for all the kids to go beyond p r a as we take on the world 8 our i do all the say we're all about the stories that matter to you. whatever you take by policemen. a deal we are, your is actually on fire made for mines. the joys of spring are highly visible in the animal kingdoms, writes and rituals of courtship, displays of prowess and flirtation, moving in pursuit of the ultimate plaza, mating. yes, even animals can have sex without offspring. thanks to contraception. that's just

one of our topics this week. mm hm. hello and welcome to tomorrow to day dw science magazine. the vice of spring time can also be seen in these red pandas still haven't connected yet. and these male, blue backed mannequins, are going all out to whenever a female but if all the animals here were to fulfill their natural desires, wazoo would soon become very crowded. the answer is contraception for the males. this is leopold. as a responsible bush peg, he takes the pill. this, i could also use it. or this sky,

male birth control has been around for quite a while now for animals. but it would also work for humans in a similar way. contraceptives are already being used in zoos with mammals are closest relatives in the animal world. thanks. hormones looked exactly the same and all mammals, testosterone, for example, produces horns in one species, facial hair, and another, or a sexually attractive body odor. but in all cases, the hormone is required for sperm production, without which there'd be no babies. oh, you just can't get enough of them. right. that said here in munich, helen quanzhou. there is room for new babies, but not so much that the animals can reproduce as often as they would and the wild

veterinarian doctor hans pathos. steinmetz is in charge of contraception, which obviously varies depending on the sex of the animal. in question, in the case of the male bush pigs, he uses hormonal contraception. that means putting lamp hold on the pill, except it's not a pill, but an injection. by dimensional pains, last line with a male bush pigs. you can't just go and give the animal's a shot at a loss, wolf oblation. or we have to administer it with a blow gun device. it's repeated at regular intervals as a booster vaccination, since it's why fi more every 2 or 3 months before and most to illustrate how the vaccine works. and importantly, whether it would also be effective with the human male. less look at how sperm

production and mammals basically works. imagine a man is a multi story building with the production department on the ground floor. sperm is produced down here in the testicles, along with most of the testosterone to operations are run up top in the brain via the hypothalamus. and right next to it, the pituitary gland. the hypothalamus is essentially the boss starting up production and releasing the g n. r. h hormone, the g, an r age instructor, the pituitary gland to produce 2 additional hormones, l h and f s h f s h is responsible for the sperm production line, and l age for testosterone production. and while sperm cells are being turned out to stops, drones swarms out across the man's body, resulting in a little body, hair growth here, and a bit of muscle mass there before returning to the hypothalamus. with that message

then operations are now up and running. the boss puts the brakes on g n r h production. but once testosterone is no longer flowing, the order comes for production to start back up again. the whole system is called the hormone feedback loop. and for contraception that loop has to be interrupted for leopold that happens by a remote injection using a blow gun and a kind of vaccination. in this case, the bush pigs own immune cells are used to interrupt the hormone loop. they've been programmed to block the generate messenger halting production. and that means no more g n are h no l h or f s age, no sperm, and no testosterone either. ah,

leopold has all the features of a male bush pig, the tusks, the masculine jock. but very small testicles, no libido and no sexy scent. although he does seem a pretty content little pig, the same hole contraception, not a bad idea for disease carrying mosquitoes. some research has already been done on it. it's not needed for the many homeless mosquitoes. they bite, but been just each but a female and not the nice mosquito can carry malaria. parasites that infect the host. it feeds on to scientists are looking at ways to prevent a malaria infection. scientists, sylvia bore to ground, is researching the parasite plasmodium farsi power. m, which the mosquito transmit when it bite,

and which can develop into malaria. blood and parasites. dangerous is that they grow inside your red blood cells in and in your blood. and they multiply for each paras item within 48 hours, gives rise to $16.00 to $32.00 and you once and as they, they growing numbers they am, they binds tor, the lining of the blood vessels rights. and in very small vessels that can block circulation in these can cause a severe problems mostly in children causes a thing called cerebral m. malaria. dr. portugal learned that the malaria power site can stay dormant, the body for around 6 months without the person getting sick. and insight that can help in fighting the disease vaccine would be helpful. i see very limited. so possibilities as we've,

he has right now for and he sense of vaccine against malaria. but we, we've seen in many countries that just development of good hospitals, access it statements, an access to health actually brings numbers tremendously bound and also mosquito factor and control the current vaccines still does not offer sufficient protection, access to medical care and many regions with malaria. is not sufficient either. mosquito netting treated with insecticide still seems to be the most effective protection against the disease. but the mosquitoes are developing in immunity to these poisons. therefore, further insights into fighting malaria are still needed. russian scientist, yelena, live ashna isn't researching the pathogen itself, but rather the ona police mosquito that carries the malaria. she learned that not every kind of mosquito transmits the disease. based on this insight,

researchers are now looking for more targeted solutions. we know about a 3 contract mosquito spacious worldwide. so it's really a, quite a number of different species and many of them are complex, suspicious. so they are inside. there are still sub spacious ofa, the same species, and out of nose i would say around 30, it's believe globally again there on the world of those which can transmit, right? and so the numbers are anything from them in the particular area will be a one to really of a, the, the most efficient vector. this one method scientists are working on is called gene dr. technology. the mosquitoes are genetically modified, so they either become sterile or no longer are able to absorb the malaria pathogen . this means they can no longer transmit disease. this

technology can be used to very, ah, let's a specific way. and the, and there are many tools in our which will be age balloting now to contain that. so you could basically stop spreading off with insights. and of course, you don't want to pull you to the world where a few spacious or something genetically modified without really been sure of that. of this a safe promising research approaches to stop the transmission of malaria from mosquitoes to humans. but there's still a lot of work to be done before the bloodsuckers. finally become a little less scary. vaccination against malaria already exists with more in the research pipeline. like some coven vaccinations, one malaria vaccine is based on m r n a technology em renee is constantly being creative in the nucleus of every cell. it's full name is messenger rival nucleic

acid. after it has copy genetic information, the m r n a leaves the nucleus and it's called the blueprint, tells the cell to make a required protein. it's quite literally the genomes messenger. before the pandemic, hardy, anyone had even heard the name a mariani. so what's behind its sudden overwhelming success and mathias henson has been researching m r n a. for decades. he leads the european molecular biology laboratory and heidi back. it's new to him that so many are interested in his research. thus long about getting out about m r and a at a dinner table conversation is something that never happened before the pandemic up on the new evolved mr. game, m r n a. serves an important function in the body,

because it's mo bile, it can transport blueprints. these blueprints are saved on the equivalent of hard drives in our body, specifically and the dna on the chromosomes. they stay there undisturbed. to build proteins, genetic information must be translated m r n a contains the same information, but is more mobile. it's the way the blueprints are transported. it leaves the nucleus and bring the information to the ribozymes. ah, this is where the m r any is read. all the possible protein combinations can now be billed from the generic specifications transmitted the body needs them for pretty much all of its processes. m r n a was long neglected by researchers. chemically. it's not much different than dna. however,

it's more stable and therefore easier to handle the sculpture much earlier, there were exciting findings about dna and orange was a bit of a late comer, but that late comers really caught up in the last few years, the life of boyhood. still some people believed in the application of m r n. a early on, one was in my her while doing his ph. d here in tubing, and he discovered that he could bring em renee and all its information into cells without any special packaging. at 1st he thought he'd made a mistake and hampton on mothers, and then very carefully, i repeated, everything's about documenting, controlling at all. exactly. and got the same results also. then there was this eureka moment. really, when i thought of at least my god, if this actually works, it'll be revolutionary roots young. with his colleagues, her later found at the company cure

a vac pcs. great advantages and the medical application of m renee them on yet. so i'm on the modifying other vaccines requires a lot of animal testing to see how well it works with renee and i just have to modify the sequence on the order of the letters. if you will miss, you can talk to the body and just move it. that's the vision. and it's the same production process. whether you're developing an arna for polio, or for corona, it's the same in terms of production. when researchers know the genetic sequence of a protein, they're now able to derive that corresponding m renee. it's produced artificially packaged and introduced into the body, which then build the desired protein all by itself. that's also the principle behind m r n a cove. it vaccines. the body gets the blue prince for viral spine proteins and uses them to train the immune system. but there was

a problem at 1st because when m r n a moves about freely our bodies view it as a foreign substance and sound the alarm cut to lean, cutting co together with her calling. drew weisman, solve this problem. they used to trick and modified the m r. any so the body no longer attacked it. finding the change that would produce that effect was the case of trial and error. and it was, you know, caught, coming down from, wanted a different modification and you are just expecting that finally you have 3, maybe at least one of those, you know, which is not the mother. jenny can logo for all day and he's made them. so that's what we found. that was the breakthrough still, it took decades of research to enable the development of an m, r in a cove at vaccine and record time in 2020. had the pandemic occurred a decade earlier. this would not have been possible mateus,

hence it has great hopes for this new type of vaccine that 1st and this is an obviously m r n a as new law as minus eastern when i consider that a positive, a positive and sinner. and it's true that messenger r renee is very unstable. instead, bill is the highest i. what that means is it enters the cells, does its job and then breaks down and disappears housing the mr. existence. so the cov 19 vaccines are very likely only the beginning for m r n a technology. ah, so an m r in a vaccination doesn't alter a gene. but there are effects on the way to alter the genes of some living creatures to produce ingredients for medication. guts are especially interesting to they can produce a substance that prevents from bases oh,

blood class. gates that make medicine for humans. there's one situation where a solitary goat can beat 90000 people. producing andy from ben doesn't ring a bell. then let's start from the beginning. researchers have been using the option of introducing foreign genes into organisms in the hope of producing medicine. diabetics have to regularly inject insulin for a long time. doctor's obtained supplies of the hormone from the pancreas is of pigs, but supplying the world's diabetics will require the insulin from one and a half 1000000000 sluggard, pigs per year, which exceeds the global population. in the late 19 seventies researchers began producing the gene responsible for insulin artificially when it was introduced to

equal i bacteria, they began producing intellect. ah, after pressing the bacteria, researchers were able to isolate the insulin to the relief of animal loving diabetics. many other drugs are developed in this way produced by genetically modified bacteria. but the method also has its limitations. the bacterial cells then also modified the desired substances. the end result is not always ideal for humans because our cells also processed substances exempt in a completely different way than the bacteria do. one solution to this problem is to use organisms that are more closely related to us, such as plants, despite the superficial differences, their cells convert the active ingredients in a similar way to ours, which is why they're often better tolerated by humans. right now,

researchers are experimenting on tobacco plants to see if they can produce a vaccine to fight cobit 19. and in addition to plants, certain animals are also a potential source of solutions. researchers we're able to engineer a goat with a gene that's responsible for the production of anti thrombin 3, which inhibits blood clotting. but it's not produced in sufficient quantities by some people in certain situations. after surgery, for example, it then has to be administered anti from 3 can be obtained from the blood of healthy people, all be it only in small amounts. and this is where the goats come into play. the anti thrombin gene was placed in them in such a way that the desired active ingredient appears. me animals milk one leader yields 10 grams of at the from been 3 over an entire year. that means a single goat produces as much as the blood of $90000.00 humans were. so goats are

a major life, so we'll know what comes out of an a death. and what comes out of the back end of grazing animals is something completely different . but it isn't just way go. sheep and cattle droppings are important for the ecosystem islands of life to pull insects and animals, one and average cow patty, ways to the lows, measures 30 centimeters and diameter is 2 centimeters, thick. old. each animal unloads at least 10 of them on the pasture a day. they are excellent fertilizers, wherever one lands it stimulates growth, creating a clump of grass. but count patties are much more than fertilizer

and one wild meadow in the tell by geese and nature reserve near fryeburg, insect expert. yo and buddha and biologist how but nichol are searching for fresh dung. here we have a fairly old patty. mike, you can tell the surface of the party is dried out and has a relatively thick crushed what we are already able to see. the 1st larval stage is developing inside. you can see that here, fly larvae like that, that grows in the dung, isn't turned food for other insects. we mainly find these bugs inside amazon here for example, we have a clown beetle on, it's relatively small, but there are significantly larger species. 2 of these are purely predatory english . they have a very large mouths, similar to a butcher's cutting machine limit with which they chop larvae into small pieces and then eat them. this is a very complex food, web cow patties are little islands of life. the dung provides food and shelter

for thousands of creatures. the colonization of a patty starts after a couple of seconds of his existence already with the arrival of dung flies that want to lay their eggs in the warm. patti's too soon, the 1st dung beetles appear. they did passageways for their offspring, these and turn our prey for spiders and predatory bunks. 2 weeks later, the earthworms arrive soon the patties themselves will disappear in their environs . there is always lots of life. birds and other meadow inhabitants, such as lizards come to help themselves to the insects dog, dog tags, o, predatory beetles, whole birds, and then birds of prey has been thus with those represent 5 tropic levels. as i didn't know what a patty generates has huge functional complexity. one's a lot. and if the patties weren't there window, if the cows stayed in the shed,

then we would lose elements of the landscape. room. one grazing cow produces up to one ton of dung per month. that generates 20 kilograms of insects, which can feed 10 kilograms of birds. 3, storks, for example. or 30 starlings for this equation to work out natural farming is required. like an ta burgeson. mm hm. mm hm. ah, here 40 animals live on 70, hector is a forest, and 30 heck dares of pasture. it's never mode. ah,

today, how about nichol wants to take stock of who was living on this pasture. with a modified leaf blower, he vacuums up a sample and finds over a 100 different species. it isn't open this sample there. often cicadas in bugs is interval. there are also beatles and very often spider let you, british even everything that jumps around above ground behind you look inside and you can't imagine it. you can no longer find that kind of diversity in a normal meadow that there is a normal cow pasture nearby. the meadows of this operation were recently mode. the biologist takes another sample for comparison. and he can't even find a dozen species as if you really are far fewer kinds insect. it's

a disaster for insects and birds. there's almost nothing left. and what about the col paddy's themself? many animals in this pastor are given medication to ward off parasites, which affects the done at the zenith. i and i think i don't see a single beetle. i don't see any beetle holes. low, no creatures at all. rockdale county back to the wild meadows and the nature reserve habit. nickel believes we could easily preserve this wonderful realm of flora and fauna. in men dodge function, it's just 5 percent of germany. as pastors were wild 1000 more extensive all season and past year lease must be insect life would get a massive grooves. reflecting even on the smallest spaces like this one, we could double or triple biodiversity, and species and individual numbers within 2 or 3 years that i've seen it work here, is it? it tries to say, ah,

none of that would have been possible without the humble cow patty. oh, more from the wonderful world of science, visit our website, or join us on twitter. that's all for now from tomorrow to day. go to venice, signs paragraph. please do join us again next week until then. date. curious with ah, with

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