Social media addiction, and the famous honeybee dance

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With me, Chris Smith and coming up this week, Instagram and YouTube were designed to be

addictive to young users without concern for their mental health, a landmark trial finds.

But can an algorithm really be addictive?

Also, scientists return to the Soviet era nuclear arm sub that sank off Norway decades ago

to assess the radiation risk and why honey bees perform a 10 out of 10 waggle dance,

but only in front of the right audience.

Up first this week, a US jury has found that social media giants,

Meta and YouTube were partly responsible for harm to a young user caused by addictive features

in their platforms, including infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendations.

The verdict has been heralded as a landmark, potentially changing how big tech can be held accountable

for mental health impacts in future.

Lucas Gunsurer is from the MRC cognition and brain sciences unit in Cambridge

and he studies whether social media use is addictive.

I began by asking him what that might actually look like.

I certainly think that platforms putting products out there have some responsibility

in what those products do, what sort of behaviors they facilitate.

There is an important distinction, which is how the term addiction is used in popular discourse

and what we mean by addiction from a sort of neuroscientific perspective.

So in popular discourse, when we use the term addiction, there's very much centers on things such as overuse.

Individuals who say that they are addicted to social media often based on the observation

that they spend a lot of time on their phone, on specific social media platforms

from a neuroscientific perspective, that in itself is not sufficient to say that you are indeed addicted

and there's currently a large evidence gap.

The research that has been conducted on social media addiction,

or trying to tease apart, can social media really be addictive in the sense that substances are

or the only established behavioral addiction gambling disorder?

And the evidence there is very thin still.

However, that doesn't go to invalidate the experiences that individuals report.

So there is certainly research indicating that individuals who have more problematic relationships

with social media, that this experience can indeed be predictive of worse outcomes later on.

So there was recent research which reported that individuals who were classified as high-problematic social media users

were two to three times elevated risk of suicidal behaviors or ideation.

What is it about the way that those platforms are crafted, the way they work,

that makes them capable of seducing some people in this way?

Algorithms line from user behavior.

We know from internal documentation, from social media platforms,

that they use the time individual spend on specific content, how they react to it,

and whether they share it with other people, determines whether similar content is going to be shown to them again in the future.

The platforms are seeking increased engagement from their users and can do so by learning from past user behavior.

Is there something about particular ages and young people specifically that makes them more susceptible to this?

Or are we all susceptible and given enough of an opportunity we'd all fall into this trap?

It is an interesting question and I think in the literature so far there has very much been an emphasis on younger users.

But what we can do is also extrapolate from the more established developmental neuroscience literature.

So things such as increased sensitivity to social information, increased social comparison during adolescence.

That is something that we do know and that is something that we can also extrapolate to social media.

So there's evidence indicating that adolescence brains show elevated responses to social award and also more sensitive to social award.

And this has actually now also been demonstrated in the context of social media.

Do you think then that the creators and operators of these platforms have a sort of duty of care?

Should there therefore be checks and balances that they're required to assess population level performance of these

and therefore impacts of these things and take responsibility for them?

Otherwise there's a real danger here isn't there if anyone creates anything in the future.

Someone will come along and say well I've now become addicted and suffered harm from using your very successful product.

And now it's your fault you've got to pay for it.

I mean you could say well McDonald's make hamburgers, they're very tasty, people eat them.

And some people eat too many of them and that has health consequences.

Does this mean McDonald's are now going to get sued?

This is a difficult line right? Where do you draw that line?

And while this is certainly an opinion rather than based on scientific evidence,

I am of the opinion that platform should be held accountable and are responsible for the products that they put out there.

Of course this question of where do you draw the line?

Like when our platform is responsible and when is it just a quote unquote good product that is put out there?

I think this is something not for researchers to decide but actually for policymakers.

But one thing that would certainly make it easier for us to also provide the robust scientific evidence

that would help evaluate let's say specific features or when that line might be crossed

would be accessed to the data that we currently don't have.

So there's a huge inequality between the platforms who are collecting very rich,

the large data sets on user behavior which they use to optimize their platforms.

But research access to that sort of data has been highly limited or only been really provided through exclusive collaborations

with individual research teams.

However, if you want to conduct reliable independent research that really meets the quality standards that we're looking for,

there needs to be done more on mandate at research data access,

such that we can actually look at what's going on under the hood basically.

For instance, many teens from social media till they're 16,

is that a useful intervention? Do you think that's going to bear fruit? Australia is doing it.

A number of other countries are following suit, the UK is discussing it, wants to introduce this.

Does that work or is that just creating more forbidden fruit?

They'll find a way around it and the people who are most susceptible are also the ones who are likely to carry on and be harmed.

Yes, very good question and I think it's the one that's very much developing.

We're only now seeing the first data coming out of Australia back and I think my understanding of it so far is that

actually large proportions of children still have access to the platforms.

We are now doing research in the team, but I think we have very little robust scientific evidence

to actually base our expectations on.

It'll be interesting to see what studies coming out in the next year.

Indeed, a lot of people are moving towards approaches such as bands.

I think again, this goes back to this framing of social media as an addiction.

It determines how we think about intervening.

Whether that's at the higher governmental level in terms of bands or individuals

deciding to do a social media detox, for instance, which means deliberately getting rid of certain social media platforms

and not using them anymore so far, the evidence that we have is quite mixed in terms of effectiveness.

Some of the changes that are already happening, though, and that certainly make a lot of the sense are things like acting on harmful content.

We know that certain content such as violent, pornographic or self-harm content are harmful to the individual and acting on them is certainly make sense.

It can be really interesting to see where this story takes us, isn't it?

Lucas Gunshra there, he's from the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge.

In April 1989, at the height of the Cold War, a Soviet nuclear-powered submarine sank deep beneath the Norwegian sea,

reportedly carrying two nuclear warheads.

The wreck now rests over a mile below the surface, and with tensions between Russia and the West rising again,

researchers are back monitoring it for radioactive leaks to better understand how nuclear materials behave in deep sea environments

and what impact they might have on the surrounding marine ecosystem.

Just in Gwynn, from the Norwegian Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority, has the story.

This was a Soviet nuclear-powered submarine that was out on one of its operational missions in 1989,

and it was out in the Norwegian sea, sailing about 400 meters underwater, when a fire broke out in the rear compartment of the submarine.

This forced the submarine to the surface. The submarine was on the surface for about five to six hours before it finally sank.

Where is it now?

It's lying at the bottom of the Norwegian sea, which is about 1,700 meters or about one mile deep.

And this was a nuclear submarine. Was it also armed then with nuclear warheads?

Because you're saying this was high to the Cold War? Was this one of the Soviet fleet of nuclear-armed vessels?

So, Consomlitz was an attack submarine, so its role was really to find other submarines.

But it was a nuclear-powered submarine, so it had a nuclear reactor on board.

But it also was reported to carry two nuclear warheads in its torpedo compartment, which it would have used with torpedoes.

So, the obvious question then is, what is the nuclear threat from having this sitting on the sea floor for 40 years?

After it sank, there were a series of Soviet and then Russian investigations.

These by quickly show that there were releases coming from the reactor. This is probably as a result of damage internally to the submarine when the submarine sank.

They were also quite concerned about the possible spread of the nuclear material in the nuclear warheads.

And they carried out a sort of series or some actions to seal cracks and holes around the torpedo compartment to prevent really or reduce the flow of sea water through the torpedo compartment.

And where do you come into the story?

We obviously were aware of the sinking of the submarine and Norway has carried out monitoring around Consomlitz since the 1990s.

This has typically been from surface ships where we have to lower our sampling gear down to the sea floor.

And this limits us really in how close to the submarine we can take samples.

But in 2019, we got the opportunity to use a deep sea remotely operated vehicle, an ROD, basically an underwater robot.

And this allowed us then the first time to take samples close to the submarine as well as see the submarine really with our own eyes.

What does it look like? Is it intact down there?

We had seen some stiller photos and some video from these previous Soviet and Russian investigations.

But it was really the first time we could picture the submarine as a whole.

It was quite incredible to see it looks like a submarine sitting on the sea floor.

We can see quite clearly the damage that has happened to the front section, particularly the torpedo compartment.

But otherwise looks as if the submarine had sank within a day before we saw it.

How are you using the opportunity to go there in order to make measurements to gauge this radiation threat?

Okay, so with the ROD, this has manipulator arms at the front of the ROD.

And this allows us then to take samples of sea water very close to the submarine and also directly from an opening where the previous Soviet and Russian investigations had reported releases.

It also allows us to take sediment samples next to the submarine and even to collect sort of samples of marine life that are growing on the size of the submarine.

And what you recover those to the surface and you can analyze them?

Yeah, so all the samples come back up to the surface. Some of that we do some initial analysis on board.

But otherwise everything came back to those different laboratories here in Norway and elsewhere.

And where we did a series of very detailed analysis to look at how much sort of different sort of aspects of radioactivity were in these samples.

And what did you find?

Interestingly, on the first dive of the ROD, where we collected water samples from this opening where releases that didn't reported previously, we actually found nothing.

However, on the subsequent dives, when we collected water samples from the same place, we found like elevated levels of radioactivity within the opening.

However, we found taking water samples distances slightly further away that those levels are rapidly diluted within the water around the submarine.

We wanted to really to answer two sort of main questions. One of these was whether we could see any of this nuclear material from the warheads in the environment around the submarine.

And the other was to see whether we could see some science releases. So we could confirm that the releases were ongoing.

But when we took samples and around the torpedo compartment, we analyzed those. We saw no sign of this nuclear material from the warheads.

So you can actually discriminate between the radiation coming from the warheads and the radiation coming from the reactor, can you?

We use very sort of sensitive analysis that allows us to look at really sort of a fingerprint for the nuclear material from these different sources.

So we have information from other studies that allows us to recognize whether a nuclear material comes from nuclear warheads or whether it comes from a civilian reactor,

or indeed from global fauna, which is another main source of some of these radioactivity in the environment.

And what about in the sediments in the marine life nearby that might concentrate some of these materials if they were there for a while?

Did you find a similar signature there?

In the sediments surprisingly, we saw very little sign of any accumulation of radioactivity.

Despite the fact that we did this something in 2019, so this was 30 years after the submarine had sunk.

Really the levels we see in the sediments next to the submarine would be those that we would expect to see anyway at the bottom of the Norwegian sea.

In the samples of the biota that we collected, we did see some, I would say, somewhat slightly higher levels of certain radioactivity.

And again, if we had taken those same types of marine life somewhere else, we would not expect to see the levels that we saw at the next of the submarines.

These were still quite low and there wouldn't really cause any health impacts for the marine life.

I suppose there are two possibilities. One is that it's been and gone and we're too late to the party to see it.

The other is that it's still all intact down there and hasn't spewed its guts out yet.

So which of the two scenarios is it?

In terms of the nuclear fuel, we know that this is still within the reactor.

In terms of the type of radioactivity that is more sort of easy to dissolve in the sea water and come out.

We're not sure how much has come out so far.

We only have our observations from 2019 and a few previous observations from these Soviet and Russian investigations in the past.

So it's a little bit difficult to determine how much has actually come out of the reactor up until this point in time.

So fascinating story that isn't it just in Gwyn who's at the Norwegian radiation and nuclear safety authority.

He just published that work in the journal PNAS.

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This is the Naked Scientist podcast with me, Chris Smith.

Still to come, the B. Wagle dance and why our favourite insects put in a top performance, but only when they've got the right audience.

But first, we're going to explore the discovery of a previously hidden magnetic shadow on the moon that might make future space travel and space work that bit safer.

New data from China's Changi 4 mission has revealed a patch of space around the earth, which the moon crosses over a couple of days each month,

where levels of cosmic radiation are much lower than they should be.

It could act as a potential natural shield for astronauts and radiation sensitive lunar-based equipment and experiments.

Megan Argo is an astrophysicist at the University of Lancashire and for us she's been taking a look at the paper which is in the journal science documenting the phenomenon.

They found what they're calling a cavity in the distribution of these things called cosmic rays, high energy particles that fly around the universe.

What we thought was that the distribution of these things was fairly uniform and it turns out it looks like it's not.

Where specifically have they been looking?

So this is a results from a spacecraft that's been sitting on moon for a little while now.

This is one of the Chinese missions, the first soft landing on the far side of the moon, which is exciting because we've never been there before.

One of the instruments that they had on the spacecraft is looking at the distribution of these high energy cosmic ray particles.

And as the moon's been going around the earth, they've been measuring these things over the last few years.

And they found a part of the moon's orbit around the earth where there appears to be fewer of these things hitting the detector than in the rest of the moon's orbit.

So it's almost like some kind of shadow, almost like a cosmic particle shadow there.

Do they speculate as to why there is this gap or this cavity where it doesn't get irradiated to the same extent periodically?

So they were specifically looking at periods of time over the last few years when the sun has been less active.

These particles are affected by magnetic fields.

And the sun has a powerful magnetic field that spreads out throughout the whole solar system and interacts with the earth's magnetic field as well.

And these particles tend to follow these magnetic field lines.

And when the sun is active, it's also pumping out particles that are very similar, so that's going to affect the readings that you get.

So they had to wait for periods where the sun was less active.

And in all of the periods they found during the observations when the sun was less active, they were looking at and were expecting a certain rate of these cosmic rays from this background of cosmic rays throughout the universe.

And there was a difference between the numbers that the detector received in a particular part of the moon's orbit.

And this is a part of the moon's orbit where the moon is between us and the sun.

That's when it would be up in the sky in daylight.

So between sort of when the moon is a quarter and when it's a new moon and you can't see it.

And in that range there is a period of a few days where they see far fewer of these cosmic rays than they were expecting.

And the effect seems to be that the Earth's magnetic field, which we didn't think was reaching as far as the moon in this part of its orbit, the Earth's magnetic field is asymmetric.

On the sunward side it's affected by the sun's wind, so it's pushed backwards and it forms this long sort of tadpole-like, it's called a magnetotail.

So it stretches along way from the Earth in the direction away from the sun.

But in the direction of the sun it's a lot more compressed and the moon goes outside it or at least we thought it did.

What these results seem to show is that at least for part of that orbit the Earth's magnetic field is having much more of an effect on this particle distribution than we thought it out.

Does the reduction in particles actually make a meaningful difference?

In other words, if you look really hard you can see a tiny difference it might make almost no difference statistically there but makes no difference.

Or is it actually a really almost like day night difference in terms of the particle density of these background cosmic rays coming in?

It certainly is statistically difference and the thing is, while the effect is certainly there, the sun's activity is a bigger effect if you like in the data.

So finding this involved looking through an awful lot of data to find the bits where they could actually do the statistical comparison.

The reason for asking that mechanism is obviously it's academically extremely interesting and we've learned new things about the shape of the Earth's magnetic field and its influences.

But if there is a window being created at certain points in the lunar orbit where radiation is at a minimum that might be a window of opportunity because we know we know it is a concern isn't it for humans out there being irradiated for scientific instruments getting irradiated.

So if we know there's a sort of safe point where they could transfer backwards and forwards or do some experiments that would be really useful but if the difference is so tiny it's inconsequential that's perhaps less useful.

So which is it? Do you think this is a useful observation?

I think it could potentially be yes. The thing with radiation is it builds up over time the more exposure that you have, the more risky you have and it's the same with humans as it is with electronics.

If you send electronics into space, all of the satellites in Earth orbit have to be hardened against these particles because they can damage electronics and that can make your systems fail.

And the same thing applies on the moon except it's worse because you're that much further away and this is one of the things they're going to be doing on Artemis.

The astronauts have radiation detectors to track their exposure while they're outside the Earth's magnetosphere.

The interesting thing is if this is statistical then it does make a difference because if you're sending astronauts up to the moon for the long term inside their base they're going to have a lot more shielding, a lot more protection from cosmic rays and solar winds and all the rest of it.

But if you have to have them going outside in spaces which have comparatively little protection, then if you can do that when the risk of radiation is reduced, you reduce their overall lifetime exposure and you reduce their risk of things like cancer for the long term.

So you get slightly less fried for two days a month. Be grateful for small blessings.

Megan Argo at the University of Lancashire there.

Honeybees are known for their famous waggle dance which is a figure of eight routine that tells their hive mates exactly where to find food.

But just like on strictly come dancing, not every performance is the same or quite up to scratch.

Scientists have noticed that even when the same bee is dancing about the same patch of flowers the quality of the performance can vary.

Why? Well it seems it all comes down to the audience.

When the right group of bees in the hive is paying attention the bee whips out her 10 out of 10 performance, sharper moves, clearer signals and a stand out routine.

But in front of a less influential or smaller audience she's more prone to wing it with a lackluster showing.

Proof that even on the smallest of dance floors it's not just about the dancer, it's about who's watching.

Here's James Nye at the University of California, San Diego.

It's remarkable but just like you and I might want to go to a grocery store and ask someone for directions and say how far is it and what direction should I go.

Honeybees can do the same thing. In fact they're the only animal we know of that can actually communicate this kind of information.

But sometimes they don't always do it perfectly. You might say go north, do go to the store and go about one kilometer.

But you might say well maybe it's northeast northwest. I'm not really sure. And bees do have that kind of ambiguity that lack of precision in their communication as well.

So we wanted to find out why is that? Why are they not always as precise as they could be?

Well how do they tell each other where the juicy flowers are? This is the rich source of nectar going this direction. How do they do it?

So almost everything they do is respect to the sun. So imagine this patch of flowers is in the direction of the sun at that moment of the day.

They will do something called a waggle dance. Now what is that? Well the waggle dance has the middle part a waggling phase. So think of a figure eight and imagine it be waggling her abdomen, her body in the middle.

When she's waggling the farther the distance to that flower, the longer the waggle. And she's actually pointed directly at the food source with respect to the sun.

The easiest way to think about it is she's drawing a miniature map inside the colony telling bees where to go.

And they're watching this. So this is in front of an audience. So they'll do this in their colony or in their hive. I suppose you could say couldn't you, to an audience.

That's right, but they're not quite watching it in the normal sense that we think about it. It's completely dark in the hive and the bees are on a vertical comb surface.

So they are in fact sensing it with their antennae. When the dancer is waggling she's actually wagging in a very gentle way the antennae of her followers, her audience with her abdomen. So she's transferring this information through physical contact.

And when you say they don't always do it precisely, is that that they're making a mistake or is it that the audience is picking up on the wrong vibes?

The audience might also not get the information correctly, but I'm just talking about the dancer now where she's not always pointed in the correct direction or maybe she doesn't do the waggle run for long enough in which case she's not communicating the correct distance.

And why does that happen? We know from a previous study that this can happen when bees don't have teachers. Before a bee performs her first waggle dance, she needs to follow when she's young, the dances of experienced bees.

So this would be like you learning how to tango and you are actually watching a teacher explain to you how to tango.

But then we noticed that there are still heirs even in bees that had good tango teachers so to speak. So why is that? And we realized that these heirs are linked to not having a good audience, not having a sufficient number of bees to actually get this information. She's really trying to communicate.

Tell us how you actually did that then, so talk us through the sort of steps of the study and how you found that.

Sure, so bees dance on an area of the colony called the dance floor. It's the area usually closest to the entrance and exit. So the bees that are ringing in food are going to be concentrated in that area.

And the bees that want that information, that want to know how to find food are likewise concentrated.

So we used a special vacuum cleaner and you were able to gently vacuum out bees from the dance floor. So you have a dancer or a potential dancer coming back to a portion of the colony that has a lot of bees that want to listen to her or has half the number of bees.

And whenever there are fewer bees, we found that these heirs of distance and direction would increase.

Is this on the part of the dancer just not being very enthusiastic because in the same way that we tend to up the ante when we've got an audience we perform our best when we know we're under scrutiny or is it that there's some kind of feedback going on.

More audience means more feedback, more reinforcement.

I think it's a bit of both. So it takes two to tango and what bee researchers didn't think about is the fact that you have the dancer but she's also interacting with her dance followers who if you watch them are sort of chasing her around as she's dancing.

So when she does not have a sufficient number of dance followers, she has to get some.

And the situation that we think about is sort of like a busker street musician. That person wants to perform. It's their bread and butter.

But they also need an audience. So it's as if between every song they're roaming around the streets trying to grab in more people to listen to the next performance.

That's what's going on in the wiggle dance. She is wiggling and in that waggle she's telling them what direction to go and how far to go.

But in between she's actually roaming around a bit and that roaming around bid is called the return run.

And it turns out that if nobody's listening to her, she actually roams farther and spends more time in the colony trying to figure out where can I go to get this audience.

And does that erode the quality of the signal? Or does it effectively for one of her metaphors does she kind of rewrite the song a bit?

So she sings the wrong song because she's forgotten.

I think in human terms it's a little bit as you're distracted. Let's say you are performing a dance and you've got the audience.

But at the same time you can't focus on them because you've always got your eye on, okay, where is the next audience coming from?

Is this person wandering a block away? Can I attract them to be my audience?

And so what she's doing is she has to perform a very complicated thing in the pitch black on a vertical surface.

It takes a lot of motor skill and a lot of mental concentration if you will.

But if she also at the same time is distracted during the return phase of trying to find more audience, those things create a perfect storm where she's not able to perform as well as she actually can.

Imagine you're a dancer and you see half the audience is getting up and walking out on you.

It's going to cause a degradation in your performance.

So bees and people are not all that different in some respects. Are they James Nye there from the University of California, San Diego?

That study just came out in PNAS.

That is it for today. We're going to be back on Tuesday though.

We're going to be delving into nature's freezer.

What microbes are lurking in the permafrost and also how do scientists plan to bring back willy mammoths?

This latter point is actually a lot closer to becoming a reality than you might think.

And you can hear why next time.

Meanwhile, thanks to all of you who are supporting us with your donations.

This really does help. We're really grateful.

And if you would like to make a contribution to keep the show on the road, please do head over to nakedscientist.com forward slash donate.

You can also follow us on LinkedIn, on Instagram and do please also leave reviews for us on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Chris Smith. Thanks for listening and until next time from all of us here at the naked scientist. Goodbye.

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