Science of the Silver Screen

A way to spot corals resistant to the phenomenon of coral bleaching - which is threatening reefs around the world - has been published by researchers in Australia. The aim is to find corals from among the existing population that are naturally better able to tolerate the higher water temperatures that are driving the problem, and use those to understand the basis of that tolerance and possibly seed threatened reefs with those more robust varieties. But first you’ve got to find them, and that’s what the Minderoo Foundation’s Kate Quigley has been able to do by combining good old fashioned expeditions to The Great Barrier Reef with some machine learning techniques…

Kate - Reefs around the world and in particular, The Great Barrier Reef have suffered quite a lot of bleaching and mortalities due to global climate change and specifically warming due to global climate change.

Chris - And when coral bleaches in that way, what's actually happening?

Kate - It's a disruption in a relationship. Even though a coral looks like a slimy rock, it's actually an anima. Inside of that coral lives little algae, which are very similar to little plants. These algae provide most of the coral's food. They use the sun to go through some chemical processes and then they give that sugar to the coral. The problem arises when water temperatures become too hot and they stay hot for long. This disrupts that relationship, causing the coral itself to go white and if those conditions persist, the coral animal can eventually die.

Chris - But not all corals are equivalently vulnerable. Is that what you are postulating? If you're saying 'I'm going hunting for corals that are more resistant to that', then it's not a level playing field.

Kate - Some corals are intrinsically more tough and can survive increased temperatures. Other corals just seem to be less tough. We're really looking for these tough corals.

Chris - And is it the corals that are tough, or is it the algae that are tough, or is it both?

Kate - It's both. The coral animal is quite complex and some of this tolerance comes from the underlying DNA of the coral animal, and some of the toughness comes from the symbiote and together they create the response that we see on the reef.

Chris - So how did you actually go hunting then in this Italy sized hay sack?

Kate - Some of the first locations were just 'let's look for hot water'. I looked at hours upon hours upon hours of satellite data stretching over many years and had some best case scenarios in terms of where we could potentially find these heat tolerant corals. Once I had these particular areas, we went on an expedition and we collected corals that were essentially reproductively ready. We wait for a few days after the full moon, till the corals are ready to spawn. Once they spawn, we collect eggs and sperm and we mix them in specific combinations to create new combinations of coral babies. We put those coral babies through a series of different temperature experiments, where we can say, 'okay, these coral babies survive better under high heat stress, and then they survive less well.'

Chris - And what about the algae? The symbiotes that are part of the equation as well. How do they get added?

Kate - We gave them specific cocktails of symbiotes that we were hoping would further increase their heat tolerance. That means at the end of all of our experiments, we could essentially identify which genetic combinations of corals were really tough and which algae combinations were really tough.

Chris - When you do that, what sort of enhanced tolerance can you endow these corals with?

Kate - By doing this form of selective breeding, we were able to increase heat tolerance by 3 degrees Celsius.

Chris - Is that enough?

Kate - 3 degrees is a good start, but given the rate of warming, as well as the magnitude of warming that we're projected to see as soon as 2050, we're first going to need very strong action on climate change, even though these results are very promising.

Chris - Is there any way to spot places where there might be even more resistant corals and even more resistant algae that could be brought together in the way you have and get an even higher temperature tolerance?

Kate - Yes. This was the second part of our paper. We employed machine learning. You can just stick all this data into an algorithm and what it allowed for us to find was places around The Great Barrier Reef that fit the conditions that we had seen in our models. It told us that we needed to go to reefs that had high yearly temperatures. We also needed to reefs that had experienced a particular level of heat stress in previous years, so we could get a value around that. We also needed to go to places that had lots of variability, so in any one given day, the temperature fluctuation was quite high. With those 3 ingredients combined that was essentially the perfect cauldron for producing heat tolerant corals. We were able to find locations on The Great Barrier Reef that had this particular cocktail of scenarios and that allowed us to find that about 7.5% of the reef area on The Great Barrier Reef had these kinds of refugia.

Dune is a sci-fi masterclass where the inhabitants are able to use their technology to breathe and fight it out on the sandy planet that would otherwise remain desolate. Otis Kingsman reports… 

Otis - Most of the technology in the film is based around this fictional theory called the Holtzman effect. This in-universe discovery is described as relating to the repellant force of subatomic particles. Here with us to explain this a bit further is Andy Howell from the hit YouTube series Science vs Cinema. What exactly is this repellant force of subatomic particles?

Andy - It's a fictional construct to be able to justify all the fanciful cool technology they have in Dune, but there are parallels in real world physics. It's hard to put two charged particles together that have the same charge, but we can do it in the atomic nucleus because of the strong force. That's what allows protons to all really be stuck together in atoms. It's sort of efficient storytelling where you just say, ‘well, there was this real genius out there that figured out a bunch of cool stuff.”

Otis - Holtzman shields in the film are integrated into the armor of the soldiers and were designed to prevent fast moving objects like bullets and lasers from penetrating it. However it does allow slow moving objects like knives and more importantly, air to pass through unharmed. Andy, is this something we can replicate using our own current technology?

Andy - There's not a one to one parallel, but this is a clever way to justify having futuristic technology, but still having swords and not having bullets. But there are some things that are similar. There's a substance called oobleck and that's just basically mixing cornstarch and water. If you smack it hard, it becomes a solid, but if you touch it easily your fingers go right through. It's a liquid. I once filmed a TV show for national geographic where we mixed up a big vat of this stuff, and I got to effectively walk on water. As long as I was running, I could stay on the surface because it was a solid, but if I stopped I would sink down.

Otis - The shield is often displayed as a blue distortion, but this goo you're talking about is, if anything, probably closer to the 1984 Dune film adaptation where it's just blocks of see through jelly-like substances surrounding their bodies.

Andy - Sometimes we have shields on say a space station. Now, that's a physical shield layers of material that are offset from each other so that if a particle comes through really fast, almost like a bullet, but there's, you know, space debris out there, it'll get hit by the shield and break up. But you could have similar kinds of shielding for charged particles using just magnetic fields because charged particles bend in a magnetic field and spin around. So in some cases you want to shield electromagnetically and in some cases you want to do it physically. Of course, we have things like body armour as well, that can take away the kinetic energy of a fast moving projectile and spread that out over a bigger area.

Otis - Dune is supposedly set 20,000 years in our future. In your opinion, how believable and how scientifically accurate is the science of Dune on a scale of 1 to 10?

Andy - I don't know. 7 for believability. But I don't think you could condense it to one number because the goal of science fiction is not really to be accurate, it's to tell a really good story. I believe that in telling a really good story, what you need to do is make something that seems generally plausible and fits within the boundaries you've set of that universe. That's exactly what Dune has done here. They've taken some plausible sounding things and have some technology that makes the story really cool, but they give you a way to write it off. I think that's ideal storytelling.

Don’t Look Up is an apocalyptic black comedy where humanity finds itself in the headlights of a planet destroying comet. NASA astronomer Amy Mainzer worked as the science advisor for the film and spoke to Otis Kingsman…

Amy - The director originally wanted the object to be a much larger asteroid, something in the range of about 60 kilometers across and he wanted it to be an asteroid. So we had to come to a compromise on that. I had suggested that instead of an asteroid of that size, which is so big that it really would be absolutely hopeless to try to stop such an object, that we really wanted something that was smaller. Still plenty large enough to cause a lot of damage, but small enough that we would have a reasonable chance of doing something about it. Basically anything that's in that size range, something larger than say about a kilometer across is big enough to cause what we would call global damage. And then also switching from an asteroid to a comet, there were a couple of reasons for this one we have really, at this point now mapped out most of where asteroids that get close to the earth in that size range are. The really truly big ones we know where most of these are now. But comets on the other hand come from much further away. This particular class long period comments can come from out of the blue. We sometimes find them with only a few months of notice; Just like comet Neowise, which we discovered in 2020. That object we found within a few months of its closest approach to the earth and the sun. So, that's quite realistic.

Otis - I suppose the temptation is to think that bigger is better, but as you've just explained, that's not always the case.

Amy - That's one of the important things I think about interacting with a movie crew as a scientist, you want to bring enough scientific realism to the production that it doesn't pop you out of the story. In this case, of course, the comet in this movie is really an allegory for a lot of different kinds of global problems that we face as a society like climate change, loss of biodiversity and even the pandemic. But you know, in this case, we wanted to make the point that if everybody works together as a society, we actually can do something about these big global problems. It's not hopeless.

Otis - Yeah. I didn't really question any of the science when watching it; I was too hooked. Take, for example, when Jennifer Lawrence's character first discovered the comet, I assume the maths and the formula were accurate?

Amy - In this case, in the movie what you're seeing is a group of astronomers who actually don't study comets as their primary science objectives, they study something else. I think these are characters who in their day-to-day lives, wouldn't calculate asteroid or comet orbits. Leonardo DeCaprio, he's a professor, he's got a bunch of students with him. He's trying to teach them and use the discovery of the comet as a teachable moment and he's gotta go look up in a textbook how to actually do this kind of math. It's not something he would do every day. That's pretty realistic.

Otis - If we actually had one of these comets heading towards earth, would it be possible to redirect it as discussed in the movie?

Amy - The single most important thing that we need is time. If we don't have a lot of time, it's much harder. What you see in the movie is there's this huge worldwide scrambled to launch spacecraft equipped with explosives that can push the comet out of the way. That task is made considerably more complex in real life, because it's very hard for us to build a spacecraft in less than a year, realistically. Not only that, it's not just the time that it takes to build a spacecraft capable of deflecting the object, but the energy that you require for your task actually gets considerably easier if you have more time. In other words, it takes less energy to push it out of the way if you can find it years to decades in advance, instead of just 6 months in advance. If you can even do such a deflection mission at all within 6 months. Time is really the most important thing.

Otis - Sure. The closer to the earth the comet the bigger the deflection we would require. I mean, this all sounds rather well thought. In your unbiased opinion, how scientifically accurate is Don't Look Up?

Amy - I would say this movie is about an 8 out of 10. It's pretty good in terms of the presentation of the scientists in doing their best to discover the object and track it, figure out where it's going, and then let everybody know that there is a large and imminent danger out there to society and to the planet. That's very realistic.

When it comes to adding scientific content to a new blockbuster, the director has a conudrum on their hands. Make it too believable, and the audience might be bored out of their minds, make it too whacky and the audience will hit the stop button and find something else to watch. Otis Kingsman took a look at this year's Naked Scientists Science of the Silver Screen Awards shortlisted nominees and spoke with a real life Hollywood scientific advisor, Erin MacDonald, to see how one goes about making a film that everyone can enjoy! 

Otis - There go the credits. I just finished rewatching our nominated films. I think, before we get on with the prize giving, I'd better find someone who can help us run a critical eye through our selection. One show that has definitely got scientists and science fiction enthusiasts hooked for over 50 years is Star Trek. They've done something right there. And fortunate enough, I have Erin MacDonald on hand, one of the scientific advisors to Star Trek itself. I started off by asking her, "At what stage of movie making is it that a real scientist gets pulled in to help."

Erin - Sometimes I'll have discussions with writers when they have an idea for a film and they just want to bounce some ideas around with like, "Maybe how the engines can work", or maybe, "How the space station could work." But sometimes I get brought in late in the day when they have a draft of a script and they're like, "We'd really like eyes on this as a scientist." It's like this improv philosophy of someone comes to me with some whacky story about time travel and music and sound and space and disastrous space aliens, and my job is not to say, "No that'll never work." My job is to say, "Okay, cool. Let's try to see how we can make that happen."

Otis - Erin tells me that the most important part of her job is ensuring that the audience remains engaged with the cinematic content. That means it can't necessarily be too whacky depending on the film. It might even need to adhere to general scientific principles. In short, there needs to be a set of rules that could mean a lot of work for a really small feature in the show.

Erin - Sometimes we'll build up tons of scientific backbone for the story and then that gets edited down to like one line of dialogue. You just want to make sure that, when they're doing that, it's not interrupting the actual flow and the cadence or anything else like that.

Otis - And sometimes after all of our efforts, it can be best not to mention any of the hard work at all.

Erin - You can look at an episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks, for example, that will have the strange energies that possess the second in command, and then he becomes a God-like creature. As soon as you try to explain it, then you start to lose the audience. A lot of times I say to writers, "Okay, that's really cool. Let's do it. Let's just not explain it."

Otis - Erin says that scientific inaccuracies which tend to throw people off are fairly easily avoided if you take the time to build up a portfolio of the likely audience and understand your genre.

Erin - A lot of it is just the basic knowledge that people have. One that comes to mind is sound and space: everyone knows the tagline, "In space, no one can hear you scream" from 'Alien'. So, anytime you have sound in space, that will pull people out. One where we do break it and it doesn't pull an audience out is the beginning of 'The Martian' The whole inciting incident of 'The Martian' with the big windstorm that's knocking the ship over and blows a satellite dish into Mark Watney, that would never actually happen on Mars because the atmosphere is way too thin to actually physically blow an object like that, but not a lot of people know that and so it doesn't pull them out of the film. Without that, there wouldn't be a story.

Otis - In fact, the audience itself has a huge influence on how much scientific language, fictional or not, is used, along with how scientifically accurate the film needs to be in general.

Erin - With 'Star Trek: Lower Decks', that's an adult comedy audience and so we're not worried much about science at all. My job in that aspect is just to make sure we don't say anything wrong. But then, for example, we also have a show called 'Star Trek: Prodigy', which is aimed at children. For that, it's not just getting the science right, but explaining it in a way that's almost educational.

Otis - It feels strange to think that there are Star Trek shows which go easy on the physics. Now, I'm not a Trekkie, but I do happen to know one. Chris Smith loves all of it. I spoke with him a little earlier to find out why he loves boldly going where no man has gone before.

Chris - One of my fondest memories as a child was being taken to see 'The Wrath of Kahn' at the cinema by my dad. It was actually one of the first times I'd ever been to the cinema which made it special, but I just loved that kind of movie. The thing that really makes Star Trek stand the test of time, in my mind, is that those technologies they had in the early days were things we all wanted, but never thought we would have. And now we have: we've got mobile phones, well those were their communicators, we've got iPads and tablets, they have those as well. They had that big screen GPS navigation system, that's in everyone's car these days, and then there are other things like MRI scans to produce those amazing detailed body scans, and the enterprise even had smart speakers. And here we are today talking to our Alexa and Google devices in the same way that people in 'The Next Generation' used touch their badge and ask the computer something, and we all rolled our eyes and thought, "Oh yeah, that'll never happen." And here we are. I think it's an amazing series. I will continue to love it to my dying day.

Otis - A true Star Trek fan is our Chris, summing up the scientific plausibilities we see on the TV. But before I hand it all over to Julia and Harry for the final verdict, I wanted to share some more of Erin's wisdom. I had her look over our four nominees and she was quick to point out that each one needs to be approached from a different perspective.

Erin - I love your selection of movies because it really speaks to your attitude here going in as a viewer. For example, when I went into 'Encanto', I was not there to scientifically analyse the plot, but it's really fun to use something like 'Encanto' to teach science or to introduce scientific topics that we haven't seen before. And when you're talking about James Bond and using nanobots, again, that's something that you go into wanting to watch an action film, and James Bond has that long legacy of weird, cool technical devices, so you're more willing to let those things go. When it comes to 'Don't Look Up', I might go in kind of curious about that asteroid, but I'm really watching it to try to see how people are going to react to an asteroid that's coming to kill the earth. And then, of course, I'm saving the best for last because 'Dune' you go in and you're like, "Oh, this is hard sci-fi. This is science fiction that's really detailed, really thought out. You go in kind of expecting to have your mind blown with new scientific phenomenon or ideas that you might not have had before, but it's really just such a cool way of having us see the potential in our universe.