A distorted view

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1:30This was thanks to America. Specifically, US President Chester Arthur, who called a conference in 1884 to get everyone on the same page. Or should that be map? Because everyone who was constructing a map was making zero somewhere meaningful to them. There were multiple meridians in the late 1800s, and in an interconnected world, this was getting confusing. France wasn't best pleased that Paris wasn't chosen and spent a few decades referring to Greenwich mean time as Paris Time minus 9 minutes and 21 seconds, which is a level of stubbornness I'm here for. Eventually, we all agreed to use UTC, Universal Time, which is calibrated to an atomic clock, which is based in Paris anyway. I'm Marnie Chesterson. From the BBC World Service, this is unexpected elements. And joining me today are two global science broadcasters in Bucharest, Romania,

2:41Andrade Fiskertan. Welcome back. Hello, money, winner. And hello to Paul Adapodju in Wilverhampton in the UK. Hi, money. Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be back. Thank you. So let me explain to listeners how this show works. What we do is we look through websites, newspapers, we find a story that's making headlines. And then we use that as a starting point to take us on an extremely meandering journey into the world of science. So along the way we'll pour over some research, we'll meet an expert or two. We might even learn something new as well. I started today with a tale of the lines on the map of the world. Now let's take a closer look at said map, which has been in the news this month. Do we need a new world map? The traditional Mercator map makes Africa appear smaller than it actually is. It makes the continent look less important, less powerful. So now, campaigners are asking for the equal earth map to be used instead.

3:42Yes, the United Nations has passed a resolution encouraging wider use of the equal earth map rather than the Mercator projection map. Now the latter is probably the one that most of us know best. It was super useful for navigating because it represents compass bearings of straight lines. So sailors could just follow a compass direction and know where they were going to end up. However, it does that at the expense of skewing land masses the closer you get to the poles. So Canada and Russia end up looking far larger than they truly are. Well, Greenland looks the same size as Africa, despite Africa being 14 times bigger. Now Paul, you are originally from Nigeria. Can I ask how you feel about the cartographic diminishment of your continent? Yes, it's fascinating. Conundrum, I reflected on the time I first saw the map in my heliskos, looking at what children would be inferring from that map.

4:43Those kinds of heliskage perception on how the region was presented in the map could probably impact how kids feel about this nature, the structure and magnitude of their countries. Yeah, because we do that thing where we go, big is more impressive, right? When it comes to, I don't know, countryside or fossils or whatever. And I was looking at Nigeria and the UK. On the old map, Nigeria definitely looks smaller. And now I don't think it is. In its defence, it is hard to put the surface contents of a round ball that the earth roughly is onto a flat map. So it's going to distort, but it is interesting. I'm used to the map with Europe at the centre, but when I went to the US one day, I saw a different world map with the US at the centre. And then of course, there's the Spielhaus projection. It has Antarctica near the centre. The oceans are shown as one big body of water and the caption reads the world,

5:50according to fish. That is a lovely way of seeing the world. So that brings me on to the theme for this week's show, maps and distortions. Andrada, any story you'd like to share from that starting point? So, Marnie, when I think of maps, I think of my favourite way to travel. The subway. I live close to a subway station here in Bucharest. And fun fact, the Polytechnica subway station has limestone floors with 80 million year old fossils that you can see. These are clams from the age of the dinosaurs. Excellent. I don't think we've got any 80 million year old clams. I mean, listeners will correct me. We do have some half decent artworks. And London Underground has its own species of mosquito, just to make traveling extra hazardous. I do like subways everywhere and I've been on the subway in London, in Boston, New York, Paris. And also in my part of the world, in Kiev, in Ukraine, and in Sofia and Bulgaria.

6:52But little did I know that each city's transit system has its own microbial fingerprint. And hundreds of researchers and volunteers worked to create a subway microbe map. Are you saying that if I took a swab from Oxford Circus Underground Station and I showed it to the researchers, they could tell that it was London Underground's just from the microwave populations? Exactly. They could tell it came from London. With the right machine learning algorithm, the accuracy was 88%. So a group of researchers led by Christopher Mason at Wild Cornel Medicine studied public transport in 60 cities around the world, with a focus on subways. They swapped the handrails, the ticket machines, the touch screens, the benches, the floors. I'm cresting all the kinds of bugs they were able to find. Well, they found some interesting microorganisms.

7:53Of the 11,614 viral species they've observed, 94% didn't match any known viral species in the databases. On the bacterial side, they reconstructed about 1,300 genomes, and more than half of those had no match either. That is astonishing. But surely there had to be some common species in there too. Exactly. Scientists identified 31 core species that were present in almost all the samples. But you said that each subway station has its own signature. Why is that? It can depend on where the city is located, if it's by the coast, for example, or population size or density. Also, if two cities have a similar climate, their microbial signature is more alike. While Bucharest was not part of the dataset, I can get an idea of its microbial signature, so Bucharest should be more similar to, say, New York than to Doha.

8:57I love it. This is a whole world of zoos that they've found. I mean, there is an aspect to this that I wonder about, because I travel on the underground regularly. I'm just wondering, should I be scared? Should I not lick the windows? Maybe you shouldn't lick the windows, but you shouldn't be scared either. And the scientists say so themselves. They said, and I quote, there is no indication that the species identified in the urban environments are pathogenic. For most people, it's good to be exposed to a variety of microbes, especially early in life, because that's how we train our immune systems. So you can treat yourself and take the subway home today. Thank you, Andrada. I will be doing that, and I will be spreading some of my own microbes, because I have a cold at the moment. Paul, where are you taking us next? We've been talking about maps of all kinds today, but did you know that, apparently, there are some birds

9:58that carry remarkably detailed maps inside their heads, too? And people still use bird brain as an insult. When will this end? Probably at the end of this episode, people will have a change of heart regarding that. I found something amazing about the black-capped chickadee. I'm not sure if you've heard of them before. I haven't. Well, this bird, the way just between 9 to 14 grams, but only that for you, because even though they are brain-maybe tiny, scientists describe the black-capped chickadee as a memory genius. And what does a chickadee need a good memory for? One word, survivor. It's survivor. The black-capped chickadee is the lever cross Canada and the Northern United States. Unlike many birds in cold climate, they don't escape winter by migrating somewhere warmer. What they are doing instead is that during periods that food is available, they hide or cache small pieces of it. Later, when snow and cold weather make food harder for them to find,

11:00what they now do is that they retrieve these tiny news. And the implication of this is that the birds need to remember and have extraordinary number of locations. I'm actually quite jealous of them, Paul, because so far in the past week I've managed to misplace my bank card, my phone, my keys, and just now my BBC past to let me into the building. So out of me and the chickadees, I'm the bird brain. How are they doing this? It's a fascinating research that goes to the team at Columbia University's at Zocama Institute. Such as this institute, they found that every time a chickadee hid a seed, a small and apparent random combination of neurons in its hippocampus fired together for about a second. Okay, the hippocampus is a part of the brain involved in memory, right? You're absolutely correct. The hippocampus is crucial for learning and memory in vertebrates. They were found that each caching event produced its own distinctive

12:00pattern of brain activity. So there were such as called these patterns backwards, because each event appeared to act like a unique liberal that is attached to an individual memory. When the bird later returned and retrieved that particular seed, the same backward-like pattern appeared again. That liberal may allow all the different parts of the experience, parts including the place, the food, and the moment itself to be stored together and retrieved later. Surely the bird's brain is also creating a map of the physical space. Yes, it is. Scientists already knew her body neurons called place cells. These cells become active when an animal is in a particular location and effectively help the brain to create an internal map of its surroundings. The initial hypothesis was that the chickadees memory of a seed would simply be recorded through changes to those place cells. But what they found instead were two systems operating alongside each other.

13:01The place cells represented where the bird was, the back was represented the individual experience of caching or retrieving a seed. It's rather like having a street map with a load of uniquely liberal pins telling you what's up on at each location. What I love about what the chickadee is doing is that it's not just a map of space. It's a map that's layered with events and experiences. And it's kind of like what we do when we go to a place. You know, if you go back to your childhood home, you remember it not just buildings and hills, it's people and places and moments. So, listeners, any thoughts on underground microbes or bird brains, you can email unexpected at bbc.co.uk and the WhatsApp number is plus 4433067830. Next up, we'll be discovering how you can peer into deep space by using a galaxy like a magnifying glass.

14:02Find out more after this. Hi there, Ella here bringing you this week's unexpected elements quiz. The Mercator projection of the world distorts the relative size of continents with the region's farthest from the equator appearing much larger than they actually are. But it's not the only map to have this kind of extreme distortion. We also have one that represents something inside of us. It's called the Somata sensory homunculus and it represents how much of the brain is dedicated to sensory processing like touch, pain and temperature for different body parts. My question is which of these body parts has the largest area dedicated to processing sensory information? A, the arms, B, the lips, C, the toes? Have a think and I'll be back with the answer soon.

15:04You're listening to unexpected elements from the BBC World Service. This week we're talking maps because the UN is encouraging the worlds to adopt the equal earth map that better represents the size of the planet's land masses without the distortions of relative area that we see in the more familiar world map. And next up we're going to be looking at distortion on a much grander scale and how it's shining a little light on the dark secrets of the universe via something called gravitational lensing. Joining us to unpack all of that is Miguel Zomala Karegi of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Madrid. Welcome Miguel. Thanks for having me. No thank you because you've got the hard questions. Can you explain what gravitational lensing is in a simple way? Right so gravitational lensing it's a distortion of usually light as it propagates toward us and caused by gravitational fields. This is not very different from when we see light going through a glass for instance

16:09if you look at a dried martini you will see often a single olive gets pleated into two. It does not because you've had too much. This is something we see like every day a lot of times I'm with used to it. And gravitational lensing is the same but caused by gravitational fields usually of very massive objects. This is something that Albert Einstein predicted, right? General theory of relativity. Tell us about that. Right so this is one of Einstein's first predictions. This effect the first time I was demonstrated was deflection of light by the sun and this was something that he calculated and then after I think time went on an expedition to measure it at a solar eclipse and he saw that stars behind the sun when you could only do this in the eclipse of course because the sun would outshine the stars significantly and he could see that the sun made them a apparent location move a little bit. This is a minute effect. And that's because the light coming from them that has to come past the sun gets bent

17:11by the gravity of the sun. Exactly and it's similar to how you put a straw in a glass of water you'll see it apparently bent. Later he also thought a star could act as a gravitational lens and could produce two images of a star that is located right behind it but then he thought this will never be observed. Then it took until the 70s for these to be observed first in an astronomical setup. Why is it important that we understand gravitational lensing and what's going on with it? Well it is important because everything that's a distant astronomical object will undergo some level of gravitational lensing. In the case when it's a mild effect that happens this is a small squishing of galaxies. And then in more extreme cases when a galaxy sits almost literally behind another we see like a very big distortion like the background galaxy can form a ring it's known as an Einstein ring. And this also can be used to study the distribution of matter around galaxies

18:16also as gravitational lens to magnify the galaxy that's behind that maybe observe an object that would otherwise be too faint for normal telescopes to pick. So it's like a giant telescope in a way. And this helps you sort of deal with some of the issues that are embarrassingly we don't really know what makes up most of the universe right? Exactly exactly. For most of the matter in the universe is dark matter 85% compared to normal atomic matter. And this gravitational lensing is one way to map how is distributed around galaxies and groups of galaxies. Also it helps us understand dark energy. It's causing the universe to accelerate so gravitational lensing can be used to measure the expansion of the universe and how fast it is expanding. Okay so when it comes to dark matter and dark energy you may not be able to see the matter itself but you can see that it's having an effect it's gravitationally lensing pulling this light around and that's something that

19:18you can see. That's right people literally draw maps of the dark matter distribution thanks to gravitational lensing effects. I was wondering Miguel if you or your colleagues actually take photos or create some sort of images. That's yeah not me. I work with gravitational waves that's many of my colleagues too. So there's really a lot of images like very distorted galaxies. There's one I really like which is the they call it the Chessire cat. It's like a group of galaxies that has like one distorted galaxy looks like the mouth and some of the big galaxies in the lens look like the eyes. Oh that sounds great. We did a show on Alice in Wonderland recently. We could have included that. Miguel you mentioned that you don't work with images because you're dealing with gravitational waves. Right so gravitational waves is a whole other story running in parallel. So gravitational waves are perturbations in the fabric of space and time itself and they're caused by

20:23anything that moves except that gravity is so weak that we can only observe the gravitational waves from the most extreme objects like black holes. So what's your version of taking a picture? Right we don't this is the main inconvenience of gravitational waves like a gravitational wave detector is like sound like it's recording when it's on. Recourse all the time takes a signal that looks like a wave. We can understand where it comes from but only very coarsely. It's like tuning to subtle features of the sound to see if a signal has been lensed. Miguel you've given us some recordings of sounds made by gravitational waves that have been lensed. These are producing collaboration with Helena Ubach at the University of Barcelona. I thought it would be fun if we could take a listen to a couple of these sonifications and then maybe you could tell us what we're hearing. Of course.

21:27Right so this one I think you hear some modulation the kind of situation where you would have an object split a gravitational wave into two signals that are very closely overlapping. Pay close attention towards the end you can hear like there's the blip is kind of doubled. So you hear like blip blip when the black holes merge. Let me do an impression of it. That corresponds to an impressively violent event out in space. Exactly that would be two objects much heavier than the sun colliding and their final final orbits. Okay this is fun let's do another one. Okay this is similar except now the signals are further split. So this would be if the object that's doing the lancing is heavier the effect is stronger it causes a longer delay and then it's

22:27easier to notice that the blips at the end when the signal is louder are clearly separated. Corresponding to a similar black hole crash. Yeah two black holes I would say a few times the more massive than the sun and they will be magnified or lanced by an object that in that case I'm guessing it's more like 10,000 times the mass of the sun. Wow thank you so much for coming on to unexpected elements. Thanks to you it's been my pleasure. Miguel my big take home is that sipping a martini counts as research into the universe and gravity and Einstein's theories. I think so yeah unless you start thinking that they're they put too many olives. You can't have too many olives in a martini. So we started this show with the news that the UN is encouraging us to adopt the equal earth map and that led us to the microbe maps of our city's underground transport networks and the bar code

23:31light systems that help black cap chickadees seek out their foodstaches and we've just discovered how light is distorted by gravity and why that can help us learn more about distant galaxies and stars. But the journey isn't over yet we've still got a few more paths to explore this week. Next up we'll be finding out why scientists are putting tiny squares on Europe's mountain summits and I'll be digging into the history of map apps. September's always busy. Whole Foods Market can help. Their September stock-up event makes it easy to load your pantry and freezer with flavorful nourishing food. Even better there are hundreds of sales. Get dinner going with canned soups and veggies. Lean on frozen pizzas, pastas and seafood. Everyone loves their build your own family meals feeds for for just 35 dollars. Stock up at Whole Foods Market.

24:33Thumbtack presents tile trouble. Every single time I use my sink I make eye contact with the uneven grout in my kitchen backsplash. The crooked corners eye me and I'm haunted by more tiling questions than I thought possible. What kind of pro can fix a backsplash? Can I replace one crack tile or should I replace them all? What? But if I just use Thumbtack I can hire top-rated pros, read reviews and compare prices with a tap all on the app. Thumbtack knows homes. Download the app today. This is Unexpected Elements from the BBC World Service, the science show inspired by the news. I'm Moni Chesterton in London in the UK and I'm here with Andrada Fiskeleton in Booker Estrumania and Paul Hadibodjou in Wolverhampton here in the UK. Now we've reached the bit of the programme where one of our panelists brings along a story that's gone under the radar of global news but still deserves a bit of time in the spotlight that the

25:37BBC World Service can provide. Andrada you are up this week. Bonus points if you can somehow link it to today's theme which is the UN changing the world map so map-seemed. I have a story about the Carpathians and other mountains and I can loosely tell it. Researchers have been mapping the flora up there for more than two decades. Points, points allotted. Okay, continue with the sockets. Thank you. If you walk to the top of a European mountain today and count the plants there, you would find more species than 20 years ago. Oh that's great news. Unfortunately it is not. There is some bad news coming. As part of a project called Gloria Johannes Wesley at University of Vienna and 46 co-authors marked out tiny squares on mountain tops. These were one metre by one metre plots. Up to 16 of them just below each

26:44summit. 62 summits in total. The study started in 2001 and every seven years, researchers would visit each plot to write down the name of every single plant and how much ground it covered. Sorry, 62 different mountain summits. I really hope that these scientists were fans of climbing up mountains. What mountain ranges did they study? So they took samples from 16 mountain regions across Europe including the Alps, the Aponines, the Pyrenees. The Romanian data come from the Rodna mountains in the Eastern Carpathians. But Marni, I cannot tell you exactly where the Romanian plots are. Baranest Mihai Pushkash, one of the studies Romanian co-authors won't say this publicly because he fears someone might go there and have a look and maybe pick some plants and ruin the data. And it's interesting how much these plots have changed. These days, in the Carpathian mountains,

27:47you can find plants like the Stemless Genshin, the Arnica, or a Carpathian bell flower called Campanulasirata and none of these three had been recorded on any of the summits when the project started. Also, in 2022, on the most recent survey, Pushkash saw a clear increase in the cover of dwarf shrubs, Rotodendron, Bilbury, and Lindenbury, which are typically found lower down. And here's the first conclusion, Marni. The mountain tops are becoming greener with plants from lower altitudes, taking up more space up on the mountain tops. I mean, I like things becoming greener. Where does the bad news come in? Well, if these plants are taking up more space on the mountain summit, they are squeezing out other species. And the rate of disappearance is increasing. Every time the researchers went back to the plots, they found more missing plants than the time before.

28:49Across Europe, more than 20% of the species that were in a plot in 2001 were gone from it by 2022. In the Romanian Carpathians, it's a little bit better. Around 10% of the species were gone. One of the lowest in the network, the really bad numbers are further south. The Pyrenees and the mountains of Crete are both close to 50% and Sierra Nevada around 40%. The ones being lost in those locations are the specialist species. Those plants that live up there with no higher ground to move to. So the overall species count goes up, but the mountain gets more ordinary. The paper's whole point is that the rising number masks the loss of those specialist species. Okay, I'm assuming it's because everything's moving higher up. And if you're at the summit, there's nowhere higher up to move. And, Roder, I'm assuming that these changes are due to

29:50rising global temperatures. So rising global temperatures are an important factor here. The summit's that warmed most, lost most specialist plants. In fact, for every extra tent of a degree, local extinctions went up by up to 1.6 percentage points. Worming also brings other changes like drier soil and shorter snow season. And the researchers are careful to say they can't separate those from the heat itself. What's also interesting money is that these extinctions announce themselves in advance in almost 60% of the cases the area covered by the plant was shrinking before it disappeared. So if you're monitoring these plants, you don't have to wait until something is gone. The shrinking is the alarm bell. And definitely a alarm bell's ringing all over the world, I think, at the moments. Are there any plans to protect

30:53the species that are being lost? Not that I'm aware of. This paper only looked at what is currently happening. But I hope that as those alarm bells are ringing, there's going to be something that could be made in order to protect those species. Thanks, Andrada, for the tale of Alpine plants with nowhere left to go. Listeners, any thoughts to add into the mix, you can email us. The address is unexpected at bbc.co.uk or you can send a message or a voice note on WhatsApp. The number is plus 443306783080. So unexpected elements is a chatty science show and our listeners' contributions are a key part of that. Hence the callouts to get in touch. So let's take a moment to have a look at what you've been writing to us about. Now last week, we learned about research that aims to induce pleasant dreams

32:00in people undergoing anesthesia. And I'd say that normally the last thing I want to do is hear anybody else's dream stories, but I did make a one-time exception for this particular case. Some of you wrote in and you didn't disappoint. Listener Darrell said, before undergoing a colonoscopy, I asked the medical crew for a copy of the video. Apparently, I continued as if a stand-up comic. When I came to, they could hardly stand and I was legend of the whole surgical suite. Excellent. Imagine subconsciously doing a whole stand-up routine. Anyway, Cara in Scotland all say through this into the mix. She says, when I was in labor with my first child, I was in a lot of pain. No surprise there, but I slightly overdid the gas and air pain relief and my husband suddenly turned into a troll. After all, it was his

33:03fault. Just joking, I changed my mind when he went on to be a brilliant dad. Andrada Paul, this is a one-time offer I extended up to our listeners and I will give it to you to weirdest dream. So this is a difficult one for me. Most of my weird dreams are about exams. I have to take exams and I haven't prepared for them. Does this happen to you as well? I see you're nodding. No, I've never had this, but I've heard that it is the classic anxiety dream. So not preparing for the exam that you're sitting and also the one about your teeth falling out. Paul. For me, I think most of my weird dreams occur around food. And the most recent one was I dreamt I went to a typical Nigerian wedding. And the moment when it was time to heat food, I was thinking, yes, finally the gelophrise was coming.

34:05That was when my daughter just came in and she woke me up and I missed her meal. She was looking at me, I was grumbling. She didn't know I she loved this dad of a nice food in the in the dream. No, you could have had dream gelophrise. Yes, yes, she woke me up before the good bit. She wanted to cycle. So I said, no, I missed the gelophrise. See, that's why you need to learn how to lose it dream. In order to kind of get yourself back into eating the main course, moving on, we've had what's that message about a program we made a couple of weeks ago where we discussed earworms. Paul, do you want to read this one? Yeah, sure. So this anonymous listener says in your episode, the show must go on. You spoke on earworms. Well, they can be annoying. What was is a partial earworm where you can't quite remember enough of the song to sing it fully and it's not enough to such a line. So earworms is one of the

35:05topics that never goes away on this program. And Roder, I'm sure we've discussed it before. Is earworm called an earworm in Romania? I don't think there's a Romanian word for that. We just say, it's a song you can't get out of your head. However, when I wake up in the middle of the night and want to go back to sleep, I try to put a song on repeat in my head and it works. It usually is yellow submarine. Do you do that too? No, I can't do it with music. I find music too distracting. Mainly, I go for speech and I will put on a podcast. Moving on again, we are still making our way through all the lovely postcards that we have received. All sorts of brilliant colours, shapes, tourist destinations on the Isle of White. There is one from the Isle of White which is an island off the UK on the south coast, which says, Dear Marnie, love the program. Hope you like

36:08the postcard. The Isle of White is known as the dinosaur isle. Also, Robert Hook, the polymath, was born here. Best wishes, Fred. Thank you, Fred. Yes, great for dinosaurs, great for sailing, really good seafood. And rather, if you're a fan of undergrounds, they've taken one of the old underground trains from the London Underground and they just repurposed it for the Isle of White and it's the overground train there now. And so, if you want to flash back to 1970s London, it's on the Isle of White. That sounds fascinating. And also the entire combo with dinosaurs and great food. This is what we are. The BBC is a doubling up as a tourist bureau for the Isle of White. Anyway, thank you, Fred. We've had lovely one with an image of a jar decorated with a bear, and that is from some listeners in California who said, Dear Marnie, sending you some

37:10indigenous art and wildlife biology greetings from listeners in California, Laura and Zeke. Thank you, everyone. We really do love it when you get in touch. I particularly love adding to my postcard collection. So, I will be sending out the full address details at the end of the show. Still to come on the programme, why do all the continents point downwards? Find out after this. Hello again, back with the answer to the quiz. Earlier, I asked you which of these body parts has the largest area dedicated to processing sensory information as seen on the Samata sensory per-monculus map? A, the arms, B, the lips, C, the toes, and the answer is B, the lips. In our cerebral cortex, the amount of space dedicated to processing the sensory information of each body region is not proportional to the size of the body part, but how many receptors and neurons are picking up and relaying sensory information to the brain. The lips are a sensitive

38:11area. They contain a very high density of touch receptors, so a larger part of the brain's cortex is dedicated to them than an entire arm. On the Samata sensory per-monculus, this is depicted as giant lips and skinny little arms. Well done if you got that right, if not, better luck next time. So, those contact details are unexpected at bbc.co.uk or WhatsApp on plus 444-330-678-3080 or the snail mail address for postcards is Unexpected Elements, BBC World Service, Cardiff, CF-104GA in the UK. Each week on Unexpected Elements, we delve into the inbox to find a science question from one of our lovely listeners. And then, we bother a scientist on your behalf. It's time for Ask the Unexpected.

39:28This question comes from an anonymous listener and it's delightfully on brand for a show themed around maps. They ask why are all the continents pointing downwards? Listener, you are not the first person to notice this. This observation even has a name. It's called Continental Drip. Simple question, but does it have a simple answer? Well, we went to Professor Renata Schmitt to find out. Renata is a structural geologist who works on the tectonics of continents at the laboratory of Gondwana Evolution at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Why that is relevant will become very clear soon. First of all, when we look at the map of the world today, when we say downwards, this actually could be upwards because on space Earth is kind of there is no ups and downs. And secondly, there is nothing attracting continents to point down,

40:28nothing related to the magnetic field, there's nothing physical. So if we go backwards in time, 200 million years, there was this continent called Gondwana. All continents in the southern hemisphere are words. They are derived from Gondwana, Antarctica, Australia, Africa, South America, and Gondwana by the Jurassic period is started to break up because they were kind of very hot normally coming from the mantle of the Earth that started to weaken Gondwana continental crust. When you break up a continent, you have to have a kind of a triple junction of fractures and then it's kind of stretched and then it finally breaks and then it comes the oceanic crust and then the ocean separates the continent. So when we look at the San Diego atmosphere today, this points down of India, Africa, South America, it means that there were triple junctions 200 million years ago between these continents and they separate from them. When we look at the

41:30geography today, the continents, the big ones, it points down because of this process. There are other small continents in the North, it points upwards, even Australia, which just comes from Gondwana, also the peninsula points upwards. It's kind of a coincidence of the shape, but is at the same time it's revealing for us about the complexity and the evolution of the last 200 million years ago of the story of Earth. Thank you to Professor Renata Schmidt there for a fascinating explanation of the Earth's continental history. So the downward nature of many continents in the southern hemisphere is due to where the supercontinent Gondwana started to split at a junction of fractures around 200 million years ago rather than any physical process turning them in that direction. Andrada pulled did other of you grow up hearing about Gondwana? Sort of five years ago I went through a jogging phase. I used to run around Mori Lake in

42:34Bucharest with two geologist friends. So I got to learn a lot about Pangia, Gondwana and drifting continents and earthquakes. Earthquake was a big topic. And by the way, did you know that tectonic plates move a few centimeters a year and that's roughly the same order of speed as our fingernails grow? That's great. Me and my geologist friends still keeping touch and we send each other science news about dinosaurs which I think is beautiful. So you stopped running or you decided you'd learn to all the geology facts and now you run with I don't know, particle physicists. So they moved. They are no longer in Bucharest. I love that. So you hang out with an expert doing something completely irrelevant to the expertise and then just get the good stuff anyway.

43:36Now each week I get the chance to link our theme with a story I'd like to tell and I want to finish with a little bit of mapping history. Maybe a bit more recent than Gondwana lands time. Let's do a fun test since we are in three geographical locations. Andrada, Paul, can you get your phones out and look up on Google maps, look for Lake Ontario. So I get two names. I can see Lake Ontario but it also says Lake America in brackets. Yes, I'm good to see. I just wanted to check because it hit the headlines a couple of weeks ago when this happened. People in the US were getting Lake America and people in Canada were getting Lake Ontario which is the name before Donald Trump decided to rename it like America and then Lake America in brackets. So basically the mapping company were deciding that they were just going to

44:39change the names on the map depending on where you were. And I've heard a lot of people making jokes about Google and Apple maps suggesting that maybe they'd taken this kind of weasily approach to compromising politically. But really maps have always been disputed and what's actually changed is something that I think we all take for granted which has only been around for a couple of decades which is that we have online maps available at our fingertips. So from the BBC Archives I found an interview with the Danish man behind Google maps. This is Lars Rasmussen who hilariously says this about his sense of direction. Our friends find this super funny that in particular me I have no sense of direction whatsoever. I will consistently get lost. That's why you build maps. That's why Lars was personally motivated. Back when Lars and his brother Yens were throwing around

45:42their exciting new idea. Maps as journalist Ashley Byrne from the series witness history explains were much more like the paper ones in your pocket. Before 2005 maps on the internet had been a bit like old-fashioned outlaces. Yens idea was to make them searchable and interactive. Maps would be scrollable. You could zoom in and zoom out and useful information would appear on the map as you moved around your cursor. So after several false starts and funders backing out the slightly desperate Rasmussen brothers decided to approach Larry Page, the founder of Google. Google at the time was just a search engine and what Lars and Yens wanted to make was much more like an app downloadable. Now back in 2005 no one has the time to download a map of the world every time they want to look. We were with Larry Page at the Google campus showing us our stuff and Larry was like are you sure this has to be a separate application? He wasn't like you got

46:43to do this. I won't talk to you. He was like are you sure? We thought you couldn't do the kind of maps of my brother envisioned in a web browser. But it turned out you just could using some technology that Microsoft had invented. So we worked like day and night and then three weeks later we came back with what was really Google Maps like a website where the map took up most of the screen. It moved smoothly and when you do the search we kind of load the data in the background and draw on top right. This is how all websites work now but it was quite new at the time. Andrada as a tech journalist this is very much your area. Do you ever feel surprised at the at list that we now carry around? I am but what surprises me the most is how quickly it stopped feeling like magic. We integrated it into our lives. We no longer carry huge paper maps with us that nobody can fold properly and it personally gives me a sense of safety to know exactly

47:44where I am. And can I ask you both because this was something I discovered is just how much of the world isn't mapped. On land I saw a study estimating about 50% is considered relatively untouched and that's usually less wealthy parts of the world. Fewer people difficult terrain. So are there bits of Romania or Nigeria that are unmapped? I will say yes a significant proportion of Nigeria was to remain largely on map. Let's not forget the way these maps are produced. Sometimes they have someone walking around or a car driving around with a camera fitted onto the car and in areas that do not have good road networks or weather that are extremely isolated from the rest of the world we do not expect that kinds of digitisation to be available. It's so interesting you talk about those limitations on how you form a map because I was in

48:48Cabera which is a big slum in Kenya, Nairobi. It's got a few access roads but it's mainly sort of tracks between houses because that's how it's been built and because of that cars don't get up it and so because of that it doesn't have a map and I was out with an NGO who were attempting to map it by taking cameras on foot because they said if you don't put it on a map then it sort of doesn't really exist when it comes to putting things like infrastructure taps you know health centers and it once caused in schools yes exactly. On that note it is nearly time for us to go. We started with the new world map that the UN is encouraging us to adopt before finding out about underground microbe maps how black cat chickadees remember their food stashes the ways in which astronomers can

49:49use space-time distortions to peer deep into the cosmos why alpine plants are simultaneously appearing and disappearing and why the continents appear to be dripping downwards and I've just revealed a little bit of the history behind the map in your pocket. Favorite top factor, androder? I think I liked the part about gravitational lensing I felt so much smarter after the interview you did with Miguel and Paul. Yes my favorite thing was learning that the pointy shapes of continents such as Africa and South America as geological finger prints left by the break up of gondwana. But how about you Marnie? Oh I'm definitely going to do some more digging into the microbe maps of the world just to see I don't know if there's a tube station around the world somewhere that has the best microbeye. Why are you doing that please don't don't leave I'm doing it. Yes.

50:53All of which nonsense brings me to the end of today's journey. Before I head off to buy a new world map I need to thank this week's panel. In Bucharest Romania thank you Andrade Fiskitan, Montemar's Marnie and in Wolverhampton in the UK thank you Paul at Apodju. Oh, dapo, Shalijok thank you so much for having me Marnie. I had so much fun. I'm Marnie Chesterton the producer was Alice Lipscomb Southwell with Ella Hubba and Devy Kilbride. Join us next week there'll be more unexpected elements. Hi I'm Gus I'm a dog in an expert in speed so when it comes to fast internet I know what I'm talking about that's why I recommend optimum fiber powered internet it has fast and reliable internet speeds starting at only $30 a month with a five year price lock so how can you fetch such an amazing deal by calling 8669 optimum or visiting optimum.com to switch that's 8669 optimum.

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