 Mm-hmm. Okay, it looks like are we here? Are we here? Have we started the show? Yay. All right. Thank you for that Q identity for So without any further ado We shall start the show in Three two this is Is Twists this week in science episode number 721 recorded on Wednesday May 15th 2019 understanding Antarctic ice Hey everyone, I'm dr. Kiki and tonight on the show. We are going to fill your head with the moon sticky-skinned and avians and STDs but first Not prepared For this There we go, okay, okay, I can't recover. I must Disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer when wandering through the world take note because everything you see is noteworthy in some way Yes, yes, there is too much information all it wants to pay attention to everything But eventually you may find yourself focusing in on something of interest and if you pursue this interest It can with time and study make you an expert on the subject. This of course does not mean you will know It all but your knowledge will not be alone an ecologist might not know much about Psychology but know a great deal about the woodling creatures that inhabit the forest The geologists may not see the forest for the trees But have insights into the history of the region and the dynamics of the dirt beneath the roots and leaves if the Astronomers seems moody on a sunny day It's just because they are waiting impatiently for a better view of the Milky Way The physicists can appear and likely sort of explore staying inside hunched over a keyboard Eyes glued to a screen for several hours But they might be adventuring anywhere from the big bang to the tiniest traces of subatomic particles escaping a super collider and While the psychologist might not know much about quantum microgravity They might understand ways in which the ecologist might better communicate to their spouse And at some point when enough of us have pursued our interest to the point of expertise We can share our insights with each other when that day comes We will all norm know more about the world around us than any one of us had time to take notice of alone Because we are never alone as long as we have this weekend science coming up next Go to find the knowledge I seek I want to know what's happening What's happening? What's happening this weekend science? What's happening? What's happening? What's happening this weekend science? Good I am Hugh Kiki and Blair And a good science to you two Justin Blair and everyone out there Welcome to another episode of this weekend science. Let's write twisters back Once again more science and our little science grab bag of fun We're here to talk with each other and with you about it all So I hope you're ready for a great show We have a bunch of fun stories ahead and an interview about Antarctic ice It's going to be amazing I have stories about the moon The moon Whale jeans And Justin what do you have for us? I've got more AT&T Neanderthal news flashes A sticky Scandinavian situation And why slow might kill you faster than speed That I would like to know Blair Animal Corner What's in there? I have the aforementioned STDs No you can't wait for those I have test bias in animals And I have catapulting spiders Catapulting spiders Oh more fun with spiders For all of you spider files out there Alright as we jump into the show I would love to remind you that if you have not yet subscribed It's not so hard to do You can find us on YouTube You can also find us at twist.org For information you can also find us Any good place that good podcasts are found Alright so now let's dive into our interview I would love to introduce our guest Dr. Christina Holba Dr. Holba is a geophysicist Who studies how and why polar ice sheets change over time She's professor and dean of surveying At the University of Tahago in New Zealand And the program lead for an investigation Into the vulnerability of the Ross ice shelf In Antarctica to the influences of a warming world Dr. Holba thank you so much for joining us Hello everybody Good evening Oh I love that yes You are joining us from New Zealand so for yourself It is daytime right It's a rainy afternoon Perfect We're getting a storm from the southern ocean So I'm very happy Just like Antarctica is right here Yes it's being brought to you By the winds, the waters and the winds So I would love to know I mean Antarctica is this distant far off continent That very few people on this planet Ever get to visit It is a focus of your study When did you first travel to Antarctica And why? My first trip was in 1991 I like to say that in front of classes Because most of my students weren't born then I'm very old I went there as a master's student actually I was geological engineering As an undergraduate And when I thought about what kinds of jobs You could get as a geological engineer I thought oh I don't want to do mineral extraction Necessarily I don't want to build dams I think I need to stay in school for a while And when I would study as an undergraduate I'd go sit in the stacks in the library Way back in a quiet place And the books that were along the shelves Where I sat were the bound editions Of the Journal of Glaciology And when I needed a break I'd pull on off the shelf and I'd have a read And it turned out that it was all about physics Which I loved and mountains Which I loved I thought okay I'll do that The only way I knew anything about it Was that I happened to read a book The one that happened to be right near you I'll just read about glaciers Let's do this I learned about glaciers in my geology classes But what Glaciology The study of the physics of ice And why it changes Was just a really interesting world And of course where I work now There are no mountains at all But there's a lot of ice There is a lot of ice So Antarctica There are glaciers all over the planet Why did Antarctica end up being the place? For me For you Because the questions are really big And the questions are global And it was a place where I had the opportunity To define a project that was all my own And I could see What a question might be I could figure out how to answer it And the person that I ended up working with For my master's degree Ian Rowland at Ohio State When I went to visit him You know when you're just starting out And you go and visit schools And think about where you might like to work When I went to meet Ian He took me for a walk in the woods with his son And we talked about every single thing That we saw along the way Why the leaves were the way they were Why the stream was flowing the way it was And I thought, right, this is where I want to be And that was what it was like Working with him Everything was an interesting question That is a definitely A way to approach science, right? How many questions can you ask about the world And then, you know, can you figure out How to actually answer those questions? And also just being in the presence Of a really observant person I've noticed is it can be very inspiring I've met a few of these individuals In my life and they always Just amaze me About how much I'm missing On a simple walk, yeah Yeah, absolutely I'd love to know about, you know The continent of Antarctica I mean, when we think of Antarctica We think of the ice So obviously the study of the ice Would be important there But there's more to it than that So can you give us a little introduction Into the, I guess, the geology Of Antarctica Or what the continent really consists of? Sure, the Antarctica has been Well, you know, it's plate tectonics Right, so plates move apart They come back together There's some of the very oldest continental crust On the earth underneath the ice in Antarctica My favorite past continent, Rodinia Is underneath there in East Antarctica But so Antarctica's been isolated From sort of the rest of the world For a while, for millions of years And as that happened As it became isolated, the ocean Around Antarctica became one continuous ocean The southern ocean So the wind flows all the way around The westerly wind flows all the way around The continent, and underneath that The ocean circulates all the way around the continent And that really isolates it And that, setting it up that way Kind of helps Antarctica to start to get cold And once it started to get cold And glaciers and ice caps start to grow Then they're changing the color Of the surface of the earth From kind of dark rocks to bright white surface And that bright white surface reflects A lot of the incoming solar radiation Rather than absorbing it all And that helps things get colder So you start to get these Kind of positive feedback That allow Antarctica to get colder And colder and colder And over tens of millions of years Sort of really the last 30 million years Ice sheets start to grow bigger and bigger On Antarctica And when we look at it today We divide it into kind of two parts Of the continent, east Antarctica and west Antarctica And there's a mountain chain That runs through most of the middle of it From the trans-antarctic mountains And the rocks underneath the east Antarctic part And the west Antarctic part are very different The east Antarctica underneath there It's like old continental crust Like Canada Underneath west Antarctica It's much younger It's a former like rift valley Like the east African rift valley And the different underlying geology Means that the way the ice sheets grow on top And the way the ice flows Is different in the two parts Before I work in west Antarctica The crust underneath the ice is thinner The elevation of the surface Or the symmetry The sea floor surface underneath the ice sheet Is much lower So if you took all the ice off of Antarctica A lot of east Antarctica You'd just see rocks Just like we do in Canada today If you took the ice off of west Antarctica It would be ocean And so those differences Mean that the ice sheets In the two parts of Antarctica Behave in really different ways And a lot of the work that I do Thinking about how processes operate today And how we can use process Kind of ice process understanding Ice flow understanding to make projections About the future Those differences are really important Because they mean that West Antarctica is a lot more vulnerable to change And I guess a really simple way to think of it Is Antarctica is the largest source Of sea level rise on Earth today As we continue to warm up And Antarctic ice melts There's 50 meters of sea level equivalent There if we just melted it all And spread it across the ocean So it's the largest source of future sea level rise West Antarctica is the largest source of uncertainty In the sea level rise projection So trying to understand west Antarctica better It has a direct bearing on our ability As scientists, as glaciologists To make and say useful things for society When we're looking at the ice I mean there's this big discussion About the ice that actually contributes To sea level rise Ice sheets that you're talking about These are, these are, this is ice That is over the ocean and not over land Correct? So the ice sheet is resting on land So if you think about how we make an ice sheet In west Antarctica So glaciers start to form as the planet cools Little ice caps start to form High in the mountains And as things get colder, those grow The ice flows like a really thick fluid Or you could think of it as a rock That's really close to its melt temperature It flows just like a really thick fluid would Through down its own surface slope Down toward the sea And as it gets thicker, you know It can extend into the sea And so it can kind of push out And displace the ocean water And fill up that ocean basin And that's what happened in west Antarctica But if the ice is like resting On the earth's surface It's like its own reservoir of water Right, so you took water out of the ocean And you stored it in the ice sheet As the ice continues to flow It speeds up as it goes from the center Toward the edge as it speeds up It stretches out so it gets thinner And eventually it gets thin enough That it does go afloat on the ocean And then we call it an ice shelf Okay, so you've grounded ice sheet Floating ice shelf Got it And we've seen With climate change and warming That's already occurring And also just natural processes Of erosion at the edges of the ice shelf We've seen these, the calving Of very large chunks of ice That, you know, people have Aquated to the size of Eastern seaboard states There's always something As they go floating off Into the ocean But let's talk about This process of The movement of the ice And the flow of the ice I'd love to find out more From your perspective as a geophysicist What are the forces that you are Interested in as What is controlling The ice movement And what will contribute To stuff down the road Sure, so fundamentally It's all about gravity It always is Gravity But so as you grow an ice sheet Think about you're making kind of Like a pillow of ice or a dome of ice So the surface height is different In different places, right? It's high in the middle and it's Lower on the edges You made a slice through that ice sheet And you took Like a fixed level So if you thought about The gravitational attraction of the earth And you just made it fixed level Then in the interior of the ice sheet The column of ice That would be above you at that level Is really thick As you go toward the edge It's thinner So if you imagine being a little person Down there at some depth in the ice The weight of the ice above you In the interior Is greater than the weight of the ice Above you near the edge Or the pressure that you experience is different So there's a pressure gradient That is generated By the surface slope on the ice And that pressure gradient Gravity tries to flatten that out And that's what we look at as flow So the ice deforms In response to that pressure gradient It tries to flatten out that surface slope Another way to say it would be That the ice is flowing Sort of down its own surface slope Or in the direction of its own surface slope So that's all about gravity How fast it flows Depends on a whole bunch of other things So it depends on the thickness But it also depends on the temperature of the ice So the warmer the ice is The faster it'll deform The colder it is the slower it goes It depends on what Underneath the ice So if the ice is flowing If it's resting on bedrock And the gravity is causing it To move across that surface The rocks underneath are kind of rough If you imagine pushing your hand across A granite boulder It's really rough and it's hard to do So the ice has the same experience And what happens is that down at the bottom It doesn't move very much But if you think about putting a deck of cards On a table And you push across the top of the deck of cards The ones at the bottom Feel the table and they don't move But the ones up at the top They're further away and they do move But the same kind of thing happens in the ice If the stuff underneath the ice Isn't really rough or isn't really strong If it moves like you have mud down there Instead of granite boulders Or if you have water down there Then it can go faster So exactly what's underneath Matters a whole lot too It's funny that you said granite boulders Because that's why I understand There's a lot of giant rounded granite boulders And the Sierra Mountain that are near here And it's because there was a giant glacier on top of it And so these were large granite formations That as a glacier slowly moved across it Created these giant rounded boulders I mean the boulders themselves came from Having had glacier on top of them And sort of doing like you might do In a kid's rock experiment Where you take rough rocks and put in there And they get ground around Yeah, glaciers are very effective At smoothing things out So you mentioned the impact of warming So we've got warming from the atmosphere That will have impacts on the surface of the ice And there are lots of complex interactions there But what about the water underneath? Are you looking at how the water underneath The ice shelf is affecting that movement and the melt? Absolutely So if we continue on our conveyor belt of ice From inside of the ice sheet out to the edge Once the ice gets thin enough to go afloat Like water is not strong at all It's really weak, it just gets out of the way And the ice can flow really fast So it stretches faster and faster It gets thinner and thinner And eventually you get to the kind of the front And you can have off icebergs And for any given sort of climate state There will be some shape to the ice sheet And ice shelf that's in balance With whatever the ocean temperature is Whatever the atmospheric temperature is Whatever the ocean circulation is like But when we start to change any of those things Then like the thickness of the ice starts to change And that means that all the forces change And that means the flow of the ice changes And once you start doing that Then that can, you know, you can have feedbacks That propagate through the system So what we think about right now What we see happening in some places in the Antarctica Is that the temperature of the atmosphere Is changing on the Antarctic Peninsula And that's driving changes in ice shelves and glaciers Changes in the circulation of the ocean water Is changing on the Almondson Sea side of West Antarctica And that's causing ice shelves to float a bit to melt And as they do, the forces all change And the grounded ice sheets start to flow faster And that propagates sort of into the interior Where I'm working right now With this big rock ice shelf project There hasn't been much change yet And that makes it actually a really good place to go Because we can look at these processes Before they've been pushed It's a lot harder to understand how things work If you arrive at just as everything is changing Right as it's falling apart You're like, what's going on? What's going wrong? Yeah Yeah, so I loved, I think this is a great opportunity For you to tell us what it's like to go To the Ross Ice Shelf I mean, on your website you say that you Use satellite imaging and all sorts of Eyes from the sky to get a look at Antarctica And the ice shelves, but you also go there So can you tell us about what a typical Field season entails going into The Ross Ice Shelf area? It entails a whole lot of planning And we're already, you know, midway through last year We were starting to get ready for the trip That we'll be taking on this November And that's just, there's so many parts That you have to sort of get moving In the right direction And it takes a lot of like logistics support Right, so as a scientist We come up with a good idea And we pitch our good idea to a funding agency And hopefully we get the money And if we get the money then we start talking with Here in New Zealand we talk with Antarctica New Zealand Which is the group that owns all the tents And maintains the base on Ross Island And owns all the snowmobiles and all of that So we come up with a big plan We need this many snowmobiles We need this many tents, whatever it is Collaboratively with their team When it's finally time to go We ship our science cargo To, well we send it to Christchurch Which is kind of the base for going to Antarctica And then either it goes on a ship If we get it together soon enough And if it's something really big and heavy Or it goes on airplanes And New Zealand works together With the US Antarctic program To ship equipment and people On planes to Antarctica So we get to Scott Base We have a few days of figuring out Where all our stuff is And testing it to make sure that it still works And then we just wait for the weather to be right To go wherever it is we're going And for this project We're pretty far away The place we've been working the last few years Is about 350 kilometers away from Scott Base And we have to get there Either by driving or by flying Driving takes longer But you can drive in most any weather Flying is more comfortable and faster But the weather has to be just right So we sort of work with the logistics experts About how to do that And, you know, once we're there Where we've been working out on the raw slice shelf It's really flat Because it's floating But I can say almost all the places That I have been in Antarctica are very flat Depending on the kind of... Just because it's this big thick layer Of really viscous fluid That's trying to flatten itself out And it's pretty good at that But, you know, depending on where you work In Antarctica, you might have a completely different Kind of mental model Like when you hear the word Antarctica You might think of something totally different But when I hear the word Antarctica I think of sort of endless flat white drifting That's where I work Yeah, so when you're driving across How long does that take you? And are there... Is it slow going? I mean, when I think of Antarctica And some of the stories I've heard I've heard of these as you go across There are these crevasses And things that have to be crossed And how do you do that with your vehicles And your trailers and... Carefully So I... Again, there's a lot of planning, right? So we use satellite imagery To know... To kind of plan for the safe route And then when we're actually Driving, if it's a new route Where we haven't gone before We use radar to look at the subsurface So we have A team that's out in front With experienced mountaineers Who are running a radar system To look out ahead of us To make sure that it's safe to continue But we also... There's one... For this work, there are a couple of tricky places That we have to get through And we work collaboratively with the U.S. To establish safe routes And then we follow those safe routes We're actually not interested In having any adventures at all Get there safely And then do your science And so once you get to Your location for For your measurements And for the work that you're doing What are you actually doing there? So in this project The big idea Is that if we want to understand You know How this part of Antarctica Is going to change in the future We know that We need to improve the projections That we make about future change For society That we need to understand rates And we need to understand If there are thresholds in the system So maybe it works one way For a while And then some threshold is crossed So it gets just warm enough Or the ocean circulation changes just enough And it starts to work in a different way And That's never just about one thing Interactions in different processes And so we said If we want to do this right It has to be interdisciplinary And so we've got to have oceanography Glaciology Paleoclimate studies Meteorology studies All of this has got to fit together And we're not going to let Anybody work Just on their own thing We're going to ask questions That require people to collaborate And so if I want to answer my questions I have to try to think like an oceanographer And the oceanographers have to try To think like me So that's the big framework And it's a lot of fun Especially when we're out there in the field And we're making measurements And the only thing you're thinking about Is this project And you're never more Like in the zone Than when you're out in a field camp In the middle of the wilderness Trying to do the science right Or clean the dishes That's also important You know You got to do all the daily stuff too But it's so exciting You know Okay, so what are we doing? We are Characterizing the area where we're working That the snow accumulation What the weather is like We're using radar To image the interior Of the ice What the ice is like at that site We use data from satellites To think about where the ice at that site came from What's happened to it along the way And then we're using hot water To drill through the ice So we make a borehole About as large as it gets Is about 30 centimeters in diameter And we do that So that we can look at the ocean underneath So We're interested in the ocean circulation Underneath the ice shelf You know, it's an ocean The size of the North Sea And it's been Observed sort of once In one place Back in the 1970s And then a little bit Right out through the front of the ice shelf So it's a huge Completely Unobserved, unstudied Part of the world ocean And we're making this tiny little Down through the ice shelf And looking at our one little spot And immediately Like sort of infinitely increasing The amount that's known So we send instruments down To measure What the water is like The temperature, the salinity We can measure the current speed We can measure how turbulent The water is And we profile up and down And up and down in the ocean We're working right now The ice shelf is about 360 meters thick And then there's another 400 or so meters Of oceans beneath that So we're floating Over the ocean With the seabed down underneath us So we have a look at the water Repeatedly And then we also are Sampling the sediments on the sea floor And we want to do that So that we can Try to build a record Of what's happened here in the past So As you know If you're in the bottom of a lake Or In the bottom of the ocean Over time Find particles settle out of the water And collect On the sea floor Or on the lake bottom And as they do that We're working on a record Environmental conditions At the time that they settled out So what we do Is use a tool The one we had the most success with A couple of years ago is a thing called The gravity core Again, it's all about gravity And essentially what we do It's like a plexiglass tube On the end of a really big weight With a mechanism to create A suction on the top of it And that thing down all 700 meters To right above the sea floor And then we let go of the break On the winch And it falls down And the tube sticks into the sediment On the sea floor That releases the mechanism to create the suction And then we slowly carefully Pull it back up to the surface And cross our fingers that the suction Worked and if it did Then there will be sediments Layers of sediments in the tube To use those to kind of look at the path How long does it take To lower it all the way Down and then pull it back Up because it seems like that would be Careful work, right? Indeed it is. So it takes about 45 minutes one way Which It depends on what you're doing So the oceanographers if they're making Really careful profiles they may go quite Slowly But if we're just trying to get down A little faster, the trickiest bit If you think about it Like there's this big ceiling of ice Up above, you know If you're swimming along in the ocean down there There's a big ceiling of ice up above you And we've made this tiny little hole And we've We've got a rope hanging down The smart rope but it's a rope Hanging down through that tiny little hole And once we Collect the sample we need to Carefully sort of pull it back up And get it back through That tiny little hole So we monitor The pressure that That the tool is experiencing as it Comes back up so we know what depth It's at and when you get close to The Bottom of the ice shelf then you slow things Down so that you can make sure that You get in correctly And you cross your fingers And you trust the engineers who built The whole system and knew what they were doing In one of your figures here You have A cross section of Seafloor sediments and Across it there are these various layers Some of them you have pointed out As being places That are called grounding lines And grounding line retreats What are those exactly? Sure so if you think about The kind of Conveyor belt of ice going from the Interior to the ice shelf To the coast that place where the ice Goes afloat gets thin enough To go afloat we call that the grounding Line and that That's like the boundary Where the ice or the Ocean water that was stored in the ice Sheet returns to the sea Right so you have Evaporation from the ocean you make Snow on the ice sheet It's just like any other Land-based reservoir of water But when it flows back across the Ocean it returns to the ocean So as the grounding line changes Position you're either Sort of making a withdrawal From sea level or making a Contribution to sea level So if the grounding line retreats If it goes back in toward the interior You're putting more water back into the Ocean effectively And that happens When as you know as all Those the climate conditions And the forces that we were talking About were changed. So this spot There's now Floating ice shell But if we go back in time to the last Glacial maximum It would have all been grounded ice And so if you think about What was the most recent big warming Experiment that earth went through It was the warming from The last glaciation So we want to look at this spot And try to figure out How it fits in the pattern Of sort of retreat From you know through that last big Warming experiment And a thing that's special about This site mostly You know we look at evidence from The mountains from the trans-anardic Mountains places where rocks are Exposed or we look At the sea floor Where there isn't any ice But a lot of the history of Antarctica is underneath the Antarctica ice sheet A special place because we can Actually get the record itself So how do you use That record to start to predict What is going to happen In the future? I mean we see The you know IPCC reports And the various possibilities For carbon dioxide Concentration Can you also start to predict What's going to be happening With these ice sheets in various Scenarios? That's what we hope So that's what we told The funders So yeah One of the big Things for us is that We know that In past war worlds there was a lot less Ice in west Antarctica But we don't know how fast those Transitions happen And if we don't know how fast those Transitions happen We can't really test the models that You can build a model And you can try, you can test it By recreating what we know Of the record of the past But there are big gaps And this issue of how fast Can things really change in west Antarctica The biggest source of uncertainty In the sea level projection If we can't really constrain Those rates then there are lots Of possible futures and it's hard To tell one from the other But if we can't really constrain Rates then another idea Is to figure out which of those Processes or process interactions Matter the most So the ocean observations That we've made are causing Us to kind of rethink exactly how The circulation underneath The ice shelf worked So it's like a wedge of ocean Water underneath the ice shelf Water comes in Like so there's kind of the Seaward of the ice shelf And the water circulating around in The ocean flows underneath the ice shelf And as it does It can Do some melting baby It can get mixed with Other water that's already under There But almost nothing is known about How any of that actually plays Out and that means that While we can build Ocean circulation Model that In air quotes simulate That circulation. We don't really Have any data to test those simulations So you need that data Yeah, pretty much Yeah There was a study that just came out This week maybe today That I found That I thought was really interesting Researchers from Australia Used Argo floats To be able to Get data on The water under In let's see In the ice shelf Yes and they were Yeah and they were looking at it during the winter months As well as the summer months To try and get an idea of year round Have you run into issues With your models And the way you're looking at stuff Because you're only able to be there We're there all year round Oh you are? Yeah, we left them mooring So this is even cooler They're in the dark of winter? Not me personally A battery is So our little hole In the middle of the big ice shelf With the little string hanging down There are Instruments that are measuring Temperature and salinity And the current All the time at a few different depths So if you imagine that big slab Of floating ice, we made our little hole We dangled some things Down through the little hole We left a few things behind So we left A series of ocean sensors The connection To the surface, the wire that goes up to the top Is now frozen in So it's there forever There's a battery down there at the bottom And it's sending a signal back up To an iridium satellite antenna At the surface And it's sending the data back to Wellington As we speak That's amazing I know, it's so exciting It's there forever you said? How long do the batteries last? Well, we'll let you know How long are you hoping That they will last? Well, we don't know I mean really, this is like Nobody's ever done this before So we don't know A few years is what we're hoping for We were excited when we got To a whole year And it was still going That is cool That's like when you buy Light bulbs and you're like It's still going and I don't have to go to the store And replace the light bulbs Or the batteries in your fire detector It's still working, it's great I feel like it's also kind of like A Mars rover Yeah So far You know, yeah Yeah, in fact We have collaborators At Georgia Tech Who really care about icy moons But these places Where we work are good analogs for that Yeah, that is cool They build instruments that Yeah, they plan to send to space But they can test them in Antarctica Which is pretty close Right, so if it can survive It can be a satellite or a satellite Or one of these icy moons Right For your work I was looking at, there's a wonderful You shared a link with me of a TEDx ScottBase talk That you did and I love the fact That there was a TEDx conference At ScottBase in Antarctica And that you gave a talk during That conference during that event But in the talk you discuss These multiple scenarios Of if we were to let The water And just the climate warm To a certain extent And looking at the possible outcomes And trying to determine What would happen if we Stop processes At different points How it would change things I'd love if you could describe Your analogy of being Parked at the top of a hill Yeah, right, so I was talking about Work that I did Well really that was led by A PhD student who works for me Scott Wyville who's in Portland And the Concern was one of these Places in West Antarctica That's changing quite quickly Right now and where there might Be a threshold beyond which You just can't stop and the Processes that you set in action Are going and you sort of Get the maximum Retreat of the grounding line And the maximum withdrawal Of water from the ice sheets Back into the ocean But we don't know exactly Sort of where in Space and time And physics The thresholds are So we don't know if we really Cross them or not So what Scott did was build One of these glaciers is changing Rapidly now a computer model Glacier And he developed a way To be able to tell from The map like when that Threshold has been crossed So he set the model up to be as Close to the present day as he could And he then started like pushing As slowly as he could Just kind of gently nudging the whole Thing along and we do that So that when like the The transition to runaway retreat Starts You know exactly why it happened And then you can watch what happens Next and One of the experiments that he did Was to say well okay so I can find Where that transition is What happens if I push a little bit harder Does it make a difference Or is it just once you make the transition That's it How long ago did we pass That threshold All that's a whole different question So we're modelers We don't deal exactly with the real world We make a lot of simplification In My party in my house We're really interested in the Processes more than in the Detailed projection So the process understanding Was that it Absolutely does matter how hard You were pushing when you Start the instability So and it matters how hard You were pushing when you stopped So that kind of The idea is that it's never Too late to make A change so Even if we invoke This kind of worst case scenario In West Antarctica and we push into The runaway retreat If we push Less hard when we get there So it's going to happen but it'll happen Over a longer time so we have more time To adjust and we have more time to get ready For the change that's ahead If we're pushing harder When we make that transition Then we have less time to deal with it It's kind of the big story So the analogy of It's like the analogy that I Use is imagine that you're sort of At the top of the hill with your kids In the car or the whole world's kids As it turns out with the global warming It's a noisy car It's a noisy car You got to make lots of stops But you need some books Audio books but You know it's like If you're starting to head down that hill And you don't know You're starting to head down You don't really know if you've gone over the edge But you know that if you go over the edge You're careening down that hill And you're going to crash at the bottom Like it matters When you put on the brakes If you're going to crash one way or another If you don't put on the brakes You're going to be going faster when you crash And even if you're not sure If you've really made it over the edge Or not it's still a good idea To put on the brakes just in case That's the analogy I love this analogy And I think everyone should know this analogy Because we should put on the brakes now Yes We agree and it's not even hard It's not hard to put on the brakes Right? Change your diet Yeah and we had a wonderful conversation With Jonathan Foley from Project Drawdown about solutions To climate change Which I think you know that's one side Of it and then it's really interesting to talk About these processes that are actually Occurring and what we understand And what we don't understand For The general person Who is not a geophysicist Or I know we're not We could be What is the From your work What is the one important Thing that people should understand About the dynamics that are at play I think the most important thing Is that it's all connected Right? What we do here in New Zealand It matters everywhere It matters in Antarctica And the change that I do Or don't create that changes something In Antarctica changes something About the atmospheric circulation Which then feeds right back to me Here in New Zealand or to my grandchildren Here in New Zealand So I think that's the big thing Antarctica seems remote It's all part of this connected system And the things I do Actually matter The things we all do Actually matter Yeah and do you have any recommendations For For young female scientists Who may want to embark On a geophysicist Adventure to Antarctica? It's a great time To be a glaciologist When I started doing This kind of work Not entirely for happy reasons But take what you can get When I started doing this work There weren't You could fit all the people who do what I do In a clown car Now there are a lot of us And it's an increasingly diverse community Of scientists And that makes it more fun And more interesting More worldviews More ideas about what's most important So it's just From the point of view of diversity Glaciology has a long way to go But it's getting better And better and better Come and join us Help make it better I love that You have an Instagram channel So what is your Instagram channel So people can follow you And your Antarctic Ross shelf adventures It's a long title It's the Ross ice shelf program But it's spelled Not in the American way It's spelled in the New Zealand programming way That's how I pronounce it When I read it like that That's how it looks to me too I haven't lived here that long I have to code switch Is it a Z or an S Or a Z That's right You have to switch Your spell check program Depending on which continent Which country you're in Ross ice shelf Programme There you go Yeah, so we We post there all year long It gets a little funny Sometimes there will be some New Zealand native birds in there During the winter When we're not In Antarctica We're out in the field as well To keep people up to date with what's going on So two years ago When we were stuck with bad weather And we couldn't We weren't going anywhere It kind of got more and more demoralizing But And you'll be heading out there again For this next summer field season Is that Indeed, in November Yeah, there you go New Zealand robin down there So as of November, there should be some new Photos coming from Antarctica Indeed Up to the minute Wonderful Thank you so much For joining us this evening And sharing your work with us And helping us understand The important perspective That it brings to our understanding Of our planet Hey, Koni Mai It's wonderful to talk with you All right, everybody You can follow the Ross Ice Shelf Program We will put the link in our Show notes, I will also link to Dr. Holba's Lab Her profile page At the University of Otago If you would like to find more Information about her work, there are links There, and we are going To take a quick break We will be back in just a few moments For more This Week in Science Thank you for listening to this episode Of This Week in Science We are so glad to be with you For another episode Full of science The wonderful interview this evening If you are interested In helping Twis out Listening is one of the best ways That you can do it But so is sharing Twis You can share Twis.org with people You know To enable them To find more Science than they could have ever Dreamed of Well, find ways that they too Can subscribe to Twis That's right, at Twis.org There is a wonderful Orange subscribe button That allows you to easily access YouTube iTunes and the Google Play Podcast store so that You can subscribe and get Our show on your device So send your friends to Twis.org to allow them To subscribe very easily Other things that you can find at Twis.org are our Zazzle store Where you can find wonderful Products, Bolo's T-shirts, tote bags, mouse pads Pillows, all sorts of things With the Twis logo emblazoned All over So that when you're out shopping For your groceries you can have a Lovely Kiwi from one of Blair's Little corner calendars and the Twis logo to share with people And they'll say what bag is This that you're putting your milk And eggs in and you'll say it's my Twis bag and they'll ask you About Twis and you'll send them to Twis.org and they will be one Of our family soon as well That's right, it's all part Of our bigger plan also Purchases from the Zazzle store Do help support the Show and the things that we do In addition to The Zazzle link you can also From Twis.org access our Patreon page Patreon.com is a crowd Funding community where you Can click on the become a member Button and support Twis at a chosen dollar Amount per month. Once a month You'll be charged for the level of your Support and each level Comes with little benefits Anything over ten dollars a month And I will read your name In thanks at the end Of the show. Ten dollars a month Photon support, it's nice And easy, a great round number And you'll know that for just about The price of a cup of coffee a week You will be helping to Continue to allow Twis to bring you science week After week after week. And so I thank you very much for Listening to Twis. I thank you for Your support. We really Couldn't do this without you. Can explain things You've heard from all That intuition A lot Of theories that shows The way to go New conclusion The methods of hypothesis Patience are the only things I need Put on a pair of goggles And go looking for the things I And we're back. You're listening To this week in science Yes you are Hey Blair, do you know what time it is Right now? Is it that time? It is time for this week In what has science done for me Our writer this week Writes in and says Hi Dr. Kiki, Justin And last but not least Blair As always I enjoy Every week with you My reason for writing again is scary But mostly happy. A few weeks Ago my fiancee had a medical Emergency. We were at home And she had gone unconscious and Had stopped breathing I heard something odd Before she had collapsed I called 911 immediately on my Cell phone. Cell phone technology Meant I could stay with her and Talk to the operator at the same Time. Even with first aid Training it helped to have the First medical help provided by many Years of medical science Talking me through it. Thanks Science EMTs showed up Still would not have been as quick A response without science She woke up and got taken to the Hospital to have many tests Which got us a diagnosis While it was not the greatest of news There is There are many treatments thanks to Science. All I can say Is science saved her life Literally Thank you for continuing to do the Great work you all do. Good Science to you. Ben Bignell Thank you Ben. Wow Science there's like There's two sides of this right. One is Just finding out more about the Universe that we live in and the Other side is using science to Make life better Real world application To help us and many of us get On a regular basis Absolutely I feel like three days a week at least I am so thrilled about the Medical technology of pain killers When I get headaches I can't even imagine what life was Like before you could pop a couple Pills and make pain go numb Exactly And Ben We are so glad that your fiance Is okay And I hope that She was able to hear this when you're Listening to it. Thank you so much For writing in Everyone out there remember You can write in. Please write in We want you to. We want to read You have to write in You must I don't know how the forcing is Happening. I don't know anything about that But we would love to know what Science has done for you lately Let us know. We have a message On our Facebook page This week in Science Or send me an email At Kirsten At this week in Science.com We're going to keep filling this segment Of the show with stories from you I realized that after Earth Day That I started We started doing the what is science Done for you lately segment Two years ago on Earth We passed our two year Science done for you and a first We've been doing this show New segments for two years old New segment, I know Two year old new segment All right, let's move on To some moony Science Time For some moony science Moony, get your moon on Moon quakes That's right, the moon likes To shake, rattle And roll. Sometimes The quakes come from deep Within the moon. Other times They are closer to the surface And apparently a seismometer Deployed by The Apollo missions Discovered That there were lots of Moon quakes and they measured A whole bunch of them between The nineteen from about 1969 to 1977 This was in NASA's Passive seismic experiment They Installed these seismometers At the Apollo landing sites However There's not enough Data to really Figure out where the moon quakes Were really originating And so now We have data from The lunar reconnaissance orbiter Which has actually given us Evidence Of Thousands of potential Fault line Earthquake sources This is newsy news to me Because I did not realize That there was any sort of plate tectonics Taking place on the moon There are none There are none Is the center of the moon Moulton? Yes! So they think that the center Is still being rather hot Maybe not molten still But rather hot! So what is there to move? So the surface of our earth We've got multiple plates And they run into each other And they slip underneath each other And they roll on over each other And they do their dance Around the surface of the planet The moon just has one plate It's just the crust of the moon And at one point in time It's very molten Because if it were ejected From an impact Of some planetary Planetoid body With the earth a long time ago That would have been a very hot event And lots of bits and blobs Of planetary stuff Blombed together In heat producing collisions Hot little moon There you go That hot little moon In millions of years And what happens When things cool down? This is compact A bit Yes! The moon is compressing Compacting And so these fault lines Are like wrinkles What are those? Shrinkage We're talking about a shrinkage What are the different plates? We're talking about shrinks Middle school science, I'm losing it These are thrust faults But they're places where The surface is contracting And because the surface Is contracting It's getting shoved up And things are getting thrust Thrust And so now We know that there were A serious number Of earthquakes over the years That were measured by The Apollo missions And now with the evidence of these Fault lines We may be able to Better determine the location Of future moon missions Of a possible lunar base Because we wouldn't want to put A base anywhere close To one of these Not a good idea Garps Put it on a fault line Because One of the other interesting aspects Of this is the quakes Seem to happen more often When the moon is at Apogee So it's furthest extent In its orbit Away from the earth And so all It's a point where all of the Gravitational force of the earth Is really directed at the moon And the moon and the earth are Before the moon starts the other half Of its return Orbit around And so the The cooling of the moon and these Gravitational forces Of the earth are what Are causing these seismic The seismic activity Pretty cool Yeah, so a moon With one plate And no known Volcanic or molten activity It still has earthquakes I mean not earthquakes Moonquakes Still happening Additionally Other moon News China we know landed A lunar rover On the dark side of the moon It's not really dark It's just as far On the other side We don't see it So on the far side of the moon The Shingi Four spacecraft Landed the U-2 Two rover And according To their observations of The surface they have been Lookin at this Basin its called the south pole Atkin Basin And its the moons largest impact Basin, and they landed there on purpose Because they wanted to get As close to the mantle as possible or at least get into an impact crater that could have gotten far enough through the crust that it would have brought some mantle back up with it. Because we're trying to figure out, you know, how the moon has been cooling, what processes have been taking place in its formation, and what it's really made of. Because it's all thrust and no, I guess, there's no rift valleys on the moon. Right, right, nothing bringing that step up. What better place than a crater, sort of like if you wanted to look over geological time, you would maybe go to the Grand Canyon because you could go down to depths and see layers over time perhaps. Yeah, and so they're looking at the spectra, this lander has an instrument that allows it to look at the spectra of light reflected off the soil. It's using its visible and near infrared spectrometer and looking at the soil in this basin, it does seem as though they are looking at stuff that's not normal crustal material. They don't know for sure, however, because there could have been, there can be other explanations for the spectra that they did see, but for as far as not having actual mantle samples or these rock samples in hand, this is a promising place for a future missions to actually go for rock return, to actually go grab a rock and bring it back to Earth or even just look at it, look at it on the surface of the moon to determine. There's something fun about it, about saying, we have really interesting data, we have no idea what it means. That's my life, that's most of Antarctic science. Yeah, it's really interesting, I can't put it in place with anything else and we can't really look at it any closer than we have. Exactly, it's the process of going someplace, especially going someplace that's so far away and so far removed from all of the nice easy machines and analysis and easy ways of doing things. You have to pack everything ahead of time, you've got one chance. Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. Would you ever have thought of volcanism as opposed to glaciology, it's another interesting geologic? There is volcanism in Antarctica, I can have them all. Oh, nice. That's right. Both, no settling, I like it. Yes, so the moon, very interesting, we may have candidate mantle materials at one point in this Aitken basin, it's a very positive, positive probability. Now my last story for this section of the stories has to do not with moons, but with whales, bring them right back down to earth. I love this story because we've talked about large organisms and the fact that they are less likely to get cancer on the show. We've talked about this before, elephants have increased numbers of the P53 gene, which is a tumor suppressor gene. They have lots and lots of copies of this gene and this is one of the genes in human cancer cases that is often mutated or has problems with it and when there are the problems the tumors don't get suppressed and cancer spreads. However, elephants, they've got a bunch of copies and they suppress tumors and they don't get cancer. Large animals, large people have a higher probability of getting cancer just because they have more cells and thus more cell divisions and every time a cell divides that increases the probability of a mutation of something that could cause cancer. The idea is that large organisms, elephants, whales, other big things should get cancer more often than they at higher rates and they don't. We want to know why because if we can figure out why these other organisms don't get cancer. We could stop answering ourselves. Ta-da! Yes. Researchers at Arizona State University at the Arizona Cancer Evolution Center have been looking at the genome of a humpback whale named Salt. They got the DNA from Salt. Salt is well known to researchers and whale watchers and is catalogued by the Center for Coastal Studies, has been around since the 1970s. She's really well documented and a pretty old whale so you would imagine if there was cancer going on or anything there would be stuff to see in her genome. However, so they looked at Salt's genome and they got about two billion short sequences from a DNA sequencer. They put it back together through genome assembly and they have about 2.7 billion base pairs. This is not quite as big as the human genome. They also sequenced RNA, which is important for the control of the genome, figuring out what gets expressed and what does not, and then they compared the humpback whale genome to genomes of other mammals, blue whale, fin whale, bowhead whale, sperm whale, some dolphins, other mammals and they looked to see what was going on in the genome and they found that there's some parts of the whale genome that have evolved faster than in other mammals. But overall whales have undergone slower evolution than other mammals. So it's a very interesting dichotomy in the speed of adaptation in certain sections of the genome. And they found that the genome, these parts of the genome, they contain genes that control the cell cycle, which is how the cell grows and divides, cell proliferation, making new cells, DNA repair, very important for controlling those mutations. And this is all part of just normal cell function. And these are the areas that have had sped up evolution, adaptation. A lot of the genes that they found have similar analogs in human genes. In human cancers, a lot of these genes are mutated. And so additionally, the whale genome has duplications in tumor suppressor genes as well. So there's a lot of interesting, unique stuff that's not the same as what happened in the whale genome, not whale, in the elephant genome, where in the elephant genome it was just the P53 tumor suppressor duplicating, duplicating, duplicating. And here, there's just a lot of stuff controlling cell cycle and making sure the cell cycle works. They accumulate fewer DNA mutations over time. And that might have something to do with it as well. So this just sounds like really big animals have had a case of convergent evolution with cancer suppression. That's what this sounds like. Just like the quills on a porcupine versus a hedgehog are completely different, but they serve similar purposes and they do not have a common ancestor that had quills. Why? Yeah, it's something that works. But it's also that we're only seeing the positive result of this control. So we're only seeing really large animals that have good cancer suppression. What we aren't seeing is those animals that we're more than happy to get large and we're heading that way, but didn't have cancer suppression. And so the larger they got, the more it affected the life cycle. So we're also seeing the result of having the benefit of having good cancer suppression and allowing life forms to become larger, but we're not seeing all of those that could not pass that threshold. That didn't make it. Right. Well, I mean, and that's definitely part of the maintenance of how convergent evolution right works is that there's a selective pressure and random mutation has responded to that selective pressure in different ways to similar results. And it sounds like what you were describing was also an increased ability of demethylation to prevent mutation taking place. So that's also an interesting aspect of this is that we're going to prevent the things that could lead to increased. So now we need to take cancer-prone laboratory mice and mess with their genome and see what happens. Right. I mean, the thing here is, what we're seeing here is that long-lived large animals, which undergo many, many cell division cycles, have evolved successful cancer suppression programming. And so it means that it is not something that is incompatible with long life and large size. So could these adaptations be something that could be added to the human genome? Is it something that we could use to target treatments, specialized treatments for various cancers? So, yeah. Yeah. Let's crisper up some lab mice. Let's start figuring it out. There you go. Justin, what do you have? I've got some stories. This is Neanderthals and modern humans diverged around somewhere in the 300 to 500,000 year ago range from a common ancestor that we had, we shared. And we know this mostly based on the finds that we have found and ancient DNA analysis is attempting to sort of trace back traits and rate of genetic evolution. However, in a Cape site in the mountains of Spain, a challenge to this interpretation of the timeline has emerged. This is Sima de los Huesos, a Cape site where archaeologists have recovered fossils of about 30 Neanderthals. And previous studies have dated this site to around 430,000 years ago, making both one of the oldest and largest collections of Neanderthal remains discovered. What's interesting here is that this is very close to the divergence point, and it's all the way in Spain, which is by itself interesting. But beyond this, what they're looking at is the teeth of these Neanderthals. They've analyzed dental evolutionary rates among hominins, and they find that no matter where you look, the rate that it takes teeth to evolve is pretty along the same curve. It takes about the same amount of time, whether you're getting bigger teeth or recessing down to smaller teeth, time frames are consistent across hominins over time. If you look at these Neanderthals, and if you look at the teeth of these Neanderthals, and there's some possibility so that these Neanderthals are actually very likely the ancestors of all the Neanderthals that we know of after. They're sort of in line. They're not an offshoot that was isolated and unrelated, both genetically and morphologically. If you look at their teeth and start to trace it back, the time frame is 400,000 years earlier to a common ancestor, putting the divergence somewhere in the 800,000 year ago category, which is really interesting for a few reasons, one of which is that 800,000 year ago common ancestor eliminates a lot of the candidates that we would have pointed to previously and said, okay, this range of hominins that was living here or there, that could be the common ancestor. It pushes it back beyond a known common ancestor to something much more primitive in the context of early hominins. And also sort of suggests that there might have been more convergent evolution between these disparate groups that they both sort of evolved in cognitive ability over time in similar ways. This is Dr. Ada Gomez Robles, UCL Anthropology. She says, any divergence time between Neanderthals and modern humans younger than 800,000 years ago would have entailed an unexpectedly fast dental evolution in the early Neanderthals from Sima de la Huesos. There are different factors that could potentially explain these results, including strong selection to change of teeth of these hominins or their isolation from other Neanderthals found in mainland Europe. However, the simplest explanation, which is usually the one that is preferred, is that the divergence between Neanderthals and modern humans was older than 800,000 years. This would make the evolutionary rates of the early Neanderthals from Sima de la Huesos roughly comparable to those found in other species. And so you would have to consider Sima fossils as likely ancestors of later Neanderthals based both on the anatomical morphological features and DNA analysis. So it looks like everything that we know about the Neanderthal evolutionary path is being challenged. By teeth being challenged. That's a nice way of saying it was wrong. We don't know. We don't know that. I know. So this is, okay, this is, of course, I'm going to do the blanket statement. This is how science works. Yeah. You're right with all of your data points because they're good data points until there's a data point that says your data points aren't the whole story. And it doesn't make them wrong. It just means that the story is getting added to that there's more to the story than you knew because you didn't have the data points. And speaking of data points, there's more data points. Oldest human DNA from Scandinavia has been sequenced from maybe at least likely at places, bits of chewed birch bark pitch spit out like wads of already been chewed gum. What is birch bark pitch? So this was gum. This was like pitch sap from a tree. That was chewed. It was, and actually up until like this is a 10,000 year old sample that they found. But you could find this behavior of chewing this birch pitch up until very recently times like within the last, you know, hundreds of years like this for a thousand years. This was gum in Scandinavia and it was passed down from 12-year-old to 12-year-old, I'm assuming. Somewhere at that age people picked it up. So this is according to Stockholm University which has published their findings in communications biology. Few bones of this timeframe have been found if you were still preserved enough for DNA to get the genetic analysis. The DNA derived though from the spat out gum wads, pitch wads, from three individuals in the around a little, it's cutting up to about 10,000 years ago. The investigated pieces come from Husby Cleve near the Mesolithic hunter-fisher site on the Swedish West Coast. The excavation was actually done. The discovery of these wads of chewed pitch was found back in the early 90s at a time when DNA extraction methods weren't a thing yet for something like this. So they've been sitting and then, yeah, so this is Pierre Pearson and Michael Menon. I'm messing up the names, it's fine. Proposed to look further at hunter-gathered DNA in these choosing gums from Husby Cleve. They were hesitant but really impressed that archaeologists took care during the excavations back in the 90s to preserve the fragile material. Says Natalia Kusheb who is affiliated with Museum of Cultural History, Naslo and prefers some of the experiments and is now a promising PhD student at Uppsala University. It took some work before the results overwhelmed us as we understood that we have stumbled into this almost forensic search sequencing DNA from these mastic lumps. We were, they were spit out at the site some 10,000 years ago. Results show that genetically the individuals whose DNA was found show close genetic affinity to other hunter-gatherers in Sweden and that time frame and the Ice Age Europe. However, what's sort of interesting is the tools that they had, the tools that were being produced at the site that were found were not classic Scandinavian. They were from the East European plain, which is now Russia. And yet they, if they also looked at it, they've also found that the genetic relationship was more like a Western Europe. So they borrowed some tools. They're like, hey neighbor, hey neighbor, let me borrow some tools. Yeah, which in our day and age, when plate tectonics aren't a big deal for travel. Doesn't seem like, you know, Eastern Russian plain, Western, you know, it's a flight, it's a train ride, it's a whatever. But this is kind of an impressive time frame 10,000 years ago for this, this much sharing of technology amongst peoples over really vast ranges. Something works, everybody picks it. It's like a meme in the ancient world, traveling like vast distances and over, over quite a bit of time. DNA from these ancient chewing gums have enormous potential, not only for tracing the origin and movement of peoples a long time ago, but also providing insights into their social relations, diseases and foods, says Pierre Pearson Museum of Cultural History. Not as though much of our history is visible in the DNA we carry with us. So we try to look for DNA wherever we believe it can be found. So yeah, I can't wait for people to go and archaeologically find the chewing gum wall, the chewing gum wall in near Pike's place in Seattle. Yes, the wall covered in chewing gum from people all over the world who go and stick their gum on the wall. Or go find the elementary school classroom and check under all of the desks. So this is also the idea for my reality show where you go around and you find a gum on sidewalks or under tables and diners. And you do analysis, you compare it to the genetic thing that the 23andMe or whatever people are doing. And you go track down the person. Oh, that would be funny. Oh my goodness. I'm not going to throw gum at anybody. I hope you don't either. But sometimes animals do. It's time for Blair's Animal Corner. We're Blair. Yeah, where's the song? I have sexually transmitted infections. No, I have animals. Animals with sexually transmitted infections. Specifically, I am looking at invertebrates with sexually transmitted infections. This is a study from the Australian National University, AAU. And this is looking at how sexually transmitted diseases can act as a mediator for sexual conflict. I will repeat. How could an STD be good? Well, it depends on what your goal from sex is. So this is when the evolutionary interests of males and females do not mix. For males, usually we think about males, they're just trying to spread their genetic material as far and wide as they can. It's cheap. It comes back later. It's an endless supply. It doesn't really go bad with an asterisk. We've talked about that on the show before. They're just trying to get their genetics out there as much as they can. For females, obviously, there is a much heavier investment. Eggs are finite. Producing eggs and nurturing eggs can be very energetically taxing. It can be emotionally taxing because of the investment as well, depending on the species. They have to make investments and decisions for their progeny. The time and effort related to reproduction is way bigger with females than males, generally speaking, specifically with animals that have internal fertilization. So this conflict means that there is this kind of difference of priorities and reasons to mate. And what males want more than anything is to make sure that once they mate with a female, that nobody else's sperm ends up competing with theirs. So they just want to make sure that they have monopolized the eggs that they had access to. So there are different ways that you can do that, like with spiny genitalia, like with mating plugs, cementing up the female opening. These sorts of things can make sure that those eggs are only being fertilized by that male's sperm. It turns out STDs could work in the same way. And that's because when an animal becomes infected with a virus or bacteria of any sort, there's usually two different ways that they may respond. The first is, oh, no, I'm sick. I better have a bunch of offspring right now because I'm not going to survive and I have to get my DNA out there as fast as I can. That's called terminal investment. The other response to an infection is I need to invest everything in my body, all of my energy into fighting that infection, getting better, and then I will be able to reproduce later. For animals with really long gestation periods, like most mammals, that is often the way that they go because if they succumb to illness while pregnant, then their baby also dies. So they want to, a lot of the time, this is why if you get really sick, people have miscarriages, stuff like that, is because the body is focusing energy on getting the host body well again before reproduction. So these are kind of the two different ways that a female body can respond to infection related to reproduction. So when insects have terminal investment, which is often the case because they put enough energy in, their life is not long, it doesn't take long for them to pop out some fertilized eggs. If they have that approach, then it actually could benefit the male to get the female sick with an STD. So this is because once they are feeling the effects, their body responds to the fact that they're sick, that means they just lay eggs, fertilized eggs, with the male sperm that they've received. They don't have time to mate with anyone else first. They don't hold back eggs, they just lay them all out there. And so this is a potential reason, evolutionarily, for STDs and STIs to exist, which is, it's still kind of in the hypothesization phase at this time, that's not a word, but it's like there is a hypothesis, there is potential evidence to support it, but it has not been turned into a formal experiment. So yeah, so the other piece of this that is very intriguing is that previous studies have shown that in at least some animal species, males have lower immunity than females, things like the man flu. So it's possible that these males actually have lower immunity so that they will catch the STI to then pass it on to a female. Fascinating. Interesting thoughts. Yeah, very interesting thought. I mean, when we think about these infectious diseases, you think of it from the perspective of the disease very often, but everything is a system. And so it's not just the virus or bacteria or parasite, whatever it happens to be, getting in there and doing what it wants. It has to pass along, it has to survive, and it's doing what it has to do. But then the ones that are infected also want to survive, also want to take advantage somehow of the situation. And so it's a tit for tat, predator prey. There's adaptations that take place to allow better survivability. And so who knows? I wonder. I mean, there could be a benefit. So the next step is to actually do a laboratory study with eucalypt beetles. They have a very unusual sexually transmitted mite that lives under their wing case. So it is transferred. I've just got it. I just keep it right under my wing. The mites are just like jumping from one to the other. But so this is something that will be easily tracked through laboratory conditions and they can see how many legs the females are laying, who the fathers are, all these sorts of things to kind of see if there is a direct benefit to having in transmitting an STI. Fascinating. Oh my goodness. Indeed. All I'm going to say is that no. Hey, nature. You don't have to like it. I know. It doesn't like me either. That's right. Another piece of our very own nature that is deep seated further back in the evolutionary history than we may realize is test anxiety and lack of performance on tests. So this is a study from John Hopkins University. And this is looking at the distinction between knowledge and performance, looking for insight into how environment can affect those two things. So a great example of the difference between learning knowledge and performance is the difference between studying for a test, knowing your answers, paying attention in class, and then bombing the test. Why is that? Why even though we know the stuff, can we not perform properly when we are asked to recall it? So a lot of people just say it's because they don't they don't test well. They have test anxiety. But there might actually be some scientific evidence here that there's something about the environment that is skewing the results of these tests. So this study looked at ferrets, mice, and rats in different reward based tests. And so in the first one, they took a group of mice, they trained them to lick water through a lick tube. So it's like a little metal tube that sticks out and there's there's water and there's a meniscus at the end. So licking it, they get the water out of the tube. It's just like a liquor that you'd have in a guinea pig enclosures and then like that. And so there would be water present after hearing a tone. They were taught to not lick it after hearing a different unrewarded tone. So that's when the lick tube was empty. It would take mice about two weeks to learn this when there was a water reward present. But in the point of early learning at around three to five days, they tested their levels and it was about 50% success. So not any better than chance. But when they removed the tube completely and they just had the primer space kind of the stage, and then they had the the tones played, they would lick at 90% accuracy at no tube at all. Which means they understood the task. Tone means lick. Days before they showed knowledge when there was a reward present. So the reward present to teach them what they needed to know, how else would you teach a mouse to stick out their tongue, was helpful. But when it came back to testing knowledge, having the reward there appeared to be detrimental. The team also in a second test had mice press a lever for water when they heard a tone. In another one prompted rats to look for food in a cup when they heard a tone. But not if there was a light before the tone. They had rats press a lever for sugar when the light was presented before a tone, had rats push a lever for sugar when they heard a certain tone as compared to other tones, and prompted ferrets to differentiate between two different sounds for water. So in all of these experiments, the animals performed better when they didn't have the rewards present. So this means they shouldn't give grades on tests? Or maybe you shouldn't tell them when they're being tested. Maybe that's what it's about. Or when they're being graded. Yes. Right. Yes. Yeah. Maybe that anticipation of the grade or of the reward. Maybe the animals, not thinking of students, animals maybe fight focused on the reward more so than the actual test. Yeah. I think about it like a second guessing machine kind of. So if the lick tube is there, if the place where the water comes from is right in front of your face, are you going to trust what you learned and not try for water? Or are you going to try for water? Because there might be water in there. On the test, especially a multiple choice test, if you think you know the answer, but there's an answer that might sound right, your gut told you it was A, but B also sounds right. Maybe I should pick B. Oh, which one is it? Maybe it's all the above. You know, there's something there that when you, when the pressure is on and there's this dangling fruit potentially, I think there's this impulse to test your options. So I don't know exactly what's happening here, but there's, there's a clear relationship between being a, having a reward present and that affecting performance that does not show intelligence. It does not imply intelligence. Well, it actually affects, it affects what we call intelligence. It affects our perception of it. Right. Maybe I'm also, I'm also getting something very different from this because, Oh, let's hear. I'm, I'm getting that there's a reward present if you get the right answer. So they have, and then they have like a 50-50 chance, right? So, so if the reward is present, look for it. And then now there's no reward present. So it's as if you think you're getting it wrong because you're not getting rewarded. So you're trying harder now to get a reward because you didn't get rewarded. Oh, maybe I got it wrong. I got to concentrate. Okay, try again. Didn't get a reward. Okay, this time I'm going to get it right. I'm going to barely focus. Okay, that's the light tone. There was a light. I'm not going to do this. Okay, now there's another tone. That's the right tone. Now I'm going to try again. I didn't get it. Okay, this time I'm going to get get it right because I'm going to get the, it seems like it's an escalation of, of denying a confirmation of the right answer or the reward that's, that's creating a greater emphasis on trying to get it versus the other one where it's like, ah, I got it right. This time I missed whatever. This is going to be another question. I'll get the reward. Interesting. Yeah, I think that's, that's an interesting way to look at it. The way I was thinking about this was, um, when you're training dogs, but also when you train other animals as well, when you're starting to teach them a behavior, you give the reward every single time the second they do it right. And as it becomes more and more easy for them, you can have instances where you ask for a behavior and they give it and you do not give them a reward. So for example, if you have an eight year old dog that's known how to come when called for seven of those eight years of their lives by the end, you're not giving them a treat every single time you say, come and they come to you. Yeah. And, and, and, and I would again say that's because maybe I didn't go, I didn't get there quick enough. I'll try harder. Just try harder. Yeah. But so the implications of this study obviously are pretty vast. The one that I first thought about was, oh no, have we been shown yet another way that the scientific community has not been testing on rodents properly because we've talked about how it turns out they need, uh, higher temperatures than we've been giving them. And it turns out that they need more living spaces so they could separate their latrine from their bed. And then also now have we been reinforcing and training them wrong? So if we misread their intelligence and are we not testing exactly right? And there's this really bizarre socioeconomic aspect of this, which is not in the study, but it's totally reflected. If you are, it's like the marshmallow test. If you're confident that you can get a reward later, uh, if you, you can, if you are comfortable with the amount of rewards you've gotten, it allows for more risk taking. Uh, you can take a risk of saying, well, I don't know if this is the right answer. I'm going to try. Interesting. Yeah. Whereas if there's limited resources and it becomes very important to get it correct, you're going to only try those, uh, those things that are going to work, which in the marshmallow test means you, if, if the strategies you live in a world of limited resources, the actual best strategy is to take the marshmallow right away because you have less opportunity later. In this scenario, uh, it also seems like that might be something. So maybe we need to next step for the, for this study, um, would be to, to kind of look at the frequency of how often you need to give a reward to still get good behaviors and things like that. But the other implications that the authors of the study propose, which I just want to throw out there is, um, that ultimately they're looking at, um, how performance is affected by these variables. And so for one, obviously this could be used to improve testing environments for children, um, as was brought up. But the other thing, which totally blew my mind was that this could potentially help with Alzheimer's because it could help maintain lucidity for longer periods of time. If we can figure out how to promote the right performance, the right pathways in the brain, um, it, is it, are those not being used sooner because they're, they're other things in the environment happening. So they, they took this way outside of the box here, but I think it's very interesting. It's a question of how our brain works. So Oh, no, I said what I'm hearing. I don't know. I don't know. What are you hearing out there? Everyone out there, let us know what you are hearing in this study. It is time for us to get to our quick stories at the end of the show. We got 10 minutes, everyone. Let's get it done. All right. I have a couple of quick stories. Oh, one of, uh, you know, Blair's favorites is, you know, artificial intelligence and how artificial intelligence is getting smarter and smarter. Well, researchers trained a computer model of virtual brain cells, an artificial neural network to learn how to identify numbers of objects in images. The network developed neurons that responded to specific quantities and these artificial neurons are very similar to number sense that we have in humans being able to have an idea of how many numbers, how many objects are in a group of objects and the behavior of these neurons very closely matched the behavior of neurons in monkey brains that were that were tested. And so there are very specific neurons in our brains in monkey brains and other mammalian brains for number sense, these number, number sensitive neurons. And it turns out AI neural networks can develop them too. Now they can count. No, they'll count better than you. And while we're counting, let's count on those photosynthetic bacteria that exist in our oceans. As we talk about plastics in our environment, we have often commented on this show about the lack of research that supports the claim that plastic is bad for the environment, bad for life in the environment. Well, a new study out in communications biology is, uh, has looked at a bacterial species prochlorococcus and prochlorococcus. It produces about 10% of the oxygen that we breathe. And they found that the cheats, which is basically they put plastic in seawater and then the plastic chemicals came out in the water. And so they put that water on the bacteria and lo and behold, bacteria growth rates went down and oxygen production went down. Genes related to oxygen production and photosynthesis and carbon cycling and all that kind of stuff in the bacteria down regulated. So we have a nice, nice little study that suggests that yes, indeed plastic that ends up in our oceans could potentially affect the bacteria that produce the air we breathe. Yeah, the ocean. It's kind of important. Kind of important, everybody. Let's get on that plastic cleanup thing. Okay. But don't just clean it up by pulling it out because then you disturbed the restroom, which is a yeah, right. We'll do it better. Justin, tell me a story. Speed kills is a phrase that is often used in reference to responsible or irresponsible automobile operation. Also responsible or just unregulated narcotic usage. But for people who don't happen to be doing one or both of these at the moment, speed might actually be a good thing. People who report that they have a slower walking pace have a lower life expectancy than faster walkers. According to a new study conducted by researchers, National Institute of Health Research, partnership between Leicester hospitals and the University of Leicester and Lowbrow University. Research using data from UK Biobank. It's a pretty good meta sample. 474,919 people recruited within the UK found those with habitually fast walking pace have a long life expectancy across all levels of weight status from underweight to morbidly. That was one of my questions. Yeah. So this is kind of fascinating. Underweight individuals with slow walking pace had the lowest life expectancy. So it is untethered from weight here dramatically and in fact inversely in a way because the slower individuals with the larger weight outlived the slow walkers with the low weight. It's your power walk on. Yeah. I wonder if it's related to cardiac health though. That's well, that's the thing. It's about eight years difference. So those who are underweight and slow walking had an average of 64 year lifespans versus 72 years for women. So women lived longer even if they were any slow walking. Power walker. This is Professor Tom Yates, who is a professor of physical activity, sedentary behavior and health at the University of Leicester. He's the lead author of the study. Our findings could help clarify the relative importance of physical fitness compared to body weight on life expectancy of individuals. In other words, the findings suggest that perhaps physical fitness is a better indicator of life expectancy than the BMI body mass index. That encouraging the population to engage in brisk walking might add yours to the lives. Makes sense. People have been talking about BMI for years as it's not so great. Got to figure out something better. It's always been very problematic. The interesting thing about this study is it's they're self-reporting over like half a million individuals, whether they're fast walkers or slow walkers. But it's not that if you are a slow walker, it's not that you can't change things. You can walk faster. This is the thing. It's not like according to the genetics of 500,000 people life expectancy is based on. No, you can actually pick up the pace regardless of where you are in BMI or any of this nonsense. If you walk fast, you will live longer. Keep that in your mind and you'll save time. And by saving time, you'll have more time on the planet. And it's now time for Blair's story. Blair, what's your last story? Oh, just I have some catapulting spiders. Okay. So it's the triangle lever spider or hip TOT's cavatis. They actually rear back. They use their web to store elastic energy. They release their grip and catapult themselves at a furious speed towards unsuspecting prey. So this is from University of Akron in Ohio. Yeah, Ohio. People have written about these observations but have not looked at them in lab conditions. Now under lab conditions, we have seen high speed videos and they have reported that they spring forward at the equivalent of around 400 body lengths per second. So that's around 772 meters per second squared. So that is very fast. This is something that we're seeing for the first time, but now it's possible. Other animals might be doing that. And the other really weird question mark is we don't know how the spiders are holding their catch mechanism, how they're holding onto the web as they launch forward, which is very interesting. Catapulting spiders. Where do these things live so I can not move there? So it sounds like Ohio. Okay. I'm not moving to Ohio. I know there are lots of nice people in Ohio. Enjoy Ohio. Catapulting spiders. I'm just assuming it's like jumping spiders. They're probably really cute. Because when someone said jumping spiders, I was like no. And then I saw pictures of jumping spiders and now I love them. So maybe catapulting spiders are adorable. Who knows? We'll have to learn to love them. We have come to the end of another episode of This Week in Science. It's another episode. Done. Thank you all for joining us once again to talk about all the science. I would love to say thank you to Fada for introducing us to Dr. Holby for bringing us this interview this evening. Dr. Holby, thank you for joining us tonight. Oh, it's been so much fun. I'm a fan and I'd like to have front row seats. Yay. I'm so glad that you stayed through the show as well. Also thanks to Identity Four for recording the program so that we can have a podcast and to Gord McLeod for helping to keep our chat room a nice and happy wonderful place. Thank you for maintaining that. I would also like to take this moment to thank our Patreon sponsors. I would like to say thank you too. I have things lined up here. Thank you too. Paul Disney, Richard Onimus, Ed Dyer, Andy Groh, Stu Pollack, Phillip Shane, Ken Hayes, Harrison Frather, Charlene Henry, Joshua Fury, Steve DeBell, Alex Wilson, Tony Steele, Craig Landon, Mark Mazaros, Jack Matthew Litwin, Jason Roberts, Bill K, Bob Calder, Time Jumper 319, Eric Knapp, Richard Brian Condren, Dave Naver, Corinne Benton, Adam LaJoy, Sarah Chavis, Rodney, Tiffany Boyd, John Bertram, Mountain Sloth, Seth O'Gradney, Stephen Oliveron, John Ratnaswamy, Deis Freidel, Jail Maishak, Andrew Swanson, Paul Ronevich, Sue Doster, Dave Wilkinson, Bed Bignell, Richard Porter, Noodles, Kevin Reardon, Christoph Zucnerick, Ashish Pansley, Ulysses Adkins, R.T. 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Just Google this week in Science in your iTunes directory, or simply this week in Science in anything Apple Marketplace-y. For more information on anything you've heard here today, shout-outs will be available on our website. That's at www.twist.org, where you can also make comments and start conversations with the hosts and other listeners. Or you can contact us directly, email Kirsten at kirsten at thisweekandscience.com, Justin at twistminny.gmail.com, or Blair at blarebaz.twist.org. Just be sure to put twist, T-W-I-S, somewhere in your subject line. Otherwise, your email will very likely be spam-filtered into oblivion. You can also hit us up on the Twitter where we are at twist.science, at Dr. Kiki, at Jackson Fly, and at Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback if there is a topic you'd like us to cover or address. A suggestion for an interview, a hi-coo that comes to you tonight. Please let us know. We'll be back here next week, and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news. And if you've learned anything from the show, remember... It's all in your head. Shop got my banner unfurled. It says the scientist is in. I'm gonna sell my advice. Show them how to sell the robot with a simple device. I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand. And all it'll cost you is a couple of grand. Science is coming your way. So everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientific method for all that it's worth. And I'll broadcast my opinion all over the air. Because it's this week in science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. I've got one disclaimer and it should be news that what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science you may just get to understand. But we're not trying to threaten your philosophy. 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Science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. The show once again. It's the end. It's the end. It's the end. Hey everybody. I forgot to announce it on the show. Santa Fe, June 15th. We'll be podcasting in Santa Fe at the Interplanetary Festival for all you Santa Fe people. Hey Fada. I'll get the story in there. I don't know where it is right now. I'll find it. I need to find it. Thank you for reminding me. It will go there at some point. I will do it. What's up Blair? You have no microphone. Your microphone is muted. Sorry. Oh there you are. My bad. I am working on the newsletter. Oh cool. Yay. You had asked about interviews. The next interview that I have specifically scheduled is June 5th. Okay. It is with Matthew Stanley and he's written a book on Einstein and his theory of relativity and World War I and how World War I made getting his theory of relativity out to the world very difficult. Okay. Well, let me, so we're going to be talking about the state of science in the early 1900s and how nationalism and war affected it and Einstein, because Einstein. Einstein. Einstein. Einstein. We left, we lost a Dr. Holby. She was great. Very nice. Very nice. How nice that she hung out for the show. Front row seat. Okay. Say it again. On June 5th we will be speaking with Matthew Stanley. Let me find you a link to his book. And that didn't work. Hey Kiki, let's actually type in the right place. Matthew Stanley and yeah, he is a professor at NYU. So is he a doctor? He is a doctor. He has a PhD in the history of science. Professor at NYU? NYU. I'm guessing that stands for not your university. Not your university. I have to go due to long states of sleep deprivation. Why are you so sleep deprived? I've been getting less than my quota. Why? Why? Why behind it? You know, sometimes you sleep a lot, sometimes you sleep less. But I will be back here next week. A few hours before. Okay. Okay. Here's his book. Here, I'll give you a Kirkus Reviews link. I know. I don't want to know the book. I don't want to hear this. I can't stand pre-searching. This is for the newsletter, Justin. I'm putting it in the, I just put it in the chat room. Oh, great. I think it'll be interesting. Hey, everyone in the chat room, if you're interested in history and science and war and Einstein. Oh, yeah. It's going to be fun. You had me. You had me the last minute you had me again. It's going to be great. It's going to be good. No, the name of the book is How Relativity Triumphed Amid the Vicious Nationalism of World War I. Einstein's War. No, it's not his war. Called Einstein's War. That's not how you should say it. Okay. Good night, everybody. Good night. I hope you actually get some sleep. Oh, yes. This is, uh, if it hasn't, if it's not already happening and I'm not talking in my sleep right now, I don't know what's taking place. Get some sleep. Go to sleep. Go to sleep. Just in sleep. Okay. Let's start singing lullabies. Go to sleep. Strange theremin sounding lullabies. Okay, I have a couple things I need to talk to you about. Awesome. Okay, so first thing, I'm getting interviewed on a podcast coming up. Yay. Where? Mostly about my work with Noki and optimism in conservation education relating to climate change. And it is going to be Citizens Climate Radio. And it's so funny. He was emailing with the Noki project manager at the New England Aquarium. And she looped me in after they started the conversation a little bit. And then she introduced me and I mentioned our podcast. And apparently he's a listener. Oh, how fun, which is very fun. But so that's coming up pretty soon. So I think it's going to, I might be doing it next week, actually, or the week after. I'm not sure. But I wanted to know if there was anything in particular that you wanted me to plug on that other than just telling people to go to our website, subscribe. Good stuff. Okay. Yeah, no, just twist.org and get people, if people are interested in your fun animal science and more climate environment and other science stories that we do our weekly podcast where they can find that. Great. Yeah, I think that would be great. Super helpful. Cool, cool, cool. Okay. The other thing I wanted to look at. Oh, man. I like MailChimp a lot, but there's some stuff you can't do, which is kind of frustrating is about the newsletter. So right now, what we have in it is just welcome to the newsletter. And I changed it from saying it was going to be weekly to monthly. There we go. Realistic. And then we have just blurbs from our bios from the website. Some information about Twist Merch, some information to email you if they want to be added to the newsletter so people can forward this to people and then they can read it and decide if they want to be added. And then I'm going to have information about the latest episode that was published to YouTube and then upcoming stuff. Is that enough for this one? Do you want more in there? Is there anything else that we'd wanted to have in there? Okay, I'll think about it. Obviously not going to do anything right now. It's a lot, but at the same time, if we're going to do it only monthly, we also want to have something that's not just what people are getting from the podcast. Yeah, so I wasn't sure if for the very first issue, if you wanted to just be like, here's Twist, or if you wanted to have more. Can you send out the Hippo one? I sent out the Hippo one. Yeah. That was like a special thing that didn't have any, it didn't have much that was actually Twist specific in it. Really had just a bunch of Hippo musings. That's fine though. Okay. That's fine. Yeah, I like your Hippo musings and yeah. No, I mean, that's kind of the fun thing is like every, we can do, if Justin actually writes something for it, then we can have a rant from Justin or whatever it is. Great. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, because I don't want to be too long, but I also don't, yeah, I do want it to have some sort of added value. So you can look at the, so I made the initial one I was working on, I turned it into a template and then this one is called issue number one. And then if you want to look at it and let me know if there's anything else you want to add. Since we have over 200 people on the mailing list, I think it would be cool to get something out pretty soon. So yeah, I'm just going to, like I said, I'm going to throw in a link to last week's episode on YouTube. And then do we want a thing about Santa Fe? Yeah. Okay, I'll add something in about Santa Fe. Find us and find us at the Interplanetary Festival in Santa Fe. Have we been tagged as spam already? We only sent one, Dave Shorty. That'll do it. Yeah, check your spam filters. Let twist through. Yeah. We don't want to overdo it on what's in there, but at the same time, it would be. I think that's good. It's kind of let us know. And I think maybe like, I don't know, maybe there's, I don't know, maybe I'll think of something to just kind of throw in there as like something just to say, write something little that can go in there. Yeah. So it's called the Interplanetary Festival. I think it's interplanetaryfest.org. On June 15th, Santa Fe. All right. This is helpful. Okay. Okay. Great. So it'll be ready for you to look at pretty soon. I'll shoot you an email. Cool. I'll try and throw something. Throw something thoughtful and little together to go in there. A note from Kiki. Interplanetaryfest. So I am happy to delete the bios. I just put those in there because I wasn't sure what else to do. No identity for. I don't think you can subscribe to the newsletter and the big orange button on twist.org. I still need to put a subscribe to the newsletter button on the twist page. I have a window that it's a pop up window that opens, but if you have pop ups closed or pop ups turned off in your browser, you won't see it. But flying out, if you want to email me your or email Blair, I mean Blair's in mail chimp right now, but if you want to email one of us, your email address that you'd like to receive the newsletter at, we can put you in. We can enter you in. Facebook swag. S is it S-C-H or S-H-W? I don't know. S-C-H-W-A-G swag. Products given away free typically for promotional purposes. S-C-H-W-A-G. Okay. I'm gonna say a C. Bleak. Stuff we all get swag. Cule. Then I need a picture. It's an acronym. Save image as. This is where I ran into trouble last week. Saving of things. Just got an email from, we, you and I just got an email from someone who listens to the show. I wonder if he's watching right now. Paul Lombardi, are you out there right now? Twist Women in Science. That is a great subject line for an email. I can't wait to read that. Yeah. Okay. Let's see. Bleak. We've all been on the internet too long. Let's see here. Okay. Great. Those are my things. I could be here forever doing this stuff. Yeah. Okay. So, Brian cannot come to Santa Fe. Marshall and Kai will be there. Oh, great. Maybe they can help a little bit. Yeah. And they will also have an AV person watching the sound and the recording is what I've been told. Okay. There will be someone at the stage to help us out. Great. Yeah. So, what I just need to figure out is that make sure we've got enough microphones and a good way to put everything together. So, I'll just deal with, I'm going to deal with all the tech side of things. Yeah. Are we trying to simulcast? I don't know. We can try, but it's not going to be my huge priority, but... Yeah. I think, well, because are we doing a normal show? We're not, right? We're interviewing a couple people talking about planetary stuff. Yeah. Yeah. We have one interview scheduled and then we'll talk about interplanetary things. Okay. Yeah. And we have a 60-minute podcast spot. So, okay. So, would it be appropriate for me to bring things that are a little bit older, but are related to what we're talking about, I guess. That's my question. You could, or we could do, I don't know, maybe we could come up with some kind of game to play. Like a cryptozoology game. Like... Ooh, that's fun. Come up some, you know, we have the interview. We could do a couple of stories, but really, I'm thinking that, I mean, if we're not... The interview would probably be the bulk of our conversation. Right. And, you know, the rest of it, like we could... I think we'll just be conversational-type stuff. We can bring like a story or to a piece, but I don't know that we'll even get to them. And I think it would be more interesting, maybe to use them as like jumping off points to talk about aspects related to space travel and space colonization and going to other planets and, you know... Right. Okay. Yeah. I don't know. Like maybe, I don't know. Maybe you could have a story about tardigrades in space or... Oh, that would be great. Or how some animals use celestial bodies to know where they're going. Yeah. Yeah. And how could we do that in space? Celestial bodies. Pulsars. We use them. We use the pulsars for navigating. Oh, speaking of tardigrades, I absolutely forgot. Did I tell you about the book Willow the Water Bear? No. Oh, my gosh. It sounds like a thing I need to know about. Yes. Yes, you do. So this guy who wrote this book, it's a little kid's book, Willow the Water Bear, and by Houston Kid, there we go. That's where it is. And Houston asked me if I would put a... If I would review the book to give him a quote for the back of the book. And so I read the book. Yeah. I read the book and I really liked it. And so I said, Water Bears are amazing creatures. And this story turns real scientific information about them into a thrilling adventure that ends with an important lesson for all. It's definitely a book I will read to my own child. Cute. It says Dr. Kee-Kee Sanford Scientist, host of Twist Podcast. This book is on the International Space Station now. What? Yes. That's quite an honor. This book with Twist Podcast on the back of it. It's on the International Space Station. It's going to be read aloud from space. Nice. Oh wait, did I put that up there? Yeah. Yeah. It's super cute. And it's a super cute book about this little Willow the Water Bear and her parents take her around to find all these adventures and meet all these extreme creatures. And then she finds she has superpowers inside of herself the whole time. And yeah, she goes, she's like, Oh, look at me. I'm in space. Look at me. I'm in this other place. Oh, look at me. I can handle all these extreme conditions. I love that. Yeah. It's a really cute story. Well, I might need to have that in my office at the zoo. Oh yeah. It might be necessary. Oh my. Yeah, you could do read aloud. You could do read aloud at the zoo. I read stories all the time. I'm mostly with older kids, but I'll jump into the younger kid classes so I can read books to the kids. I love doing it. I love that. It's one of my favorite things. Oh, they've been reading, trying to figure out what is going on in the chat room conversation. Decomposing. Who? What? I don't even know what's going on. Who even knows? I'm behind the chat room times. Who even knows? I would read aloud. Yeah, look. Oh, wait. When's it going to be read aloud? Oh crap. I did not mean what just happened. What did just happen? My whole screen just, my whole screen just resized itself? That's weird. Oh my. Where did you go? I lost you. What just happened? Why did it do that? My whole computer screen just resized to a like massive size. I can't see anything anymore. Oh no. Oh my God. Noodles. I want your cookies. I like cookies. I like cookies. How do I fix this so that I can say I can't find flair? There you are. Okay. Hello. Hi, you're taking up my entire screen now. Uh-oh. I have a giant screen here and you're in all of it. Oh boy. How do I? What's up settings? Why did you decide to display funky settings? Um, videos. That's not what I want. I'll just stop. Am I going to come back? What's up? Crap. What's wrong? Now it's completely broken. I can't see anything. What's wrong? Are you there? I'm here. Oh, it's so broken. You're too listening to me. Computer. I don't know why it did that and now I'm really confused. I need this. It's because I opened up this web page. I know it. Go away, web page. What did we talk about last week? What did we talk about last week? I'm trying to finish the newsletter. You guys are all, everybody's telling me things in the chat room. I can't, I don't know how to read anymore. It says tell Kiki Windows key plus escape. Oh, see that's the problem. I have a Mac wireless keyboard. Oh no hooked up to my Windows computer so I can't hit that Windows key. There's no Windows key on my Mac keyboard. That is the problem. I know web pages can't force full screen. I don't know what happened. It just all of a sudden decided that it was going to go full screen. It happens from time to time. Let's see, you said we're going to fill your head with pages, fly sex and hot ice. So I will say that what we talked about. Command and escape and nothing's happening. Control is, oh fly sex and hot ice. Oh wait, I have my settings over and I don't need to do that. I don't know why everything's so huge. It sounds like a personal problem. I have to fix it. Yes, I'm blurry. Go away settings and other stupid computer mess up things. I think my computer wants to be restarted is what it want. Yeah, that's fair. It's pretty late. Saying, hey Kiki, I really just want to be restarted, you know. So I'm just kind of giving you a hint here that, you know, I'm tired, you know, and being restarted might be kind of nice. Okay, this is ready for you to look at. Okay, so yeah, take a gander and let me know what you want to do. Broken. Did somebody, I didn't get an email flying out. Were you trying to email me to get added? So I could do it right now just. Dr. Holby just emailed and said thank you for the invitation. That was loads of fun. She listens to the podcast on the weekend. So actually watching during work was a treat. I'm now pondering how to use mastic lumps in casual conversation. Somebody is already having my e-mail from college. Okay, so I got bleaks. Bleaks sent me a private message flying out. You can do that too. Yeah, you are sweet. Yeah, you can do that. Let me go add you right now. Ah, here, audience. How do I manage audience, add subscriber? That's what I want to do. Bleak, you're already on the list. So that means spam. Yes, I think I remember adding bleak. Okay, great. Great, great, great. Spam or was added after the hippo newsletter? It's a possibility as well. Because we only had like 40 people on the list when I sent the hippo letter out. And now we have over 200. So a lot of people didn't get that one, I think. Sadly. It's sad. Get it, people. You could get it, get it, get it, get it. What else is going on? Oh, check this out. Here, I'll show in time. You're going to be blurring. You're funny. I'll move my camera. What? Oh, did you put that together? Oh, heck no. That's awesome. That is the largest Lego set ever made. Is it larger than the Death Star? Yeah. It's 7,500 pieces. It's a lot of pieces. Many hours of attention. Happy. It's been like two years. I think. I think it took them about two years. Now we just have to buy a glass coffee table to put it in. Yeah, so it's a display case, right? Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. That's awesome. Do more projects. I love projects like that. I know Lego Envy. Tell me about it. That's one of those things that I've gone to the Lego store before. I've been like, I'm not buying that. I have Lego Lust, but I will not give in. I will not buy it. A Plumbus. Oh yeah, I do have a Plumbus. It was my birthday gift to Brian. Where's your Plumbus? This is a Plumbus. What? Also, this is what the back looks like. What? It's from Rick and Morty. Oh, okay. It's from the second episode of Interdimensional Cable. But it came with a care manual, and I should grab it and read it. It's really good. One of the things is you can't put it near a mirror or it'll replicate. Hold on. I'm going to grab it. Hold on. Yes, it will. Yes, it will replicate. Oh my goodness. Oh my God. I don't know where your care manual is. But Plumbus owner's manual confused about this mass thing. I'm adding and subtracting numbers inside of numbers. Oh, here we go. I can see it. Okay, let's see. Friday, yes. Twitch stream, 1.15, probably, 1.15 p.m. Friday, twitch.tv slash Dr. Kiki. If you are interested in hanging out and chatting about science, talking about things in the world, and having a nice conversation, I would love to have your company for conversation. It'd be cool. Oh, here we go. Plumbus is not alive, but do talk to Plumbus for CO2. Placing Plumbus near reflective service will result in duplication. Do not operate Plumbus within seven Ctons of other Plumbuses. Regularly grooming Plumbus induces desired behavior. Keep Plumbus powder dry. Always keep an ideal temperature. Plumbus will sweat if too hot or cold. If too red, return Plumbus immediately to manufacturer, not to store. Test Plumbus on a small area before applying to a larger surface. Pressing Plumbus against sensory organs will result in sickness or death. Exposing Plumbus to atmosphere is greater than 8% brand zine not recommended. Plumbus may cause emotional disconnect from duties. Never stare directly at the parted chumbles. Instead, poke a pinhole in sheet of paper and stare at chumbles through hole. If not cleaned regularly, Plumbus will attract dark Plumbus. Plumbus may suddenly expand one size. Take necessary precautions. I like good instructions. Yeah, there you go. Never fully cover Plumbus while sleeping. Always face Plumbus east when praying. Always turn the grotesque to desired trim length. Using Plumbus in correlation with scrupulous will result in a 6.00.32 fine. If Plumbus revolves faster than 200 rpm, it must be boiled. Outline of Plumbus should not be traced onto paper. Don't mess up the chumble. Don't mess up the chumble. There you go. That's silly. That's Plumbus care. Don't mess the chumble. I don't even know what I just said. Yeah, do you watch Rick and Morty at all? I have. I'm not a regular consumer. Yeah. Usually I've had to turn it off. Marshall thought it was appropriate. Oh, no, it's not. And I was like, okay. And then I'm like, this is not okay. No, it's not appropriate for younger eyes. No. Marshall was like, yeah, it's Rick and Morty. It's fine. I'm like, I don't understand what you think is okay. Yeah, it's definitely not. Definitely not. We need to talk, kid. Let's talk. Yeah, it's not appropriate. So I've only watched like an episode here or there because usually Kai's around. And so I'm not like hanging out and watching all the shows that I would like to watch, unfortunately. Someday. Someday. Someday, it's all good. It'll be appropriate for all of you and he won't want to watch it with you. Oh, no. Mama, I don't even want to hang out with you. Oh, man. No, don't like that. Yeah, Pam, G rated. I try, we tried G rated for a very long time and we're up, we're pushing the envelope with Marvel movies, I think. But for the most part, we stick with PG at the highest. Well, I think maybe we started going into some PG-13, but which would be the Marvel movies. But yeah, we really try and stick to G and PG if we can. Really. My media consumption for the last eight years has been limited. Limited by opportunity. Yes. All right. People are sending me their e-mail addresses. Oh, awesome. Good, good, good, good. Because they know that you have the window open right now. And everybody who's messaged me is already on the list. So that's great. Yeah, I took a lot of people e-mailed me. Some people e-mailed me and other people sent me Patreon messages and I put people on the list, but it's good to double check. Yeah, Dave Shorty, you're going to keep waiting for that six and seven-year-old to be ready for Rick and Morty. It's a few more years yet. Oh, I love the Miyazaki films. Those are fantastic. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And Bleak, you're absolutely right. And you should not have probably seen Bloodsport at a young age. Yeah, that one a little bit much. But yeah, I mean younger kids have older siblings and get exposed to all sorts of stuff and end up totally fine all the time. It's just kind of what happened. The first kid goes through and you're like, kid gloves and take everything carefully and I'll only expose you to the nicest things. And then all of a sudden the second child comes through and it's like, whatever they're watching. Yeah, whatever's happening. Okay, by the fifth or sixth kid, it's just like, I don't even know what's happening anymore. Yeah, neither of us figure that out. No, I'm not going to. Yeah, Bleak, we know there's evidence. There's so much video games don't make people aggressive. Aggressiveness makes people aggressive. Bad home environments, possibly environment and genes. But video games don't necessarily mean. Yeah, you. All right, I like video games. They're good. I just closed the window. Don't. Male kimp, you know, I can. Male gimp? No, male kimp. There's like male gimp, like the one that you keep in the basement. It's so if you ever listen to cereal, you know, yeah, they had the ad for male chimp where people are saying male chimp wrong. That's all I can picture now when I can. It's pretty funny. Alrighty. Yeah, should we do it? Should we call it? Yeah, yeah. For some reason, I like woke up early this morning. Let's just like, boom, I'm awake now. Now I'm tired. It's good. All right. Everyone, thank you so much for joining us tonight. Thank you for letting us know whether you want to be on the newsletter mailing list or not. And thanks for enjoying the show. I do hope that we will see you again next week. Come back. Come back for more science, for more fun with all of us. Who knows what crazy invertebrate story Blair will find for the next week's show. Yeah, it's been a good couple of weeks. Too bad we're not going to the entomological conference now. Yeah, no, it's good. All right. It's good. All right, everybody. And Blair, thank you for a great show. Yeah, thank you. It was a fun one. It was fun. Everyone have a wonderful week. Have a wonderful weekend. Enjoy the science. We'll see you again next time. Thank you.