 Why Facebook? I'm live. Okay. Why? Why am I live? Why are we live? We're here because we do this every week. It's time for this week in science. We're ready. Justin is awake. Justin, have you had your coffee yet? It's only the first cup, so I might need a refresh somewhere in there. All right. We are here. This is the show where we do all the talking about science. This is the live broadcast of the Twist Science podcast. Not all of the things from this video program will be in the final podcast, but you can always subscribe to us on the video platforms, YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, or podcast providers, directories. If you want to get those edited versions, for sure, podcast directories. We're out there. Subscribe, subscribe, subscribe. Click that subscribe button, the notification bell. Make sure you know when we go live, when we have published. Come on, everybody. I'm not ready for today. There was a lot going on today in science news going on in the world. Yes. A lot of science news, a lot of things going on in the world today. I'm ready. I'm ready. Are you ready? I'm ready for this show. Are we going to do this? We're doing it. We're doing it. We're making a show now. Hi, everyone. Are we loud enough? Test, test, test, test. Checkity, check, checkity, check, check, check. Testing, one, two, three. Sounds good in my ears. What do you say? Internet? 5x5 from Shoebrew. Thank you. Plenty loud. Okay, here we go. In A3, a 2, a 1. This is Twist, this week in Science Episode Number 806, recorded on Wednesday, January 6th, 2021. 2021 Science Predictions. I'm Dr. Kiki, and today we will fill your head with surmises, suppositions, and science. But first, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. What you are about to experience is unlike anything else you will hear on this show, while normally focused on science and science alone, once a year, twist, crew, toss themselves headfirst into the depths of the cult mysticism and future-telling divinations. We reach out into the in-between worlds of what is and what may be yet to come. As mediums, we speak of the unseen wisdom from beyond, the world of spirits, ghosts, fallen gods, and failed stand-up comedians whose powers of prognostication are at once awesome to behold and chilling in their near inability to connect with reality. When a prediction comes true, it does so with such ominous and resounding accuracy that it stands as confirmation that the hosts have connected to the supernatural world. When predictions fail, they are quickly forgotten. Oh, spirits, allow these mediums of science to be inoculated with your exponential growth wisdoms. Suspend all this belief and peek into the future with us here now on This Week in Science, coming up next. Science to you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back again after the first of the year. We're into 2021, and oh my goodness, are we at 2022 yet? I'm kind of ready already. Are we there? Good day today. Oh boy. But you know, we are here to talk about science. Six days into the new year, we are here to make our predictions. That's right. So on tonight's show, stay tuned for a review of our predictions from last year. How'd we do? You can let us know, follow along with us and tally our scores and we'll figure out who's the best prognosticator of the three of us. See if anyone predicted what happened in 2020. No. And we will predict our science predictions for 2021. And then we'll get to a bunch of science stories, because there is actually science going on already. We were supposed to bring science stories also. We're going to talk about science. It's going to be great. We're going to have such a good time. All right. Justin, what kind of science stories did you bring? Do you have something to tease? Yeah, sudden stratospheric warming over the pole. That's going to be fun. Redacted, retracted, science papers that are still being cited today. And another avenue, another vaccine in the mix that's being worked on that may overcome some of the deficits of the ones that are currently out there. Nice. Blair, what's in the animal corner? Oh, I have owl pellets and useless pandas and octopus skin. Can we all have octopus skin? That's what we're going to talk about, actually. That would be great. Okay. Okay. I can't wait. I can't wait. I've got progeria, proteins, and a possible cure for depression. Is that happiness? Yeah. Is it 2022? Yes, it's a... I love how everyone is already skipping to 2022 because 2021, it's like a rebound relationship that you know is still not the right one, but I need anything. This is like a palate cleanser. Yeah. But this still won't be it. It's already everybody going into it knowing this is a temporary arrangement. Get it done. We'll see. We'll get her done. All right. It is just about time for us to dig into those predictions from last year. But before we do, I just want to remind you that you can subscribe to TWIS. If you are not subscribed yet, you can find us on YouTube, on Facebook, and as TWIS Science on Twitch. Subscribe. Hit that notification button to know when we are live. And you can also subscribe to us as a podcast. Any podcast directory, look for this week in Science. You can find us on KDVS 90.3 FM, and you can visit our website, twisttwis.org, if you want to find out more information. Okay. Let's time travel back to the beginning of 2020. Oh, we were so naive then. We were so optimistic. This is going to be a great year, everybody. I got to tell you, even when I was looking through for last week's show for the top 11 stories, and I was going through all of the broadcasts, it was very funny. It was very funny even at the start of the pandemic for us to say like, oh, what a few weeks. We had no clue. All right. I predicted that dark matter experiments in Japan and the US would successfully go live, but report no evidence of WIMPs, weekly interacting massive particles. In 2020, it was kind of right. There was no, there were no WIMPs, but they found axions or they found evidence of axions, no evidence of WIMPs. There were no WIMPs, no WIMPs involved in these dark matter experiments. The Japanese gravitational wave detector will add to the resolution of the current LEGO Virgo collaboration, allowing triangulation of even smaller merger events in the universe. Yeah, no, that didn't happen, but Kagrad did go live and begin initial observations, although not at a high enough resolution to really add to what LEGO Virgo was already doing. I predicted that SpaceX and Boeing would successfully launch crewed missions to space. SpaceX did. They did that. That was awesome. Boeing, no. So I was like half right on that one. Said India would return to the moon for another attempt at landing on the surface, and that didn't happen. Artificial intelligence will beat humans at the game of life. I haven't seen that happen yet. We're still winning when it comes to the game of life in artificial intelligence. Did you mean like life or did you mean the board game life? It was a prediction. Okay, all right. I mean, has anybody let artificial intelligence play the board game of life? I don't know. What would AI do? I feel like they'd say it's stupid. That is basically my prediction in 2021. Are you reading ahead? Self-driving cars would take over more roads leading to many taxi selfies on the internet. That did not happen. Not yet. Not yet. More robots will leave Earth heading to Mars, leaving behind millions of jealous humans. That happened. Perseverance headed out, and it launched, and boy were we jealous. Boy were we with you. Yeah, that happened. That did happen. Organoids, CRISPR and gene drive will be in the news more due to sensationalists scaremongering than real research advances, and twists will have to calm things down. No, that didn't happen at all, because I think COVID pretty much took over the news with the sensationalists scaremongering and everything. I think we did a good job at trying to calm things down though. Xenotransplantation involving CRISPR will be successful and lead to a pig to human experiment. That has not yet happened. No xenotransplantation pig to human. Still lots of stuff involved in pigs though. Stem cell trials will see successes this year for macular degeneration, retinopathy, Parkinson's, and others. Yeah, there have been successes for lots of stem cell-related news this year. That's great, but not so much that stem cells have become the panacea that we hoped it would be yet. But then I said in November, California's CIRM, California's Institute of Regenerative Medicine will succeed in renewing its funding mandate from the public to pursue stem cell research efforts. And it did. I was right on that. So more money to stem cell research in California. Yeah, pressured by their constituents. Countries around the world will increase their efforts to combat climate change by reducing emissions even further than currently promised. That was a lot of countries except for the United States. We were like, let's go backwards. We're gonna go back here, guys. Yeah, we were going backwards. The climate will continue warming even as the grand solar minimum begins, further disproving claims of solar influence in current climactic trends. Yeah, kept warming. There was lots of that news. It was really bad. All of us will have to work more diligently to recognize fake news, pictures, and video. Totally true across the board. I got that one. And that one is when we're gonna have to do again this year. Awesome. And then let's see, this year is going to take patience and kindness and compassion and science. Was I right or was I right there? And science, especially. Thank you, Max. And science. More interviews, more live shows, and more twists in 2020. We did that. We did make two live shows before the pandemic, which is crazy. We did. We had a couple of live shows before it happened. And then not anymore. Yeah, I think I did a pretty good job. I definitely didn't specifically predict COVID and a pandemic, but there were some vague approximations for what it would take to get through the year, for sure, that I think I got right. Justin, what did you predict? Oh, my predictions are all over the place. I predicted an object in space would be discovered hurtling towards Earth, and that we would be powerless to stop it. That's true. Okay. This is sort of thing happens every day, but it will be the first time an object so small has been tracked so well. It hurts. Arecibo went down, which was tracking a lot of these near. So that one, I don't know about small, but we have that school bus size one that came. That one came pretty close. And that one had been being tracked. Yeah. I actually, before it went down. So that's still a miss. So I said here, 2020 is the year everybody has to start saying that hindsight is 30-20, although I think the real prediction, the real truth of the matter is 2020 being hindsight. For future generations, they're going to think we meant because of this. That's what they will think that term means, 2020 being hindsight being like, oh yeah, they should have seen all of that coming. Shoulda coulda woulda. Oh my goodness. Furthermore, we'll become in a criminal offense. The word furthermore people will be arrested for using it. Didn't happen. Did not happen. Yeah. Also, we finally agree to eliminate the word therefore from the English language. Those were two very specific word. 2020 will be referred to as double deuce, not exactly once. But I think that's wrong because I've done it now twice. Now, and when I made the prediction that it will. In different years though, but yeah. This is true. 2020, the wealthiest of the world, warm up to the idea that climate change might only be a poor people problem. But that idea quickly arose along with most of their beachfront property. Still taking a little, it's slow, the erosion. Very slow. Going, it is. Going, going, not quite gone yet. The ocean is slow, but merciless. I predict that people would finally become aware that Google has still been developing wearable goggles, goggle glasses this whole time that have screens on the inside. When tens of thousands of people are forced to wear them as part of a gig economy. So instead of actually going through real training, the screen just pops up and tells you what to do next. Unfortunately, because it's Google, there's so many pop-ups for better jobs. Quickly, these people move on and the technology is once again strapped. Instead, everyone went home. Everyone just stayed home. And yeah, we're staring at screens all year. So that's how the vision comes through. People looking at Google while working. The mystic mists are sometimes very misty and foggy. So you get the most you can out of it. You try to get the gist, right? Yeah. These sea leaves and these mists, they're hard. They're difficult to... Yeah. I predicted that the game chess would make a resurgence so much so that people would play a match and chill instead of Netflix and chill. But that didn't really... I mean, if you had predicted Among Us and Chill, maybe. Yeah, that one would have been a little bit stronger. 2020, there are people who watched the show Ancient Aliens will become slightly more informed about actual ancient history by watching cooking shows instead. I think that one might have happened because people won't stop eating out as much. They're like, I'm going to have to make my own food. I should watch a cooking show. So that one, I'm going to give myself a hit on that one. 2020, I predicted, would go down in history as long as we made it to 2021, which we did. And it does. Most of us. Also, I predicted a novel virus will ground civilization to a near halt and people will react by taking all necessary precautions to curtail the advance of a possible pandemic. And the entire thing would last for approximately three months. That was obviously a very big miss. Well, you know, this is how mystics work. You make your predictions and you're like, oh, there was one I was going to make, but it seems so off that I'm only telling you about it after the fact. I mean, we knew about coronavirus by this time last year, but it was just like a couple of cases, right? It's like very small still. I don't think I knew about it until we were in Seattle or leaving Seattle when the first cases were really appearing there. That was the first case in the US, but I feel like it was in China for a while before that. But there's always like, there's always a novel virus somewhere in there. Right. Right. Which is why we weren't talking about it. But I think we talked about it on the show. It was late January. It was the third. It was like the January 22nd or somewhere around there. That was the first episode that we talked about it on the show. Yes. Yep. Oh, well done, Justin. Some hits, some misses. Always a good time. Blair, what did you predict? How'd you do? My first one was someone will write a short story with Justin's predictions because I thought they were very sci-fi. I don't think that happened. I haven't heard about it. Okay. Microscopic life in outer space. Now we did find phosphine in Venus's atmosphere. So we found like a precursor, the potentiality, but we didn't actually find microscopic life. We will find out we are treating lab mice wrong again. Yes. There were multiple stories about this this year. There was one about them needing mental stimulation and that they can get depressed and then become pessimistic in trials if they are put through unfortunate circumstances too often. How do you know that when a mouse is pessimistic? It was the whole study. It was about the choices that they made. It's like, if you have nothing to lose by trying for something, if you try for it, then you're being optimistic. But if you just say, never mind, I give up, then that's like being pessimistic. So it was through training trials. But anyway, another HIV patient cured, well, maybe. Wasn't there something this year about that? So what I could find is that some from Sao Paulo was reported as cured, but it was kind of not super clear. It was just like their symptoms abated, but they didn't confirm that they were cleared of it. So maybe. Lots of maybe's in my list, unfortunately, which I guess is a no in science, but that's fine. Clare change will be discussed in the presidential debates, but it will be one-sided, definitely. It was mentioned a lot. I don't know if they had a full-fledged discussion in the debates about it, but it was definitely tossed around as a buzzword a lot, which is way more than we got in 2016. So I appreciated that. The most I remember from the debates about the global warming is when Trump was mocking the Green New Deal and Biden got confused and thought the Green New Deal was his plan and forgot that he was against it, sort of. It was a very awkward moment where he's like, no, I'm not for the Green New Deal. What we need is funding for the Green New Deal so we can have the Green New Deal going, wait, that's you for the Green New Deal? No, I'm for the Biden plan, whatever that is. It was really an awkward moment. Well, I'm happy that there's discussion of rejoining the Paris Accords, which that is an amazing first step and I will take it. Anyway, it was a discussion. We made our numbers for the year, so far. Accidentally? Well, except that without getting too far down a rabbit hole here, that's also called into question because there could be long-term booms in carbon based on the way that we used power this year. So there's lots of weird stuff. Anyway, what was my next one? More species will be found to be shrinking from climate change? Yes, this did happen. My favorite one, though, was actually fish shrinking from CO2 concentrations. I remember that one. Yeah. So despite all the other mountain species and stuff we talked about before, fish. A new cephalopod species will be discovered. Here's another maybe. We found dumbo octopuses, two different species of them, really, really, really deep. Assuming it's new species because of the depth at which they were living and laying eggs, but without DNA, difficult to say. We will reach the $2,000 a month goal on Patreon. I don't think that happened. Patreon doesn't show you how much anything's made more. It did not happen this year, but we are a little closer, but we are not yet to our $2,000 a month goal. We will get there. I have no doubt in my mind that our supporters will help us get there. And then I had my obligatory, the pop culture prediction, which was baby Yoda will be at least temporarily evil. It didn't happen. It got close. There were moments, but no, he did not get at least temporarily evil, but he did choke some Star Troopers, which was something. The last thing I had was that scientists will attempt to create a black hole in the lab and destroy all life. Well, thank goodness that one didn't. Yeah, that didn't happen. You know, we're in a parallel universe now. I'd give you the baby Yoda one because it wasn't there. It's the only episode I saw of this thing, the Mandel Mancherian, whatever it is. Don't pretend you don't know. Try to be cute. Yeah, they walk in and he's choking and slamming Storm Troopers all around, and he looks like a little evil guy. He's seeing the dark side coursing through him as he's abusing these Storm Troopers. He was trapped, so I think he was actually out of desperation. But anyway, it's fine. It's all good. It's fine. Yeah. All right. I'm gonna say from looking at all of these, Blair, I think you did the best out of all of us in predicting 2020. Well, I did predict a virus that would cause us to be indoors. Did I mention that one? Oh, my goodness. If you just tuned in, this is This Week in Science. We are going over our annual predictions. What do we have to predict for 2021? Oh, and if you're interested in a twist shirt or mug or other item of our merchandise, you can head over to twist.org, click on the Zazzle link, and browse our store. So many good items. And also, I think there are maybe like five calendars left. We're scraping the barrel here. So yeah, I'm gonna have to be quick on the we're out button. So I don't have to say so I don't have to send sad emails back to people. But I think we have like five left. So get in there right now if that's something that you want. All right, let's come back and talk about predictions. Oh, wait, oh, wait, oh, wait, I'm ready. I'm ready. Is that because your future is so bright? I think that's right. I gotta wear shades, right? The future is so bright. Who's first? Justin? Are you first? Will you predict the year to come? Glenn Brady in the chat room is following up on Blair's black hole prediction of the world ending. As the universe ended, the hologram was reset. Smooth, wasn't it? Oh, is that what happened? It was just a glitch. That's all. All right. Yeah, I'll launch into the future. Tell us the future. Let me look into my crystal ball. Ah, what do you see? 2021 will see more COVID cases and more COVID deaths than 2020. Yay. There's predictions and all are gonna be good. Okay. As the vaccines make the rounds of inoculation worldwide, politicians everywhere finally acknowledge that public health can be important. That's great news. I like this one. Yeah. But that's all they do. Right. Right. They acknowledge. They say words. Despite the fact that science is responsible for saving hundreds of millions of lives in just this one COVID pandemic thingy alone, many people continue to pray. Religion still continues to be a thing. Absolutely. Not going away. Okay. Oh, here's one. As air travel opens up internationally, the specific ban on Americans traveling to France remains in effect. No public explanation is ever given by French authorities and Americans never question it because we get it. Totally. We totally get it. Although I'm really sad because I really want to go to France in 2022. Come on. 2022 might be fine. I can't be beyond 2021. All right. Researchers will develop a simple bio algorithm recognition app that makes a loud buzzing sound whenever somebody tells a lie. The application of which makes most human conversations entirely incomprehensible as the constant buzzing drowns out most speech. Oddly, politicians are unaffected. At first they are thought to be more honest and moral than expected. Later, we learned that the app does not work on the truly delusional. If you really believe what you're saying, a revolution in materials is coming. One that makes meaningless current energy storage and computing power. Unfortunately, it will take another two years to become fully available. In the meantime, no new devices are produced by phone manufacturers as people are asked to keep their old devices until the markedly improved versions are available. That'd be great. I'd be so happy with that news. Kill Kiki. That's also my favorite one. That would be such a No, no, no. We've actually got such a better phone coming out. It's going to take two years. Don't even bother buying it. We're not going to make one for two years. You thought it would be better. We're not going to push your phone out of your hand. We're going to take your time out for this year to come out with a really much better thing. With the rise of deepfake technology, that's the ability to make a believable audio and video of anyone famous saying anything you want them to. You can sort of program it. The technology is used less to create hoaxes and misinformation as most people had been fearing. Instead, it is used to sort of a filter screen effect for all news and zoom meetings and remote classes hosted in the voice of your favorite celebrity hunk or bombshell. Honey, why are you getting tax advice from Brad Pitt? The same reason you get your traffic updates from that Queens gambit woman and Taylor Joy, by the way, artificial intelligence comes online in touring test-busting fashion and is even thought to have achieved consciousness. Researchers are made certain of this as the AI professes serious reservations about three-dimensional reality and even raises doubts about human existence being anything more than a figment of its imagination. It immediately begins designing a second more powerful AI computer to act as a therapist, which when built, advises the AI to adopt a lower intelligence as a therapy pet, which ends up being humans. This goes unnoticed until the AI proliferates into multiple replicate versions in the demand for human pet skyrockets. Eventually, this outpaces normal human reproductive rates leading to massive breeding and cloning colonies on the moon. Now this one will be made into a short story. Are you already working on it, Justin? I mean, come on. That's a story right there. I love that pitch. In U.S. political news, which we weren't going to do much of, but there's one here, nothing naturally embarrassing or egregiously legal takes place in the White House after January 20th until the entire administration or maybe because the entire administration become therapy pets for the AI overlords. These crystal ball visions are from now until the future or from earlier today into the future? Never mind. What happened today? People keep saying something happened. I just woke up. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. It's fine. It'll be fine. Yeah. Will we start out a country? Okay. So your predictions are amazing. I don't know if I, I mean, I want that phone one to be true, please. I just love the idea that they would just call it off for a year. We actually have something really good coming. We're not going to pitch crap at you for the next two years. Never. Never will. All right. Let's keep predicting. Blair, give us your predictions. That's crystal ball. Crystal ball. What do you do? Tardigrades will do something weird. Something weird. That's something weird. You know what I'm saying. Carbon emissions will be cut in the U.S. to a number here for unforeseen since the last decade. That's only two years ago. That's the 2010s. But still, this is something. We will learn some long-term physiological effects from the isolation of COVID times. It's my epigenetic stuff. In the first COVID babies. But it won't actually be bad. It'll just be a change. It's not going to be like deleterious or anything. I love how you mean your prediction. You're like, I'm going to preserve the children. Children are going to be fine in my food. Children were harmed in this prediction. And if I want to get a little more specific, I'm going to guess that maybe it's going to have to do some way with the wiring of their brains. Something different up there. Anyway, new 4D movie theaters will start springing up in the wake of all the shutdown of conventional movie theaters. The fourth dimension, you ask? It's smell. Oh, so smell-o-vision. We're finally going to get smell-o-vision. Yeah, we're going to get our smell-o-vision. Is that what's coming out at CES right now? Do we want that? Do we really want that? I mean, we'll find out. No. We'll find out. Nobody thought you were going to drive it. Have you watched the new Superhero movie? Yeah, turns out they sweat an incredible amount. Yeah. Why does your house smell like a burning building? Hulk has the worst B.E.O. in the world. They never mentioned it in the comic book. It's super. He's a superhero. It'll be super. Next, half of the U.S. will get vaccinated. Half of the U.S. will get vaccinated with doses procured by the U.S. government. The other half will still get vaccinated, but they'll be sent by other countries who are sick of waiting for us to get with the program to reopen everything. Twist will eventually, late in the year, stop doing a COVID section every single week. That would be really nice. Yeah, just some weeks. But not all of them. Protesters at the inauguration will be ever so politely asked to leave. They will eventually. And now I have my pop culture prediction. I don't know what you're talking about. I'm never political. In Boba Fett's spin-off show, Baby Jabba the Hutt will attempt to capture our hearts like sweet, sweet Grogu. It's Baby Yoda's name. But many Baby Jabba toys, they'll expect to be a big thing. They'll stay on the shelves forever. You know why? Because the first ones that rolled out, a couple of kids lost eyes. Because the rocket was still at the rocket launcher, even as a baby. No, no. Jabba the Hutt. Oh, it's Jabba the Hutt. Oh, it's Jabba the Hutt. Climb man. And my final prediction on a personal note. Do you think Nima Toad, when he was a baby, I'll have, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm just imagining little Baby Jabba's tongue. So you know Baby Jabba was a thing in the cartoons to this point. So he already exists, but I think he's going to show up in live action, and he's going to be gross. Anyway, okay. And finally, my very last prediction is that I will have my gosh darn wedding. I hope you will. You got hitched. It looked like a lovely ceremony. Wearing the dress, he was wearing it. I was not wearing a dress. My dress is still in storage. Oh, I see. It was, it was small. It was the big wedding. Do you have a marriage? People and friends. Do you have a marriage? Do you have a ceremony? Do you have a marriage? I hope it's a wedding. It's called a mini-moni actually, a word invented because of COVID. There we go. Oh, Glenn Brady is suggesting Baby Jabba the Hut on the 2022 calendar. That's not a real animal. So no. Maybe 2022 could be made up animals. We need ones with copyrights. Animals that could live on other planets. That doesn't sound very Blair's animal corner to me. Sounds problematic. I want to see invertebrates. Lots and lots of invertebrates in the animal corner this calendar this year. I think I only have one year. 2022. Make a plan. Make a plan. All right. All right, Blair. How your predictions work. I hope that last one does come true. I have predictions. Yes, what did you predict? I predict things. I predict that vaccinations will predict 60% of the United States from COVID-19 by the end of the year. But slow vaccination efforts in other parts of the world and a significant percentage of US anti-vaxxers and vaccine hesitant will result in continued spread and mutation of the virus. And I'm not going to say the other things that follow on to that, but this is my prediction. I like how you're reserving. I like how you're reserving. Like there's more to this prediction, which I'll tell you at the end of the year. The rest of it kind of goes into 2022 and kind of what happens next and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, I think I don't know. We aren't going to get that 90% vaccination rate that people would love. No, it's going to be hard. But anyway, I like to predict things. We'll see where I land by the end of the year. More mRNA vaccines will enter clinical trials after positive effectiveness of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines leads more credibility to the growing technology. So like Moderna had not yet gotten any of its vaccines to clinical trials and to actually be authorized by the FDA. But now they've done a really great job with their mRNA vaccine. So hey, maybe they'll have more winners enter the sphere. Bring them. I hope so. Biden will reengage the United States in the international climate community. Paris Accords maybe, IPCC stuff, UN, and set goals of carbon neutrality for the U.S. by 2050 that we will become carbon neutral by 2050. I think that I want that to happen. I'm going to predict it. Let's make it happen. The James Webb Space Telescope, which has been delayed and delayed and delayed and delayed and delayed and delayed and delayed. And the budget's gone up and up and up and up and up and up. I think I predict it will actually launch in late October of 2021 and capture its first light image before the end of the year. And that'll begin a new age of space exploration for the United States and the world. Seeing things in a different light, even more clearly than Hubble could give us. Perseverance will land safely on Mars because it knows how to persevere. It's going to get there. It's going to be awesome. China is going to touch down on Mars successfully and have its first rover on Mars. TWIS will continue to bring you the joys of science. And I'm going to get glasses. I predict based on my failing eyesight, this is the year I get glasses. Ah, and then I wanted to add some prediction. You've had a good run. You've had a really good run of no glasses. I've gone through several prescriptions in just the last couple of years of needing ever more magnification of the world around me. I know. Like, please stop. What can I do? Make it stop. I want to save my eyes. I made it to age eight before I needed glasses. Oh, there we go. And I reached out to Twitter and asked Twitter what they thought could optimistically happen in 2021 because I was having a hard time not being pessimistic earlier today. And so from Twitter, Jones said, more alien extraterrestrial alien unknown radio signals from nearby galaxies. I like that. Let's find out. Or yeah, maybe we'll find out about the extraterrestrial signals we've gotten. And Sean Mack says, proof of life on other planets, grinning faced with smiling eyes. Someone will find a cool looking undersea critter that has not previously been identified, said Pasta Disasta. And I think that someone will be our previous twist guest Chad King from the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary going deep in the Monterey Bay. Maybe they're going to find something under there. Yeah. CRISPR will show promise in curing more otherwise uncurable diseases, said Ringmaster. I like that. I totally agree with that one. Rediscovery of species that actually didn't recently go extinct, but are instead really good at hide and seek, said G. Kaminer. RFR Gomez said teleportation of a proton? Maybe. Teleportation of photons is really ramping up right now. We've got some, I mean, our quantum entanglement and quantum-based internet, teleportation-based internet, that's coming right along. Photons, but a proton. That is a different story. Dr. Ben from the, I think is the titanium podcast. I think I'm getting it wrong. He's a physicist, said weird neutrino results. I think that pretty much nails it. They're always weird. And Aran Lore, and this was seconded by Gord McLeod, will crack the code and get a universal flu vaccine. Yes. That would be pretty awesome. Could you imagine only getting one flu jab? Like for every 10 years or so? That seems so hard. There's so many. It would be amazing. And let's see, better geology said, I'm going to figure out if a fault is active. Climb in through, climb in into the earth, figuring out whether or not it is shaken. I don't think that's how they do it, but. I know they set up their sensors, but I really like the idea of geologists crawling into cracks in the earth and like feeling them to see. They go down there and then they listen for rumblings. Are you active? Yeah, exactly. I like the way that they like put their hand and their ear on the ground, they go and they like pet it. It's okay, girl. It's okay. You're not at fault. Oh, our future is so bright everyone. It is 2021, looking like a good year. I like those predictions. That was fun. Listen, something's going to happen. There's going to be science. Some good stuff will happen. Some bad stuff will happen. But I would like to predict that the earth will still be turning. It will be. Come 2022, so. That's right. That's one thing that will not stop anytime soon. The earth's going to keep on turning. And twist is going to keep on going. Right? You guys in for another year? We good? Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, we got another year of twist ahead. But coming up next is science. It's time for us to talk about science. This is This Week in Science. Thank you so much for joining us for our annual predictions show. We hope that you enjoy it as much as we do. If you do enjoy the show, tell a friend about twist today. Help us grow and get more subscriptions. Thank you. All right, everyone. You ready for that? Science. Okay. Fresh science. Fresh, so fresh. I have a story about progeria. Pro what's the minute? Progeria. It is a rare disease that only affects about 200 people worldwide at the moment. But it is a mutationally-based disease in which there is a very specific point mutation where a T, a tyrosine, a single base pair, tyrosine to adenine is switched. And that's it. I'm sorry. I'm getting it backwards. There is a TA, a tyrosine adenine, where a cytosine guanine should be. So there's a TA where there should be a CG. And if they could just get rid of that TA and switch it to a CG, then the body, the gene that it's a part of, would stop making a poisonous protein. And as it is, progerin is the protein that's formed. It's poisonous to the body and it causes rapid aging. So that kids who are born with progeria usually age incredibly rapidly and die by the age of 14. So it's very sad. It's devastating. And it's incredibly rare. Is this the disease that that Robin Williams movie was about? I thought that was like science fiction. It was called Jack. And he- I didn't see that movie. Oh, yeah. He was like an adult in kindergarten. But you told him the chat room helped me. I don't think it's the same thing. I don't think so. Maybe. I don't know. No. But what happens is the body ages really, really, really quickly. So kids who are young, 13, 14 years old, they look like they are 80, 90, 100 years old. Their bodies are ravaged and they die young. And so researchers were looking at the idea of using CRISPR to be able to cut open the gene, the DNA, and to replace it with a CG, right? And so there was a grad student, a postdoc in a lab who was doing the work at one point. And the head of the lab was going to give a talk at the NIH in front of Francis Collins, who has been working on progeria for a very long time and with CRISPR and all sorts of stuff. And just happened to mention it to Francis Collins. And it wasn't going to be a part of his talk. And instead, Francis Collins was like, you need to talk about this. The world needs to know that CRISPR could be a successful treatment. Like this is something that needs to be talked about. And researchers need to be working on this. And anyway, it led to a collaboration. And down the road, they switched tactics and left the idea of using CRISPR behind because of the way it cut the genes up. And instead, they ended up using a viral vector-based gene modification therapy, where they initially were using an adenovirus. And this new study, the results were just announced. Today, they base-edited 62 progeria mice. Francis Collins has a bunch of genetically modified mice that have progeria at the National Institutes of Health. And they were cured, essentially. Not a pathway to a thing that might lead to the thing that could eventually open the door to, they actually cured the mouse model. Yeah. So this base editor that goes in and swaps, it's a base editor. It just, instead of cutting the DNA, it just swaps one of the bases, the T. And then the natural, it switches the T for a C. And then the DNA error correctors, the natural mechanisms within the nucleus, actually go and fix the rest of it. And so the genes are fine. And the genes start producing healthy protein. And then because there's no more poison in the body or a massively reduced amount of this poisonous gene, that the mice were basically fine. And so they are really pushing this year to push this research forward into humans because it was so extremely successful in mice. Yeah. They said they had these mice injected with the base editor via an adeno-associated virus. And after six weeks, 10 to 60% of cells in different organs around the body had been edited. And the gene-edited mice- This is editing in a living organism. Yes, in a living organism, yes. And the approximation of the age of the mice would be the same approximate age of a five or six-year-old human being. So not an embryo either. So this is something that would be done during development. Yeah. But the epithelial lining, the smooth muscle cells inside blood vessels were effectively 100% corrected. And this is the first time that they've seen anything like this. Yeah. So huge. Huge. Yeah. Living organism just going in and face-correcting, not snipping, not using the CRISPR cut and put a whole new gene in kind of technique, but just because it's a single nucleotide polymorphism mutation where it says, one little thing that's different. So this is, by the way, the type of story you need to think of when they talk about genetically engineered babies. This is the actual use of that technology. It has nothing to do with eye color or whatever. Saving lives. Saving lives. Reversing nature's mistake. Yeah. Making your kid good at basketball, that's at least 10 years old. All right, Justin, tell me a story. What you got there? Let's see. Whatever I got. This is a study led by researchers at University Bristol, Exeter and Bath predict winter weather. We may soon have in store following a dramatic meteorological event that is currently, currently, like right now, unfolding high above the North Pole. So whether forecasting models were predicting with increasing and increasing confidence that a sudden stratospheric warming event was going to take place January 5th, it snowed out here in Denmark overnight on the 5th and throughout the 6th. Not that this local weather is necessarily connected to this event, but apparently hadn't done it in over two years. So something's going on. The stratosphere is the layer of the atmosphere from around 10 to 50 kilometers above the Earth's surface, which for those unfamiliar kilometers is about the same as 10 to 50,000 meters above the Earth's surface. Sudden stratospheric warming events are some of the most extreme type of phenomena that can take place. You can see a polar stratospheric temperature increase by up to 50 degrees Celsius or 122 degrees Fahrenheit. Now that doesn't mean it's a 122 degree day at the North Pole, but if it's negative 30, it could be like negative, or it could be positive 70 Fahrenheit, right? It's a huge shift in the atmospheric temperature. What that then does is it changes all of the air, the jet stream and conveyor belts of heat that normally move throughout the Atlantic or the Pacific Oceans, but mostly affecting, I think the Atlantic Oceans conveyor belt. They attribute something that's called the infamous 2018 beast of the East, which apparently plummeted UK and Ireland into sub-zero blizzard-like conditions for days on end. The disturbance can be transmitted downward, and if it continues to the Earth's surface, shifts the jet stream. You'll have unusually cold weather across Europe, Northern Asia. It can take weeks sometimes for the signal to reach the surface. It can also take place in just a few days. The study is published in the Journal of Geophysical Research and was funded by the National Environmental Research Council. Had 50 observed, they used the analysis of 40 previously observed events like this, which occurred over the last 60 years and found this thing tracking. This is sort of like a polar vortex type of a thing, where because of all of these, the fact that Ireland, Glasgow, Scotland, I think is far north is maybe Calgary, Canada. London is as far north as June, Alaska for those West Coast or American Canadian people. Do you understand? Most of Northern Europe is much further north than we picture it to be because the climates are kept pretty temperate and mild, thanks to the jet stream coming up across the Atlantic and bringing all sorts of warm air that keeps it from being a frozen frigid Northern Canadian tundra type environment. But when that thing shuts down, due to an event like this, the cold comes in. This one looks like, based on that little graphic there. Yeah, it's Canadian tundra. It looks like Eastern Europe gets it if that graphic is actually being representative. But I think that's the old one that they're showing a picture of there. I think that's the 2018 one. 2018, yeah. Which then pushed cold temperatures across Northern Europe as well. So, and it's also funny because they say the last time it snowed, here this early was two years ago, which was about the time that this last event took place. Interesting. That's matching up. Anyway, really weird heating event. So also remember when somebody's like, ah, look at the freezing temperatures they're having in Europe and right in the East, the United States right now, it can't be, so you're saying global warming? Yes, that's a global warming event. Can lead to vocalized weather that's very cold and unprecedented. Right. And when you have high temperature, high pressure zones that push lower temperature, low pressure zones out of the way, then things like the Gulf Stream, the Jet Stream, they move. They get pushed around. They get pushed around those weird places. So when it's these pressure gradients that push things around and that's how you have this connection between warming in the North and then cold weather elsewhere, it has to, there's connections to it because warm stuff, it's a big bully pushing it around. Now, doesn't sound like good news to me. Although when I did see this story, I was excited about the possibility of snow in Portland, but that was not what this story was about. It was about cold in Europe. And actually Canada too. So what they said, this is one thing specific about this event. They say it's the sudden stratospheric warming event. In this case, they say, well, this is according to Dr. Richard Hall, lead author of the study, is potentially the most dangerous kind where the polar vortex splits into two smaller child vortices. So instead of just going in one direction, it's splitting off and heading in multiple directions. So that doesn't say where it'll hit. It could actually still hit Portland. It doesn't, that graphic, I think that we had there was the 2018, the last final destination though. So we still don't know where this one went. It's on its way. It's pushing things around right now. Not to get cold, some places. Somewhere. More on that later. We'll report on where it got cold next week. All right. So this last year, we talked about artificial intelligence, the natural learning, machine learning algorithm that is Alpha Fold that Google's company used to successfully start figuring out how proteins fold, what a sequence of amino acids leads to in protein structure. Well, some researchers at the University of Chicago are also working on this problem, but kind of from a different direction. What they want to do is design new proteins. And so they put AI, artificial intelligence, onto the problem of learning how good proteins, proteins that are good at their jobs in nature, how they're folded, and not necessarily why they're folded the way that they are, but how they're folded. And the researcher, Rama Ranganthanan, says, we have all wondered how a simple process like evolution can lead to such a high performance material as a protein. We found that genome data contains enormous amounts of information about the basic rules of protein structure and function. And now we've been able to bottle nature's rules to create proteins ourselves. They published in Nature how they use these machine learning models to basically figure out how to build proteins. And they looked at a particular group of metabolic enzymes called the Chora's Mate Mutase family. They're a protein that are important for bacterial life, fungi, plants, and they discovered the design rules of this family of enzymes. They set their algorithm on it and the algorithm was able to say, this is how these are the Lego pieces that go together to build the protein. And so they built their own protein and then they stuck it into a bacteria replacing the original protein and they found that it did even better than the natural protein. It was more efficient than nature's proteins. Renganthanan went on to say, we generally assume that to build something you have to first deeply understand how it works. But if you have enough data examples, you can use deep learning methods to learn the rules of design even as you are understanding how it works or why it's built that way. Yeah, especially in proteins, the way that proteins are folded is with all sorts of little helpers and they're free-floating gangly things when they get printed out. And there's parts of them that really want to connect together and they have helpers that push them into place. But definitely I think there can be a higher engineering level to that. And I'm glad that we're unlocking that because that is again, I think this is going to be perhaps one of the most important technologies going forward is the ability to custom-make and design proteins because it's a hidden world to most of us. But that is what drives so many catalytic energy producing things in the biological world and the industrial biotechnology world. It's a major driver of everything that we do almost in a lot of sciences and biotechnology. The ability to customize these things and or just make it what parties they're more efficient. Yeah, I think that's the really interesting point is that the evolution has done a really good job of getting things to work, right? But we know that our whole bodies are just a higher level, a higher order of the basic structure of the proteins and molecules that make us up. So we're a collage. We've been pieces that have been shoved together. Some of them it worked. Some of them that didn't work. Things that fit, things that didn't fit. And there are probably aspects of proteins where maybe they don't need a certain amino acid sequence or maybe they just don't need something in there that just happened to fit because it wasn't deleterious to the function of the protein. So it didn't go away. And the protein itself and the gene ended up sticking around and not going anywhere. But that begs the question of is it the most efficient design possible? Probably not. At the end of the day, men have nipples and whales have toes. Right. And nature's getting there in a lot of cases. It's because life was not designed. Life came about. It evolved. And when you design something, it's very purposeful. And especially, I don't know, if you're trying to be efficient, you can make things very efficient in the materials that you use. How much material you use. What the outcome is. There are costs and benefits that can be worked out depending on the end function that you want. Yeah, I feel like you're at Ikea and they're like, okay, there's a giant pile of parts. Go make a bookcase. And that's us as opposed to receiving the box that has exactly what you need and the instruction booklet. You might end up with a bookcase both ways. But one is definitely going to be more sleek, efficient. Yeah. Delivered. And I don't think that if anybody was designing a human body with that, you know, all the parts available, that they would put the part that you usually want to keep very clean at all times is close to the place that's going to be the dirtiest at all times. I don't know. I don't think that's a bad design. Like I would rather have all sorts of things. We could we could critique human design, animal design. We can critique it all day long. I would love to talk to designers. I would like to talk to some designers about how they would design animals if they were to design them for form and function. I would need that. This is exactly what we discussed on a podcast episode that I was on earlier last year, was how to make the perfect animal. We made a monster. It's terrible. But it was very interesting covers it. Fun. I love it. I mean, yeah, but this, yeah, this is going to be a huge direction that we're going in the future. Artificial intelligence, robotics, these and synthetic biology, these things are going to go hand in hand. We will be designing organisms to help with our with our everyday needs, whether it's breaking down plastics or whether it's building plastics. There are all sorts of things. And this is going to help us get there. It's really a fascinating advance for artificial intelligence. Yeah, even with all of the technology we do have in these fields now, we're mostly nudging things in the direction that we like. And to get this next level of absolutely, I mean, absolutely game changing everything the way that we do stuff. I mean, you're talking, you're talking about everything. I can't even give you a specific way. It's like everything. It's everything. Pharmaceuticals, all cleaning, everything that can be cleaned. The designing drugs, designing. Yeah, all the stuff. Everything. Textiles, fuel, biofuels, power, anything that you can diet. It's just so phenomenally everything in it that. Yeah, that's going to be awkward. I'm going to borrow those shades. Kiki, you got this. Oh, you got to put those on. I got my shades. Tell me another story. I'm going to just sit here and bask in the science. Oh, OK. Wait, do I have a story that says AI builds protein? No, that's the one you just did. I have a story that says every year, tens of thousands of science papers are written adding to our knowledge as a planet, as a species, and everything once in a while, there's an oopsie. It did not mean that I wasn't supposed to. There are actually increasing numbers of oopsies and retractions as. Well, but there's if only if there's increasing number of papers overall. So scientific papers are occasionally retracted for research that was conducted in error or was even built on fraudulent data, which because that happens. Those papers retracted. OK, well, there's a problem. It gets identified. We pull that from the herd of papers. However, those papers can continue to be cited by other scientists in their work, potentially passing on misinformation from those retracted articles. This is Jody Schneider, Professor of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana, Shampanya, who studies Schuyler publications and how information gets used. It's considering how scientific journals can better communicate about those retracted articles. Sort of like the thing I've talked about too many times, maybe already the no result journal. We're like, oh, this didn't work. Well, there's one place I can publish it, the no result. Because then you could search the no result journals and see, oh, somebody already did that experiment. In fact, three people did and they all failed. Maybe I'll try something else. The retracted ones don't necessarily get flagged properly after they've been archived. So there's been a number of places where the papers are sitting, that they can be cited, and they can be added to other people's journals. Usually it's a confirmation like, oh, hey, they worked here and I'm going to cite that and why I'm asking for this grant, why I went this way with my research or why I didn't need to look at this in my research before doing the rest of my research because somebody already did it. So I'm citing what they did. She found a retracted clinical trial report that was being cited 11 years after its initial retraction and that the citations actually increased after it was retracted. So it was getting cited more after it was retracted than it had before. Schneider's team reviewed citations of a 2005 paper in the field of respiratory medicine that found omega-3 fatty acids to be helpful in reducing inflammatory markers and patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The paper was retracted in 2008 because it had falsified clinical data as part of its conclusions. However, it continues to be cited to support the medical nutrition intervention programs. Schneider's analysis covered 148 direct citations of the paper from 2006 to 2019 and 2,542 second generation citations which I think means citations that cited the papers that were citing the thing. Retraction was not mentioned and 96% of the 112 direct post-reaction citations. So anyway, this is a major problem. She says out of and since 2012 there have been four retractions for every 10,000 publications. So what we're talking about is not a systemic failure of science to produce science but we have though is obviously a tracking issue. Traceability is everything. Traceability is everything in a scientific process in your experiment. You don't have traceability. It's like having eyewitness information in your research. You need the traceability of all these things. You need to know all the ingredients come from everything, right? The fact that there's not traceability post-paper, post-publication is kind of stunning. That's one of the places where I would figure at the very least that would be important. But yeah, so 10% this is also a problem. 10% of retraction notices don't mention the reason for the retraction. Okay, we're going to retract it. I can't actually that to me isn't too bad of a number. That 90% do mention the reason. That's pretty good. We're unsure about after all about some of the conditions of our experiment or some of the data that we relied on. 90%. 10% that retract but they don't know why they're retracting. Seems odd, but maybe it's like there's multiple like iffy-nesses and we don't know exactly what the iffy thing was and we don't want to tell people this is what was wrong because we're not really sure but something didn't happen right because there was one example that's not in here. There was something about card grades having horizontal gene transfer. Oh, that was retracted. That was retracted but I remember that was one that got cited quite a bit but it had gotten retracted. Analyzed the context as well as the number of citations Steiner found that more than 41%. Post-retraction citations of the respiratory medicine paper or of a respiratory medicine paper did not mention the retraction that was described that described the paper in detail. Yeah, so I'm just one, once it does get retracted yeah, what is the system that's in place to make sure that the databases get that information because once it's already been put into the databases there has to be an update somehow and then there has to also be if people are publishing and they're doing their database searches that's a novel database search as opposed to just taking the citation list from previous papers that they've been working on and if you're using a citation software to store all your citations and things that you use regularly is that updating from the databases even if the databases get updated? So yeah, I can see how this could be a problem and Oh, great. Are they flipping it? Yeah, so actually, you know, if you think about it it should not be too difficult. If only four out of 10,000 are UPSIs, you just create a database of UPSIs. You just go straight to that database and then you just have to cross-reference. So information scientists students at Illinois University of Urbana-Champanya built a prototype tool called Retracker. It would automatically check for retractions among the articles that scholars compile in their online libraries using data from PubLed and add the retraction status directly into the library. Zotero, a popular reference management software system used for managing bibliographic data and research materials have also been developing such a tool. But this is the quote from Schneider, a Jody Schneider that I liked, a scientific paper that is right. It's like a brick to build walls of evidence we can rely on, which is why it's so important that each brick has the integrity to hold the strength that's necessary. Don't want your wall to crumble because it's built on faulty papers. You want to build that wall of... Yeah, of data and evidence. Papers and data. And RetractionWatch is a great website, a great resource for retractions and they talk a lot about, okay, who's doing the most... Which researchers have the most retractions? They track things and they see how things are going on. It's a great resource. I think that this is something where I don't often say, you should look at social media. But actually, I really... I think they've come a far away in a very short amount of time mostly because they messed up initially. But in their ability to flag misinformation and explain exactly why and put links to truthful information within that citation, that sort of kind of running living thing exists in there. And I think that maybe this is an opportunity for us to use technology that we have now that we didn't have even 10 years ago when papers were being published to adapt and change how we store, archive, and cite papers. And you could create a living list and a living database that has this kind of tagging availability. Hey, you're interested in this paper. This is another paper that you might find interesting. There's lots of opportunity here, I think, for... Well, it would require a lot of collaboration though, which I think is where there's a lot of work to be done and a way to make sure that... You also need open publishing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, open access. Yeah, you need that for the information to be available so that you can do those cross-references and suggestions and really, really dig into stuff. Yeah. But there is, I think, a propensity to oversight. I mean, if you look... Some of the papers that I've looked over have hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of citations. And in the case where I'm looking at it going, did you pick that title because it sounds like it's just... Like, did you really read all of that? And of course, I assume that they did. But if I was... The graduate students did. Yeah, somebody was forced to. But even when you read those papers, you may not get flagged. You actually have to dig deep to see what was retracted or when they were retracted though, if they were retracted. Yep. Thanks for that, Justin. Oh my goodness! We're getting to that part of the show. Where we get to talk about animals and stuff like that. But very quickly, I want to say, hey, this is This Week in Science. Don't forget that you're a part of this show. Thank you for being a part of everything that we do for being here, for listening, for watching wherever you are, for bringing us into your lives. We do hope that we are giving you some joy and science satisfaction for your day. We hope that we continue to do that. And if you're already supporting us on Patreon or PayPal, thank you for your support. You really help keep this show going. For those of you who are not yet supporting us, consider going over to Patreon, clicking on the Become a Patreon button for This Week in Science. You go to twist.org, click on Patreon link, and then head over and click that Become a Patreon button. And you can choose your level of support. We have annual subscriptions now so that you can just get all the payment out of the way or you can subscribe on a monthly basis and be charged on a monthly basis. It's your choice. The amount is your choice. It's all up to you. And the bottom line is that what we do is listen or support it. So if you are able to help us out, to can help us continue to bring the show to you every week, then that would be really wonderful. Help us continue to bring science to people like you and to try and grow the show to find more people who need this show, who maybe haven't found it yet. Thank you for your support. We really can't do. We can't do this without you. Thank you. Alrighty, Blair. It's that time. What time is it? It's time for Blair's Animal Corner. She's your mom. Except for Giant Pamela Sprung. Hey, man, I'll go tell her. What you got, Blair? Thank you. I can't start unless someone says that first. I won't ask to sing it. Well, I have a story about Eurasian Eagle Owls and crickets. And I had to tell you it's an interesting story but I also picked it just because of all of the names in the story. So I have to give you the whole rundown here. Now, first of all, the Eurasian Eagle Owl. This study was studying them in South Eastern Bulgaria. And the genus species of Eurasian Eagle Owl is one of my favorites in all of zoology. It's bubo bubo. So I love bubo bubo bubo bubo borealis. Yeah. And so the Eurasian Eagle Owl eats pretty, it's very unpicky eater. They eat pretty much any animal. That is between the size of a tiny mouse and a rabbit. Just anything they can get. Mammals, birds, lizards, amphibians, insects, anything. And so Dr. Dragan Chabanov. Yes, Dr. Dragan. Insisting of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research in Bulgaria. And Dr. Boyan Milchev from University of Forestry, Bulgaria. Did a report on the frequent presence of the Big Bellied Glangular Bush Cricket. Finding out this word soup that I found in the story. That's just so amazing. So just to keep everyone up to date here, we have bubo bubo. We have Dr. Dragan. And we have the Big Bellied Glangular Bush Cricket. AKA Radiporus Macrogaster. Okay, yes. So these guys are threatened with extinction. They're in trouble. And they found that Eurasian Eagle Owls were eating a lot of them. How did they find that out? Well, of course, that was by analyzing the remains from their pellets. So owl pellets, a lot of us probably have dissected owl pellets in school. That's the all of the kind of them. I mean, normally it'd be like the fur and the bones of a mouse would collect in their crop and then they'd cough up a pellet. In this case, it's probably just a lot of keratin, a lot of exoskeleton and probably some legs. I'm guessing they didn't bother with those. I don't know though. I'm not sure because these are giant crickets. So maybe they did. Who knows? Anyway, from these owl pellets. These are big birds though. These are big birds and they're eating giant crickets. These are the largest owls depending on how you measure it. They're the heaviest owls. So they're pretty big for that reason. Their wingspan is about five feet and they can weigh around five pounds, which for an owl is insanely heavy. The great gray owl is taller, but not as heavy. So that's the back and forth there. It's kind of like the Burmese Python and the Anaconda. One's heavier, one's longer. Anyway, these guys, depending on how you measure it, are the biggest owls. But yes, so they were analyzing these pellets from 53 breeding sites in southeastern Bulgaria and they found that they were eating a lot of these crickets. They actually found three species of bush crickets that became a significant part of their diet in this area. And all three species are either rare or threatened there. So the big-bellied glandular bush cricket is of special concern because they're on the precipice of extinction. And they think the reason that these Eurasian eagle owls have shifted their diet to be so cricket-based is that there has been a local decline in mammals and birds as well in that area. And as I mentioned, they'll eat pretty much anything they can catch that's big enough to be worth their while. So it makes sense that they would kind of shift to crickets. But also the Eurasian eagle owl is of interest for researchers because they have requirements for habitats of low disturbance and high vegetation. And that kind of jives with these crickets that they were trying to track. So where you find bubo bubo, you might be able to find these big-bellied glandular bush crickets. So not to mention they're easier to find than other animals because they're so big. And they're very loud when they talk to each other. That's how the owls are finding them. The crickets are just not quiet enough. The owls are like, you're so easy to find. I got these ears and these eyes. Oh, I meant the owls are loud. So it's here for the researchers to find the pellets. Yes. So yes, a big fat Eurasian eagle owl hooting away. You can go like, oh, I bet there's pellets over there. They can go and they can find them. Yeah, so the Balkan peninsula was already recognized as an area with high diversity of grasshoppers crickets and bush crickets, also known as orthopterans in Europe. And they're also one of, I was going to say, this big-bellied glandular cricket. Bush cricket, yes. Bush cricket. I forgot the bush cricket. Okay. It looks a little, it looks large like a Jerusalem cricket. Or so it looks like it's, I mean, it looks like a very substantial cricket. Yeah. I actually didn't look up there. I'm doing it quick Google. Well, this reminds me a little bit of the Book Never Cry Wolf, where this researcher went up to the Arctic and he camped out and he was watching this family of wolves. And, you know, he was looking to watch them take down a caribou and do their hunting thing. And what he, the thing he discovered, this is an old book, but the thing he discovered is that they mostly ate mice. So you have this sort of apex predator. Because they are big and they have to continually eat and keep going and caribou isn't a daily thing. They went after one of the smallest prey, the majority of the time. So it shouldn't be surprising that one of the largest owls needing to maintain that metabolic physique all of the time is going to be less choosy. It's not just going to go after rabbits or whatever, you know, small, other small birds or whatever the owls are, mice and rodents and such. But yeah, crickets, I add whatever it can get, it's talons and beak around. So the, so other bush crickets can get to be about five inches long. These are huge. Yeah. That's, that's not too small. Five inches. That is not small. No, that's huge. Yes. So this is looking at owl pellets who, you know, at first you read the story and you think, oh, oh no, the owls are eating this endangered cricket. That's bad. Right. But actually they're providing, providing survey data, which is super good. Yeah. Anyway, gives a good clue into one of the most biologically diverse areas in the whole palearctic realm. Which I had to look up and is Eurasia north of the Himalayas, north Africa, and the temperate part of the Arabian peninsula. So cool. Yeah. So important somehow. Yeah. Well, it's, it's interesting to hear it called the Palearctic, it sounds like it's coming from Palearctic, but then Arctic and is that because during that time period it was in a different place on the globe? You know, I did a good look at that. It's geological history perhaps. Yeah. So where the, where that region was located. I don't know. I guess it is the largest of the eight realms. Realms. I didn't, we have realms on that. I thought that was like Middle Earth or, okay, I'm going to do a deeper dig here. And if you want to learn more about the realms on planet earth, we're going to talk about it in the after show. How about that? It's very awesome. I love it. Great. Okay. So I love it. And Carol Ann Benoit is reminded, it's the weta that it looks like the New Zealand crickets. Weta looks very much like those. Yeah. And anyway. Well, moving on to some Breaking Panda news at the dawn of 2021. Pandas are breaking? They're breaking other stuff. They're, they're up to no good. They betrayed us again. Oh no. What now? Why is panda conservation important? You two. According to Ecosystems. Blair, they're not. So you're both right. So for a very long time, conservationists have preached that the popularity of an individual animal can be leveraged to support their entire ecosystem, their habitat, and therefore all of the other plants and animals that live there. So that the panda was kind of the poster child for that because so much money gets put towards panda conservation. So much science goes into that. And they're kind of a niche animal in every sense of the word. But the idea is that anything that lives in a bamboo forest could benefit from the conservation of pandas. So this study published in Biological Conservation from Michigan State University's Rachel Carson Sustainability College looks at this really. How much does it actually help the other animals in that bamboo forest and surrounding areas when we conserve pandas? How does this umbrella work? And it turns out that different species have different needs and different preferences. Right. They used camera trap data they collected throughout the mountain ranges in this area of preserved bamboo forest to get a clear understanding of what and how animals were using those protected habitats. Now, what do we know about pandas? They don't move a lot. They don't have huge home ranges. And if they go too far, they get lost. They get lost. Do other animals act that way? Generally speaking. No, they don't. No, they know their home ranges and they stay close to home. They know what they're doing. They don't get lost. But I would also say a lot of animals, especially forest animals, venture way farther out to forage than a panda would. Because a panda is just like my entire food supply is within reach. It's just bamboo. So, you know, there was an expectation that animals in these surrounding areas were doing better because pandas were doing better. They were declared threatened rather than endangered in 2016. We talked about it on the show. They were pulled back from the endangered species list, which is huge, the poster child of the endangered species movement, suddenly turning threatened, right? So, three out of the eight species they looked at in this study, an Asiatic black bear, the forest musk deer, and a Chinese, I looked up how to say it and I'm probably going to say it wrong again. Cerro, which is a goat-like animal. They're just like an anelope thing. They have suffered a significant habitat loss and habitat degradation under panda-centric habitat management. And that is because pandas need bamboo, a gentle slope, and no contact with humans. That's what they need. But the forests and shrublands in lower elevations next to those habitats being protected by pandas are actually what these bear and deer species need. And so at the detriment, a lot of times if you protect an area, it's at the detriment of areas nearby that are not protected. Right. And so because they were just looking at what the panda needed and protecting that space and not doing a full ecological assessment and figuring out what the entire ecosystem needed, the entire food web needed, then they were only protecting the part of the forest that the pandas needed. So once again, this is a situation where saving one species does not do the good that we want to do. You have to save habitats. You have to save communities. You have to save ecosystems. And you can use a panda as the reason to save a giant space in the future. It's a giant space and not just the small space around. Yes. Right. So you don't just do research to figure out what the pandas need. You have to extend your research. Then you can use the panda as like the hook to get what you need for all these other species. But really, you have to be doing systems thinking. Yeah, there is of course, there is of course one animal that is causing havoc in most biomes across the planet. You're talking about humans? Yeah. So be careful. Careful how far you go in preserving habitats. Well, they're highly adaptable. One animal. It doesn't even go anywhere. That would need to be called. Yeah. Yeah, but I think that this is a situation where I don't want to throw too much shade, I guess, on predecessors in the conservation field. Because we didn't truly understand this until I would say the last 30 years. And there was a lot of environmentalism that happened that was just save the whales, save the pandas, save this, save that. And we didn't really have the body of research and science behind us now to fully understand ecosystems. I mean, I was still being taught food chains instead of food webs when I was in school. They don't teach that anymore. They teach food webs now. There's a reason for that. And it's because there's a better understanding of these ecosystems on our planet and how there's an interconnectedness. So rather than wag my finger at previous conservation that has happened in the past, I will say let's just try to move forward and get more complex in our approaches and see if we can leverage past experience towards this ecosystem thinking. Complexity and systems, ecosystems. Absolutely. Thank you for that, Blair. This is This Week in Science. All right, I have a story that could just possibly fix depression someday in the future, maybe. Maybe not yours right now, but maybe the promise of the treatment will help your depression. Maybe a leave, a little unhappiness. Is it money? It's not money. It's not love either. What else is there? An acute epigenetic treatment. Is it acute? It's acute. It is acute, yes. Researchers at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil have been studying depression and how epigenetic mechanisms might be related to depression. So they found that when people are depressed and have depressive behaviors, that the stress that triggers depressive episodes will very often lead to epigenetic changes in the neurons. Many of those epigenetic changes affect brain-derived neurotrophic factor. BDNF, and it is a protein that is involved in neuronal plasticity. So when brain stressors come on, depression gets triggered, pruning starts happening. Neuronal plasticity becomes limited because epigenetic controls get put in place that basically wrap up the DNA that contains the gene for BDNF so that less BDNF is able to be produced by the cells, by the neurons, and they become less plastic, less able to make connections. So these researchers, understanding this from other researchers' previous work, there's a team led by Samia Joka, a professor at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil and also the University of Aujus in Denmark. And they decided to find out whether or not they could erase those epigenetic markers. So the epigenetic markers, again, are these molecules that end up wrapping up the DNA so that, like I said, the genes can't be read. They're basically locked down so that those stretches of DNA can't be opened up to be translated and transcribed by the cellular mechanisms. And so that's exactly what they did. They used a couple of drugs. One is used to treat gliomas and the other is a very experimental drug. And these drugs that they used in the experiments can't be used to treat depression because of the way they decrease DNA methylation, this epigenetic mechanism. If they're doing it all over the place, all over the brain, they would probably change or increase expression of all sorts of genes and not just the one that's related to BDNF and neuronal plasticity. So there would be a lot of bad effects. But in the experiments that they did, in which they used these drugs and were able to basically create a depression system or something similar to it in mice, they used antidepressants, antidepressant drugs, to use a chronic treatment of depression, but also with these very single-dose acute treatments of these experimental glioma drugs. And the results that they showed were that the acute erasure of the epigenetic markers totally fixed, didn't fix it, but relieved ameliorated depressive symptoms. And there was more BDNF, they saw more neuronal plasticity and animals were less depressed. So very possibly down the road, not right away right now, but maybe there will be single treatments instead of chronic treatments that don't really work. Because we know that antidepressants don't work for everybody and they don't work as well as we'd like. Well, and it's also a good reminder, I know we know this, but it's a good reminder that depression isn't a, I don't know how to put it, but like a self-induced problem, I know that's like the wrong words for it, but do you know what I mean? There's definitely societal pressure that it's something wrong with your outlook or you're just eating the wrong stuff or you're not getting enough exercise or... Just nap out of it. Just nap out of it. Just nap out of it. Just nap out of it. Yeah. Just nap out of it. Just nap out of it. Just nap out of it. Well, I mean, there's... Yes and no. Yes. Yes and no. Yes and no. There are physical reasons that the brain changes and that depression can happen. There are genetic reasons that depression can be triggered. There are situational psychological reasons that depression can be triggered, but the end result, depression is not something that you can necessarily just snap out of or change your mind about. There is very often a real physical reason in the brain that you need to change your neurons. You need intervention, which a lot of people are not willing to get, especially if there's pressure from them that it's somehow self-induced or preventable in other ways. But if you know that there is a medical reason, if there is a real scientific reason for depression that can be cured or treated, I guess, then maybe there will be less stigma towards getting that treatment I think that's changing. A lot of people are more open talking about their issues with anxiety and depression and other mental health issues and that invisible suffering, the invisible diseases that people don't necessarily know that you have because they're in your head, right? They're not necessarily always visible. Those diseases that we look on and we look on them differently than others, the more people talk about them and the more open people are about their experiences, the more it will be, if not accepted, at least that we will begin treating them in better ways, that the entire treatment pathway can be helped. But yeah, it's... But anyway, hey! This is one of the things that does need to be regulated ahead of rollout, I guess. I'm flashing back to the anti-depressants that were being prescribed to teenagers on mass in the late 80s, early 90s, the head lingering effects because yeah, teenagers are... That's... Depression is a normal part of being a teenager. It doesn't necessarily need to be medicated. I think there are people who could be living a better life and that might be the cause of the depression and maybe they need therapy or do need to make these adjustments. And it would also correlate a lot to what we saw happen with the opioid epidemic where pain was being respected but it was being treated with what was supposed to be short-term treatments that were then being applied to chronic... chronically as if that weren't applied... Opioids weren't supposed to be utilized for chronic pain. So there is, you know, there is a danger. Everybody... The amount of people who are going to anaphylactic shock from gluten is a tiny percentage of the people who are trying to live gluten-free. We live in a world where people do self-diagnose and where things get over-prescribed and I'm terrified of a happy pill. I'm just... This is not... This is not a happy pill. This would be... No, I mean... Okay, I'm really upset at this conversation actually. I mean, I suffer from depression and I take antidepressants and it is... It's something that is a decision that was... That I've come to several times in my life, taken them for a period of time, used them as a method to get myself back up and running and then moved back and then stopped taking them and then come to a time again where I've needed more antidepressants. It has happened over and over in my life and it... I really... My feathers are very ruffled at the comparison to the opioid epidemic and mistreatment for pain. No, but... I've seen... No, because I've seen it first hand. There were suicides at my high school of kids who... They later attempted to do the over-prescription of antidepressants in teenagers. Like, you have to be very careful. It was not that. Antidepressants have been shown to have effects and this is something they did not know at first and this is why we need to test drugs on all age groups that they're going to be prescribed to before they are handed out and I absolutely agree with that. What I was going to say is that patients need to have a good relationship with their therapists and their doctors and come to their treatment choices together in a very aware and open transparent way. And if... If we are giving any kind of drug, if there are any kind of new treatment for kids, absolutely, teenage brains are still changing, they're growing, they're developing and if you're going in and making an epigenetic adjustment to neuroplasticity in a brain, yes, that is something that really needs to be well considered and well tested and proven before you go and do something like that but to jump, this is a very early stage study and I am excited about it because for people who are chronic sufferers of depression for whom antidepressants do not work or for whom you're on antidepressant your entire life because you can't get off of them because it's the only thing that keeps you stable, that keeps you from going down and becoming more depressed, something like this. This is why people are excited about ketamine treatments. It's why people are excited about all sorts of possibilities, mushrooms, even we've been talking about psilocybin. There are multiple potential avenues to treat chronic depression which does lead to suicide on its own in way too many cases and so, yeah, anyway. And in that application I 100% agree with you. Absolutely, yes. Anyway, I think I'm going to cut a whole bunch of stuff out for the podcast this week. Anyway, what is your story about vaccines, Justin? There's a lab Stanford University biochemist Peter S. Kim has been working on developing vaccines for HIV, Ebola for regular old good old-fashioned influenza. They closed the lab space as part of COVID-19 precautions but they then did turn their attention to the SARS-CoV-2 because that's the big story going on everywhere and the virus that causes it. So what they are, this is quoting from Kim, our goal was to make a single shot vaccine that does not require cold chain for storage or transport. If we're successful at doing it well, we should also be able to do it cheap. So basically they're targeting their vaccine for low and middle income countries people access. Their vaccine they have is detailed in the published paper in ACS Central Science and they're using nanoparticles studded with the same proteins that comprise the virus's distinctive surface spikes. So one of the reasons that these are called coronaviruses is that corona is Latin for crown and they have these spikes that facilitate infection by fusing to a host cell and creating passageways for the viral genome to enter and hijack the cells machinery. I think we've all learned a lot about viruses this year actually feels like that education levels increase. So the spikes can also be used as antigens which means their presence in the body is what can trigger an immune response. Nanoparticle vaccines balance the effectiveness of viral-based vaccines with the safety and ease of production of these subunit vaccines. Vaccines that use virus to liver antigen are often more effective than vaccines that contain only isolated parts of the virus however they can take longer to produce, need to be refrigerated, more likely to cause side effects. The nucleic acid vaccines Pfizer Moderna types have been authorized for moves used by the FDA are even faster to produce than nanoparticle vaccines but they are very expensive to manufacture and may require the multiple dose scenario so we're seeing. So initial tests and mice that they've done at Stanford suggest the vaccine could produce COVID-19 immunity after just one dose so they've done this in mice they already have the mouse model shown that they can be effective at this still early stage and according to the researchers they're like well this is probably a technology that they were going to then utilize for some future pandemicy virus thing because it looks like there's already a lot of vaccines on market and by the time we're ready to roll with this they'll likely have everybody inoculated I think that might be rosy based on what we're seeing the the rollout has been everywhere so convolutedly bad everywhere you have one very important job for government to take on logistics of a of a scenario and they're just failing there was somebody who was making this point in the in the media shows that you can you can get marijuana delivered to your doorstep within two hours of clicking a button just give them the vaccines they know how to get to people like this in the emergency situation that's funny yeah yeah I mean I think that there's there are a lot of there are a lot of issues at play and I'm not surprised at how poorly the rollout is going I think I I would like it to get better I think that that's what we should all expect is that it'll get better with time but yeah so uh also this is quoting Kim again what happened in the past year is really fantastic in terms of science coming to the fore and being able to produce multiple different vaccines that look like they're showing efficacy against this virus it normally takes a decade to make a vaccine if you're even successful this is all unprecedented looking back at the project there like this is I think this is Powell who's another one of the researchers in here time from inception to the first mouse study was about four weeks four weeks from the inception to the of this project to the first mouse ball everybody had a lot of time and energy to devote to the same scientific problem it is a very unique scenario I don't really expect to ever encounter that in my career again well and everyone's working like 12 hour days in the lab because there's nothing else to do and you know this is a crew that has been working on multiple targets has been you know again these are not it doesn't just take four weeks to hey wow we try something new and being you know they are working on all of the viruses for decades in coming up with things and focused all energy brain super brainy Stanford e-brain power this is one target and in a four week period managed to come up with something get it into a mouse model and it was effective they uh they did a mouse model that had oh what was that I think it was this more times the amount of of uh inoculation then you would find in a normal human subject so they over sort of over infected the mice right and we're still able to have an efficient outcome of knocking knocking out the virus so it's this is an immunization right so they're still going to have to go through they've done the mouse stuff and now they have to go into human trials probably to be able to get the clinical trials to make this actually work yeah okay so maybe maybe by the end of the year I it's good to know that there's another another vaccine on the way we want to have all of them and I want them able to also fix themselves when the mutations kick in and make the current vaccines you're absolutely right so that uh they inoculated to vaccinate and then are they vaccinated and then they inoculated with a much higher dose then you would find in a human subject and it did not it result in COVID reaction from the mice but you know the fact that it's cheaper and may not be required the temperature thing and this might end up being like the fourth the fourth error in the quiver might be the one that ends up getting used if the other three can't get their acts together and can't get governments to be able to facilitate this it may still end up being very much in play because well I think this would be six right all right this yeah oh maybe but this is three mRNA and then there's two like normal so there are there are many many more already in development and already in clinical trials and that we're just waiting to see how they come out so we've got the two mRNAs we've got the adenovirus from the AstraZeneca we've got the Russian adenovirus whenever they finish their clinical trials and publish their data there's Chinese adenovirus no no there's I don't think China is using an adenovirus vector but they there's China's vaccine India has its own vaccine and then there are there's over a hundred there's there are so many and a lot of them are already in clinical trials which is very exciting I thought at least in the U.S. I thought we had we have the two but I thought there were three that were they're expecting to AstraZeneca will be the next so it's yeah so Pfizer and so there's Moderna Pfizer and then AstraZeneca but we still have to give AstraZeneca the thumbs up I think yeah yeah yeah this is encouraging stuff look imagine what can happen when you allow brain power to be applied to problems so many good things so many good things yeah I want to know now I want to know now though about the problem of replacing my skin with octopus skin you know that that's a good question Kiki I get that question a lot so let's talk about how we can oh yeah well unfortunately I think we're several steps away from changing your skin but at least it's a first step we can talk about robot skin so this is inspired by the color changing skin of cuttlefish octopuses and squids this is from Rutgers they have created a 3D printed smart gel that changes shape when exposed to light becomes artificial muscle and may lead to new robot or potentially human military camouflage could also lead to soft robotics and flexible displays they also developed a 3D printed stretchy material that can reveal colors when light changes so they have the chromatophores like in a in an octopus or something related to it so that's it's not too different from how you think about your fancy tv works they have just like with chromatophores you have the little cells that expand that are different colors and then this one's like a teeny tiny little light bulb lighting up essentially right so anyway it's a similar functionality but they're always very rigid our LCD screens we still haven't gotten our flexible full de-phone yet and that limits the shapes that they can take and how they interface with 3D services but they were able to engineer a new camouflage that can be added to soft materials and create flexible colorful displays it is a 3D printable hydrogel or smart gel that senses light and changes shape as a result they keep their shape and stay solid despite containing water and they're analogous to jello diapers or contact lenses which is the thing I was like oh yeah so it's soft it has water in it but it still keeps a shape and so this light sensing smart gel combined with the 3D printed starting material can change color resulting in smart camouflage so the next steps are to improve the technology sensitivity response time scalability packaging and durability was there a lot of illides that are going to be needed before it can be used for anything at all but in the meantime it looks like we have the starting the starting pieces of 3D printed octopus skin that's fantastic I mean 3D print me the octopus skin I will put it on my car or 3D print me a new t-shirt I was saying you get a unit card right you get one of those like even one of the green man suit one of the the suits that cover your whole face and then just you can but even even just a unit chart that's like a a turtleneck at top and goes to the ends of your wrists and down because then you can wear whatever you want over it and then you can still like change colors of your neck and arms be so fun it would be fun and that would be someday someday we will be able to change colors on a whim or in the meantime it can make our drones invisible whether that's a good thing or a bad thing and then also okay or that yeah it could help make soldiers blend in better whether that's a good thing or a bad thing I don't know I don't know I'm not here to judge yeah I'm just imagining the the new raps that they put on buses for advertising it'll just be color chasing color changing chromatophores this sounds like back to the future no I know very cool how how very interesting that they can print this gel that becomes like muscle that was the aspect of it that I kind of went what what I was okay with soft gel and then becomes like muscle yeah and responds to light there you go there you go that's really cool hey do you like broccoli or do you think it tastes bitter both I guess both all right I don't think I'd like it but it's got a little bitterness to it and I'll enjoy it very much just a little bit just a little bit yeah uh well researchers looking at the differences in taste between people from different cultures this is from the University of Copenhagen and the researchers looked at the difference differences between Chinese people's tongues and Danish tongues and apparently the Chinese don't like bitter tastes as much as the Danes do Danes appreciate bitterness a bit more than the the Chinese tongue and researchers were wondering why that would happen well it turns out that there is a different distribution of bitter taste receptors on the tongues of Danish people versus Chinese people so tongues are set up differently in different places and there's they are proposing that there is a genetic component to our tasting of bitter flavors hence how many bitter receptors that we have on our tongue where they're placed on our tongue that there is a genetic instruction that places them there but then they also went on to investigate other things like liking crunchy food food that you have to chew a lot turns out Chinese don't like to chew a lot the Danes really like to chew on things so the chewing went on and on and on and on for the Danes and that they couldn't find a physical reason for it so they're blaming that just on Danish culture I think there's a lot of tastes that come from culture I mean the very first thing I thought about was all the weird kinds of fish that a lot of cultures have so like lutefisk or kippers or the one that I was thinking about from my culture is gefilte fish which is mashed shaped pickled jelly fish and I enjoy it but it's because I've been eating it since I was a kid it pass over right so it's definitely I think about a lot of tastes that are are just so wired yeah you grow up with for sure so they they acknowledge that there is absolutely a component of learning and culture what you eat determines what you like to eat you know you grow up with stuff and then when you're an adult you're like of course I like to eat that but there is definitely a the sensory aspects of our tongue allow us to have certain experiences and to engage with our food in different ways and so that will inform the cultural appreciation or how cultures have potentially developed to like certain foods or not maybe it goes hand in hand and maybe there's you know the way that we got genes to break down milk the lactase enzyme right at some point maybe there is you move someplace there's lots of grasses that you have to eat in Dain land and so the Danes are like oh I gotta eat the grasses and the tubers crunch crunch crunch crunch and then you get better at it and you're happy with the bitter things because your body adapts even even the candy in Denmark is bitter and salty like that's not really like so there is no really a whole lot of other option like I've even had gummy bears here that seem to have like less sugar than the ones you would have in America well America puts more sugar in everything everything is and then you can imagine the crunching is just because such a frozen tundra at times you have to chew through the ice always gnawing on jerky and stuff Gigi does it mean you would say it's nature and nurture yep there you go Danes are sort of famous for being explorers of real tribes like they have a lot of people leave Denmark like it's been the same population of Denmark probably for three years I wonder if it's just they leave because everybody's salty and bitter yeah no the people with the sweet taste buds are just like I'm gonna get out of this place I gotta go somewhere I gotta go they go travel they have like a proper cake or something like oh I'm not leaving I'm staying here yeah I'm not going back well I hope everyone who's watching or listening right now it's gonna stay with us come on back again next week our show is over for the night thank you for listening thank you for being a part of the show thank you for great predictions co-hosts that was awesome thank you let's hope some of it but not all of it happens next year this year I like the optimistic ones saying that's the pessimistic ones man yeah all right I want to shout out to Fada thank you for your help on social media and with show notes Gord thank you for manning the chat room and identity for thank you for recording the show I'd also like to thank our Patreon sponsors and the boroughs welcome fund for their generous support and I'm opening up my window right now of excel okay thank you to Woody MS Andrei Baset Chris Wozniak Dave Bun Vegard Chefstad Hal Snyder Donathan Styles AKA Don Stilo John Shiole Guillaume John Lee Ali Coffin Gaurav Sharma Shoebrew Sarah Forfar Darwin Hannon Donald Mundes Steven Alberon Daryl Maishak Stu Pollock Andrew Swanson Fred S104 Sky Luke Paulronovich Bentley The Translator Bignell Kevin Reardon Noodles Jack Brian Carrington Matt Bates Joshua Furey Sean Anina Lam John McKee Greg Riley Marqueson Flow Jean Tellier Steve Leesman AKA Zima Ken Hayes Howard Tan Christopher Rappin Dana Pearson Dana Pearson Richard Brendan Minnish Melizan Johnny Gridley Kevin Railsback Flying Out Richard Porter Christopher Dryer Mark Miseros Artyom Greg Briggs John Atwood 2020 Can Bite My Shining Metal Yep, that's what I thought it said Arse Rudy Garcia Nick Dave Wilkinson Rodney Lewis Paul Rick Ramos Matt Sutter Phillip Shane Kurt Larson Craig Landon Mountain Sloth Jim Der Poe Sarah Chavez Alex Wilson John Ratna Swamy Sue Doster Jason Olds Dave Neighbor Eric Knapp E. O. Kevin Parachan Erin Luthan Steve DeBeld Bob Calder Marjorie Paul Stanton Paul Disney Patrick Pecoraro Gary S. Tony Steele Ulysses Adkins Brian Condren Jason Roberts and Dave Frydell And an extra shout out to Shoebrew for helping me buy a new set of earbuds That's going to be awesome Thank you Thank you everyone for your support on Patreon If you are interested in supporting us You can find information at Patreon.com Slash This Week in Science On next week's show We will be back On Wednesday 8 p.m. Pacific time Or 5 a.m. Central European time Broadcasting live from our YouTube and Facebook channels And from twist.org slash live Hey, want to listen to us as a podcast? I don't know why you would when you could be Looking at us and hearing all the juicy stuff But if you wanted to listen to us as a podcast We're there for you Just search for This Week in Science Wherever podcasts are found If you enjoyed the show Get your friends to subscribe as well For more information on anything you've heard here Show notes and links to stories Will be available on our website www.twist.org And you can also sign up for our newsletter Where we sometimes write newsletters Yep, sometimes You can contact us directly Email kirsten at kirstenthesweek in science.com Justin at twistmeaning at gmail.com Or me, Blair, at BlairBazz at twist.org Just be sure to put twist-t-w-i-s in the subject line Or your email will be spam-filtered Into the mouth of a boo-boo-boo-boo Into the girl-it And then cough back up as an owl pellet You don't want that No You don't want that You can also hit us up on the Twitter Where we are at twist science at Dr. Kiki And Jackson Flyer And at Blair's Menagerie And do we love your feedback And if there's a topic you'd like us to cover Address And a suggestion for an interview On a haiku that comes due in the night And please let us know We'll be back here next week Week two of 2021 What could go wrong? And we hope it doesn't end for more great science news And if you've learned anything from the show Remember It's all in your head This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science It's the end of the world So I'm setting up shop Got my banner unfurled It says the scientist is in I'm gonna sell my advice Show them how to stop the robots With a simple device I'll reverse all the warming With a wave of my hand And all it'll cost you Is a couple of grand This week 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 Cause it's this week in science This week in science This week in science Science Science This week in science This week in science This week in science Science Science Science I've got one disclaimer And it shouldn't 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 understand But we're not trying to threaten your philosophy We're just trying to save the world From Japanese And this week in science Is coming your way So everybody listen to everything we say And if you use our methods That'll roll and I die We may rid the world of toxoplasma Cause it's this week in science This week in science this week in science Science Science this week in science This week in science This week in science Science Science I've got a laundry list of items I want to address From stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness I'm trying to promote more rational thought And I'll try to answer any question you've got But how can I ever see the changes I seek When I can only set up shop one hour a week This week in science is coming in a way You better just listen to what we say And if you learn anything from the words that we've said Then please just remember it's all in your head Cause 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 This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science We've come to the after show We have the crystal ball I've got the sunglasses of the bright future Pew Justin's taking a quick morning break Taking a constitutional Constitution Good for his constitution Pew Having fun flipping us around Wee So fun Too much fun RGB globe, that's right, noodles, that's super fun I hope everyone had a great dance You know how much that show Improved my mood from earlier today? That's great So good I know I'm like scared For a little rant, for a little bit there No, that was necessary I Sometimes Thou dost know what thou doesn't know I know I'm not, Caroline I know there are many many people Many many people out there Yeah I'm afraid to look at the news Before I go to bed I know I will look at the news before I go to bed Because that's what I do I go I'm going to read a book And then of course because I've got Kindle on my phone I'm like I'll just look at Twitter Before I open my Kindle app Just for a moment and then it's ruined And then the whole night And sleeping It's not ruined I had a dream About a bathtub Full of poo last night This is like the state of my dreams I don't have a bunch of bad dreams last night as well One of them Is not okay I don't remember Well, okay, so there was one that was actually pretty long I know usually telling stories about dreams are really boring So I'll be quick But I remember that So I was wearing like an oversized t-shirt to bed And so I imagined I was walking around the neighborhood I grew up in Sunset District of San Francisco With just an oversized t-shirt on Oh dear I was like, I'm cold It's San Francisco, that makes sense I had to walk home I remember very clearly I had to walk home Because I couldn't catch an Uber because of COVID So COVID still existed in my dream So I walked home And it was to my parents' house But I knew I didn't live there But then I get there And then Sadie came running behind me Like down the street I was like, oh my god, you got out I guess I thought she was at my parents' house And then there was like a hole in the fence It was a whole thing But it was, yeah, it was very stressful Because I thought that she had been out in the world And also I wasn't wearing pants Which adds to it for sure But it's such a COVID dream too Because people are at home Not wearing pants And you're like, maybe I just left the house And my dog got out Can we invite a dream researcher on twist? That would be fun actually That would be really interesting That's a great idea We have to find one that has some science though Come on there No, no, no, I'm just saying it's just It's a tough realm Because I feel like It's not a dream interpreter It would be a dream researcher Researching the dreams Yeah, I like that idea Oh my goodness Yeah, Jenny Bienal says Look at the news tomorrow Yeah I think I would have said like a term at any time Why do people keep talking about the news? Okay Alright, Mr. Not in America So it's not your problem I'm not in America I don't know what's going on in America What do you care about over here? Good night, Bada Glen Brady says An oversized t-shirt and flip flops Is formal wear in Australia That's awesome Move on, Justin Don't worry about it Shouts identity four Shouting Oh my goodness How was New Year for everyone? It was good Uneventful It was fine How was Danish New Year? How were the exclusive The most amazing, incredible Fireworks and stuff Fourth of July is going to be canceled in the United States Because they used all of the fireworks Wow They used all of the fireworks And over the course of a couple days But So you know like at a firework show When they have the grand finale And it's like That went on from about 4 p.m. to 2 o'clock in the morning Block by block everywhere In Kubenhouten Because They sell These boxes that launch fireworks up into the sky To anyone To anyone I guess it's damp enough there That they don't have to worry about fire Fire has a thing, is it really a thing? A lot of the buildings where I'm at At least I made a concrete They have good national health care So they can sew fingers back on Honestly They've commented a lot That they think the U.S. is like Insanely litigious Like nobody sews people over things here And it's just because they get fixed If you've fallen and hurt yourself on cobblestone You don't sew the sidewalk You just go to the doctor and get it fixed Oh my gosh That's such a cute project If health care were covered Why wouldn't you sew somebody? You don't have to worry about covering the costs I'm here on the 8th floor A little penthouse suite There were fireworks outside the window And both ends of the flat here Just in the window It was amazing Everywhere out in the horizon Block by block It's the same thing Fireworks are just going up There was supposedly the biggest Fireworks display That Tibley Gardens Is sort of a centrally located fun park Had the biggest fireworks display They've ever had But you could almost not tell Because it was also everywhere else At the same time I don't know how much money was spent I don't care But it was phenomenal Like this is their All of the big party days That the United States has Whatever they are They combine them all into this one And they do it for new And there's some fun traditions At midnight you You know backstrikes, gongs The final gong of midnight Everybody jumps off of a couch Or a chair into the new year Bunch of fun traditions There's the Queen That's better than running around And finding a stranger to kiss I'm going to describe that I feel like that's I read an article that was like In America the tradition is To find a stranger to kiss at midnight And I'm like Have I ever done that? Who doesn't sound familiar? That's definitely like with the media tone I mean I'm sure people have done that With varying degrees of Success Noodle says yes it is Noodle's like how I roll Right there's mistletoe also Fair enough, yeah I guess America is like A kiss happy country You know why? Because we started Via Puritans and we don't Train kisses for other things So I think that's it right? You're like kiss on the cheek all the time We're like no kisses No kisses Only for special occasions when plants Or a clock tell us to That's good Oh my god that's good Do you want to hear about the eight realms? Yes one second though I love that identity four Says he has been learning How to program sounds on his New Roland synthesizer That's fun That's cool I've always wanted that Sound box app type To like make wonky sounds During the show but Kiki's Always told me no We're not a morning radio show I don't know what we could be It is right now today It has been in the past Oh my god There was some kids Google kids Ah boy was that Google sound maker What are these What are realms These are I love the realms So this is Post-dates my time in College I think is this Invention I do believe It does say that Well okay so The concept first arose in 1975 But then WWF started Talking about in 1998 But I think it only came to like Here we go so like in 2015 I guess they started talking About it more Yeah so that might be why I did not hear about it but The Their bio geographic realms Defined based on Taxonomic composition So like animals Plants etc And so they correspond more Less to the floristic kingdoms And zoo geographic Regions so I'm going to open that In a new tab but The eight realms Are What is this Getting ready for her to read The eight realms The paleo arctic Which is what we talked about today That's the bulk of Eurasia in North Africa And then we have the knee arctic Which is most of North America The Afrotropic Tropic? Tropic probably Including Trans-Saharan Africa And Arabia Tropic South America Central America Caribbean Caribbean I don't know Australasia Is Australian again New Zealand And the neighboring islands Bye Ryan Bye And then We have Indo Malaya The Indian subcontinent Southeast Asia and Southern China Oceania I probably have heard of Australia No In Australasia As I mentioned before Oceania is Polynesia Micronesia and Fiji And then Antarctic With Antarctica You see But what are they based on? They're based on Taxonomic similarities In the plants and animals there So it is evolutionarily Kind of Probably Geologically Based And they're somehow related to Zogeographic regions Which there's only five of those I guess You've got to have your categories In order to Categorize So what's very funny Is the zogeographic regions Different Zoologists Or scientists of some sort Slapped their name on it Every 10, 20 years since the mid-1800s And renamed them And reassigned them So they were reassigned We got more information now There we go Three, four, five times The latest time was in 1957 Oh, hey, we're due We're really overdue So he has six In two schemes Darlington Realm, Megagia And then Eugia, Notogia I made it five Climate-limited regions Main regions and barrier-limited regions So there you go I look like I'm expressing What the hell are you doing? Stop it! Stop now! Just knock it off Okay He's had it, I didn't say it No, no, this is what Blair's face was telling me It's super fun It is Should I keep going? Should I stop? Keep going, I'm just playing with It's in Google Chrome It's Music Lab Google Chrome Song Maker That's very fun It's funny because I actually Until recently, I might still have it I had a sound-making machine That had buttons that made like Clapping and And stuff like that Totally irrelevant and obsolete Now Hey, what's going on in America? Oscillators Don't look Let's play with oscillators This one is Type Square How is everybody not looking? I've been looking all day I like that sound This is a sawtooth oscillator I like that one This one is a Triangle How about a sign? Ooh, that's an alien They're fun, huh? Oscillators, do you like the sawtooth? I like that one a lot It sounds like a bug It does Realms, I hear realms And I'm imagining that whoever came Up with the idea that there are realms On the planet was Some kind of a Fantasy reader Played D&D for sure Someone who worked with Tolkien Back in the day They're like, oh yeah, Tolkien, what you doing? I got this story, it's got all these realms Oh, I like that word We can use that What was it? Realms also Like to distinguish Different areas of control of Kingdoms Kingdoms in Britain, I think that was just sort of How you said that's like That territory or whatever Region What are realms from? Oh yeah, Carol Ann Warhammer Oh my goodness, I'm learning all about Warhammer Yeah Brian's getting into it He's painting miniatures It takes place in the year 40,000 40,000 That's a lot He's in charge of a group That are basically space vampires So That's rad There's also cyborgs And then I don't remember It's a lot The book is like this thick for this game He's never played it because he's like I have to study I need to study I don't have time for this Yeah, I guess Asgard Midgard We're taking the hobbits to Isengard Isengard The etymology Realm etymology Originally from Interesting Latin Regimen Government Middle English Room And then English Regimen And Old French Royal So it became realm Interesting I don't remember what I guessed that Fantasyn Fascinating Kingdom Fantasyn I've shared a very important YouTube video in the chat room Just to see you guys know Very important Heyo, Caltech Very important You love so much Let me see this video Is 2 minutes Taking the hobbits to Isengard I can't watch that right now It's really good I'm really stuck in my head It is coming up Upon second breakfast Rather quickly here I need to go to bed I'm emotionally exhausted Denny4, you have a really pretty Roland Super Programmer thingy, it's cool Have fun programming that, that sounds I want to hear the sounds Ubuntu Studio From Thunderbeaver Lots of audio things That's awesome, make your own sounds, make your music Make it happen And then Find a plant or a clock That tells you when it's time to kiss Plant or a clock It'll tell you Is it time for us to Head to the realms Of second breakfast and sleep Yes We'll see how much sleep I actually get done I am going to try to set an alarm for 10 minutes I'm going to try to go to sleep 10 minutes? Of news, is all I guess Oh yeah I might just stand here and play with The Chrome Music Lab a little bit That's good Because it's super fun Wait for this one, before we go This is the voice spinner, hold on I'm saying something Wait, I'm saying, I would have to allow it To use the microphone I'm saying something right now I'm saying something No we will That's the microphone I'm saying something right now I'm saying something right now Okay, use the microphone I'm saying something right now Now let's go backwards Excuse me? Okay Do me a favor Excuse me Excuse me I need you to say something in particular Something in particular I need you to say They are taking the Hobbits to Eisengard Okay They're taking the Hobbits to Eisengard Taking the Hobbits to Eisengard I'm going to sign off with this, I'm going to sign off with this sentence that I'm paraphrasing. I'm going to sign off with this sentence I just read, little sign remains of what took place at the US Capitol except for trash cans overflowing with discarded Trump flags. Say good night Blair. Good night Blair. Say good night Justin. Good night Justin. We even know it's morning. Good night Kiki. Good night everyone. Thank you for joining us tonight and we'll be back again next week and maybe the Hobbits will be a nice in guard by then. We hope that you will join us. We're really looking forward to seeing you again. Everyone stay healthy, stay well. Stay away from eyes and guard. Stay away from eyes and guard. Good choice.