If Spurs and also kept up the chase at the top with wins over Leicester and Huddersfield respectively their wins 2 for Manchester United West Ham Cardiff and Burnley in the Scottish Premiership champion Celtic over to Kilmarnock at the top with a big 51 win a Parkhead England and Scotland have been drawn in the same group at next summer's Women's World Cup in France Japan and Argentina make up their group Gloucester left exit as hopes hanging by a thread in the rugby Champions Cup thanks to victory at Sandy Park Glasgow got an important win but both the wasps both lost and Macallan will meet Ronnie O'Sullivan in Sunday's final at the U.K. Snooper championship in New York Allan came up being on thanks to a final frame decider this is B.B.C. Radio 5 Live on digital B.B.C. Sound. A look at the weather frequent shows in southern areas soon clearing away leaving a day of sunny spells and a few showers these most prevalent for western areas and also northeast Scotland winds sort of easing as well then receiving a clear nice with perhaps the old isolated showers around western coastlines as a ridge of high pressure builds in. The lake Premier League football and then to anyone else this is a. Commentary match Council this is life producing shame this. Is your station this is. What I forget Chris and Sam here for breakfast from 6 o'clock but now it's time to join 5 life science if you get this program is prerecorded so please don't text or call. Hello welcome to 5 Live Science I'm Chris Smith from The Naked scientists team into the program the new phone app to tell if you're a new MC The scientist who claims to have genetically engineered humans goes missing a why did dark skin evolve in the 1st place clue it's nothing to do with skin cancer plus a collection. Microorganisms which cooperate one another the antagonize one another and they produce lame and that's lame sticks them to the teeth we're getting out teeth into the sons of dentistry that make it scientists find. 2000000000 people worldwide off acted by anemia In other words they have too few red blood cells This often means they need to be monitored but that monitoring is inconvenient is time consuming and is costly Emory University's robot Menino who has a solution literally at his fingertips this technology was developed and motivated by the fact that I myself suffer from serious in the ME there requires me to receive regular blood transfusions and as part of that I get my anemia levels checked quite frequently doing this involves me getting myself to the hospital waiting around in the waiting room getting a venous blood draw so getting stuck and then waiting for my doctor to tell me the results and I thought there would be a better way to do this and so I've developed a smartphone app that's able to measure the color of someone's fingernails and correlate that color to a person's hemoglobin level now hemoglobin is a protein that's found in the blood gives blood it's red color and it's responsible for transporting oxygen throughout the body and low hemoglobin levels are what the finds anemia and the low hemoglobin levels they reflected in changes in in the fingernails how exactly what you're looking for we're looking for the color so because human globin is what gives blood its red color. Someone with low hemoglobin levels will have paler fingernails So how does it work than what you literally take a picture of you'll fingernails capture the image and then process the image with the app and it extracts the color and that's what tells you roughly what you're him a globe and never will be yes exactly a user can download the app on their phone and simply take an image of their fingernails based on the color of their fingernails the app gives an estimate of the hemoglobin level how good is it Rob is it highly reproducible if I did this 10 times on myself would it return the same hemoglobin estimation each time yes so we've shown our results to be on average within plus or minus one gram per deciliter of the gold standard test for measuring hemoglobin levels and that's right around plus or minus 10 percent. And is that good enough is 10 percent good enough for someone with a condition like yours who needs to know what the hemoglobin level is would you be comfortable with 10 percent on the side so right now the app cannot be used to diagnose or treat conditions but the accuracy is acceptable in our opinion for screening so someone getting an idea of whether or not they should seek treatment based on the results I presume that the system would be frustrated by no vanish and as it was clear but what about the defects lesions these things these white marks that we get enough fingernails can it get a court help so you've actually hit the nail on the head with that one yet certainly won't work with nail varnish or nail polish as and like you mentioned certain fingernail better irregularities can impact the results patients with white spots on the fingernails or maybe nail bed injuries would not be able to use the system if a significant portion of their fingernail beds are obscured now I'm in the process of developing quality control methods to try to ignore spots in regions on the fingernails like that a follow on from that is that a significant number of people who have hemoglobin problems linked to anemia often have dark skin I'm thinking about conditions like sickle cell anemia which tend to be in black Africans do people with black skin have a problem with your app or color blind as it were so that's actually the great thing about using the fingernails under normal circumstances in the fingernail beds there are no skin cells that produce pigment So in normal circumstances regardless of the subjects skin tone the color of the fingernails should be the same and so we actually did studies with patients for many different skin tones and being in Atlanta Georgia we actually have a fairly large sickle cell disease population who was included in the clinical studies that we did and we didn't show any correlation between skin tone and error . Given that you've got this technology working you can capture an unnamed in future saying you'll be out a better capture images of the nail bed and extract color information could you use this diagnostically or as a screening tool for a range of diseases not just to name it Could you extend this to other possible conditions because we know lots of diseases do manifest with changes in the nails. Yes absolutely so we chose anemia because anemia was really the low hanging fruit so to speak but really this technology could be applied to any condition that manifests in a physical change or discoloration of the of the fingernails jaundice where regions of the body get a yellow color some heart conditions manifest and something called Scion osis where fingertips become more blue through the circulation issues Well he beat me to the line about hitting the nail on the head didn't he but his idea really does That was Robert Menino and he published the trial they've run on the app in the journal Nature Communications the world of genetics has been rocked this last week or so with the announcement from a scientist called he. China's southern University of Science and Technology in Chen's in that he'd been using the experimental D.N.A. Editing system called crisper to alter human embryos the modified embryos were implanted and children carrying the genetic changes that he claims to have introduced have allegedly been born including a pair of twins now if this is true it's a monumental milestone for science but it's also an ethical upheaval on a massive scale but the scientist involved has since vanished and his website has been taken down so did it really happen and what's the fallout looking like George Mills caught up with Anna Middleton who's head of society in ethics research at the Welcome Trust genome campus in Cambridge this is not been published in a peer reviewed journal so we're not entirely clear if it's true or not but I was at the Hong Kong summit where it was announced and it seems credible that it may have actually happened and so of course then the next questions are Will how could this possibly happen because the implantation of edited embrace is illegal in many countries across the world and it just raises so many ethical questions my mind is absolutely blown with questions these researches this to how they did this and how they got away with it. What kinds of things would you like to ask them and I suppose where have they crossed the line well I did actually get a chance to ask them so I stood up and said Could you tell us about the consent process because the 1st point in any research like this is to understand if the research participants themselves that should insist on what they're getting into and it seems from the consent form which is actually now disappeared from the Internet but we managed to have a look at it before it went advertise the research project of facts a nation against HIV So it wasn't being touted as a project about editing of embryos so sort of in the small print the embryos were mentioned the only consent form is actually available that we've seen is in English and the participants as far as I understand were Chinese and the form is full of legal jargon and scientific jargon and if you put it to readability school you need at least a degree 2 in the subject in written English so I think the 1st point is we could probably say with confidence the participants didn't understand what they were taking part in so you can send the 1st research into editing of embryos around the world isn't to the goal but what the common kind of guidance is that is that we don't implant that it's lead to pregnancy in the embryos are destroyed at the 14 day kind of mark so to actually implant them with leading to pregnancy is highly unethical just really because we don't fully understand the downstream effects of this editing and whether they could be extreme harm in G. Sed to these embryos you know you go to get it one gene and at the genes you did that you had to do the same time and all the science in this is not being fully completed you're right and I suppose doing something like this so dramatic you'd expect it to be for something lifesaving in the embryo but this was something different yet absolutely So these embryos were completely normal to the point that they were edited you know they wasn't like he was trying to get rid of a really serious domestic disease that the embryos already had they were. Completely normal What was the reaction like in the room when this gone out their reaction was palpable there was a gossip there was silence people were just shocked it was really incredibly powerful and the sort of elite of medicine ethics and science with there in the room and there was just a sense of absolute disbelief how could he do this which research ethics committee approved this has he got I thinks approval how how is this funded Where was this done and it turns out there's questions about all of those things now do you think this is going to be the tip of the iceberg crisper runaway train that we're just not going to be able to stop that's the big fear and if you look at it the right stem cell clinics that are popping up around the world where the earth is promised to tempt people come and have a stem cell transplant and you know lots of money is exchanged and this is not leading to treatments and cures for people if ills as if they could be the same industry around editing of embryos but having said that I mean if you think about the process they actually have to go through at the moment it's an I.D.F. Process and that's not a straight food process with a high very high success rate so I don't know if this is going to be a mass market for this moment and it was going to happen to the scientists now and from what I understand he's going into hiding in the family is going into hiding we also understand there's another family on the way with the pregnancy on the way says 2nd family but of course they've non-disclosure agreements who probably never see them and who knows what will happen to this scientists I understand he has a large amount of cash backing him so I dunno maybe he just disappeared to the commercial world and keep delivering his services who knows depends of what the Chinese government decided today so this is a this is a really liminal moment and so I guess 510 years from now when you think will be. I wonder whether this is going to really push forward 2 things one is tightening up the regulation and for those can. She's that don't have legal frameworks Maybe they'll put in place legal frameworks but also I wonder whether they disease and patient community will push forward their agenda on this and what was really exciting to see was the Sickle Cell community in the dish and Miska dystrophy community at the conference and you know they were saying that we want sematic gene therapy as we want to understand how editing of embryos can help us and it may well be like with mice control donation they'll they'll push for access to the services that they want and certainly in the U.K. That would require a change in the law but that may be something that we start to work towards I don't know but I think it will you know really catalyze conversations about this which is a really good thing I'm absolutely positive that this is not a loss we're going to hear on that story that was on a Middleton she's in the world compass in Cambridge and she was talking with George Mills you're listening to 5 live songs with me Chris Smith still to come how gravitational waves rushing in a new era of astronomy and we're getting out into the science of dentistry but 1st it's time for a misconception and this week Eva Higginbotham has been picking apart the science of skin color from very pale to very dark modern day humans have a whole range of skin colors and that's just because having dark skin is better in hot countries to prevent skin cancer and having light skin in cooler countries is better for making that essential vitamin D. Right well this is true but it doesn't actually explain how we evolved to the variety of skin colors that we see today even with lots of time in the sun you know 2 likely to get skin cancer until at least middle age and because evolution is all about who survives long enough to pass on their genes to the next generation whether or not you got skin cancer by the time you had grandchildren shouldn't really matter in an evolutionary sense so what's the real story before we were actually humans we started off in Africa with pale pink skin covered by a generous serving of fair and are expensive but he had the hard work of protecting our skin. From the sun's strong E.-V. Rays as we started losing off our skin gradually darkened and this was to protect us from U.V. Radiation but it wasn't just to prevent skin cancer the main reason we needed protection was to preserve a foliate a vitamin that is absolutely essential for a healthy life as a human especially if you want to reproduce for pregnant women it is exceptionally important as a lack of folate during pregnancy can lead to serious spinal defects and importantly U.V. Radiation is very good at breaking down fall late so if you were an early human living in Africa and you had pale skin you want going to be making too many babies because your foliage would be constantly depleted by the hot sun but if you had darker skin you a mole protected from the sun's U.V. Rays and so able to hold on to your foliage better increasing your fertility and making it more likely that you'd have a healthy baby are dark skinned full Bez had the evolutionary edge over the lighter skinned as a result and so by the time our ancestors had evolved to be Homo Sapiens the species we are today everyone had dark skin so the reason we evolved dark skin in the 1st place wasn't really to do with preventing skin cancer the much more important factor was that having darker skin protected people from depleting their full 8. Now once humans started dispersing around the globe to countries with weaker sunlight they had to balance the need to protect their full late with their need for vitamin D. In other essential vitamin for humans which needs the opposite of fall 8 lots of sunlight and ultimately the range of skin colors we see today all come from the competing needs to protect our full 8 and make of it a mehndi not to stop us getting skin cancer still since we are living much longer nowadays it's best not to skimp on the sun cream when getting out and about in the summer sun so competing vitamins are responsible for all that variation that was even Higginbotham with this week's misconception Meanwhile if there's some suspicious sounding science that you've come across do send it to us at 5 Live Science B.B.C. Dog cottage U.K. And we will take a look. Predicted over 100 years before they were detected for the 1st time in 2015 gravitational waves one Nobel prizes for the discovers and they for the validated Einstein and his general relativity theory said all along they should exist since 2015 the detectives which along tunnels resembling John L's have continued to operate on the scientists working on them have been picking through the cosmic hubbub that they've been recording them from that data they've been up to tease out evidence of gravitational wave events corresponding to Pez a black holes merging a neutron stalls colliding the whole thing's ushering in a new era in astronomy this week 4 more events are announced and I caught up with 2 members shine Lawson to hear how it's going when stars reach the ends of their lives they become these very compact stellar skeletons called the black hole an object which is so gravitationally strong that nothing can escape it these stellar skeletons They lie around in the cosmic graveyard together and sometimes they find each other they orbit around each other and merge to form a bigger black hole and we can detect those with these gravitational wave detectors like go in Virgo now you made the 1st announcement of this happening back in 20152016 so what has changed between then and almost 3 years later so we turned the instrument on and there on the directional and on all the time and in 2015 we ran for a short period of time and then we turned off our detectors to increase the laser power fix some things that were broken and we turned them on again and then we ran for another very long period of time and so these new detections released over the weekend is the content of that 2nd observing run that we made and since your 1st observation run you've added another detect to not see what she detecting with 3 different observatories on you yeah so the network right now is the like O. Observatories the 2 of them in the United States one in. Hanford Washington and one in Livingston Louisiana and then the European gravitational observatory called Virgo which is outside in Italy and how do these detectors do what they do we call them observatories because we're doing astronomy we're observing the universe but they are not telescopes in the sense that we're used to thinking about astronomy they're laser interferometers So we basically use lasers there are these gigantic bells in the lasers go in 2 directions down what we call the arms and these gravitational waves when they come through the detector they change the lengths of those arms and we can sense that by time I mean how long it takes the laser to go down to the end of the arm and back again given that these changes are going to be really subtle excruciating the tiny changes in the lengths of those ARMs which a comatose Lawndale knees How do you actually detect a difference that minute so what you're looking for is gravitational waves they warp the shape of the detector in a very definitive way they tend to tak