Should we rethink navigating by GPS?

This BBC Podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Du, jag skulle ju köpa några nya palpställd i lagret. Det kanske blev lite mer grejer. De hade ju allt, hade en skribd, jag köpte en sån här, och kontornstolar, och så hade de en sitsnygg typcontainer. Vi har inredning för hela arbetsplatsen. Välkommen till AI-produkten! Amazon presenterar Simon och Hans dejingnär. Under miljontals år har djur utvecklat sofistikerade paningsriktologer.

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Hello, welcome to Inside Science with me, Tom Whipple. This week, how geopolitical breakdown interferes with navigation, how the sun interferes with space missions. and how AI could help us understand how dark DNA, formerly junk DNA, can interfere with the rest of our genome. Also joining me is science journalist Caroline Steele to look at the key stories from the journal.

Caroline, what have you been interfering with? Well, I've not been interfering with anything, but scientists could be interfering with our atmosphere. Excellent. We will look forward to hearing about that. But first It was a pretty stern letter. The British government this week joined with thirteen other Northern European nations to warn that maritime safety and security itself was being put in jeopardy. Too often, this group said, ships sailing in the Baltic found that their satnav, their GNSS.

was giving them the wrong location or no location. No prizes for guessing which nation with an exclave on the Baltic they blamed. But actually it's not just the Baltic. For three decades ships have relied on satellites to sail the open seas. Now from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, they are finding that they can't. The Royal Institute of Navigation has warned in a new report that the situation is getting desperate.

I spoke to Ramsay Faraher, CEO of the Royal Institute of Navigation, and asked him what is going on. This is a storm that's been brewing for a number of years now, Tom. Th there's been a lot of problems around Russia, specifically Kalingrad, which um borders Europe. And of course the whole Russia Ukraine conflict, all of those areas Where there's been extensive jamming and spoofing of GNSS. This is being done to prevent drones and cruise missiles.

and some manned platforms from operating in these theaters of war, but it's spilling over into all of the neighboring territories as well. And yes, a number of nations have put their foot down and said we cannot keep operating around these regions where Our neighbor is intentionally jamming and spoofing G NSS and hugely impacting civil aviation and maritime. Um now you happen at the Royal Institute of Navigation to have written a report about this.

And it's fascinating because you we've got all these amazing navigation tools. You you talk about you know satellites above our head. And right at the beginning, after having sent up hundreds of satellites to tell us exactly where we are with pinpoint accuracy, You recommend Teaching sailors to navigate by the stars again. Well, s certainly in the maritime community I think they've always relied on stellar navigation and this is just a good example of why those

um particular skills should not be retired just yet. The the problem we're highlighting in the report is that we as a society have become incredibly over reliant on these open GNSS signals from space. And so when you say GNSS, just say this is what we would colloquially call GPS, but it actually includes Galileo, the European system, and Glonas, the Russian system, and various other things.

Exactly. They're so special and important nowadays that multiple countries all have their own satellite navigation system, but they're all vulnerable to jamming and spoofing because the s satellites are twenty thousand kilometers away, and that's very, very far. That's twice the diameter of the Earth. from a few kilometres away, then you completely drown out the satellite signals.

And jamming is you just prevent them having a working signal and spoofing is you tell them they're somewhere they're not. Exactly. Yeah. So jamming is really cheap and easy. You just transmit noise loudly and that's always been cheap and easy. Spoofing is something that about ten or fifteen years ago you might have argued was really something that just state actors, big countries with big militaries, might be doing. But technology has moved on so much in the last couple of decades.

that you can basically buy spoofing equipment on the internet easily. And that's a big problem. You want to talk about the maritime problems, but I guess one of the most alarming and immediate facts is that about 1,500 planes a day are getting their satellite navigation systems knocked out.

So because these signals are being broadcast just openly in the conflict regions, they're going straight up to space, straight out onto the horizon and straight across the sea. So they're affecting aircraft, ships. Cars, trains, anyone with a mobile phone. They're even impacting low Earth orbit satellites.

So everyone is getting affected by this. We will have flown on aircraft within the last two or three years that have dealt with this while we were on them. And the pilots will have changed settings in the cockpit, turned off the alarms. reset things and they're literally power cycling the aircraft every time they land now to wipe the memory of all of the systems that have been fed incorrect GPS data. And what systems does it affect?

Why why does this why does this matter? And if fifteen hundred planes are being hit today by the but fifteen hundred out aren't falling out of the sky, does it matter? We've created connectivity diagrams of all of the things on a modern vessel and on a modern airliner that touch GPS for either position or time. And the list is quite staggering. There are things on there that firstly you just wouldn't expect to be using or needing.

GPS for position or time. And there's also systems on there which traditionally you'd have said, Oh, it's okay if GPS goes down because we'll use that system or we'll use that system instead as a backup. And it turns out those systems also alarm and have errors because they were using GNSS. The the silliest example I can give you from aviation in some private jet. The toilets don't flush if the GPS is jammed.

It's because there are certain toilets where they use the pressure difference from inside and outside to effectively charge a vacuum to flush the loom. And if you're being spoofed at ground level, it goes, Oh, well I can't flush the toilet because there's no pressure differential. So it just refuses to flush. So fine. Um billionaires can't go to the loo. I'm I'm fine with that. What sort of things are you worried might happen in ship?

The report's key concern is that there's a number of safety systems on board these maritime vessels that use GNSS. There are things like an emergency button that you hit on a boat if you're in serious trouble, if you're literally going down and everyone's heading to the lifeboats. And this broadcasts your position and the emergency information over satellite.

And of course nowadays it transmits the GPS position. So if you're in a spoofing region, then your emergency broadcast would report the incorrect location, which is not ideal. In terms of the fixes. Can you be more specific? How easy are these things to solve and what would you like to see done?

Yeah, so there's lots of good news on that front actually. Some of the simplest fixes are updating software, which in theory can be done relatively quickly. It's just that traditionally Consumer and commercial GNSS receiver manufacturers didn't really have to worry about electronic warfare, but they do need to now.

There are clever types of antennas called controlled radiation pattern antennas or CRPAs, and these basically can detect whether the signal is coming down from the correct azimuth elevation in the sky where the true satellites are. or whether it's coming from totally the wrong direction and is way too high powered and is clearly a naughty person lying over GPS.

And then There are a bunch of other um radio positioning aids that are available in different parts of the world, lower quality than GPS can provide. Which a decade ago you'd have said, We're all being retired, not needed anymore. But here we are in a world where there's active and aggressive jamming and spoofing, covering hundreds of kilometres.

in various places of the world. And I don't think it's a problem that's really ever going to go away. I think this is now going to be a permanent feature of geopolitical dispute.

That was Ramsey Farraher, CEO of the UK's Royal Institute of Navigation. Now to catch up with our global science correspondent Roland Pease, who's been looking into an AI model by Google which aims to shed light on the role of our dark DNA. The team DeepMind that a few years ago unveiled the Nobel Prize-winning Alpha Fold, the AI that seeks to understand the design and function of proteins.

have now unveiled Alpha Genome, an AI that could unravel the workings of our DNA beyond the twenty thousand genes that have been recognised. Those genes Code for the proteins, the molecular machines, construction materials and enzymes that make our cells work. But they're only a small part of our entire genome. The rest was once considered junk, but now it's called dark, having a role in how the genes play out that's barely understood, as DeepMind's Natasha Latisheva told me.

The main idea here is that only two percent of the human genome encodes for proteins. So ninety eight is not protein coding and for a while it wasn't clear if it was actually functional, if it was important, what its roles were. We have more information now.

But it's still, I would say, fairly early days. And one of the things that our model is trying to do is uncover some of the mechanisms in these non coding regions, figure out which bits are functional, which may or may not be contributing to specific diseases. I mean the proteins. are the machines of life. Um, they're the things that either run our muscles or they're enzymes that f control what goes on inside a cell and so on. But there needs to be a conductor, as it were.

To tell which protein to do what and when. Yeah, exactly. So just having the recipe for protein. is just one part. They need to be made at in the right location, in the right tissues. They need to be present in the right quantities. And this is what the regulatory, this dark part of the genome, if you like, is doing. So it's sort of orchestrating all these different temporal and spatial patterns.

And as I understand it, one of the reasons you can do this with AI is that nature's very lazy, um that often it doesn't invent something completely new, it just adapts something that already exists. In other words You can use what Biologists have learnt in the past about some parts of this dark genome.

And then start searching the rest of the misunderstood dark genome. Is that right? We kind of train our model from scratch, end to end, so we're not really like relying on previous knowledge from biologists. We want the model to sort of have a blank slate. and not tell it too much, like about what it should learn. We want the deep learning algorithm to sort of figure out on its own

what's relevant and what's not relevant for predicting these functional signals from the DNA? But the idea is that there are sort of repeated patterns or very nearly repeated patterns across the genome, is it that The AI can pick out. Yeah, that's true. So for example, like before the start of each gene, there are these regions called promoter regions.

And those tend to be like fairly similar across all genes. There's definitely repeating patterns throughout the genome. And so as I understand it from from the paper, you can stuff a million genetic letters A Ts, Cs and Gs. So a a long string of these letters into your machine and it will sort of sift through all those letters and it'll find all the bits that are interesting and how they relate to each other? Yeah, exactly. Um so the model will predict signals for each base.

So it will predict, you know, where the genes are and their activities across different tissues, whether the DNA is sort of compact or open. And it'll do that for each base of the DNA. And for parts of that million base pairs, some of those might not be interesting, and then the model predicts like a flat signal. And then other parts may be quite active biologically and then we predict like these nice profiles that you might have seen in the paper.

recognizes them without actually referring to previous biological knowledge. I'm pretty surprised by that. It's I don't know, how do you kick start it? Yeah, so we train the model in a supervised way. So we feed it uh lots of examples of pairs of data, so from DNA sequence predicting these profiles.

So through the training process it's learned to associate these DNA letters with their function. And then when we come to apply the model, you know, it has learnt these patterns from these pairs of data. But we can then apply it to new DNA sequences, sequences it's never seen before, and it can generalize quite well to these new sequences. And then this sort of like mutation effect prediction is a capability that that also emerges from this training process on these on these pairs of data.

So what sort of questions are you trying to open up? As as far as I can tell, this paper is really a proof of principle. Mm-hmm. But in terms of, for example, disease conditions, cancers or I don't know, susceptibility to some kind of aging processes and so on. I is there something that this kind of AI approach Can bring that

classical sort of wet lab approaches won't or make might take a long time. Yeah, in theory, I mean we sort of view this tool as a way to like generate hypotheses about how mutations could lead to these different conditions.

Although that said, like we're not really predicting like the disease states. We're predicting uh like kind of the consequences on the molecular level of these DNA mutations. And you know, there's many other factors that lead to a disease like the environment and so on. We don't handle that. But I think what the model can do is it can say like, look, you know, if you have this mutation here associated with the disc cancer, we hypothesized that it's affecting this gene.

And it's reducing the expression of this gene in this tissue. And then that sort of gives wet lab biologists a place to look and do their wet lab validations and then potentially also develop drug targets against the phone. Because quite often they'll know that there's something wrong in some part of the genome but they don't know how that mutation then relates to all the consequences which might be let's say a cancer. And this is a way to sort of

start that search. Exactly. Yeah. And there can also be so many mutations that look associated with the disease, but um you you kinda want to like filter them down, you know, wheat from the chaff. So a tool like this could come in handy as well. Uh I mean i i you're very much a computer scientist.

Clearly working at DeepMind. Do you get to talk to the biologists in wet labs and people who are sitting there with pipettes and trying to sequence genes and stuff like that? And get a sense of what they want from this? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Like we we have programmes sort of as we were developing Alpha Genome, trying to figure out like how can we be most useful to the community? Like what do biologists actually want? Like what's lacking in their workflow at the moment.

I mean I I would say I'm kind of a biologist, like I studied you know, biochemistry and then computational biology, but but yeah, like I'm not sitting at the bench in the wet lab. Um it's something we prioritize for sure. Like we don't want to be isolated and just do like the AI stuff well and then be happy with ourselves. Like we actually do want to integrate with real world workflows and like eventually help actual patients and actual biologists.

What Natasha Latasheva and her colleagues at Deep Mind have just shared in nature is really a proof of principle, but if Alpha Fold is anything to go by, keep an eye out for future revelations from Alpha Geno. Thanks, Roland. We certainly will. You're listening to BBC Inside Science from the BBC World Service with me, Tom Whipple.

Jag skulle ju köpa några nya palpställer till lagret. Det kanske blev lite mer grejer. De hade ju allt, hade en skribord, jag köpte en sån, och kontorstolar, och så hade de en skit snygg typcontainer. Vi har inredning för hela arbetsplatsen. Välkommen till AI-produkten! Amazon presenterar Simon och Hans dejingnär. Under miljontals år har djur utvecklat sofistikerade paniksritualer. Fåglar dansar, varje rylar och pinger fria med stenen.

Och Simon, han ska laga middag. Och han flippar ur. Men Simon shoppade på Amazon och köpte ljusstakar vinglaser, eftersom han är optimist. En extra tandborste. Simon, det bor alltid ett djin rackare. Få dig den att hända, hoppa på Amazon.se.

The sun has been busy. Its surface is a broiling boiling maelstrom of angry plasma. Or rather it's even more of a broiling boiling maelstrom of angry plasma than usual. Last week it spewed out some of that plasma in the biggest magnetic storms seen in decades. At the same time, for the first time, scientists published research showing just how such storms might come about.

And all this is happening as a spaceship with fragile electronics and even more fragile humans is sitting on the launch pad set to orbit the Moon. Which makes the job of another spaceship, with some pretty robust electronics and definitely no humans, all the more important. Between the Earth and the Sun there is a tiny craft. It is packed with observation equipment and it is sending us information about the sun's weather.

This morning, around nine AM, it messaged home, home being a lab at Imperial College, London. Hi, my name is Helena Bryan and I'm the instrument manager for the magnetic field instruments on Solar Orbiter and IMAP. I'm Tim Horbury, I'm a professor of physics here at Imperial. and I'm the science lead for the instruments on Solar Orbiter and IMAP. We're in our white coats and we have come into the Solar Orbiter's lab. There's a lot of It looks like gaffer tape and aluminium foil.

Very sophisticated stuff and definitely not just gaffe tape and aluminium foil. We have here an exact copy of our solar orbiter magnetometer instruments. We have an electronics box which sits in the main body of the spacecraft and then we have our two sensors which sit out on this boom away from the main body of the spacecraft.

Mae'n ymwneud hyn yn ymwneud â'r fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff So we want our senses to be in their comfortable science range.

We've got something called a spacecraft interface simulator, which means that we can test our instrument with the same interactions as we see on the spacecraft. So that means that it really does operate here like it operates in space. Mae'n bwysig iawn i ni fod yn gweithio'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno

calmly, safely, in our own time and then when we're ready, then we interact with the one in space. And you've been interacting with the one in space daily? What does it tell you? Yes, it gives us the magnetic field data and it gives it the magnetic field data right up to date so we get instant data about what the field is doing at that spacecraft location. Can you explain to us what the magnetic data tells us? What is space weather and what's going on in the sun?

So the sun uh looks like quite a boring star when you first look at it, but actually it's an enormously active plasma object. And from the sun flows a stream of plasma at about a million miles an hour, which we call the solar wind, and it carries the sun's magnetic field with it. And when that arrives at the Earth and interacts with the Earth's magnetic field, it can drive lots of really interesting effects. The Aurora is a positive one.

But it can also have lots of negative effects as well, and we call that collectively space weather. It can damage power grids, it can degrade satellite navigation. But also the shock waves that come with uh some of these events coming from the sun can accelerate particles to very high energies. And those particles can then uh damage electronics on satellites in space, but also they can be a hazard to athletes. Just last week the sun was up to all sorts, wasn't it?

That's right. It's been really active recently and a few of these really big events called coronal mass ejections have come off the sun. Last Monday a huge event arrived at the earth. It's one of the fastest events we've seen in a long time. And actually it carried with it a field from the sun, which is the strongest magnetic field we've seen near the Earth for more than 30 years. We saw that event about six hours before it arrived at the Earth.

And thankfully for that one, the magnetic field inside that coronal mass ejection pointed in a good direction, which turns out to be north. And in that case it meant that it wasn't going to be a really bad event at the There's a paper recently out that's used the solar orbiter to get a better understanding of what's happened. Can you tell us about that?

Yeah, that's right. So it's a paper by Pradikte. So he's a real star in the field, he's going places, and uh it's a really nice study. It uses one of the telescopes on solar orbiter. It's called uh EUI.

So EUI measures makes really high resolution, very fast measurements and he's used those new data to be able to show that the flare isn't a single event, it's an avalanche of multiple little events that gradually build and build and build and finally become the enormous energy release that we see. So with this new instrumentation and really good data analysis, we can really see for the first time how these events are triggered and hopefully in the future be able to become better at predicting.

If last Monday you'd looked at your data coming in on your your daily update and you'd seen not only was this a really, really energetic event, but the polarity, this this coin toss that makes all the difference was such that it was going to be bad for Earth. What might have happened? We provide our data in real time to uh space weather forecasting agencies across the world. So they would have picked up that data, they would have realized how bad it was going to be.

And at that point they can give warning to things like power grid operators. You try and get everything back online, you try and get the best people in the control room, you try and give them as much coffee as possible because you know bad things are gonna happen and you need to be ready for it. So getting that warning is incredibly important.

In May twenty twenty four there was a very big storm and that actually affected the top of the Earth's atmosphere, what's called the ionosphere, and that degraded satellite navigation. Uh and you might think, well, I don't really mind very much, but actually it turned out to be the main planting season in North America. And these days farmers tractors drive themselves with GPS to make sure they make perfect rows when they plant.

And the degradation of the GPS meant that they couldn't plant for about a week in the peak of their planning season and actually that has an economic impact of several hundred million dollars. So it's really surprising where space weather can affect society in ways that you don't necessarily expect. Helen, you've been collecting data daily, but the data is particularly pertinent at the moment. Can you explain why people on both sides of the Atlantic are really interested in this?

So we are particularly interested because of the potential launch of Artemis. Rydyn ni'n ei wneud, yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r ymwneud â 50 ymwneud, ac mae'n ymwneud â phobl ymwneud â phobl ymwneud â phobl ymwneud â phobl ymwneud â phobl ymwneud â phobl ymwneud.

Once you're up in space, you could make decisions potentially about whether you leave the magnetosphere, the Earth's magnetic protective bubble, which is where the the Artemis spacecraft will spend the first day or so. Once you've gone, there isn't a lot you can do. But still mission control will want to know because it's not only the astronauts, it's also equipment and actually we've seen instances where

Thanks to Professor Tim Hawbury and Helen O'Brien at Imperial College London. Now, Caroline Steele joins me here in the studio for the week's review of the journals. Caroline, what have you got? So Solar geoengineering. So basically sort of a group of climate interventions that are proposed and aim to

cool Earth by reducing the amount of sunlight that reaches the earth. Dr. Evil Buffins blocking out the sun. Basically so this paper specifically looks at something called stratospheric aerosol injection, which is basically where you inject tiny particles into the stratosphere These tiny particles reflect the sun, less than heat reaches Earth and it cools down the planet, which could have a whole host of benefits, including financial ones, which is what this paper focuses on.

So scientists at the National Autonomous University in Mexico have done some modelling and have basically found that solar geoengineering could halve the cost of climate change, but there's a huge bar. If we suddenly stop it,

temperatures would rebound in something that's called a termination shock. And that could actually cause more financial damage than if we had done nothing in the first place. And this basically sort of adds to the school of thought that For solar geoengineering to work, we need a huge level of international collaboration because the risk of it failing has to be really, really low.

Food for thought and things to consider if we do end up going in that direction. Talking of food for thought, I'm going to talk about insect food affecting their thought. That is a a link for the ages. Um psilocybin and Drosophila. Why is it that magic mushrooms make humans hallucinate. Why would you have evolved as a mushroom to bother doing this? And this paper

has looked at insects. The hypothesis is that the same receptors that hit our serotonin and make us see perhaps gigantic insects coming to attack us could for insects be really bad. What they found is that uh Drosophila, the fruit flies who are always getting this sort of stuff happening to them, um, when they grow them and feed them on psilocybin, they don't really develop. It it's really, really bad for the larvae.

Um and so the idea of this paper is maybe they evolved these particular things to defend them against being eaten by insects, and just because they hit such an ancient set of neurotransmitters, for us it produces an entirely different

set of effects. Although interesting the the research isn't definitive in that they're sort of saying, look, this this this might be the case, but it could do all sorts of other things. Like maybe they also slightly do mind control on insects and get them to transfer their spores to lots of places. So what did this experiment look like? I'm picturing flies Expecting to have a good time, not having a good time.

Yeah, it's a really bad trip. Um there were there were two aspects. So the were the the pupie which were fed on on ground up magic mushrooms and then They also put um adult ones in a a sort of a sweet, sugary magic mushroom soup and then they headed off uh and didn't didn't walk or fly terribly competently. So between these two things that they're they're inferring that this is this is pretty bad if you're a a Drosophila.

I was gonna be happy, but now I feel so sorry for fruit flies. Now we've ended on a poor fruit flies note. That's all for this week. Victoria Gill is with you next week, so it's goodbye from Caroline Steele and it's it's very much goodbye from me. Bye. Bye bye. Div just nu har extremt låga priser på frukt och grön, vad sägs som kvistomater för bara 29-90 kg eller jordgubbar 400 gram för så lite som 39-90, mer för pengarna på Liden. Det lönar sig.

Du, jag skulle ju köpa några nya palsrält. Det kanske blev lite mer grejer. De hade ju allt, skribord, jag köpte en sån här, och kontorstolar, och sen hade de en skitsnyg till. Vi har inredning för hela arbetsplatsen. Välkommen till Agen.