under peer pressure. And that's where we leave b.b.c. Radio 5 Live on 95 point one and 95.6 m one a 4.4 f.m. 855 n 873 am and on digital Good morning and welcome to another day's broadcasting here on b.b.c. Radio Norfolk. B.b.c. Radio Norfolk news at 6 o'clock comments me Isaac's good morning a British tourist has been killed and his son injured after they were shot in a suspected attempted robbery in Argentina the 2 men were attacked after getting out of a taxi outside the hotel and want to say Aries police are trying to establish whether they were targeted over it Teams of a random attack the Foreign Office says it supporting the family Braille passengers are being urged to check their train times before they travel as a new winter timetable comes into effect today the major changes are aimed at cutting journey times increasing services and adding new routes across the country Israeli authorities have told Christians living in the Gaza Strip that they will not be able to travel to Bethlehem in the West Bank to celebrate Christmas it's a sudden change of policy by the government which is cited security concerns. 6 men and women will compete to be named b.b.c. Sports Personality of the Year tonight chosen in a public vote during a special awards ceremony an expert panel has picked the 6 nominees including the gold medal sprinter Dein ashes Smith and the England cricket all round Ben Stokes. A north of evolutionary biologist Professor Ben Garrett is on television tonight for a special 6 part series on the human body's latest largest organ the skin the programme will be aired every night this week on b.b.c. 4 and that's your b.b.c. Radio Norfolk news at 6 am a blunt will have forgotten at 7 o'clock. B.c. Radio no for the a blustery day with fresh south westerly winds may bring a few showers throughout however there will often be dry conditions with spells of sunshine it will feel chilly though with a top temperature of 8 degrees Celsius those shells matter more widespread this evening spreading in from the southwest much of them will fade away though during the early hours of Monday morning it will stay rather breezy and a minimum of 3 degrees Celsius tomorrow will become rather cloudy and a spell of rain will push in from the south later this rain may turn heavy and persistent into the evening will have gentle southerly winds though top temperature similar to day of 8 degrees Celsius chews day early cloud and patchy rain Wednesday looks set to be largely dry and bright Thursday will see unsettled weather with clouds and scattered showers a bit of a mixed bag over the next few days you're into what is forecast for Gibraltar point to North fall and strong winds a forecast the wind westerly or southwesterly 6 to Gale 8 backing southerly 5 to 7 later visibility goods occasionally moderate at 1st your weather showers with rain 1st sea state slight on moderate occasion rough 1st your time times Hunstanton high tide is a 100 low tide at 1453 wells high tide I wait 28 low tide 1641 crime high tide 20 low tide 1454 and Great Yarmouth high tide at 1020 low tide at 1635. Days like 1st wave and only Isaacson. On b.b.c. Radio Norfolk. Welcome along Sunday breakfast with me Anthony Isaac I do hope you well they Sunday morning early start as we do every week with half an hour of hymns and worship music. Around a quarter past 6 we have another chorus to from northeast Anglican Cathedral Abbey who thoroughly enjoys seeing a piece from an animated classic. Half past 6 brings us the Sunday papers of producer casting film Plus details of events happening around all counting. And before 7 with a growing population of Polish Sharon are counting on across the u.k. Doshas Smith's been finding out how they celebrate Christmas actually eat turkey or to kill something like that we eat fish like mushrooms she was 90 plus that's all that's hard to explain it's like cooked Joey and like cabbage take the pill of that it's a fascinating insight and if you still need to get into the festive mood how does classical music by candlelight sound the peasants performing it is delighted to be back in our county. Studio for 2 years telling local music and incredibly fond memories of it and it's the 1st place I really encountered the special music like it all to go in the next hour where the time is 5 past 6 Good morning to you study as of this Sunday morning said Michael Singh is and the Sheffield celebration Kwanzaa.