In this episode of Tiny Show and Tell Us, we cover a recent story about how spending time outdoors can help keep kids from becoming nearsighted and the mysterious absence of skeletons at the site of the Battle of Waterloo despite over 10,000 soldiers dying (and how the beet sugar industry may have played a gruesome role).
Want your Tiny Show and Tell featured? Email tinymatters@acs.org with some science news you’re itching to share, a cool science factoid you love telling friends about, or maybe even a personal science story. In every 'Tiny Show and Tell Us' episode, we’ll read your emails out loud and then go a bit deeper into the tiny science of it all.
Transcript of this Episode
Sam Jones: Welcome to episode two of Tiny Show and Tell Us. I'm Sam Jones. I'm the exec producer of Tiny Matters, and I'm here today with my wonderful co-host, Deboki Chakravarti. For those of you listening who are not regular Tiny Matters listeners, first off, we're really glad that you're here. And second, you should know that there's this thing that we do at the end of every regular Tiny Matters episode called The Tiny Show and Tell.
And it's where Deboki and I each bring a piece of science news or a story that we recently read and we share it with each other. And now we want you to share with us, hence the name of this bonus episode series, Tiny Show and Tell Us.
Deboki Chakravarti: For these bonus episodes, send an email to tinymatters@acs.org with a science story, some science news you can't stop thinking about, maybe a science factoid, and we're going to read it aloud and then dive a bit deeper. So that's tinymatters@acs.org. We'll put that in the episode description as well.
Sam Jones: And before we dive in, I want to give a huge thank you to Anne Hylden for doing research for this episode. She did research for the previous episode as well. Anne is a science writer and chemist, and she's working with Tiny Matters for the next few months. All right, Deboki, episode two. Let's do it.
Deboki Chakravarti: Okay. I think I go first this time?
Sam Jones: Let's do it. Yeah, we'll switch off until we forget, which will be approximately episode four. So please go ahead.
Deboki Chakravarti: It's going to be very obvious when we're recording multiple of these at once versus when there's been time in between recordings.
Sam Jones: Yeah, give us a few weeks, maybe a month while Deboki is on maternity leave, and we will forget everything and it'll be starting from scratch. All right.
Deboki Chakravarti: Clean slate.
Sam Jones: I'm excited to hear yours, so go for it.
Deboki Chakravarti: My story for today is from listener Mary Anne, and she writes, "Here's something that I just learned, children who spend two hours a day outside have a much reduced risk of developing nearsightedness. At first, I thought it was about giving their eyes a chance to relax and to not focus on books or screens. Then I found out that it's all about being outdoors, and it doesn't matter what they're doing.
Kids could be playing or reading or doing homework, which is pretty cool," which I agree because I don't have good vision. And I definitely grew up an indoor kid, and so I was very intrigued by this. My parents keep making fun of me for being the one with a bad vision. And now I'm like, well, maybe if I had gone outside.
Sam Jones: Maybe you should have told me to go outdoors, mom.
Deboki Chakravarti: Exactly. My mom's going to listen to this, and she's going to be like, "I did make you go outside," and she's probably correct.
Sam Jones: Actually forced you and your eyes would be worse. No.
Deboki Chakravarti: That's really the sad thing is my eyes could be worse probably is what really I should be taking from this. Okay, so to start, what is nearsightedness or myopia? So basically our eyes work by focusing light. And so that depends on the power of our lens, and then the distance of the lens to the retina, which is called the axial length, and how that light gets focused then dictates the blurriness of what we see.
So the focal point of what we see depends on that axial length. And if that axial length gets too long, then the focal point will be in front of the retina instead of on it. And apparently this creates blurriness.
Sam Jones: Oh, weird.
Deboki Chakravarti: I'm bad at light and image science, so basically my understanding is there's just a difference of where the focal point should be, and that's what's creating that issue.
Sam Jones: Interesting.
Deboki Chakravarti: And so the other thing that's interesting is that when you're born, you actually start out nearsighted. And then over the first three months, there are changes in the shape of your lens that then make you hyperopic or farsighted. But then again, your eye shifts to what should be perfect vision slowly. That shift happens until you're around 15 months old.
Sam Jones: To be honest, being a baby sounds exhausting and horrifying. I'm so glad I don't remember being a baby. Can you imagine if you remembered being born?
Deboki Chakravarti: I think about it all the time, because I have a human in me where I'm like, what are you aware of? What's going on?
Sam Jones: And then you're born and you can't see far away, and then you can't see up close. And it's like, who are these people? What are these sounds? Anyways, please continue, but it sounds terrible.
Deboki Chakravarti: I mean, everything I've been learning about what it is to be a baby makes it sound horrifying. But also, I guess their needs are taken care of. So I don't know, maybe they have it good.
Sam Jones: I don't know. I'm cool not remembering being a baby.
Deboki Chakravarti: Well, the good news is that obviously you grew up. And as you grew up, Sam, the thickness of that lens changed, and that had to be coordinated with how the length of your eyeball was also changing so that you can actually see well. And so that's regulated by a lot of mechanisms in the body. And one idea that scientists have had based on just different experiments is that the eye itself can actually trigger biochemical responses to stimulate eye growth to compensate for issues in how that light is getting focused.
And so this process can happen more in kids and adolescents because they're still growing. So there's more of a chance for there to be some flux in how their vision is shifting so that maybe their power is changing, but it can get fixed a little bit more because they're young. There's just a lot going on as you grow up. Related to the question, it does seem based on clinical trials that kids who spend more time outside do have a lower risk of nearsightedness, but it's hard to figure out exactly why.
Because there's just so many factors related to how your eyes are developing, the light, the activity, and there's also a lot of other factors that drive nearsightedness as well. If you have parents with myopia, you're probably more likely just genetically to have it. Also, doing a lot of reading can make you more likely to get nearsightedness. So it's not clear what factor is most important. And obviously scientists have their own opinions on what they think is the most important.
And also ultimately, it's probably a combination. It's probably not just one thing that's driving the whole thing. It's a complicated process, and so knowing exactly what factor could be creating nearsightedness is just never probably going to come down to one obvious factor. And so for humans living in dim lighting or spending a lot of time in dim lighting worsens what's called our accommodative response, which is how our lens flexes to see things that are close to our face. And so that leads to blurriness.
There's also apparently evidence that using glasses to correct for nearsightedness during childhood can actually lead to faster nearsighted progression. So there's research being done to figure out whether there are other correction methods or even non-correction methods that might be able to slow down the progress of nearsightedness through those feedback mechanisms that I mentioned earlier to regulate proper eye growth. But it seems like we're a ways away from being able to do anything clinically.
Sam Jones: I will say, when I was in high school, that's when I started to need glasses, and I felt like the prescription I was given was way too strong for what I needed. But within the next year, it was like, oh no, that works for you now. And it's like, yeah, but I don't think that was needed. And ultimately, I got LASIK a few years ago, and I love it so much. I'm like, why didn't I do this five or six years ago?
You want to wait until it seems like your eyes are super stable. But I'd been at the same pretty bad prescription for three or four years, and so I decided it's time. And it's the best decision I ever made. I love not having glasses and having to put contacts in. But yeah, so I will just say, I don't know, there's no way for me to prove it, but it definitely felt like this is too much.
And the doctor was like, no, you need it. And actually, she was a horrible eye doctor, and I got rid of her. Even as a 15-year-old, I was like, this woman blows. Can we please not? But anyways, so please continue.
Deboki Chakravarti: I mean, it's interesting because weirdly when I was little, I really wanted glasses. The great tragedy of my life for a while was that I didn't need glasses. And then I finally needed glasses. I think I probably was 10 or something when I got glasses. And so I was very excited, and now I'm like, well, would I have been better off? But I don't remember how bad my vision was at that point, so maybe I still needed it.
But I'm really curious what some of these other methods that people are exploring are, because it does make sense that, okay, giving kids glasses at a time where their body is still really adaptable and might be able to correct a little bit, maybe we're interfering with that process. But then again, obviously sometimes kids need glasses.
Sam Jones: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You want a kid to be able to see. So then with the outdoor stuff, how does that play into all of this?
Deboki Chakravarti: So there is this idea that bright light can protect against nearsightedness because bright light triggers dopamine, which can inhibit axial growth. And so this is the idea underlying the idea of going outdoors being good for you. And so Maryanne actually linked us to the NPR article that she had found this fact from, and there's some really interesting stories around the research from this. And so there were researchers in Australia who were really curious about the fact that myopia rates in East Asia were a lot higher than they are in Sydney.
So we did a study and found that kids in Sydney who were outdoors more were less likely to be myopic, and also that they were less likely to become myopic later. And that study was published in 2008. And so an ophthalmologist in Taiwan named Dr. Pei-Chang Wu, he came across the study and he had a son starting out in first grade, and he was worried about the high rates of nearsightedness he had seen in his patients. And he attributed it to this academic culture where students would usually spend recess inside doing homework.
And so he actually asked his son's elementary school to up the amount of time they spent outdoors. And this is kind of wild to me because I'm very curious about the ethics of this. He also got a control school to compare to, and they found that when they increased the time spent outdoors, his son's school had half as many new nearsightedness cases in general. And so it seemed to be helping. And so he did build on this research, and he got the Ministry of Education to try and get schools to have their kids spend at least two hours outside every day.
And the program started in 2010. In 2011, 50% of students had nearsightedness, and it went down to 45.1% by 2015, which is a pretty good result. I think that sounds good. I'm curious, long-term, how that trend has maybe continued, not continued. Obviously, COVID may or may not have had an effect too. Maybe kids were spending more time outside, less time. I'm curious what that might've done. But yeah, it did make me feel like, oh, I should have gone outside more.
Sam Jones: I feel like I was definitely an outdoor kid, but I think it was in my mid-teens that I became, I guess, more of an indoor kid. I was a swimmer and I was swimming indoors all the time. It's just like I wasn't out in the sun as much.
Deboki Chakravarti: Again, there's so many other factors that also control nearsightedness where it's like it could also just be genetics or it could be just reading a lot. I assume you were also a reader, but it is really interesting to me that this theory is that it comes down to dopamine, that maybe the bright light triggers dopamine.
Sam Jones: Oh, that's cool. For someone who's had horrible eyes and gone through LASIK and other things, my understanding of how our eyeballs and all of their connections work is so minimal.
Deboki Chakravarti: It's tough. It's tough.
Sam Jones: Thank you, Deboki. I like that. There are a lot of good reasons to be outdoors, but this is just another one to add to the list.
Deboki Chakravarti: For sure. Totally.
Sam Jones: So I'm going to take a real left turn here with mine because my story is about grave robbing.
Deboki Chakravarti: Oh fun. For eyeballs.
Sam Jones: They were going for skeletons, not... I feel like eyeballs, you got to get in there real quick because those aren't going to last that long.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah, for sure.
Sam Jones: It's really dark. Okay, so this is an email from listener Matt, and I'm going to read as if I am Matt. I've been truly fascinated with an article I read in Science Magazine a month or two ago. Archeologists have been excavating battlefields from the many, many wars in Europe fought in the 1800s and 1900s, and yet they have found surprisingly few bones. In the 10 years they have been studying Napoleon's final battle, the Battle of Waterloo, they found two bodies, yet over 10,000 people were killed and almost as many horses.
Where are those skeletons? It turns out this brutal century and a half, so late 1700s to 1920s, was a time of industrialized grave robbing. The bodies left from what was often two foreign armies that would then fight in a third country had their bones processed to get phosphates to make fertilizer. I'd read this past winter that the earliest factories making baking powder required shipments of bone for the phosphate, and I was wondering where the bones came from. Now I know one source.
So thank you, Matt, for writing in. This is both alarming and fascinating. So Matt also sent us the article that he mentioned from Science Magazine that he just couldn't stop thinking about, and it's an interview with an archeologist and one of the authors of a new book about this topic called Bones of Contention: The Industrial Exploitation of Human Bones in the Modern Age. So I've left a link to the book in this episode's description, if you really want to dive deep.
And I will say we also have, little plug, we also have a Tiny Matters episode from May 2022 that has a little bit of overlap with this topic. So if you find this interesting, definitely check out our episode titled Body Farms Anthropogenic Research Facilities Are Teaching Us About Life After Death. All right, so let's talk about this. The Battle of Waterloo was fought in what's now Waterloo, Belgium in June 1815, and it marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars, which were a series of wars where a French military and political leader Napoleon Bonaparte was wilding out all over Europe, warring with everyone.
Truly, he was a terrible human. Millions of people died in these wars. He was horrible to women. He reinstated slavery in France's Caribbean colonies. Didn't know that, but I digress. In this final battle at Waterloo, at least 10,000 men were reported to have been killed, and researchers have been excavating Waterloo since 2012. And like Matt wrote in his email, they've only found two bodies. That many skeletons don't just disappear.
And so it got the authors of this book, historians Bernard Wilkin of Belgium and Robin Schäfer of Germany, I'm sure it's like Schäfer or something, so apologies, Robin, it got them thinking, did someone take them? So they start looking into this and they find a number of things that would point to grave robbing. So first, in the 1830s, the Waterloo area became a hotspot for sugar beet production. I didn't know this.
Deboki Chakravarti: I was not expecting that to be where this was going.
Sam Jones: Yes, this is going to go in some weird twisty, turny directions, but it's fun and interesting and gross. Okay, so first, in the 1830s, the Waterloo area became a hotspot for sugar beet production. I didn't know this, but you can actually get sugar from sugar beets. Sounds like a duh kind of thing, but I don't know. I think of cane sugar and I think about... Yeah, I wasn't thinking about it.
But apparently you need to extract the sugar juice from the beets, purify it, heat it, ultimately you create this granulated sugar. So these two sugar factories very close to the battlefield pop up around 15 ish years after this battle. So do you know what was needed back then to purify or filter that sugar?
Deboki Chakravarti: You're going to say bones, aren't you?
Sam Jones: Burnt bones. In other words, bone char. So bone char is created by charring bones in a low oxygen environment. It essentially just leaves activated carbon behind, which can remove mineral impurities like calcium and magnesium sulfates from the sugar beet juice. Also, activated carbon is what you find in a lot of water filters. This is just like old school activated carbon where you have to burn bones to get it.
So the activated carbon in bone char can also help remove discoloration from the sugar before crystallization. Fortunately, now companies will use a combination of activated carbon that doesn't come from skeletons and ion-exchange resins to achieve the same thing.
Deboki Chakravarti: I hope so.
Sam Jones: Phosphates in bone were also important for fertilizer, as Matt mentioned. So there's a couple different things going on, but in this article, they talk a lot about sugar beets and the sugar beet industry. So these are a couple different pieces of evidence. But then at the same time, there were a number of official documents and stories of travelers who said that they saw people exhuming corpses in different European countries.
There were advertisements asking people for "animal bones," but with no specification on the animal. And these companies apparently pay really well for bones that were given to them to be able to continue the sugar process. And so for farmers living near these battlefields, which weren't protected and easy to access, it was a way to make money.
Deboki Chakravarti: Sure was.
Sam Jones: Yeah. If I'm playing devil's advocate, I guess you could feel for some people who are really desperate to make money, and they were also thinking like, "Hey, I'm digging up the grave of a soldier from another country who came here to fight another army from another place or came here to kill the people in my country or claim my land or my country." But also there's this huge ick factor.
There's this one account from a reporter in Hamburg who in 1821 wrote, "In the early morning, one could see the bone collectors in their hundreds with pickaxes and spades and supplied with roomy sacks rushing out the gate and out into the fields where the French were lying and no interdiction," which totally is not a word that's used anymore, "and no interdiction of the authority could put a check on this atrocity."
So yeah, it's still pretty gnarly. I don't know. You're exhuming what was once a person from a grave, and then you're selling their parts essentially to make a buck. So there's a bunch of different variables here. You have grave robbing, particularly for skeletons. That's booming. And then on top of that, there's this explosion of the sugar industry and development of sugar beet production, particularly at the Waterloo battle site.
And so in combination, all signs really point to human remains being dug up and sold. All of this is pretty alarming, but apparently also at some point, bones in Europe started to run out. I guess these processes required a ton of bones. And so European countries, of course, started exploiting other parts of the world because that's just how it goes. That's just the horrific way that things are and have been.
The French went and dug up cemeteries in Algeria and shipped the bones to sugar factories in Marseilles. We know the British imported mummies from Egypt on an industrial scale, which is just all of it's terrible, all of it's horrific behavior.
Deboki Chakravarti: Good note to end on.
Sam Jones: Yeah, I guess I have one more little thing. I guess one of the authors in the interview said that there's good evidence that grave robbing for bones was still happening after World War I, but soon there were more laws protecting battlefields, at least in some countries, and I want to say probably European countries, so cannot comment on the other stuff that was going on, but those sprung up around in the 1920s.
So this type of grave robbing today, at least in European countries, in the US and some other parts of the world, it would be very obvious and you couldn't get away with the same thing. There are a lot of countries getting away with a lot of really horrific things in a lot of other places, so I can't comment on that. But this does seem to be something that is not happening in Europe or the United States anymore. And I guess there were some people who said, "Oh, well, some of this was also happening following the Civil War in the US," but there isn't as much evidence for that.
Deboki Chakravarti: Oh, interesting.
Sam Jones: But I thought this was just so fascinating.
Deboki Chakravarti: This feels like the kind of thing where you would see a sign somewhere being like, "No grave robbing at this battlefield." And then you'd be like, what is the story that led to this sign? And now we know.
Sam Jones: Yeah, it's really fascinating, and it's so hard also proving that this happened. And I guess there was something that I read briefly about how one of the archeologists who is talking in the story somewhere else maybe mentioned that if a grave has been dug up, you can tell based on the condition of the soil and the coloration of the soil sometimes if something's been dug up. But I mean, it's been a long time.
But then on top of it, what if a lot of it were mass graves where it's just harder to really be able to tell? But then I think he also mentioned somewhere that there could actually be evidence, like images that have been taken where people are trying to excavate areas. And they just haven't looked at them correctly at this point to be able to say like, "Oh, no, look at that. Look at this physical difference here in the soil. This would indicate that it was dug up," kind of thing.
I thought this was so dark and fascinating. It gives real Sweeny Todd vibes. Let's give you your sugar. How did you get that sugar? Oh, by grinding up bones and using them to process it. Oh, there was a battle. That's interesting. There's a big sugar plant that just popped up right...
Deboki Chakravarti: You know what we should do? We should open up a sugar beet factory.
Sam Jones: Yeah, capitalism, man. That's my story. Actually, that's Matt's story. So thank you, Matt.
Deboki Chakravarti: I feel like between this and our last Tiny Show and Tell Us, you were talking about parrotfish poop, and I feel like there's a weird body horror kind of thing going.
Sam Jones: Yeah, I think that's my essence is finding really bizarre/warped stuff to talk about, and a lot of it has to do with death and medical history and feces. So I'm hitting all the important points here.
Deboki Chakravarti: For sure.
Sam Jones: Thanks for tuning in to Tiny Show and Tell Us, a bonus episode from Tiny Matters, a production of the American Chemical Society. And thank you again to Anne Hylden for her work on this episode.
Deboki Chakravarti: Send us an email to be featured in a future Tiny Show and Tell Us episode, tinymatters@acs.org. You can find Sam on social @samjscience, and you can find me @okidoki_boki. See you next time.
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