Science communication isn’t always easy, especially if you are trying to get across the mind-boggling complexity of immunology or climate change in a 10 minute video. But Philipp Dettmer, the founder of science YouTube channel, (German for “in a nutshell”), believes scientific topics don’t have to be hard to understand. “Everything complicated is only complicated because someone is bad at explaining it,” he says. Kurzgesagt videos have received billions of views and now Dettmer has written his first book, , in which he brings to life one of our most complex biological systems.

Conrad Quilty-Harper: In a nutshell, what is Kurzgesagt?

Philipp Dettmer: It’s a big science YouTube channel trying to do stuff that makes science interesting. I started the channel after university because I didn’t want to get a real job. The idea was to make two videos [with German voiceover], and that was honestly supposed to be it. But I had a gut feeling to make the videos in English, too. And then it went viral.

Who are your videos aimed at?

I don’t want to have a target audience. I want to make the videos in a way where it works for everybody. Grandparents are supposed to be able to watch them with their grandkids. You know, my first and foremost goal is to spark curiosity. Learning how we actually work is breathtaking, it’s amazing. We just make the videos as well as we can, whatever that means at the time we’re making them.

Your book has some really amazing descriptions. In one part, when describing the actions of the C3 protein in your immune system, you write: “Imagine you would go through the day minding your business and suddenly hundreds of thousands of flies, in unison, covered your skin head to toe. This would be a horrifying experience and not something you could just ignore.” How do you come up with that stuff?

Everything complicated is only complicated because someone is bad at explaining it. I’m convinced that every single fact in every single field can be turned into a number of different short stories. We as a species, as a society, we should come together and make the decision to simplify the language of basically all scientific disciplines, as much as it makes sense, of course. It will always be more complex than regular human language. But I don’t think there’s a reason why it has to be as hard as it is now. Especially in immunology, which is a shame. Because as a science it is such an interesting field. People might have fun reading about it if it wasn’t so horrible. The human immune system is the most complex biological system we know after the human brain, and yet most of us never learn how it works or what it is.

And it’s important too, especially in the context of vaccines. Does that motivate you as well? Good information beating bad information?

With Kurzgesagt, my foremost goal is to spark curiosity. To make people interested in researching themselves. My main goal is to inspire people to do very, real research for themselves. We try very, very hard to not spread false narratives about science. We will publish a video about this in December where we talk a little bit about oversimplification and science. After doing it for so many years, it’s shocking how hard it is to do it properly because you need to make decisions about how and what to simplify, and you can’t escape [those decisions].

In your book, you also write about how being diagnosed and treated for cancer was a curious thing that motivated you to write your book. How so?

I know, you’re not supposed to say [things like this] but technically it was a super interesting time. Cancer is not pleasant and chemo is not pleasant. I can’t recommend that. But it was super interesting actually learning how medicine works on that level, how you work. I used that time to ask a bazillion questions and to learn more and read more. I mean, I had time. So in a sense, it was one of the most interesting times of my life.

At the time, it was another reason to learn. Like [I was] addressing my immune system and [thinking], hey, guys. What? How? You’re not supposed to miss this, why did you miss it? And I’m learning about that. And then again, not being angry at my body, but grateful that with a little bit of help from my doctors the [chemotherapy] melted and ate the tumours.

Good information can help you make better decisions in your life. Are there any things that make you optimistic for the future? What gets you excited rather than scared?

Immunology. What we now know today is breathtaking. It’s amazing. It’s learning how we actually work and the complex systems we are. Vaccines, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, all the stuff, that’s helping people to live longer, healthier lives. I think ending disease should, very firmly be one of the goals of humanity. And we are going in this direction. It’s just we have been going slowly, slowly, slowly and now super fast.

So that’s the positive side of the pandemic in a way?

Yeah, for sure. I’m pretty sure the pandemic will have done so much for virus research.

What’s the biggest misconception about the immune system?

I feel that it is a thing that most people don’t have any sort of mental image of. People feel confident about saying, “Oh, my immune system does that, or my immune system is good or weak or whatever”. It’s sort of a cloudy entity in our minds. But in reality, it’s not. It’s this super multifaceted organ system that runs through your whole body, interacts with every process that you have. [It’s] an incredibly large army of many, and sadly, we don’t learn enough about the immune system to imagine a picture in our mind.

What’s your favourite bit of the immune system?

I think my favourite bit would be the neutrophil extracellular trap. Your soldier cells deciding to explode themselves in like a suicide bomber fashion. And, they do that by taking the whole genetic code, the DNA, and unfolding it and mixing it with all the deadly chemicals they have inside them and then just vomiting it out.

Imagine you took your brain out of your skull, spiked it with blades and then punched someone with that. You would expect to be dead then, right? But, neutrophils sometimes survive this process and they keep on fighting. What even are those cells? The immune system is mental, and there are so many stories like that.

For someone who’s never read anything about the immune system, what would you hope they come away with from your book?

I hope people come away from that with a really genuinely different appreciation of the body and what it means to be sick. So the next time they are sick, it’s less scary. It’s more concrete and they feel more in control. And the other big thing is to hopefully be amazed by biology and your body. And amazed by all the universes inside of universes inside of universes. And somehow all of it works.

Are there any topics that scare you? 

I think the topic that scares me most is climate change. I just could not research the topic without getting so depressed that I felt I can’t put this in a video. I thought, this is actually not helpful, this is counterproductive if I don’t find a way to spin it differently. But by talking to actual scientists, I got back from a climate change depression that was so bad.

What did they tell you?

That it’s not the apocalypse. And if it’s not the apocalypse, that means we can still do something. I feel like once you’re in this like doomerism mindset, it’s like a trap and it really traps you to, like, move forward or like back in any direction, really.

What would you say to scientists who are working in some abstract field to better spread their ideas and their findings?

Talk to science communicators. Make it easier for us to make your science approachable to other people. There’s a good relationship, I feel, between scientists and science communicators, at least on YouTube. Everybody is very open, very kind.

Philipp Dettmer’s book, , is out now, published by Hodder.

Boris Johnson’s first speech as prime minister on 24 July was notable for mentioning a sweep of scientific and technological advances that he sees as unique to Britain. These ranged from gene therapy treatments for blindness to satellites orbiting in space, but is Britain really “leading the world” in these areas, and how will they be affected by Brexit?

“Using gene therapy for the first time to treat the most common form of blindness”

This is a reference to a genetic therapy treatment for age-related blindness which aims to preserve sight by halting the deterioration of cells in the eye’s retina. One of the most common forms of sight loss, age-related macular degeneration (AMD) affects about 600,000 people in the UK. In February, a woman from Oxford became the first person to receive this gene therapy treatment. If the trial is successful, it could preserve vision in people who would otherwise go blind.

The treatment was manufactured by Gyrocope Therapeutics which is funded by Syncona, an investment firm founded by the Wellcome Trust. In its most recent financial results, Syncona identified “political and economic uncertainty, including impacts from the EU referendum” as one of the “potential risks to research funding and so the pipeline of attractive opportunities; to attracting talent and so the ability to build successful businesses […] or to profitably commercialise new products.”

Eliza Manningham-Buller, the chair of the Wellcome Trust (which owns about a third of Syncona), recently sent a letter to Boris Johnson warning that leaving the EU without a deal would threaten the £1 billion in funding that it provides to support research – like Syncona’s gene therapy treatments.

Robert MacLaren, the ophthalmologist who lead the team which is carrying out the AMD gene therapy trial, also lead another groundbreaking gene therapy trial at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London that has given hope to those with choroideremia, a degenerative genetic disease that causes blindness. People with the condition have a mutation in a gene called CHM – or are missing the gene altogether. After modifying a virus to deliver new DNA to the back of the retina, the cells adopt the material and are permanently changed. Everyone on the trial maintained or improved their vision for up to five years after the operation.

MacLaren did much of this work at Moorfields Eye Hospital, and like many scientific institutions, Moorfields has received grants and funding from the European Union – including more than €16 million to support research into treatments for the retina. It also employs many non-UK EU nationals, who constitute up to 20 per cent of the hospital’s entire staff. In a freedom of information request by campaign group Best for Britain, the hospital identified a “possible negative impact to our workforce” as one of Brexit’s risks to its operations.

“… leading the world in battery technology”

In 1980, John Goodenough discovered lithium cobalt oxide at the University of Oxford, and invented the technology necessary for lithium-ion batteries. Unfortunately for the UK economy, it was then Sony that commercialised the technology, and the UK saw very little direct commercial benefit. This trend continues to be true of the impending shift to all-electric vehicles. The Telegraph, for which Boris Johnson is a columnist, , “the UK is still very much in the slow lane in the race for next generation automotive technology”.

The UK has been trying to turn this situation around for some time. Since 2011, the government has invested significant amounts to subsidise plug-in cars. In 2017, it announced an investment of  for battery research and to create the yet-to-be-built UK Battery Industrialisation Centre in Coventry to provide testing facilities. The government has also spent £400 million on electric car charging infrastructure.

This investment is necessary to encourage investment in electric cars, which is needed if the government is to meet its pledge to ban internal combustion engine cars by 2040 and match its net-zero CO2 emissions target by 2050.

However, UK investment is dwarfed by state and private investment in battery technology projects in the US, China and elsewhere in Europe. The French government, for instance, has pledged €2.5 billion over 10 years. Investors have also poured more than , which has been supported by huge tax credits and hundreds of millions in taxpayer-funded subsidies for its cars.

Tesla is constructing a $4 billion “gigafactory” with Panasonic to manufacture batteries on a new and unprecedented scale, and China has similarly ambitious plans to maintain its 60 per cent share of global lithium-ion battery production. Volkwagen is spending €20 billion on batteries for its all-electric cars, and is involving companies in China and South Korea.

The UK, however, is home to like Nissan’s packing of Japanese cells for its all-electric Leaf, Jaguar Land Rover’s £1 billion investment to produce hybrid and electric engines, and Aston Martin’s plans to produce its batteries for high-end luxury cars.

One of the biggest factors limiting the UK’s progress with battery technology and adoption of electric cars has been uncertainty over Brexit. External investment into the UK automotive sector, which includes petrol, diesel and electric technology, has dropped 80 per cent since the referendum result in 2016. As for , , where he is working on an idea for a “super-battery”.

“… liberate the UK’s extraordinary bioscience sector from anti-genetic modification rules…”

Current EU rules mean that the UK can grow and sell any genetically modified crop that has been shown to be safe for consumption. However, GM plants are only currently grown in the UK for research purposes, not for food. This isn’t down to EU rules – it’s more due to an unwillingness to market GM foods to a population that has been resistant to the idea in the past.

In the wake of Johnson’s speech, plant scientists have expressed concern over proposals to weaken the current EU rules, as these ensure safety. Any change to such rules would be unlikely to tackle the wider issue of anti-GM public opinion.

“… let’s develop the blight-resistant crops that will feed the world…”

The UK has a relatively strong agricultural research base and, in 2014, a UK trial successfully cultivated GM blight-resistant potatoes. None of this has been done in opposition to the EU, which approved this and a subsequent trial, currently under way at the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich.

It has been estimated that growing a GM pest-resistant crop like this in the UK could save about  in pesticide use, but there aren’t any specific EU regulations stopping this from happening. It remains to be seen if the UK really does come out in support of GM crops after Brexit, or whether we have been using the EU as an excuse all this time.

“Let’s get going now on our own positioning, navigation and timing satellites, and Earth observation systems – UK assets, orbiting space with all the long-term strategic and commercial benefits for this country”

Thanks to Brexit, UK suppliers have already been of the €10 billion Galileo Global Navigation Satellite System, a rival to the US Global Positioning System designed to provide positioning and navigation services to the military, commercial organisations and individuals with mobile phones.

The UK has , and it could ask for a rebate as part of Brexit negotiations. Suppliers to the project have already started moving their work to the European continent so they can continue working on the contract, taking expertise out of the country.

This is at odds to the UK’s aims to own 10 per cent of the global space market by 2030. There are plans to  with £20 million of funding, and establish a launch site for small satellites. Theresa May announced in 2018 that the UK would build its own navigation system, but such a feat is likely to cost £3 billion to £5 billion.

In 1961, ��è����Ƶ was calling for a halt to the moon race.

Indeed, our 8 June 1961 issue said that the superpowers were squandering resources better spent on earthbound problems. Today, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon, it’s surprising to hear such a negative attitude to crewed spaceflight. Nevertheless, our opinion barely changed over the decades, and we maintained our opposition into the 1990s.

Despite ��è����Ƶ’s lonely protests, the Apollo missions got underway, and our harrumphing didn’t stop. In our Apollo 8 editorial of 19 December 1968 we said the mission was an “empty, obsessional quest” and “…the true scientific value of the Apollo project is virtually nil”.

In the same issue we said: “We are forced to the conclusion, time and time again, that the whole manned space business, if its relationship to reality is not of a more ominous nature, is mere prestigious prancing”.

“…the true scientific value of the Apollo project is virtually nil”

The thrust of our complaint was that uncrewed space probes would have done just as good a job for the fraction of the price, and that the vast amounts of money spent sending people into space would have been better spent on “constructive aid” for “underprivileged nations.” In the same issue, we published (wildly incorrect) predictions that there would be 5 billion people living in poverty in the year 2000, which perhaps gives us some context for this editorial line.

Our annoyance at the theatre of the occasion is slightly less forgivable.

Before Armstrong’s first steps we wrote: “If previous missions are anything to by – the entire sequence of Apollo 11 will simply reel itself off like clockwork with an exactitude extending down to the smallest detail. Surely this entire approach is the very antithesis of adventure?”

In the first ��è����Ƶ edition after the Apollo 11 moon landing our leader article on 24 July 1969 was mostly worried that the astronauts might have been “infected by the show-biz bug.”

Although we did deign to say the sight of a human being walking on a celestial object other than Earth for the first time in history had a “touching splendour” and the “kangaroo hops of the astronauts had the same emotional potential as a baby’s first earnest, awkward attempts to walk,” we also asked “hadn’t we seen this before?” in movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and in cheap, rival magazines rapidly produced to cash in on the occasion (ahem).

The following month, we gave a voice to the “NASA scientists grumbling as moon results roll in”, featuring the complaints of scientists at Houston working on the Apollo project. We mentioned the plight of Eugene Shoemaker, principal investigator for lunar geology, who was 14th on the priority list to receive an official set of pictures from the moon, and who “was eventually given a set by a reporter”.

We also complained that “no scientist astronauts have been named either for the prime or backup crews of the next three lunar landing missions, causing one of the few scientifically qualified astronauts to resign in despair.”

Two years later on 28 January 1971 we published the words of Peter Stubbs, who questioned the true “raison d’être” of this exceedingly costly undertaking: “The Apollo programme has clearly generated a lot of scientific activity of interest to scientists, however secondary this may be to its primary purpose. But the usefulness of planetary science to the wider world is surely even more debatable than that of modern high-energy physics.”

We got closer to the mark in another story quoting Brian O’Leary, one of the 11 out of 1400 scientist-astronaut applicants selected by NASA. After budget cuts, astronaut chief Deke Slayton told him “you may as well face the prospect of long delays and perhaps no flights. We don’t need you around here, at least for the time being.” In response, the beleaguered recruits labelled themselves the “Excess Eleven (XS-11).”

O’Leary said, “I believe that the American space programme can be made worth what we are putting into it if the emphasis on manned flight can be curbed. We should encourage science looking for a mission rather than a mission looking for science.” The story finished by saying “The question on many scientists lips at Houston at the moment is: ‘How can anyone talk of sending men to Mars when we can’t get NASA to do the best possible science on the moon?'”

You might laugh with us at the absurdity of our anti-Apollo campaigning, but perhaps make a note of 13 December 1972 in your calendar. That was the moment 47 years ago that Eugene Cernan, and the rest of humanity, left the moon for the last time.

So did we have the last laugh, or will we see people step onto the moon again within our lifetime? Only time (and public opinion) will tell.

Artificial intelligence lets programmers control Barack Obama’s face, replicate the styles of painting greats and even turn a picture of a . Now you can do the same.

Launched this week, a new desktop application called makes it is easy for anyone to run their own AI experiments. The code for many AI projects is already freely available on the internet, but using it normally requires a knowledge of programming and access to powerful and expensive computers.

Runway is like an App Store for a type of AI called a generative adversarial network (GAN), which is often used to make and manipulate text, images, or videos. No technical knowledge is needed to use the program.

Once you’ve downloaded the app, which is still undergoing testing, it lets you select which tool you’d like to try with only a few mouse clicks. For example, you could choose to play around with StyleGAN, a GAN that is used by the website “” for generating believable images of people who don’t actually exist. With just a couple of clicks you can create your own artificial face and tweak how similar or different each new face it generates should be. You can also guide the algorithm towards different effects, colours or themes.

Running a GAN is power hungry, so Runway does all of its processing on servers hosted in the cloud, which users pay 5 cents per minute for.

Dozens of other different GANs are available on Runway, including facial recognition, image labelling, and OpenAI’s super-trolling text-generating AI. The team say they aim to let people create their own training datasets and even combine the inputs and outputs of different models.

“The idea was to create tools that we want to use,” says Cristobal Valenzuela, who co-created the app. To access machine learning before Runway you had to go to a code-hosting website and find a way to access powerful computer chips, he says.

It may not look like much, but this orangey brown puff of smoke high is the aftermath of the third largest meteor explosion to have impacted Earth in modern times.

The huge meteor explosion hit Earth in December but was only spotted by researchers last week, and now we have visual evidence thanks to the camera of the geostationary .

The meteor’s smoke cloud was recorded at 2350 GMT in the same location over the Bering Sea that was recorded by NASA’s monitoring sensors.

The smoke trail is almost vertical, showing that it entered the atmosphere very steeply, and it’s possible to see a long, thin shadow cast by the smoke cloud against the Earth’s cloud layer below.

Simon Proud, an aviation safety fellow and meteorologist at the University of Oxford, who , said, “I’m sure it’s the meteor trace.”

He said, “It appears in the images at the right time, it is in the right location, the smoke column is almost vertical, and the smoke is very high. Much higher than any clouds in that region and too high to be a contrail.”

The giant fireball hit the atmosphere with the force of 173 kilotons of TNT, ten times the force of the atomic bomb which the US dropped on Hiroshima at the end of the second world war.

The explosion is the third-largest in modern times, after an explosion over the Russian Chelyabinsk region in 2013 and a massive explosion that occurred in Siberia, Russia, in 1908, known as the Tunguska event. That air burst was so powerful that it flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of more than 2000 square kilometres.