This is a science hour from the B.B.C. World Service with me Roland piece later in the program we'll be sitting down with some chimps for some choice viewing what they're really interested in like humans is social complex so we kind of hear a little Charlie Chaplin version of The Jersey Shore for apes and as well as chimps will be meeting whales off the coast of Oregon who may have lessons about Human Fertilisation But let's launch off with this week it's been the Nobel Prizes in medicine chemistry and physics it really is my favorite time of the year where we get to talk about just about anything but actually am I putting too much emphasis on just one funny week in the year well I'm joined by Phil bought science writer founds of all wisdom Phil and I are for playing it oh you know I mean it's always it's always fun it's always the great excitement and you know it's always fun to make predictions and to see them fall by the wayside as they almost inevitably do you know it's always the I mean in a way as we will get to for a science journalist they also allow us to talk about things which we don't always talk about because you know these experts are thinking about on different levels yeah I mean that's the interesting thing it forces us and forces to public attention things that not only are not often talked about but they're actually very difficult to talk about in some cases because they're hard to explain and the challenge and it's a nice challenge for science communicators is to try to explain why ideas that seem incredibly obscure actually have made a big difference in science well we'll put you to the test. You talked about predictions of this type Last week I was pretty certain that there would be very few surprises since the international management last February the long ago detector had felt the earth move because of cosmic gravitational waves confirming Einstein's theory of space and time it had looked like the. Physics Prize was completely a done deal Major hoops there and I wasn't alone in thinking that the game changing Gene editing technique crisper had reached the Nobel threshold so there was more uncertainty about that one so again in both medicine and physics the Swedish Academy's utterly wrong footed me and many others by opting for topics that frankly journalists have largely overlooked so let's start with something rather more journo friendly chemistry fail I'll let you do the honors on this well the chemistry award went to Fraser start out who's a Scottish chemist. French chemist and then for a guy who's a Dutch chemist and all of them have worked on what is called molecular machines which are basically assemblies of molecules that are completely synthetic So they've been put together by design by hand that do things that move around so that rather than just being a you know a static market molecule as many are having a fixed truck these are things that can change their shape that can switch and possibly can even be harnessed to do work at the molecular scale I mean was this what a surprise to you it sounds sort of slightly trivial in a way well I don't think many people saw it coming all those certainly some of these names at least have often been on people's list of potential candidates for the Nobel Prize because the work is so gorgeous it really is lovely it's ingenious in the way that these molecules have to be put together because it's a little bit like a Lego game but one in which you have to thread things through other things and of course you can't actually do this with these things in your hands you're doing it all the solution I mean I have like you long been a fan of this work in about 15 years ago I visited Fraser start slamming then in U.C.L.A. In California because of his work had made a fantastic example of nanotechnology which I was surveying for discovery here on the B.B.C. So he. Me too mechanical molecules as electrical switches. These molecules are really very small the smallest of them is a cubic nanometer So that's $100.00 thousands of a human hears diameter so we really don't to something very very tiny and so we use these kinds of mechanically interlock molecules to switch between 2 states one which is more conducting and this gives us the basis for an on off switch between 2 electrodes so it's a get this straight you're making molecules with moving parts Yes and using electricity you can move we can move the parts in the shape of these molecules then is that one of the components just like a dumbbell the kind of thing that a week lifter would lift I did with a lot of rotten too but that lump that I joined section with 2 lumps city Chand on the lumps must be big enough to retain one single ring and the other thing the rod section must have is 2 different stations where the ring can stop one character affairs to be under normal conditions and the other where it will reside fairly happily when it's given a kick in pill to go there and you talk about doing so on this dumbbell that's also a loose ring that chills are going forward the ring moves back and forwards in and that's a pretty unusual sort of molecule most molecules are absolutely you know continuous in some sense you're looking at atoms and joining together again that the molecules are unusual and so far it's not only do we have the classical chemical bond but we have the mechanical wrongness So you've introduced into the molecular world engineering in another form the fact that you have interlock components components that are not linked in the classical chemical way but are linked in a engineering type of memory and. That's phrases start out when I met phrase I mean he that was a description of one of these molecules who's talking about more complicated ones which had connections in. Moving parts and he was talking about some kind of molecular muscle that could be made rather like human muscle. In those 15 years how far the scientists and the people following their work got well they haven't I think it's fair to say that many things actually useful in the everyday world certainly nothing that's in an appliance but that possibility is definitely there and you know in terms of muscles this is something that jumpy or survive has done that lead to kind of quite difficult to describe but it's like a ring with a leg and you get 2 of those together and each leg goes through the opposite ring and so they can slide over each other and if you can control that sliding the thing gets longer or shorter depending on where they are in conjunction with each other and so you can think about using that as a kind of piston or muscle to do things at the molecular level the Nobel Committee sort of made something of the uses but for me you know isn't this an example of where the sheer beauty of it is enough for a prize like this well I feel it is and I think that for a lot of chemists this is the nice thing about the work they're not particularly worried about whether they're ever going to show up anywhere there it's just such an ingenious way of doing things at the molecular scale that are sort of familiar at the everyday scale of making machines with moving parts Well I had spotted an interesting connection between that chemistry prize and the medicine prize which is also effectively about molecular machines but in this case a natural one again why don't you tell us what this is well yes so the medicine prize went to Japanese research where Yoshinori assume me and it's for the discovery of something called Orta Fady which basically means eating itself and this is what Cells our cells have occasionally to do not necessarily to eat themselves but to eat parts of themselves to get rid of and recycle stuff that they've gone in them that has reached the end of its useful time but you want to. Cycle those parts so you need ways of breaking those things down they may be proteins they may be whole clusters of proteins that have done a particular job or they may be things called organelles which are little compartments within ourselves to do specialized tasks for example at the mitochondrion which creates energy for the cell so assuming you've figured out how cells do this how do they do this breaking down of you know a very general a very wide range of different structures of different different sizes how do they do that and he figured out the mechanics of it so he figured out that there are particular components within dicta compartments within our cells in which this recycling happens and he figured out the genetics behind that process so it is a it is a machine of sorts I mean my understanding of this is the these are you know you have a big recycling cell sensor in the cell you have the machinery that delivers the the rusty components of the cell in there they all get chewed up. It's as you say is a really nice example of mechanics going on inside a cell I think this is something that tend to get overlooked because these days we have so much focus on the genetics that you know is essentially if you like it's a kind of program that's controlling a lot of these processes but actually they only work after the to much bigger scale and because of this the sort of mechanical processes that are going on so the the cell biology is often overlooked in favor of the genetics but we only really understand the cell once we start to understand these these mechanics of how it get it moves things around how it puts things together how it takes them apart you're enthusiasm is so powerful but you know this was a medicine prize and that means that it does come with some a sense of what's it does in terms of medicine in the future and that's actually often what you do with things when they go wrong and so it is with this also fragile so which is really starts to fail in old age which is almost also the time when it's most needed as outside as expert Ralph Nixon explained to me early this week. This is something that becomes more and more important as we get older which is one of the keys to why different proteins seem to accumulate and become the signature of different diseases because as we get older our proteins acquire a bit more damage because of the various assaults of aging and the need to turn them over becomes much more important and at the same time the ageing process starts to corrupt the tough itchy process and this is how we got interested because we figured that age related accumulation of proteins must involve some failure of the clearance system so there can't be a more important process for targeting and treatments that are addressing these diseases so that's near a scientist Ralph Nixon and why in medical terms this is so important to say I did get this one actually wrong I was fixated earlier this week on the new gene editing technique called crisp and I had actually laid a rather public bet on it getting the price others had warned me that the price would hang on the arguments over a priority the technique was 1st used by Jennifer Doudna U.C. Berkeley and Emmanuel sharp pointy a now Max Planck in Berlin who found the patent for it in March 23rd seemed pretty nice stuff but things MIT also filed a patent in October 2030 and his paper has been granted Well the happiness and sharpen taste is still under review so well the technique is a revolutionary thing the work of biologists everywhere there is a legal nightmare brewing How do you live for this nature magazine is among those following every twist and turn and as he told Adam rather than start with some good basics well crispy in nature is sort of primitive immune. system that microbes used to to target viral d.n.a. And sniff it out but to researchers have hacked that in turn it into a way to with they like to say edet to genomes to make very precise changes in d.n.a. Sequences and his better than what we've we've been using for the last 20 years cheaper it's faster it's easier mean you hear people say that high school kids can do it in their lads i've heard i heard one researcher say a 3 year old could do it i'm not sure i buy that but so yeah it's been a huge really for the field researchers are is napping it up like crazy ok so i realize this is a sin off falsely simple question but who invented it Well it depends on how you define inventing so there was a team of researchers It was led by Jennifer Dell not Berkeley as you mentioned in sharp N.T.A. They were the 1st to reprogram the system and to have it cut to D.N.A. At sites that they chose but this was an isolated D.N.A. In a test tube a few months after that several groups published papers where they used the system to cut D.N.A. In living cells and specifically in human cells grown in culture so you know which of those you want to define as inventing is and those 2 things the difference between the 2 titans it's a key difference I think I mean you know the if we say the Berkeley group for example that they filed their patent in the wake of their publication I think they do allude to use in higher organisms but they don't really dwell on it in their patent application whereas the broad group at MIT functions group they quite a bit on the use of the system in you carry it's 6 human cells so how is it the 1st Payton filed by the shop and hand out now hasn't been granted but the 2nd one that's in in actual cells has been granted how does that work I gets into some of the vagaries of the patent office I think it's you know MIT in the Broad Institute when they filed their patent they just elected to do so with it a faster pathway they paid a fairly nominal fee to have it the review accelerated I think there are some tradeoffs in terms of how much you can fight back on the reviewers the examiners comments and so forth that was the strategy they took and they got their their patent granted 1st but you know the Berkeley teams application is still pending and if this feels like a messy situation I mean is it personal or is it the institutions how is it going to play out yeah you know I when I talk to the scientist I really they seem to be perfectly generous with offering credit to one another you know that I don't see this sort of thing spillover that often but you know it really is I think the institutions and not just the academic institutions the companies have already licensed the intellectual prop. Rights that go along with these patents and so they're fueling a lot of the legal battle as well and I mean the real question I guess is given that this is a technique which biologists already using And as we've said I don't think we're exaggerating by saying it is revolutionizing Gene editing technology how is the legal quagmire going to affect you know your average working scientist Well now the hope is that it won't impact the average working scientists in academia very much in the past when these sorts of discoveries like P.C.R. And so forth were made and were patented You know sometimes academic institutions would have to pay a small fee that usually in general it hasn't been too burdensome and the hope is that it will play out that way again for companies that it's very important for companies who are looking to make for example a gene therapy based on this kind of technology you know they're hoping that that will be lucrative for them some day in and the patent licenses that they need to get will be instrumental in developing this and what about the prospect of this being resolved legally because you know I'm a bit of a pain when it comes to buy attack which I realize is not the sexiest thing I've ever said but these disputes can last for absolutely years and the only people who really get rich in the voices Yeah that's true I think this one is probably going to drag out for quite a while there may be some interesting twists and turns along the way and one thing that people are looking forward to people who are looking forward to 2 developments in this particular case is that there may be oral arguments heard in the interference coming up possibly towards the end of the year possibly later than that but that would be an opportunity to hear from the scientists themselves in this which would be quite interesting but yeah the whole thing you know in terms of who's going to win that's going to drag out for years there are other patents out there in the system as well Heidi let for Phil did these concerts speech Steve think they play a part in the decisions in the Nobel Committee and no one is allowed to know what the right of passage decision is it's kept so under wraps so it is I think isn't it I think very very I think they must do but I also Frank but it's widely said and certainly I've heard it said that you know if there. A Nobel for this then it'll go to diagnose and sharpen and and trying so where's the problem you know we don't have to wait for a resolution of who invented what I mean it's a technique Nobel ready I mean is there waiting for something more to happen what were you thinking I think it is Nobel ready already there are clinical trials on humans for things like cancer therapies that will be using gene editing that are already starting there is one about to start in China there's one that's got the green light for the U.S. So already you know it's starting to filter through within just a few years and to clinical practice and I don't think anyone in the field of Gene editing doubts that it's going to continue to have a huge impact on the field so I think it's one of those really quite read this coverage of that almost immediately it's really clear that this is important stuff well it's funny you should say that because there was another event earlier this year which I thought told us exactly what we were going to get for the Nobel Prize in Physics ladies and gentlemen we have detected gravitational waves we did it. So you know we had drafted the citation I've named the laureate so I've set up the interviews for this groundbreaking test of our In science 100 year old theory of gravity and instead we got the math of top illogical insulators 6 hours later one of the laureates when he appeared on B.B.C. Radio Duncan holding had clearly grown why so the futility of explaining what it was all about back in the in the eighty's we didn't know a lot about that we now know apart the strange things that quantum mechanics can do with matter for both David and Michael Steele it's myself in our different ways we came across using very simple kind of Tory models we found that very surprising things that work against the common wisdom of the time good. Happen and with the common thread of the old turned out to be that there were new kind of properties of quantum mechanics which was constrained by what mathematicians call apology which is a kind of basically gives us the ability to strange states on the surface between normal kinds of condensed matter the usual solids that we looked at before and you crimes and the surprise that's come up in recent years is that this probably logical matter is actually much more widespread than we thought for a long time it turns out it was on the no think people will find you through or just never recognize the strange probably will fill you said you liked the challenge of trying to explain to listen to be the Swedish committee that used some bakery products to try and explain it but can you give us a gluten free version Yeah we had a lot of bagels in pretzels and to be honest I can't help feeling that that misses the point that I think they were grasping at something that seems to be something appeal Yeah but really I think to understand why this is important you have to take a step back and think what what it is that physicists really try and do and certainly what they it what they generally aren't trying to do is just to look just to find some new weird phenomenon that they can you know explain actually what they want to general phenomena things that happen across a wide range of different systems and that's really what these guys have discovered and one of those general types of phenomena called phase transitions where suddenly the behavior of a collection of particles or collection of of constituents of some kind suddenly changes something for media like vapor turning into a state into water or something like that or maybe even something that is not conducting that starts conducting electricity won't you know it's even more familiar than that traffic jams are an example of that so suddenly you go from Fino freely flowing traffic and it is quite sudden you know you suddenly enter a jam and it's and it's it's solid and it's invented itself and that's right and. What happens what happens when water freezes isn't anything to do with the water molecules they don't change at all but their range meant their configuration of one to another changes and so this is a property that physicists call collective because it just it's a property of the whole group of these particles or of these constituents of the system you see them also in some kinds of animal behavior in animal flocking as well as in magnets and in you know liquids freezing and in some quite exotic quantum mechanical systems like the ones that Duncan Harding was was talking about so this this kind of behavior is what excites physicists because suddenly you've got a kind of phenomenon that seems to explain a broad range of different kinds of systems and that's really what certainly what constitutes and Foulis we're looking at in the 1970 S. When they did their key part of the work so the fact that in the public we're talking about different things from the physicists like the chemistry this is a prize that physicists will say well done oh physics this is a physicists Nobel Prize really you know that it's that this is sort of physicists physics if you like it's so that I think within the community people thought yeah this is there's no doubt about this it it's fantastic it's important work and it's told us it's given us new physics OK I get that but part about gravitational waves Nobel said in the past year they could actually have done it for one I'm not sure I have seen discussion that the submissions have to be sooner than or possible Proceso that you know that's just the way you get there but you process is a process it is an deadlines or deadlines and I'm sure that's what at least partly what played a role in this so you can you know to file your prediction now as you probably have for next year I see no reason why this this won't just be a shoo in for the Nobel next year but I think that's what got in the way this time Well Phil thanks very much for your thoughts there still to come on the science hour we will be looking at the behavior of whales and of chimpanzees. You're with the B.B.C. World Service the news is next but 1st a look at our latest series 2 majorities that go down in our history. The United Kingdom voted to leave Europe that is nations as communities as individuals there's still divisions left 48 percent of people in the car production who did not vote for this in a 4 part series we travel across Great Britain and Northern Ireland to see what breaks it has revealed about divisions within the United Kingdom. To go back where you came from many of them in the 2nd chance we're in Wales where in many cases the areas facing most strongly to leave with those receiving the most money from the something desperately needs to happen in this country because people well they are desperate and that's a disunited Kingdom at B.B.C. World Service dot com You're listening to the Psalms out with me Roland peace still to come on the program we hear alarming warnings about the unlicensed chemicals some people are infusing into their veins in order to lighten their skin color our reporter spies on the family life of killer whales in the Pacific in the name of understanding for men a pause and we sit down with some chimpanzees to watch their favorite T.V. Programs specially made and all for a good scientific reason some sour continues after the news B.B.C. News with Julie Kenda the Ethiopian author to say the army will be deployed across the country as part of a 6 month state of emergency which has been declared hundreds of people have been killed in unrest involving Ethiopia's 2 largest ethnic groups at least 18 people including 10 soldiers have been killed in Turkey by a car bomb detonated at a military outpost in the southeast of the country the blast has been blamed on Kurdish militants from the P.K. K. . A senior advisor to Donald Trump says the billionaire business been may use the next televise U.S. Presidential debates later on Sunday to raise the sexual history of the former president Bill Clinton he was responding to the outcry sparked by Mr Trump's lewd comments about women. The number of people killed in the southeast of the United States as a result of hurricane Matthew has climbed to 15 hundreds of others were rescued from rising floodwaters a mass protest against Saudi Arabia has been held in the Yemeni capital Sana'a a day after an airstrike by the Saudi led coalition killed at least $140.00 people thousands of Yemen is chanted and Saudi slogans international election monitors in Georgia have praised the conduct of Saturday's parliamentary vote which looks set to be won by the governing Georgian Dream party the pro western party has established a clear lead garnering 49 percent of the folks counted so far the latest accounts for the social media giant Facebook show that it paid a 1000 times more corporation tax in Britain last year compared with the previous 12 months base because now it's to earlier this year that it was restructuring the way it paid tax in Britain after being accused of avoidance. A Russian hot air balloon ist has given more details about his plan to take the world altitude record next year the design of Federico new cost balloon the world's biggest will include a pressurized gone. B.B.C. News. Welcome back to the science hour from the B.B.C. With me Roland piece in a little while we'll be heading out to the Northern Pacific to hang out with whales . We know who they're socializing and we can construct this over the years months and even years and know who's hanging around here in Haiti as you'll hear their behavior may help us understand humans a little more and we'll join some chimpanzees on the T.V. Couch to find out what they're thinking what they're really interested in like humans is social complex so we kind of created a little Charlie Chaplin versions of the Jersey Shore for apes we start with a health warning skin whitening is a global industry with people buying creams cement and even battery acid to put on their black skin in the hope of making it lighter now there's a new trend intravenous infusions into the blood of an untested chemical called Glue to fire on consensus been raised in the British Medical Journal that the use of these infusions is on the rise despite the potential health risks which include damage to the liver or brain it's not approved for use in the United States but is used commonly in the Philippines and in the U.K. Consultant dermatologist affiliate that Z. Is finding a cell fielding more and more queries about it but her clinic London ethnic skin probably haven't winter meter at Hillingdon hospital on the outskirts of London polluted iron is actually an antioxidant that's a substance that normally will prevent damage to the skin just every day damage however it's actually being used to lighten the skin there are also all tablets of glue to tie in available but the particular concern obviously is that intravenous the injections of glue to tie in to lighten skin so that means people are getting a higher dose presumably Well it's very difficult to know exactly what the deuce is the problem is that if you look at the scientific. Literature there hasn't really been any studies so as a doctor as assigned is the 1st question you want to know is how are people calculating what do search how do you know how to use it for how do you know if it is really efficacious in this format so do you know if it does work well theoretically beautifying can lighten the skin so if you look at our skin we have something in it called melanin and that's the pigment in our skin we think that glue to try and interferes with the production of melanin So it's going to reduce your melanin in the skin In addition there are 2 types of melanin you melanin which is brownish black and there's few melanin which is a reddish yellow ish pigment and few melanin is what you see in individuals with red hair freckles skin and pale skin we think that blue to try and switches the melanin production so you've got someone who's normal melanin production is you melanin which is brown black with blue to thigh and they switch in towards a different type of melon then there have been some limited studies taken oral beautifying and based on this we did notice some like in effect online you can see adverts for places that are offering less and there's almost a kind of implication that it's that it's extra healthy and good for you but what do we know about the risks 1st of all if you're actually injecting something into the body especially intravenously you have injection site reactions even infections at the site of injections The other problem is that if you have a non medical practitioner doing this do they know about infection control potentially transmitted infections each I.V. Hepatitis B. Hepatitis C. If needles are been used on several patients and there have been reports in the literature about people developing kidney problems liver problems and even severe skin reactions as a result of using this cheap. And and then finally there are theoretical concerns about long term skin cancer risk especially if you use in this and also have an on conclude ultraviolet experience so is it legal for clinics to offer this treatment so actually if you look at the Food and Drug Administration F.D.A. From the United States of America they've issued advice you warnings about injectable skin agents and have actually stated that this is not approved in the U.S. In this country there is an explicit approval but the regulator aspects is not entirely clear are you saying more women who do want to light on the skin yes I am through my London ethnic skin clinic I do find that an increase in the amount of women will say men seek to light in the normal skin color as a purely cosmetic problem and previously was people have used topic or agents such as I don't know potent steroids and even homemade caustic agents glue to tie in now appears to be an increasingly a fashionable fact it seems very sad that people are prepared to take such risks to change what is their normal color of skin it is indeed and in fact part of it is that we encourage and individuals to be more accepting of who they are and also white in our definition of beauty so that people feel that it's actually quite inclusive and then we have to look at the regulator aspects and we as physicians as well educating people about potential adverse effects of these sort of practices so it's hard for you when you see people coming to see you are so unhappy with their natural skin it is and I spend time talking to them about except in themselves and also really educating people about potential adverse effects and the way that we define beauty should be more in. Yousif and this is an issue in many countries isn't it where people are trying to find different ways to bleach their skin it isn't even For instance if we consider countries such as Nigeria perhaps up to 75 percent of the population might be taken skin lightly and we have data from places like Sinegal 52 to 67 percent up to 35 percent within South Africa so it is so a widespread global phenomenon we need to continue talking about this and engaging communities to understand the potential risks with some of these treatments and also to try and educate people about self acceptance What do you advise people to do who are thinking about whether to use closer Diane My advice is to avoid it based on lack of scientific data on the efficacy especially in terms of the intravenous kilted iron and also based on potential adverse effects Dr affiliate that's he talking to Claudia Hammond and now off to see killer whales and humans are almost unique in the animal kingdom the females of both species go through the men a pause in their forty's or fifty's and then live for decades without producing any more offspring themselves it's an extremely rare phenomenon no other mammal does this not apes not monkeys not elephants just one exception of another species of tooth whales so what's the benefit of the many pores Why did it evolve B.B.C. Science reporter Victoria Gill headed off to the northwest coast of the USA with whale experts including a team leader Ken Balkan who believe the killer whales in this part of the world can explain why the miniport works for orcas and for us we are headed down to the south and us an island place called. To Wales or down there we know of and the others are offshore from there this is called open day that we're going out into. Beautiful calm water clouds in the background moans of a cruel Island and the trees of San Juan and reality that are right surrounding open day can began to work here during the worst of times for these whales the center's research director is Depor Giles when that killer whales in this region for started being studied by might begin colleagues in Canada and then very shortly after that Ken doll come here in the states nobody had any idea of how many animals there were so this population was very heavily targeted in fact the stall target for killer whales that were removed from the wild and put into marine parks countered by me how many whales are actually taken in the seventy's 67 sister for well they didn't really keep good records records yeah but we can confirm at least 45 are probably in the order of the low fifty's yeah yeah so if someone were drowned in the cab here and they were cut open and saw you know they were hiding the tape because they're only allowed to take so many if one died they like to go and get a replacement so they decided size probably about 40 percent of the population of 30 so devastation were taken it was pretty devastating even and helicopters and planes were used to locate the animals and then speak to the boats and tell the boats where to go to corral them in coves in inlets that could be used to cordon them off seal bombs were used in those pretty pretty horrific situation it was the center's whale counts that ended the rendition of the Southern resident zoos and theme parks the southern resident population of Wales it's one clan and within that clan there are 3 pods we call them J. Pod Capon in Alpine each part consists of several related families all metro lines what's unusual about this population is that the sons and daughters don't disperse from the family group so the live in a much maligned around a female around that old. Mother her offspring and then grand offspring you know when you see one you'll see the other some are real and they stay with their mother and her entire life there's no dispersal from the family which is very unusual for a model for a social model. 20 minutes of chugging along the coast and we spot 1st killer whales a couple of members of the family in Alpine. Go through them and get him out of the way I mean he. Is a male so I think they can take up a nifty Yeah the size of the state you know the males have a very tall dorsal fin and when they reach their sexual maturity like grown a beard only to think. That's the way they know that's the male. And the female over here is still 22. Percent identifies each whale as an individual from signature nicks and scratches on its dorsal fin. And the shading pattern on the grey patch behind the fin think of them as fingerprints. All. Over so that the stuff can see the tail flaps of quite a lot when they're driving the fish they're kind of like dogs to see. Who is spending time with who what they're doing for how long and where is all noted and goes into the sentence database along with all the other information that the men oppose research is a finding invaluable down Frank's University view we know who to socialize here and we can construct this a fair days once and even years and know who's hanging around here basically we also know from that day to the family structures as well saying he's an move it can move there and that's really useful we also know best and best and because they used it in for so long we haven't looked this investigation and. Look at survival and this brings us to the 1st of the team's discoveries about the importance of older females to their families using that data we've been able to apply the same analysis techniques that insurance companies would to calculate your insurance policy for life life insurance you know you are a certain age a certain gender certain certain life his You've got a history about driving smoking or whatever and then they can calculate your mortality risk how long are you likely to live for that for how much should your premium be and using that same methodology sense to cicle analysis we can ask how long these whales would look for in these different conditions so we've been able to ask OK so if a son has his mother alive and he's an adult what's the chances that he's going to be alive next year or if his mother dies what's the chances he's going to die next year so using their survival analysis we've been able to show that these old females actually keep their adult offspring a life and it's not just the young males the teenagers these are the old males that 30 year old males they don't live much longer than that that have been dependent on their mothers for their survival if their mother dies by using this long term data so we've been actually able to show that their mortality has at the risk of them dying increases by about 8 fold in the year following her death so it's a she yeah it's a huge effect to these all females I contribution by keeping their offspring a life has an effect on daughters as well as particularly their sons. You. Think if you're feeling. Like you know that just moving so slowly you must be less than 20 meters away yeah yeah that door says saints yeah when a marriage is from the water it's like a big Black Sail just yeah coming out what you really see the abs of tights and it is good like a periscope of the supreme when they go down and see this trifling thing that even . It's just I mean just again she's a little bit farther away and you use this scenario this is you know 89 and 89 and how easy it was born in 1903 so that what makes him go to 2323 and 3 you know it's 3 years yeah and closely behind him is his mother just following certain I don't male and his mom but that fully grown male fully grown adult male you know this mom told his mother comes 46 and that means that she's gone past that point in life where she's going to be having a wrong tops and so she's gone through this period now with similar to humans but of course so now she's Post reported that she had 2 other offspring a female and the male both of those. Both sexes on opening day of the year the disunity born the other one day 2030 which couple years ago right here. He was born with. An older brother yes so the males typically are not getting past much hostility only some of them do but typically we're looking into the effect of the males have a much shorter lifespan is that dramatic Yes Showalter so the females are getting back into their eighty's ninety's the males in that. Manner poison killer whales is just so interesting because only females live to such old age as anthropologist research when middle age is reached females have man pores and go on to lead the group and males just die so this is man opposed with knobs on I mean this is really going to tell us something about the evolution metaphors. Where he she was where Stacy recently she is that yes so strange that. I'm with well research center volunteer Jane COLGAN And Dan Franks in search of the Southern residents mother of all grandmothers J.T. a Little north of this house. Just pretty close to the shore with just the news off if she's pretty much a different degree so she's laid a place. A mile or 2 ahead of everyone else she has kind of a prescribe the route Long Island when she comes in front of our house she's almost always on the same track line. And then quite often the J. Cortines and J. Nineteen's are not too far behind her. You know I've always loved the old ladies they're just so spunky and me think ah shit 80 How can you launch your body out of the water like a D.J. Too but she's one of the more prolific creatures within the clan possibly a 100 and something new Those who threw them into the roads now she's somewhere between mid eighty's and 105 this week or last calf was J. One making it one they were travelling like the other an adult son. When we 1st saw her. And then we have photographs of her in the sixty's that's where we know you know that she was adult then. Most often we see 2 leading the group there's a junction up here where straight kind of ends and becomes Swanson channel going straight up and boundary pass off to the right and say some of the pod members will start meandering off to the right a boundary and I've seen so many times J.T. Will just start hitting the water with her tail really really hard yeah like Get back here and sure enough everybody turns around and comes right back to her and then they'll travel in the direction that she wants to go it's not only Granny who leads the way analysis of the senses video records shows that it's usually the post-menopausal females who are out in front especially when times are hard these whales are coming in in the summer months to feed on salmon migrating up into the rivers and the timing of when and where the salmon is it is variable in space and time so the individuals have to make decisions about. To go on when to go over what we did was we looked at one of my students and the Foster looked at hours and hours of video 751 hours I think a video footage of these whales swimming around these coastal waters and in that video she recorded who was where in the groups and he was leading the group and he was following and what we found actually is the old females that lead the group around and that they do this more during times of low sun so when salmon is in short supply these old females are guiding the group and leading the group around these foraging grounds and that's really important because salmon is absolutely crucial to their survival and years of low salmon we know there's higher mortality so one potential explanation for why these all females are so important is actually they store the information of when and where to find food and they share that information with their family group by guiding them around these fortune carousing if you think back to humans in our ancestors about think about our own evolutionary history about when and where we might need knowledge of elders Well actually if we think about droughts that might occur very infrequently every 40 years or something actually if there was a drought we want to know where to find water where we can get food with us the elders so in hunter gatherer communities elders are really important that's where the information is that's where the knowledge the social environmental knowledge is and so something similar we think is happening the killer whales are storing that information and sharing it with their family group invite doing that they're increasing the survival of their group this is a perfect example of this actually seeing out here what we found when we look in the data that all the females I mean anyway so here she's in front of me needing us to be that report on whales humans and the men of course was by Victoria Gill another unique thing about humans is supposed to be our ability to put ourselves in other people's shoes to know what they're thinking what they want and what they know is called theory of mind since the 1960 S. Primate scientists have been testing this theory in. Chimps using variations of the Haydn seek situation you can do this with children where they see one character Sally hide an object and the 2nd character and secretly move that object and hide it elsewhere if you ask very young children where Sally will next look they will pick the 2nd place where I put it but all the children can put themselves in Sally's mind and look where she left it in the 1st place now the barrier here with both young children and with chimps is language you need to ask a question and be sure that they understand it but advances in I track a technology allow primatologists to run this experiment without question and says Just by filming where apes are looking as they watch videos. For the work published in the journal Science this week Chris companion and co-author Fumi hero can know how to make videos for chimps Chris told money to support the 1st challenge was making that T.V. Footage nearing what they're really interested in like humans it is social complex so we kind of created a little Charlie Chaplin versions of the Jersey Shore for apes and we were fortunately very successful and they were very engaged so what happens is the apes live in their normal social group and then the keepers call them in one other time and so they come in and then part of the wall has a Plexiglas window and they look through the window and read outside the window is a screen where they can watch a short video and they can also drink a little bit of juice while they watch the video and just look at video is this I track air which identifies their location or their eyes in tracks the movements of their eyes so that it can alternately map their gaze our to their videos that we can see exactly where they are looking at it watch the video and the videos that they're seeing are these sort of social conflicts between a human actor and a person to. Just. Like costume which we call King Kong and so in one case the human came can have a little fight and then. Runs and hides in one of 2 hay bales and the human actor goes to retrieve a stick and comes back out and hits attacks one of the neighbor elsewhere he thinks King Kong is hiding and then came conscripts off and the other place the human actor is trying to retrieve a stone that King Carl has hidden in one of 2 boxes and so in their critical conditions the human actually here has seen the initial hiding but the location has moved since and so in the human after comes back yes the false belief about the location of the object that he's trying to pursue and the question is can the Apes anticipate when he sort of approaching book Asians do they look in anticipation of him searching according with its false belief and consistent maybe they actually did do that and does it matter how old they are so we've tested actually quite a range of animals from probably 2 or 3 years old up into adulthood and we didn't find any effective age in our sample I mean there are a couple of different explanations for this one is that they have I suppose genuine empathy into someone else's mind that they have this kind of system where they know that if someone is going to come back after something's been hidden they get a look in the last place they thought it was yes that's right so in humans this sort of theory of mind fall sleep under standing at least in human adults is in its truest form based on this ability to really imagine someone else's perspective imagine how they misunderstand the situation or the false information that they're acting on and you can use that awareness and her to their correct there be. Wavier or even to exploit it to deceive them something like that but it all it is true that these kinds of findings also could be based on a simpler rule base explanation that individuals have learned during their lifetime that others will pursue objects in the last place where those individuals saw those objects and so you know it's possible that they're using this simpler robot even that is actually still a fairly sophisticated skill because it means that they're paying close attention to where all the actors are doing this scenes and they're tracking you know what the actors are aware of and it leaves the last sort of awareness that the actor has of the objects location and that in itself is at least foundational to this ability to represent your Imagine someone else's perspective even if it isn't ultimately that same full scale and course which one do you think it is I guess that's a tricky question I think we have some other studies planned where we can we're going to trying to use a part of these different hypotheses I think what we can safely say is we've shown something that is more in the direction of human theory of mind than has been shown before but I think that the jury's still out on this on this question of whether or not they have this sort of full blown theory of mind that humans did either way there are implications for how we treat apes and indeed animals it seems we're kind of moving further away from this idea that humans are special and deserve special consideration and all other species are just complicated robots Yeah I think a lot of people underestimate how intelligent animals are and especially these kinds of animals that are so closely related to us they're clearly quite brilliant in fascinating and also unfortunately they're all species of great apes are endangered so I do hope that the kind of work that we're doing showcasing how similarities animals aren't humans and how intelligent they are were. Can help people to you know invest in their conservation and help to save them before they go extinct Dr Chris Crippin yanked from the Max Planck Institute for evolution 3 M. For poetry in Leipzig and if you're curious we have 33 years on our website just go to B.B.C. Talk. For the science hour and hopefully they'll fill the gap now that this edition of the program is finished honor and pace the producer was Deborah Cohen thanks for listening with news of an intriguing arrival here on the B.B.C. World Service Here's. The response is a new program that lets you tell your stories to the world using just a voice recorder on your phone for the 1st program we're hearing stories about turning points we've heard a story from a woman who found love later in life and an accountant who turned his life around by learning to dance the response on the B.B.C. World Service at B.B.C. World Service dot com slash documentaries This is the B.B.C. World Service bringing news from around the world to a global audience our chief international correspondent leads to set is in the capital of our Europe editor catch up at that was up was let's turn to the B.B.C.'s Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg cream and market live which will be online on mobile. This is the B.B.C. World Service the world's radio station.