Hi listeners, Benjamin here.
Welcome to the Nature Briefing podcast, the Friday show where we talk about a couple of stories we've been reading in the Nature Briefing, which is Nature's daily roundup of the latest science news.
And joining me today is none other than Nick Petrich-Howe.
Nick, thanks for being here.
Well, thanks for having me, Ben.
So, a couple of stories then, as I say.
Why don't you go first this week, Nick?
What are you bringing?
Well, this week I've got a story that I think a lot of people will be happy to hear.
It is a story about how caffeine could help slow cognitive decline and stave off dementia.
That is good news, and I'm very excited to hear this, Nick.
Go ahead.
Well, before we get to the good news, I should puncture it slightly, as this is only observational data.
So this is not based on an experiment.
This is based on long-term surveys of people.
So there's only so much we can actually do safe from this, so we should interpret it with caution.
But getting to the story itself, this was something i was reading about in nature and basically a study has looked at 130 000 people over 43 years so a really long-term study and found that moderate caffeine intake so one to two cups of tea or two to three cups of coffee is is linked to slower cognitive decline and less chance of developing dementia, things like Alzheimer's.
Well, that sounds like good news then, Nick.
And you say this is a big study then.
Talk about some of the data they included.
So this study leveraged two decades-long health studies.
So this was the Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals' Follow-Up Study.
So these are for health professionals, and it's tracked their caffeine drinking habits for over 43 years, as I said, and as well as documenting their diet, people also filled out questionnaires about their cognitive function and they took tests as well for a more objective measure.
So they did things like recount strings of words, which can help detect signs of dementia.
And you were saying here then that there was a correlation seen between caffeine intake then and the results of these medics' tests.
Yes, but it's not quite a straight line.
The biggest effects were seen around this moderate consumption.
As I say, two to three cups of coffee or one to two cups of tea a day.
Lower levels of consumption also had some benefits versus people who were not drinking caffeine or even people who were drinking decaffeinated drinks, which suggests that it's actually the caffeine itself doing the business, not other things that are in coffee and tea.
And this did hold up for higher levels as well.
But what I must say is past work has shown the opposite.
So we need to interpret this with a little bit of caution.
But in this particular study, those people who drank large amounts of caffeine this is maybe up to five cups of coffee a day they had an 18 lower dementia risk.
Any more than one cup a day and I'm running through a brick wall, Nick.
So I think I'm probably in a moderate intake.
Do the researchers offer any insights as to what might be going on here?
No, the study itself doesn't go into the mechanisms.
That'll be something for future studies.
But one interesting aspect of this study is it also looked at a genetic variant that's associated with Alzheimer's.
So this is a variant called APOE4.
And if you have this, it increases your risk of developing Alzheimer's.
And the study showed that even for people who had this...
The protective effects of caffeine still seem to carry over, which one of the researchers interviewed for this article thought was particularly interesting.
But as you say, this is correlative.
This isn't saying that X equals Y, for example.
Yes, and the effect size here is quite small and there are lots of different ways that cognitive function can change and there are a lot of different factors going on.
And as this is an observational study, they weren't able to control for all of these factors.
It's possible that people may have been taking medications and things like that that happen to coincide with them drinking caffeine.
So there's a lot more to unpick here, but it could be that caffeine is part of the puzzle.
Well working in a newsroom that is fueled often by caffeine, and when the coffee machine broke, there was almost a mutiny.
I'm sure our colleagues will be reading this with some interest.
But let's move on to story number two today, Nick.
And it's a story that I read about in Scientific American, based on a paper in the journal Antiquity.
And it's about some research looking to figure out the forgotten rules of an ancient board game.
Oh, that's cool.
Because I guess yeah, the question is how on earth do you know what people were doing or how they were playing this?
Because presumably there aren't instructions with it.
Absolutely right.
This is one of those fascinating ones, Nick.
I know you're a big board game fan, and so am I. And it turns out our forebears were as well.
Throughout history, there are examples of board games being played.
They're mentioned in ancient texts.
They're shown in art.
There was a story here in the UK about a medieval D6 that was discovered recently.
So, yeah, there's plenty of evidence that folk love playing games across cultures as well.
But what we know about them is... kind of what remains, right?
They're identifiable as games or they're written down.
And so they resemble something that we're familiar with.
And it's likely that many more objects formed, either maybe a game piece or part of a game board, something like that, but we don't really have any context for what it was or how it was used, and often parts of these games were made of sticks or shells or things that don't tend to last very well in the historical record, and working out what something may have been is very much central to this story.
It's a bit of a detective story.
Well, when were people playing this?
What sort of period in history is this from?
So this is from the Roman era, but the story as we know it starts in 2020, when a researcher by the name of Walter Christ was walking around a Dutch museum that was devoted to Roman artefacts.
Now, with wonderful serendipity, Walter studies ancient board games and he came across this object that rather... stood out to him there's a picture of it in the paper and we'll link to that and the new story in the show notes and this item was a piece of gray limestone like an oval maybe 20 centimeters across and it was found in the netherlands in the place that was once an important roman settlement And this limestone piece had some things that really kind of stood out in terms of it was essentially neatly finished.
This was a thing.
It wasn't just a random stone.
It was maybe 1,500 years old.
And it had a number of lines scored into it and some wear on top of the stone surface which looked a bit like something was dragged across it, maybe a playing piece.
And so Walter was like, aye, aye, this looks like it might be a game.
I need to find out more about it.
And so what was Walter's first move then?
I guess to try and figure out how this might have been used, or what kind of board game this was.
Well, hitting the books kind of came up blank.
You know what it was, what it was called, how it was played.
And so the team behind this work.
Then, in their paper, they've described a way of combining essentially classical archaeology techniques with AI to try and get to the bottom of what's going on.
And so what they've done is they've got two AI agents to play against each other, using the information that they've managed to get from this stone and the lines on it, and using rule sets from known European games.
And they got the AIs to play lots and lots of rounds of these different games, a thousand rounds of each rule set and look to see how the moves of pieces may have matched up to the wear on the board.
And so, after these agents played the games, they found the one that most closely matched the wear, I'm guessing.
Bingo.
And actually, they found nine rule sets that seemed consistent with this wear.
Now, these are all variations of a type of what's known as a blocking game, which is a game where you move your pieces and try and prevent the opponent from being able to move their piece, to sort of trap them in.
And these sorts of games were played in the 19th and 20th centuries in parts of Scandinavia.
And researchers thought that really they dated back to early medieval times.
But this suggests that this game was played significantly differently earlier, as i say, in the roman era, and the team have called the game ludus choreovali, which is latin for the game, from choreovalum, which is the city where this stone originated.
And what's quite neat is you can actually play this game online, although my boss might be listening.
I have yet to attempt that, but i'm going to give it a go sometime.
As i say, i love board games.
I'm certainly going to give that a go as well, but to play on the opposing team for a second.
How can they be sure that this is what the Romans were playing, because I guess, like I say, there's no rule books or anything that they can go and check this against.
Well, absolutely.
Without access to a time machine, it's going to be hard to know what was going on and how this game was being played.
But I think this is the researcher's interpretation of what may be the case.
Of course, it may be different.
But I think what it shows is that combining these tools kind of opens up a new way of looking at things.
There's lots of objects that... hey, that might be related to a game, but it's impossible to know.
But I think it also adds a bit more texture, a bit more colour to what life was like on the outposts of the Roman Empire all that time ago.
Yeah, I must say, I'd never imagined Romans playing board games and stuff, but they were humans as well.
So it isn't necessarily surprising, but an interesting flavour to the history, as you say.
But I think that's all we've got time for on this week's Briefing Chat.
Listeners.
For more on those stories, you can check out the show notes, where we'll link to them, and we'll also link to the Nature Briefing itself, where you can sign up and get more of these stories delivered straight to your inbox.
Don't forget, of course, you can reach out to us on social media.
We're at Nature Podcast.
We'll be back again next week.
In the meantime, I've been Benjamin Thompson.
And I've been Nick Pettichow.
Thanks for listening.
