This week we’ll be diving into the world of whales - as well as dolphins and other cetaceans - with biologist and filmmaker Tom Mustill, author of the fascinating book How to Speak Whale. I first learned about Tom’s work in 2023 when I attended a talk he gave at the British Library, and he began with the story of how on a kayaking trip he was almost crushed by a breaching humpback whale.

After that experience, and the discovery that the whale may actually have saved his life by twisting in the air to avoid him, Tom became fascinated by the inner lives of these creatures, and by the exploding potential of technology, including AI, to monitor and understand what they’re getting up to beneath the waves. And there was one question he wanted to answer most of all about their complex communications: could we ever learn to understand them, even talk to them?

That might seem a crazy question, but the availability of massive amounts of data, combined with AI algorithms, is now opening a door to decoding the patterns and structures in the vocalisations of all kinds of species, like a kind of Google Translate but for animals.

I caught up with Tom to talk about the latest results, as well as what it’s like to be caught underneath a falling humpback - and why we should stop comparing animals’ abilities to ours, and instead open our minds to other kinds of experiences, to the alien horizons of their lives and worlds.

Tom’s home page

https://www.tommustill.com/

Tom’s book, How To Speak Whale: A voyage into the future of animal communication

https://www.tommustill.com/how-to-speak-whale

Footage of the humpback whale landing on Tom and Charlotte

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee79_7CZ0uM

How to be a whale: a half-hour listening journey

https://www.tommustill.com/howtobeawhale

Project CETI

https://www.projectceti.org/

Earth Species Project

https://www.earthspecies.org/

Happy Whale

https://happywhale.com/home

Tom’s humpback

https://happywhale.com/individual/1437

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This week, we're digging into how living creatures – including us – sense and respond to magnetic fields with quantum biologist Margaret Ahmad of the University of Sorbonne in Paris.

For decades, biologists knew about striking examples of species apparently navigating by Earth’s magnetic field, from monarch butterflies to loggerhead turtles to racing pigeons. Yet for years, many physicists said any ‘magnetosense’ was impossible, insisting the Earth’s field is far too weak to affect any biological processes within living cells. And yet, life really had found a way, and Margaret was one of the key researchers who showed how.

Back in the 1990s, she discovered a blue light receptor in plants, part of a mysterious family of proteins called cryptochromes, and she has since has pioneered research showing how these receptors don’t just sense light but magnetic fields, too. Through quantum physical effects, these proteins magnify impossibly weak magnetic signals into measurable biological responses in a cell.

For Margaret, this connection with the magnetic fields around us is a fundamental characteristic of all life, that should transform our thinking about everything from bird migration, to plant growth, to health effects in humans – and might even lead to revolutionary medical treatments. I spoke to her about her research, what it’s like doing science ‘out on a limb’, as she puts it, and what to do when the evidence leads you off the beaten track…

Margaret Ahmad at Sorbonne University

https://www.ibps.sorbonne-universite.fr/en/ibps/directory/17216-Margaret-Ahmad

Hypersensitivity to man-made electromagnetic fields: 2024 case report

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39108419/

2024 review on cryptochromes

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38495372/

New Scientist story I wrote about Ahmad’s work in 2020 (£)

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2251835

2021 review on the bird magnetic compass

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physiology/articles/10.3389/fphys.2021.667000/full

Roswitha Wiltschko’s lab

https://www.goethe-university-frankfurt.de/47093824/Physiology_and_Ecology_of_Behaviour

Some bacteria sense magnetic fields via magnetite crystals. It's possible these play a role in other species too, maybe even humans

https://www.eneuro.org/content/6/2/ENEURO.0483-18.2019.abstract

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This week, we delve into one of the ancient world's biggest mysteries: the Herculaneum scrolls. Computer scientist Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky talks about a journey that has taken him from Mars to Beowulf to the Dead Sea and beyond. AI has been key to finally reading what's inside the scrolls -- but this is a story about human ingenuity, and what it takes to make an impossible dream come true.

These are hundreds of Greek and Latin papyri, buried by the Vesuvius eruption in 79 AD and dug up in the 1700s. The scrolls were crushed and carbonised; when anyone tried to read them, they crumbled. Scholars had to accept the rest would never be opened.

This is the only intact library we have from the classical world – complete texts, direct from the pens of ancient scribes. Yet we can’t read them.

Until now. These unopenable scrolls are now being read, through the Vesuvius Challenge, which offers prizes for teams using AI to find the ink in X-ray scans. I’ve written several articles on this, and the pace of discovery has been jawdropping: scholars could soon read the whole library.

But solving this problem hasn't just been about switching on AI. For me, the truly fascinating story is the 20 years of imagination, invention and persuasion that led to this point, all essentially due to one man who persevered even when everyone else thought the idea was crazy.

Brent Seales

https://educelab.engr.uky.edu/w-brent-seales

Vesuvius Challenge

https://scrollprize.org/

Schmidt Sciences

https://www.schmidtsciences.org/focus-area-ai/

My articles:

Scaling up the Vesuvius Challenge: Apr 2025

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01087-y

AI could rewrite history: Jan 2025

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-04161-z

First passages revealed: Feb 2024

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00346-8

Brent Seales' quest: Jul 2018

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/buried-ash-vesuvius-scrolls-are-being-read-new-xray-technique-180969358/

Journal papers:

Reading En-Gedi scroll

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.1601247

Recovering Herculaneum ink

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0215775

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