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Adam Rutherford: Coming up in this week's show a

surprising finding from a stationery cupboard. (Sound of
peeling tape)

Seth J. Putterman: People studying lightning get all excited

about the possibility of getting 10 kilovolt X-rays out of
lightning and here we can peel a tape and get 50 KV X-rays
out of peeling tape.

Kerri Smith: And how putting rock samples in plastic bags

might throw out your dating methods by, billions of years.

Birger Rasmussen: There have been papers published that

were claiming, sort of new biomarkers based on compounds
from plastic bags and it certainly puts a bit of a question
mark in a lot of biomarker studies of these very old rocks.

Kerri Smith: This is the Nature Podcast. I'm Kerri Smith.

Adam Rutherford: And I'm Adam Rutherford.

Adam Rutherford: Since the discovery in the 19th Century

of one of the most famous fossils ever, archaeopteryx there
has been speculation and research into dinosaurs with
feathers. This week we publish a discovery of a small Jurassic
creature by a team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
No they indeed do not have feathers and it has got a carnival
style plume as well. To talk us through the significance of our
ancient feathered friends, one of Nature's best preserved
fossil's biology Editor Henry Gee has joined us in the pod.
Henry, since archaeopteryx, what have we learned about
where feathered dinosaurs fit into evolution? Nature 455,
1105–1108 (23 October 2008)

Henry Gee: People have long suspected that dinosaurs

would have had feathers, but this was only made real as it
were in the 90s when some spectacular discovery started
coming out of China; dinosaurs with feathers on, really, and
truly feathers and kind of hairy stuff that people call
protofeathers but are certainly a kind of fluffy skin covering
to a lot of these carnivorous forms.
Adam Rutherford: And given that these feathers were
developing on some dinosaurs which were flightless, what
function did the feathers have?

Henry Gee: Well clearly, it wasn't for flying. People have had
all sorts of ideas about this. They could be just insulation,
they could be sexual display and they could be all of these
things and there's even some rather more wild ideas that
some of these dinosaurs actually had flying ancestors, so that
flight might have originated well back in the dinosaur tree.
That's a very weird idea at the moment but it keeps coming
back to all people.

Adam Rutherford: All right, so tell us about this new

discovery, whose name I am struggling with somehow,
Epidexipteryx, I think, it is called.

Henry Gee: You said it, and I am not even going to try. This
creature was about the size of a pigeon and it lived around a
160 million years ago, that's middle to late Jurassic or Early
Cretaceous in China and it's a small lightly built, carnivorous
dinosaur, although it doesn't seem to have many teeth. It's
more like one of the Oviraptor type dinosaurs and it had all
over its body a coating of this kind of furry protofeathers, but
the remarkable thing is sticking out of its tail, were 4 very
long single feathers. So we had a kind of tuft on its tail or
very, very long feathers which was long as the body.

Adam Rutherford: Okay, so let's just talk about those

feathers for a second. What are they for, are they sexual
traits for attracting females, may be?

Henry Gee: It's very, very hard to say. Plainly they're not for
flying because there are no other signs of flight feathers on
this creature and it could be for sexual display.

Adam Rutherford: Potentially rather like peacock feathers.

Henry Gee: Potentially, there are some fossil birds with long
tail feathers a bit like this. There is one called Confuciusornis,
which is a proper bird and almost distinguished by very, very
long tail feathers like this. So, all these ancient dinosaurs and
bird-like dinosaurs and dinosaur-like birds and really truly all
birds went in for this sort of display plumage.

Adam Rutherford: And so this fits into an evolutionary

lineage in which dinosaurs eventually lead to modern-day
birds, is that the current thinking?
Henry Gee: The current thinking is this creature is as close
as possible to the lineage of birds without actually being a
bird. Of course, that is, you know, subject to a great deal of
revision. There's been a lot of work on the evolutionary
relationships of birds and other dinosaurs that are kind of
close to it; Troodons, Dromaeosaurs and other things. So it's
going to be some revision. But what interests me, is that
there was a lot of evolutionary experimentation with feathers
and plumage and integument and it shows that flying was
just one thing they did with feathers. And even know there're
still feathered dinosaurs of new sorts coming out of China
more than 10 years after the first one.

Adam Rutherford: Okay, thanks for joining us Henry.

Coming up later in the show, all the science news you'll ever
need from Nature's blogger-in-residence.

Kerri Smith: And I report back from the meeting, addressing

the many faces of autism.

Adam Rutherford: But first Charlotte Stoddart finds out that

oxygen-producing bacteria are not quite as ancient as we
thought.

Charlotte Stoddart: Atmospheric oxygen is essential for

almost all life on earth. Without it, there'd be no plants, no
animals, no people, no Nature Podcast. Imagine that! But our
planet hasn't always been so rich in this life-giving gas.
Around 2.4 billion years ago, the amount of oxygen in our
atmosphere suddenly increased and this is known as the
Great Oxidation event. The oxygen came from
photosynthesizing single celled organisms called
Cyanobacteria, but exactly when these oxygen-producers
first appeared is up for debate. Fossil evidence suggests 2.7
billion years ago, but this is a puzzling 300 million years
before that Great Oxidation event. So Birger Rasmussen from
the Curtin University of Technology in Western Australia has
re-examined the evidence. Nature 455, 1101–1104 (23
October 2008)

Birger Rasmussen: The most widely accepted evidence for

the appearance of Cyanobacteria which are oxygen producing
prokaryotes stems from hydrocarbon biomarkers extracted
from shales from Australia and those shales were about2.7
billion years old and they provided certainly the most robust
evidence for the beginning of oxygenic photosynthesis.
Charlotte Stoddart: And this date, 2.7 billion years ago,
does this fit with everything else we know about the early
biosphere?

Birger Rasmussen: In some ways no, when these results

were first published it did create a slight anomaly in that the
geochemical evidence and the geological evidence from the
rock record suggested that the first major increase, over rise
in atmospheric oxygen occurred by about 2.3 billion years
ago, so there was some who said they were oxygen
producing micro organisms at 2.7 did create an anomaly or a
puzzle in turn to why it did take 3 to 400 million years for
oxygen to rise in the atmosphere.

Charlotte Stoddart: And so what you and your team have

done is you have re-examined the evidence? You've gone
back to these, what we call molecular fossils and had another
look at them. So what have you found?

Birger Rasmussen: The molecular fossils or biomarkers

were extracted from shales and the carbon isotopic
composition of those biomarkers were found to be quite,
quite similar to, sort of, modern organic matter but what was
thought was that the whole rock carbon composition of the
same samples was extremely depleted in carbon 12, so that
was a quite possible. So what we did was, we looked at the
shales and we found organic matter in particular, solidified oil
droplets and those oil droplets, we were confident had
formed in the shales and were indigenous. So we analyzed
those and found that it had a very similar isotopic
composition to the whole rock organic matter but was very
different to the hydrocarbon biomarkers and that made it
very difficult to explain that the biomarkers were indigenous
to those rocks.

Charlotte Stoddart: So if these biomarkers then weren't

indigenous to the rocks what does that mean for the origin of
oxygen producing photosynthesis?

Birger Rasmussen: Well certainly, our work suggests that

the biomarkers were not indigenous and therefore entered
the rock much later and therefore it means that the
biomarker evidence for the emergence of oxygenic
photosynthesis does not stand up.

Charlotte Stoddart: So what's the next bit of evidence that

we have for the origin of oxygen producing photosynthesis.
Birger Rasmussen: Certainly the oldest unambiguous fossil
evidence is about 2.15 billion years old which places it well
after the Great Oxidation event and eukaryotes the oldest
probable fossil evidence s about 1.7 or 1.8 billion years old.

Charlotte Stoddart: So effectively this closes the gap

between the evolution of oxygen producing life and this
increase in oxygen in the atmosphere that we see.

Birger Rasmussen: That's right. It essentially or potentially

removes this puzzling delay.

Charlotte Stoddart: You have established that these

biomarkers, these hydrocarbons must have entered the rock
later than the rock formed. So how did they get into the rock
then?

Birger Rasmussen: There are lots of possibilities; it could

have entered the rock hundreds of millions years after the
rock was deposited. It could have happened during drilling of
the coal; drillers often put grease and also the exotic material
into the drilling fluid, so that could have contaminated the
rocks. Also just handing of the material in the lab Jochen
Brocks the co-author in this paper has shown that just
putting samples in plastic bags can contaminate samples and
they can be quite difficult to remove that.

Charlotte Stoddart: Gosh!, So rather than being 2.7 billion

years old these markers could in fact just been just a few
years old.

Birger Rasmussen: Potentially yes. There have happen

papers published not that long ago that were claiming sort of
new biomarkers based on compounds from plastic bags, so,
yes, yes it is surprising. And it certainly puts a bit of a sort of
question mark on a lot of biomarker studies of these very old
rocks.

Adam Rutherford: Birger Rasmussen talking to Charlotte.

Kerri Smith: We have more chemistry related goodness for

you in ChemPod our bi-monthly chemistry show including a
colour-changing polymer that could be used in electronic
books, the extraordinary life and work and Ernest Eliel aka
'Mr. Stereochemistry' and an exclusive interview with one of
this year's Nobel laureates Martin Chalfe – that's out
tomorrow, find it
at http://www.nature.com/chemistry/podcast.
Jingle

Adam Rutherford: In just a minute another use for sticky

tape, but first Kerri you are just back from a meeting in
Pittsburgh.

Kerri Smith: Yes I am. I was in the home of Andy Warhol in

the City of Rivers and Bridges as they call it for the Carnegie
Symposium on Autism and this was one of the series of
symposium they have annually. This is the 35th one that has
been from the Psychology Department of Carnegie Mellon
University and it was just looking at many faces of autism
basically from lots of different approaches so fMRI, imaging
studies, genetics, and there was even a historical view of the
condition that was a follow up of Hans Asperger's original
patient from the 1940s.

Adam Rutherford: So what were the particular highlights of

this conference?

Kerri Smith: Well, I was looking forward to seeing Temple

Grandin who is a Professor of animal science at Colorado
State University, but she is also a famous autistic and she
has actually been profiled before in Oliver Sacks' book An
Anthropologists on Mars. So here's a clip of her telling me
just how differently autistics think.

Temple Grandin: I am a visual thinker. I don't think in a

language; I think in photorealistic pictures. In fact my mind
works like Google for images. You know, you are asking me
about something, I like to search all the database I have in
my mind, but its all photorealistic pictures, even when I think
about abstract things. It was very interesting for me to
discover that other people don't visually think the way I do.
Words just narrate the pictures in my mind, you know, if
someone asked me think about a church steeple, I see
specific ones and I put those in a church steeple file folder. I
don't get some vague generalized image; I was shocked and
I found out some people get a vague generalized image.

Adam Rutherford: You know, I don't think I would actually

mind too much if my mind worked like Google images. So did
any themes emerge?

Kerri Smith: Well, one useful feature of the conference was

that they had a rap up session at the end of every day which,
at larger conference you don't really get and you don't
therefore get a sense of where a particular field is headed
and they were really useful. One of the themes that emerged
from those talks is the idea that researchers have really got
to remember why they are looking into this and that is really
to find some kind of treatment or cure for autism. But that in
itself was another issue. Kevin Pelphrey from Yale University
who is the co-organizer of the conference talked at the
beginning about how we should be trying to find a cure and I
almost felt some of the audience members bristled slightly at
that because as we had seen from Temple's speech you know
may be this isn't something we need to be thinking of
completely curing in a very black and white sense. So after
dinner on the second day, I spoke to Kevin Pelphrey and I
asked him what he feels of that.

Kevin Pelphrey: Saying that you're going to cure something

that is more or like a difference in cognitive style, I think is
what people were bristling at, but at the same time I see this
as a neurodevelopmental disorder and so even though there
is great heterogeneity, there is this commonality and people
with autism are sort of lack of social engagement that
manifest this part of brain disorder. And so that's important
to remember that you know ultimately we would like to
prevent children from having this brain disorder and find a
cure for it. So I think that even though I understand the
controversy but I used that word and that's really the goal
and I have two sides of this view, I am a parent of a child
with autism and I am also a neuroscientist studying it, so I
am, sort of, comfortable with the idea of curing it in the
sense that I would like my daughter to have, you know, the
greatest outcome possible. And so even though at the same
time you know she is a person and has these differences and
some days it's hard to decide whether it's just that she's
different or if she truly has, you know, a disorder and what
parts of her personality and her way of being represent the
disorder versus her struggling with the disorder.

Adam Rutherford: Okay that was you talking to one of the

organizers Kevin Pelphrey.

Kerri Smith: Yes indeed and I will have more from him and
from the other speakers that I interviewed at the conference
in the next issue of the neuroscience podcast Neuropod which
is going life hopefully in the next few days.

Adam Rutherford: Okay next up, Geoff Brumfiel gets

himself into a sticky situation with an X-ray.
Geoff Brumfiel: Think back to the last time, you had an X-
ray. It was a pretty involved process. You were probably
lying down in a doctor's office or a dentist's chair wearing a
lead bib and someone was pointing that big expensive X-ray
camera at you. Well, a group of scientists at University of
California, Los Angeles have come up with a much easier way
to make X-rays. It's actually a simple as peeling sticky
tape. Nature 455, 1089–1092 (23 October 2008)(Sound of a
tape being peeled)

Seth J. Putterman: People studying lightning get all excited

about the possibility of getting 10 KV X-rays out of lightning
and here we can peel tape and get 50 KV X-rays out of
peeling tape.

Geoff Brumfiel: That's Seth Putterman a researcher at UCLA

who takes a keen interest in unusual energy focusing
phenomena. In this week's issue of Nature, his group shows
that peeling tape can create high power X-rays. The
phenomena is a little like static cling, think about when you
rub your feet on the carpet, you build up a net charge that
can really sap whoever you touch.

Juan V. Escobar: And we had heard that adhesives could do

something similar and we didn't believe it at first.

Geoff Brumfiel: Juan Escobar is one of Putterman's

collaborators. He may have been sceptical but then they put
the theory to the test.

Juan V. Escobar: So these are Geiger counter and we are

going to see as soon as you turn it on.(Sound of the counter
being turned on)

Geoff Brumfiel: So what is going on here? Well as the tape

is being peeled it is leaving electrons behind on the roll and
when enough potential energy has built up between the roll
and the tape, the electrons fly off and smash into the strand
being pulled. They hit it so hard that they generate X-rays,
again Seth Putterman.

Seth J. Putterman: You get a collective blast of a 100,000

X-ray photons in merely 10-9 a billionth of a second. I don't
understand how such a collaborative phenomenon takes
place.

Geoff Brumfiel: Now don't worry about radiating your kids

during arts and crafts. This little trick only works when the
tape is under vacuum because air molecules short circuit the
static build up, but incredibly the effect is powerful enough to
actually take some simple X-ray images and that was just
with the first roll of tape that they happened to try.

Seth J. Putterman: Can the chemistry of the tape be

modified so as to improve the flux of X-rays by factor of 10?
How do we know that what we have here is the best one can
achieve? I proposed that by studying various adhesives and
what's going on in learning what's happening here,
improvements for a factor of 10 or a 100 could be made.

Geoff Brumfiel: And if they could be made, that in turn

might be to new applications like cheap X-ray sources for
hospitals in developing countries. For the Nature Podcast I
am Geoff Brumfiel.

Kerri Smith: And that study is

on http://www.nature.com/nature alongside a rather spiffing
film of the team who made the discovery. We nearly done for
another week but we wouldn't go without rounding up a spot
of science news for you, oh, very nice. Joining is in the pod
today is Daniel Cressey editor of our blog, The Great Beyond.
Dan, tell us why the LHC is in the news again.

Daniel Cressey: Well the LHC is obviously the biggest news

story of the year but its turning into a bit of a nightmare for
officials at CERN, the Europe's particle physical laboratory,
because the entire Large Hadron Collider which was launched
with great fanfare earlier this year is completely broken at
the moment with at least 29 of its 10,000 magnets needing
replacement after about 6 tons of helium was released into
the tunnels earlier this year.

Kerri Smith: Yeah and there has been a report out about,
sort of, that situation hasn't it?

Daniel Cressey: Yes, the initial report about what exactly

went wrong says it is going to take 8 months to fix the LHC
but it isn't quite as bad as it sounds, because it was going to
be closed for the winter anyway but it is still going to cost
them around 90,000 dollars to set right everything that has
gone wrong.

Kerri Smith: And we were so looking forward to as were that

half a million journalists that went to CERN for the event.
Adam Rutherford: Okay and sticking with physics it seems
that another country has joined the space race right.

Daniel Cressey: That's right, India is launching its first

spacecraft to the Moon on Wednesday in what's widely being
seen as the most ambitious Indian space mission to date,
although even those involved in the project say there are
distinct geopolitical reasons for sending this mission up now
as well as obvious science that's going to be done.

Adam Rutherford: So they are heading for the Moon and

what are they aiming to find out, surely, we know quite a lot
about the Moon already.

Daniel Cressey: We do, but there's a surprising amount we

don't actually know. There are actually going to be 11
scientific instruments on this probe, 5 Indian ones, 3 from
Europe and 2 from America and 1 strangely enough from
Bulgaria. One of the things they are going to be looking for is
Helium-3 which could potentially be used in nuclear reactors
for any colony that was established on the Moon; they are
also going to be looking again for water and attempting to
resolve this issue of water on the Moon.

Kerri Smith: So India off to the Moon and the LHC is still in
the in the doldrums. Have you got anything a bit more cheery
for us?

Daniel Cressey: Not exactly cheery, but I can announce that

we have a new world longest insect called Chan's megastick
announced last week. It's an absolutely horrifying 56.7 cm
long if you include the legs.

Kerri Smith: And megastick, I am gathering, it looks like a

small tree from here. It's a stick insect.

Danil Cressey: It is called the stick insect or a branch insect

which might be more appropriate.

Adam Rutherford: And if you could just put some of our

listeners at ease, can you tell us where the megastick lives.

Daniel Cressey: Well it was found in Malaysia and only 3

specimens of this have been discovered so far. So they are
not crawling all over everything but if you do fancy a bit, I
am afraid, there are pictures of the megastick on our blog
and more on all of these news stories on Nature News.
Adam Rutherford: Okay thanks for joining us in the pod
Dan. That's all we have got time for this week. Join us next
week to hear about frogs in parole and Econophysics. I'm
Adam Rutherford.

Kerri Smith: And I'm Kerri Smith. Is it a bird, is it a plane,

no it's Epidexipteryx!

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