 Hello, everybody. Welcome to another week of Science. This is This Week in Science. We are back again to talk about all the things that we thought we would bring to the program today. And as you all know, this is the broadcast of our podcast. So some of the things in the next hour or so maybe edit it out for the podcast version. So what you're watching is- Raw live version. Raw live version. So, but it's going to be interesting because Justin's going to be very quiet today in VR voicing because his baby's still sleeping. So don't wake the baby, Justin. I'll try not to. I'm really, I'm very actually afraid that I will forget. Try not to get too excited about concrete. Yes. My child is sleeping and say something loud. And then there'll be this shrill. Wow. Daddy, what have you done? I've done it. Why don't you be with me right now? All right, everyone. We are going to do this science show and we'll be with you for the next couple of hours talking science. We're glad you are here with us. So I guess as we get started, make sure you click those likes and those bells and all the things and make sure that the algorithms love us. So let's start the show. Oh, wait, that's Blair, not me. Hey, you want to do it? Yeah. I click a button. It turns into Blair. We do a thing. It's all good. Yeah, that's just the way it's going to work. All right, let us begin like Caesar, like Romain in a three, two, this is twist. This week in science episode number 909, recorded on Wednesday, January 18th, 2023. Laser guided lightning, very, very frightening. I'm Dr. Kiki. And today we'll fill your head with lightning nonsense and snot bubbles, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The following program is all about science. Not about all science I would take too long to listen to. This is just a slice of recent science. A peak into the ongoing efforts within research to reassure you that sane work is being done somewhere in the world. And to get your mind thinking. Not that it wasn't already about what a truly wonderful mystery we are surrounded by with all the things we know already, with all the discoveries and inventions that have come before. New knowledge has a certain excitement about it. You can feel almost inevitable at times when a new technology or therapy is unveiled, but there is, along the way, incremental advances. Simple mechanisms understood, previously missed observations noted, concise experimentation conducted. And through it all, the step-by-step data point by data point gathering of knowledge builds upon our previous understanding to make the mysterious mundane. The mundane, manageable, and the previously unimaginable as routine as a self-driving electric car or a novel-virus rapid home test. Or another episode of This Week in Science, coming up next. ["Science To You Kiki and Blair"] I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I wanna learn everything. I wanna discover reason happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I wanna know. Good 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're back again to talk about all the science that we wanted to talk about this week, and we think that you will enjoy as well. Don't wake the baby. Okay, we have a whole bunch of science coming your way. Thank you for joining us for the show today. On the show tonight, I have stories about aging mice, solar flares, and vagrant birds. Yeah, Justin, what'd you bring? I've got laser-guided lightning, self-healing Romans, ancient Norwegian nonsense, and an anti-matastic peptide fantastic story. Wow, okay, I wanna hear about that one. Blair, what's in the animal corner? Oh, I have the snot bubbles that you mentioned earlier. Very excited to talk about that. Also, I have some dogs and toddlers always fun in a room together, and then intentional invasives. How's that for an oxymoron? Yes. Like humans. I want to go there. You're right. You're invited? Invited? Are they invited? Yeah, it's a whole thing. We're gonna talk about it. Yeah, I can't wait. I'm looking forward to it. All right, as we jump into the show, for those of you who know, you already know, but those of you who don't, if you have not subscribed yet to our podcast, we have podcasts. You can find us all places podcasts are found. We also stream weekly Wednesday nights, eight o'clock p.m. Pacific time on YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook, we are- And then again, and then again we do the same thing at five a.m. central European time. It's all at the same time. It's time zones, Justin. It's just the same thing if people are up that early. Yeah, okay. But you can find us on Twitter and Mastodon and Instagram and Twitch as Twist Science, T-W-I-S-C-I-E-N-C-E. If all of this is just so much, head to twist.org. That's our website. Show notes, links, all that kind of stuff is found there. Time for the science? Yes. Let's do it. Okay, let's make this show happen. Scientists want to predict the future. Of course they do. Of course they do. Researchers, NASA researchers have been working recently using NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory to take a look at various layers of the sun's atmosphere to determine the dynamics of the photosphere, the chromosphere, the corona, all of these various layers that may give some kind of information about what kind of energy the sun is going to just impart on us, solar weather. It affects us. From those solar flares that are just energetic and impact our magnetosphere to the ones that are really, really energetic and can actually impact our satellites and all of the electrical systems on our planet, overloading capacitors. I mean, things could happen and we want to be ready. We want to know what's happening in terms of the sun's activity. Solar flares, we know are a big part of this. And so how could little flashes on the sun be like a little match that starts the fire that becomes an eventual flare that will impact us? And so the researchers have been taking look. They just published in the Astrophysical Journal their information from the corona that's different from the photosphere which is the surface of the sun. And they've discovered a marker actually that allows them to determine which areas are going to flare sooner rather than later. Which areas are gonna stay quiet and which ones are not? So this particular paper, and there's another paper that's published as well that has publicly available data from the SDO, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, has been taking a look at images of these active regions in ultraviolet and extreme ultraviolet light. So stuff that's not in the human visible spectrum. I mean, ultraviolet light, you can maybe take a look at just at sunset, right? But ultraviolet light, extreme ultraviolet light, these are things that are outside of our visible spectrum, but they are energetic spectrums and we can look at them with various instruments. And so they've been able to take a look at eight years of images of these active regions and based on statistical methods that are developed by a team member named Graham Barnes, they have determined that there are little tiny flashes in the corona that precede the actual flares. And so it's kind of like trying to figure out when a volcano is gonna erupt here on earth, what are the little signals or little shakes that'll allow us to have a little bit of warning before a flare happens? So once we see a blast going off, I'm trying to figure out my brain is trying to wrap around this. It takes eight minutes for that light to travel. I don't know how long a solar flare takes to reach, probably not far behind that eight minutes. However, if we're doing an observation, we need the light to have traveled for eight minutes. So now aren't we finding out that it's happening as it's happening? No, because we don't have FTL communication with the Solar Dynamics Observatory. So it's all time shifted, but because we're seeing the flare before, I mean, the little flash of light, there's a little tiny flash of light, right? We see a flash, we go, oh, we could be ready for this. And if it's something that's pointed at us, we can potentially take action because we'll have maybe a little longer than eight minutes to be ready. But that flash happened eight minutes ago on the sun. Right, but the flare comes after the flash. Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, okay. We have time. Yeah, it's a warning system. If it takes a while to develop, we would have time, like maybe we're like, oh, this is developing, but it takes a month or something. Maybe the Earth will be pointed somewhere else or somewhere else or slightly around to the sun. Yeah. Or if it's a 12 hour, it's like, ah, I don't hit the other side of the world. We'll be fine. That's really the question is, what is the general range of warning that we would get from this? Yeah. Well, it's better than volcanoes currently. So, which is maybe 30 seconds. It still seems like it's not enough time to shield all of our electronics. We should probably do that hardening first, regardless. Absolutely, but there's not a lot that we can do about our satellites. I mean, is eight minutes enough time to signal to our satellites to power down for a period of time? Is the flare going to be the kind of flare that's so powerful that it just burns out electrical components and satellites, regardless of whether they're turned on or not? There's a lot that still needs to be determined, but this is the beginning of developing that early warning system that will allow us to be able to make potential changes down here on Earth. But yeah, you're exactly right. We need to strengthen our electrical transport systems, our infrastructure here anyway. There's a lot that we just need to be doing differently. But yeah. So basically we figured out there's a precursor. Now is the time to collect just heaps and heaps and heaps of data to figure out what kind of precursor on average it is to then be able to toy with things that we can do to, okay, got it. Yeah. I also appreciate that these researchers did not take the advice they were given as children and have been staring at the sun. I mean, you got them. Yeah, they do it, so we don't have to. Thank you very much for ruining your vision. The laser beams, that's another thing you're not supposed to look at. What have you been staring at, Justin? Never stared a laser beam. So this story goes back a little bit. Back in 1769. Oh, that's a lot bit. That's a lot of it. Lightning hit a church in northern Italy. So while this sort of thing happened occasionally to tall buildings, it still does, this time it resulted in a tremendous amount of damage as the church exploded. It blew up, showering large stones of the church over a half a mile away, destroying much of the surrounding city, killing many hundreds of the townsfolk. The reason, the lightning rod, which had already been invented by Ben Franklin, hadn't made its way to the small town at the foot of the Alps yet. That, and for some reason, the church was storing 100 tons of gunpowder in the basement. And then the lightning kaboom. There's a combination of factors. Yeah, that's what we do with it. The importance of lightning rods to divert lightning strikes from buildings has become well adopted. In fact, this is considered the event that worldwide got people's attention to Ben Franklin's invention. Lightning rods start going up very shortly after this and places that hold hazardous material in the light. And nowadays we have them everywhere they're incorporated, even if we don't see them. So this all makes us safer from lightning strikes. Unknown if churches are still stockpiling gunpowder. There's not been an update on that. The Empire State Building is a lightning rod to top it, diverting some 25 strikes per year from itself in the surrounding buildings, transmitting all that energy safely underground. On a mountain in northeastern Switzerland, sits an 124 meter tall telecommunications tower that is one of the most struck by lightning structures on the planet with over 100 strikes per year. Partly this is due to being just closer to the action on top of this mountain. And partly because the size of the tower acting as a lightning rod, the way it works is it attracts lightning strikes from an area twice as wide as the tower is tall. Sort of the basic lightning rod math on what a lightning rod can protect. So it was the perfect location for Swiss and French researchers to test out their latest invention, a laser guided lightning rod. Wow. They used, so this has been tried before but lasers as much as we can maybe see them in the night or on a sort of misty night, they tend to dissipate. So in this experiment, they used intense short laser pulses that were fired very close to the tower at a thousand times greater rate than it has been attempted before in similar experiments. So they essentially were competing against the tower for the lightning strikes. The laser pulses are very intense and they are intense enough to ionize air molecules creating narrow channels of ionization, laser pulses over these long distance. This is that create a sort of ionized filaments in the air. The air mouth, oh gosh, hang on a second. I have no idea why Siri is popping in here to try to talk to me. Okay, the laser pulses are intense enough to ionize air molecules creating narrow channels of ionizing laser pulses over long distances along these regions. Air molecules are rapidly heated by the absorbed laser energy and expelled radially at supersonic speed leaving behind these long lived channels of air that have reduced density. Reduced density air is the path that lightning travels when it's a downward strike. So these low channel density channels just millisecond in duration have higher conductivity than the surrounding air and therefore the lightning decides to go that way. So you can make your lightning rods way taller, basically. Yeah, so the idea is, and okay, great, we have these pictures up here. Now, in this experiment, you can see that it caught the lightning and then the lightning chooses the rod again later. And it's only grabbed it from about 50 meters. So it's not yet at the point where you're talking about where you can have the lightning rod that goes all the way up to the atmosphere or something like this. This is, but in this experiment, they proved that it's possible. They proved that it's possible to use a laser to, as a lightning rod, to divert the path of lightning coming down. Also interesting is that there's a potential that they could use this to trigger lightning, to actually do a discharge that didn't naturally happen. So part of this is they're talking about, yes, we could use this to protect things like launch sites, sensitive installations, places that you'd be very afraid of having be hit by lightning at certain times. Although if you're launching a rocket, you should be doing it during the day when there's a clear day without lightning strikes, but still. And see these pictures that we've put up here, the top ones, you can see where it's kind of captured the lightning and the ones at the bottom are ones, strikes that have happened without the laser on and where it just naturally hits that lightning line. So you can kind of see the difference when it's doing the diversion. But the other thing that might be that it's just, if you can prompt a discharge, and I don't understand why this tower doesn't have some sort of energy generation, batteries, free spinning kinetic wheel or something to capture this energy. It seems like you could just use it as an energy capture method at some point. That's cool. Yeah, but then at some point you're like, oh wait, we needed that electricity in the atmosphere because it's holding everything together. I don't know. So it's not gonna stay in the atmosphere anyway because usually this energy is finding the easiest path to the ground, right? So this is a way for the atmosphere to discharge into the ground. Now that said, there are potential reasons that it might be beneficial to have it go into the ground. Or it is a preemptive. If you're really worried that there's a big electrical storm is looming over a town or a facility or something like this, it might be a smart thing to do to discharge it with lasers in a controlled environment versus having these lightning strikes all over the place. So anyway, this is published in the current edition of Nature Photonics Online. They say there is more research needed. I think so. Fair. But this is the first proof of concept outside of a laboratory experiment that actually successfully diverted lightning strikes from nature and with a laser. Pretty cool. Cool. All right, so high intensity, ionizing lasers, short, high frequency bursts. Oh, and one important note that I left out. They can control where these pulses are ionizing the air in such a way that they can get it to begin a kilometer away from the laser. Oh, whoa. Which then allows it to, you know, when it comes down, it can divert to a proper lightning rod as opposed to blowing up the laser every time, like making it all the way back to the laser. Don't come back to the power source. A little bit of control of where I suppose the wavelengths are building up for these pulses. That's cool. That is, That crouchy gamer. You know, shooting lasers into space. Do we really want to do that? Yeah, we might attract a little attention now. We've been doing this, I think, so it's too late. Yeah, your planet was shooting at us when we flew by. Whoa, what's up with that? Oh, sorry. You're just having a light show. Yeah, just a nice little rave. I remember one year at Burning Man, there were some NASA JPL dudes who had a big laser and they were encoding messages from people at Burning Man that they sent out to Alpha Centauri. So who knows what people messaged Alpha Centauri with on that night? Yeah, they only know about Burning Man attendees. That's interesting. That's not too terrible, I guess. I don't know. You could do worse. What about dogs? It could be much worse. What about dogs, Blair? We could get ahold of our internet. Yeah, really. Well, dogs, so if you enter a room with a dog in it, are you compelled to interact with that dog? I know I am. Not at all. And more specifically, I know you're not Justin, I knew, I didn't do that. More specifically, if there was a dog and there was a toy, like under the couch or something and you could see it and they were trying to get at it, would you grab that toy with your nice opposable thumb and hand it to that dog? Yes, yes I would. Yeah, probably. Yeah, I would do it. So a sample group of children age two to three years were twice as likely to help a dog reach a toy or treat when the animal showed interest than if it did not. So Justin, you just proved that hypothesis, actually. Children were more likely to help the dogs get the out of reach items if they already lived with a pet dog. It's definitely helped. Prime them to how dogs work, right? And if the dogs were live layer, so if they showed interest in the toy or if the item was in fact a treat rather than a toy seems like these toddlers are more keyed into the idea of feeding the dogs than retrieving a toy for them. So this experiment was 97 toddlers, 51 girls, 46 boys between 20 and 47 months. They were all from middle-class families in and around the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan and surrounding towns. So this definitely needs replicating. The majority of children were white. The rest were multiracial black or African-American, Latino or Asian. 71% of them were white though. So this is like pretty skewed. Why would there be a difference? I don't get it. It's just culturally, right? If you, especially if you are raised in a house with a dog versus not with a dog, like it's, we don't know what's linked, right? So this is just a potential. Or rural versus urban. Yes, absolutely. So I grew up out in the country and the way that I thought about animals growing up is not the way that people think about animals now, like, you know, for babies was not the thing out in the country. No, livestock impacts very different type of animal. If you have predominantly white researchers looking at predominantly white children, there can be skewing of results in observation. So there's all sorts of things, just basically you have to watch your variables, right? So the thing that I think would skew the results the most is whether or not the dog had a flat stout or a big pointy one. Well, you can see the three dogs right now. It is Fiona, Henry and Seymour. Is Henry in the middle? Three dogs. I don't know. If it's the one in the middle who's got a long nose, I bet that one would be the most successful. Because partly, I think it's, you know, the toddlers are recognizing the dog with its forward-facing eyes or looking at an object. That's part of it. But the nose, if you've got a dog with a long nose, it's almost like they're pointing. But see, again, it depends what kind of dog they have at home. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. I think dogs depend. If they have a pug at home, then they might respond better to Seymour. It depends, right? It depends on experience dependent. Yeah. If it's a pug, it's looking to the side and up at the same time. This might also be... You have no idea what that dog was. Why they picked these three dogs, they would do it all the different. And it also might be why we should listen to the results of the study. We'll be determined. I'm trying to make my decision. I've gotten there. So, 44 of the children had dogs at home. 53 did not. The toddlers... See, this is... Oh, this is between 2015 and 2020. This was a lot of results over kind of a long period of time. The toddlers gave out-of-reach treats and toys in 50% of all events. Great. However, they offered dogs objects they ignored only half as often on only 26% of occasions. So, if the dog was specifically paying attention to the item, they were much more likely to hand it to them. So, if this is independent of whether or not they have a dog at home, this particular metric, that means that toddlers can pick up on the body language that the dog is giving, saying, I want this thing that I can't get. But then, separately, having a dog at home also had an impact on how good they were at grabbing things for the dog, but that makes sense because they're used to handing things to the dog at home. That's whenever I have a toddler over in my house, they just hand Sadie a toy over and over, and she drops it, and they hand her a toy, and she drops it, and they hand her a toy, and she drops it. Oh, it's the perfect play partner. Yes, exactly. And then, also, this idea, the thing I thought was really interesting was that if the outreach object was food, rather than a toy, they were more likely to grab it. Now, this is interesting to me because why? Is it because the idea of eating something is universal from a very young age, or is it because humans are obsessed with feeding animals? Because this is the thing, right? Like, if you offer, as a person who's worked with animals a lot, if you offer somebody the opportunity to feed an animal, it doesn't matter how old they are, who they are, they get very excited. And I still get excited. I visited a wildlife area recently, and I was offered to feed a giraffe, which I have done literally hundreds of times, maybe thousands, and I was like, yeah! So I don't know, is there something weirdly, innately there about us wanting to feed things? I don't know. It's just very... Interesting question. It's a very interesting piece of this study. Obviously, future research needs to be done just to get a larger sample set, but also they wanna look at the psychological components of the interspecific instrumental helping. So is this something that happens across species? Is it just with dogs? Is it just with these items? What if the dog needed to get somewhere? Would toddlers open a door for a dog? Like, what is the helping, right? And then also looking at the underlying emotions that motivate them to help the dogs. And is this shaped by culture? Is this shaped by evolution? What is happening here? Why at such an early age, do toddlers move to help a dog reach something that they can't get to? It's pretty interesting. Yeah, I think it is fascinating, especially when it's not your own dog, especially when it's not a dog in the toddler's household. I mean, there's the getting to know all of the individuals in the household as part of a social group and the reciprocity of helping and playing within your social group. But then when it's an animal outside of that group and you transfer that behavior to another animal, it's interesting. That's why toddlers get bitten by dogs a lot. So everyone, be careful with your toddlers around strange dogs. Or family dogs. It's usually the family dog that does it, not some strange dog. Anyway, yeah, why? When do we get around? Is it reciprocity? Is it, you know, as an adult, yeah, I wanna get close to that giraffe. Yes, I wanna get close to that weird emu. Yes, I wanna get close to the rhinoceros, you know, to have them so close when you're not just throwing food a distance away, but that you're actually feeding them. That means they're interacting with you. Yeah. And Lauren in the chat is asking, is it just empathy? Empathy, right? I need to know, would a toddler do this for a rat? Would a toddler do this for a lizard? This is what I need to know. Is it really just dogs? Like, were we predisposed to do this? Is this why dogs domesticated us so easily? What that's all I was gonna say is I think essentially the mindset of a toddler is not unlike any pack animal. Yeah. They're running with their pack, you know, they don't, toddlers don't fall down and then look for any human for help. They look for their pack, they try, they're like, oh, you're one of, yeah. So I don't know. There's a little of that. I also wonder if there's any connection to the thousands of years of animal husbandry that humans have been involved in. That's interesting. Yeah. In terms of like wanting to, like you're saying, wanting to feed animals and take care of livestock. I mean, this is, if you ignore everything else in human history, this is how we've sustained ourselves for thousands of years, largely from agriculture and from animal husbandry. And I'm wondering if you were to run this test with peoples who didn't have dogs but were in a strict hunter gatherer society, would they care at all? Right. Or would they be like a, you know, a hunter farmer, I don't know, seeing as this is a competitive, competitor in the environment and be like, I'm not gonna help that dog. That's good. I might need that treat later myself or whatever. I don't know. Well, that's the other thing. We need to do this experiment with chimps. Get away from the human aspect and see the animal husbandry control. Yeah. Well, first of all, I could forget if a chimp would help. Yeah, if a chimp would even help another chimp. Right. See, that's the, I guess bonobos. Let's go with bonobos. Yeah. That's our best shop for anything. Yeah. Moving away. Gotta love them. Go ahead. I have to love them. Many people also love birds. Yes. And it's always interesting during bird migration season to find out that there are wandering, vagrant birds in your local area. And if you're a bird watcher and you keep track of stuff, you know, people who are on the bird watching scene, they'll be like, oh my goodness, there's a broad-tailed hummingbird in Portland. Broad-tailed hummingbirds shouldn't be here. They're more southern. This is not where they should be. You know, why did they get here? And we think things like, oh, maybe these birds got pushed off course by winds. Or maybe, you know, they got confused. But it's usually only one or two. And if you think if it were a real wind event, you would see lots of birds having moved from one place to another. So researchers at UCLA have published in Scientific Reports this last week their work looking into how geomagnetic fields might actually play into these vagrants. And their hypothesis and their evidence suggests it is disturbances in the geomagnetic field that often correlate with vagrants in different areas. And they actually have a website where they've got a lot of, they're doing a lot of predictions and they're looking at localized geomagnetic fields. Like we've talked before about the shifting poles of earth and how north and south are kind of shifting over time. And as part of that, there are like these weird outspirts, kind of like solar flares, but they're weird little outbursts that happen around the planet. And we're not predicting them very well, but what they've been able to do with their data is looking at 2 million captures of 152 land bird species in North America over 60 years, they have associated magnetic field disruption with vagrancy during fall migration. And it happens more so during fall migration than during spring migration, which is interesting in itself. But they also have determined that sunlight, so daylight migrants are less affected by these magnetic fields. So it's the nighttime migrators that seem to be more affected by the shifts in the magnetic fields and these disturbances. And when they have put all these links together, all these bits of data together, they've determined that some, it's a variation some birds are more affected than other birds by the geomagnetic effects, and solar activity can have impacts on it as well. But overall, they can predict an increase in bird vagrants, the wandering birds based on little blips in our magnetic field. Yeah, so the birds are already migrating. That's already the thing, but they get out there and the GPS is off, they end up in the wrong spot. Yeah, what I think is really interesting and this is mostly like fall migration. So older birds and younger birds are affected, but fall migration is like, these are juvenile birds who've never migrated before, they're heading out and they're like, all I have is my magnet, you know. If I lose my GPS, I can't just feel my way there. Yeah, and so the solar activity, the polarization of the light, that they're focusing on these cues that are probably very genetically ingrained and they haven't learned all those little local cues of, oh, that tree's nice, that lake is nice. This is the path I go down, whereas older birds will be like, dude, I'm just gonna take shelter for the night. This is weird. Yeah. That's true. My GPS is out, I gotta find a hotel. Better to spend the night than fly for a whole night in the wrong direction. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, they have a very interesting website that you can also access that is on hiatus for the winter time because nobody's really migrating, but it is called the Rare Bird Forecast. And if you're interested in bird watching and kind of predicting whether or not there might be vagrancy or increased incidence of vagrancy, they are linking geometric activity and solar activity and making predictions as to the likelihood of whether or not you should be on the lookout for weird birds in your neighborhood. And you can actually sign up for them to notify you when it's online. If you are a bird watcher, this might be kind of cool. And then you can also help in the identifying of vagrants and the data collection and all the cool stuff that goes along with us trying to keep track of all these things. Groove. Yeah. So now that we're done with birds, you wanna talk about concrete. Yes, I have a very big news. Big news from the world of concrete. Okay. We may have finally figured out how to make it like the Romans did, thousands of years ago. So despite all of the concrete that we've used in the last century, it's, we still don't really understand why it is that the Roman concrete structures have survived for thousands of years. Typically modern steel reinforced concrete, it's good for about 150 years. That's like maybe at the best. So as long as it can avoid earthquakes and water making its way into the cracks or ice forming in those cracks, it can survive for about 150 years. We don't see a lot of major buildings collapsing or being demolished because of expired concrete. That's mostly because we haven't been doing large scale building with concrete for 150 years. So those days will soon be upon us as many iconic buildings will be reaching their expiration date by the end of the century. So it may be much more common. It's like, all right, this year, hey, they're gonna bring down the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building that we might start losing some of these buildings because they're built with modern concrete. It just doesn't stand to test time. Meanwhile, the Parthenon, the Coliseum, countless bath houses and temples and even some Roman houses are over 2,000 years old, standing still from Roman times. Previous attempts at recreating Roman concrete focused on one version of it, the chemical interactions of seawater with volcanic ash and the ancient admixture that adds structure to the cement that actually made it harder over time. Now researchers at MIT have discovered that hot mixing which allows for a reaction of pure quick lime with water which can produce a lot of heat. Potentially it can cause an explosion. But by doing it this way, it allowed for a rougher admixture which is very much like what was seen in ancient Roman concrete. So it appears when you look at it almost as though it was poorly mixed because it's very granule and there's big chunks of this lime and calcium sort of stuck in there and it looks like they went through all the trouble to make this incised formulation and then they just sort of half mixed it mixed it by hand as opposed to in a mixture. I mean, in a lot of times it gets chalked up to like, well, the technology at the times this is the only way they could do it. The clumpiness of lab made concrete in this way contained a lot of calcium in lime when exposed to water through the cracks, seat out and made their way into the cracks and then sealed them up again. So they had blocks that they made with more traditional formulations and some with this hot mix are going. And by the way the hot mix didn't explode anything. They say it did heat up and there was a little bit of steam release of some sort, but it didn't explode. It was nowhere near that level. When they cracked the blocks and added water to them the old formulation, they just stayed cracked. But in this formulation where they did it very much like Romans did, they self-healed within two to three weeks, a self-healing construction material. Right, we talked about this on the show before. It's like it's just there, it's been there for years. Thousands of years and it's just whatever. The question is, did they know what they were doing or was this just the only way to do it at the time? So very likely they knew what they were doing. So some of this, some of the earlier that the knowledge of that seawater was making some concrete strata. They built piers into the sea that are still there, which we can't do. We pour concrete into the water with the steel reinforcement and it breaks down over time and that's the replaced. It gets into the steel and it rusts away. So they knew that there was obviously something going on here. And if you look at the recipes, the few that are out there from ancient times, they're very specific that the lime, that a quick lime must be pure, completely white without impurities that, so they even figured out their formulation. Now it's the Romans, not the most inventive people. Not, they really aren't. They are very good at implementation of things that other people have come up with. Very true. Like almost everything about the Roman Empire's technology is Greek, almost all of the science they're using is Greek from a time gone by. Yeah, so you could question whether or not this had been discovered before or on some smaller scale, but once they find a useful thing, stick into it and recreate it. And so that's why also the researchers thought, it's so weird that they have this sort of poorly mixed and it turns out it's actually what was required for the initial, for the chemical reactions to be taking place slowly over time and to create a self-healing construction material thousands of years ago, that's still there. Now, maybe not everybody used this. Maybe there's plenty of Roman structures that they were like, why do we need to follow that specific recipe? I'll just mix the concrete, put up, those buildings have been long gone. Those buildings have been gone for 1,900 years. You know, dust, they've been built on top of. But in using these forms, especially for these large structures, they must have known that they needed this, this strength and this weatherproofing for something like a coliseum or a parthenon, right? So the big question now, because with concrete manufacture now, the big issue is carbon dioxide emissions. So as Rob Haglund is saying in our YouTube chat, what are we doing though? I mean, this is great, self-healing. It'll reduce the amount of carbon of concrete that we have to produce over and over and over again. But- Correct, and that's it, and that's the thing. If you can build it once, because it's the manufacturing process that's also causing a lot of this carbon, right? Adding more and adding more and adding more concrete where concrete already was placed. Sidewalks, infrastructure, all these things. If you can build it once and it stands the test of time, then you've reduced it just right there. The carbon footprint of the concrete, yeah. Yeah. But fingers crossed that they can also, you know, potentially work on this and reduce even the carbon dioxide output of this. I mean, Justin, I think you have brought these stories about Roman concrete to the show for the last couple of decades. We're still not there. We're still not there. We're still not there. And so this is some very exciting story. It really is. It's something, I can't remember what it was. It was some sort of fake inventory where they pictured the future without humans. And I remember being really astounded by the fact that in like a hundred years time or so, all the buildings are gone. All the skyscrapers are gone. Like all these things that you would think, oh, in the future, people will look back on this great modern civilization of humans and say, oh, look at all that tall stuff to me. It's just dust. It's all just gonna turn to dust in 150 years or so. You know, so. Well, but that's only things they had, not everything's made out of concrete, right? Because like, the- Yeah, the plastic will be here. You're talking about Roman concrete, but if you go to Europe, there's a lot of structures that are hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of years old, right? And so what are they made out of? They're not made out of Roman concrete. Well, actually some of them are. Actually a lot of them are. Actually, no, no, that's the thing. That's the funny thing. When you go to Paris and look at the old, and if you go to London, you're like, oh, look at these aqueducts. It's still Roman concrete. Got it, all right. If you're talking hundreds of years, you know, you can make brick and mortar buildings that can last hundreds of years, but those are also when a brick breaks, you don't know how often these bricks are getting replaced. You don't know how often maintenance can be done in small sections. When you're talking about a walls of concrete, those crack. But I would say that's an argument against concrete, right? Because having something that you can repair sectionally is more, has better. Yeah, but then you're getting into a skyscraper. At some point, I think there's something to do with physics, where like now there's a brick at the bottom that's taking the weight of the entire structure. Right. But yeah, a lot of the ancient structures that you'll find in Syrian bathhouses and ancient French temples or whatever, those are still Roman construction. That's what's so amazing about it. It's all across Europe. You can find these ancient Roman buildings that are thousands of years old. Speaking of carbon emissions, there are organizations that are basically the leading ones for the carbon offset industry, carbon taxes, so to say. So one of the leading organizations is called Vera. Vera has been, is known for its position in the industry of being the leader in these projects in the Amazon and other places where they say, these trees that you put your money into, we're going to save them and it's going to be wonderful. We're gonna buy this area. No more deforestation is going to happen and all sorts of big corporations have bought into this stuff, like major organizations, Gucci, Salesforce, BHP Shells, EasyJet, Leon, and the band Pearl Jam, have bought rainforest offsets that are approved by Vera for environmental claims. There has been a massive investigation by Guardian journalists and the German weekly desite and source material, this is a non-profit investigative journalism organization, and they have also been looking at new analyses of scientific studies of Vera's rainforest schemes to determine how good they are. Are they actually doing the work they say they're gonna be doing? So the researchers have determined that, no, it's all overstated. It's not, the Vera's rainforest carbon offset schemes are not actually helping local economies. They're not helping the rainforest. There's all sorts of stuff going on. Vera, of course, is denying this and saying, no, no, no, you didn't look at the right things and the comparative spaces were not the right comparisons and there are other details because this is very complicated and of course it's complicated, but what the researchers have determined is that about 90% of Vera's rainforest offsets are useless, which when we're trying to figure out how we're going to deal economically with carbon moving forward as corporations say, oh, I've put my money into the rainforest and deforestation, so we're net neutral, right? And they can put stuff all over their labeling that says zero carbon, net neutral, we're environmentally friendly, maybe they're not. And so this is a huge issue and there are a couple of studies that have just come out in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that are looking into various locations throughout the Amazon and how they're actually working to offset carbon emissions or not as the case may be. So Pearl Jam, Gucci, Salesforce, class action suit please, get your mind back and put it to good use. Yeah, I mean, there's one to learn from in this, I think, but like right off the bat, we're going to plant trees in the rainforest. How do we need trees? You're going to prevent them from being cut. Yeah, prevent, yeah. We're going to do a thing by not doing a thing. Yeah. Okay. Yes, well, you know, you can't when Vera started doing their offsets, they didn't know Bolsonaro was going to be elected and push more deforestation. You know, and now the situation may switch and the politics of an area affect various things as well as the localized politics of whether or not people are supporting deforestation, how they're going to work economically with farming or not farming or whatever they're doing. Or did the area you buy was that already in a protected forest and so you didn't do anything. But to keep these points then you really do need to give them a chance under a more helpful administration to take these things on before you judge here. For instance, biofuel in the United States, the corn ethanol, whether you're for it against it, all but disappeared for three years, four years under the past administration because they ended subsidies or not so much subsidies, but it was a requirement that regular fuel have this admixture of a certain percentage of biofuel added to it that then paid for the biofuel industry basically. Yeah. And by eliminating that, the fossil fuel industry said, well, we don't need you or our competition anyway and we'll just not use you at all. And it shut down the entire industry basically for three years, four years. So if there's a political, yeah, I can see if there's a real political thing involved in this in terms of you wanna buy this land but we're gonna cut it down anyway or we're gonna cut everything around it or yeah. There is a need to do massive reforestation and nature protection. Yes. But to identify them as this is something we've offset, like I've offset my carbon imprint by buying a certain percentage of rainforest that is already existing isn't an improvement in the situation. Yeah. Exactly, right. Throwing money at the problem is part of the issue as well which we've talked about before like. And then also, how many other people bought that same piece of land with you? Their private jet, but instead if they could fly commercial first class that would reduce their carbon footprint, right? So there are things that you can do that would help in actually the people of the power to do but giving them the option to just throw money at it and say, I've done it, I'm carbon neutral is it's a cop out, unfortunately. Well, yeah. But at the same time. They don't wanna discourage it too much, right? Right, but at the same time we don't want it to become a situation where major corporations who do have massive influence globally stop paying to avoid deforestation. So who's in charge of making sure that's actually happening then? Me. I am nominating me. You gotta do it. I'll make sure it happens. I'll get it done. There has to be consequences, that's the thing. This is why I'm saying that they need to be, if nothing else, they need to be sued. They need to feel it fiscally, right? So like, there needs to be consequences so that people can't show up and say, I'm selling you a piece of the Eiffel Tower. It's like, you can't sell the Eiffel Tower 50 times. That's exactly what this is, right? So it could be, yeah. So that's the danger here. Is anybody can show up and say, I'm buying some trees in the Amazon for you? I don't know that that happened here, but that is something that could take place where, yeah, that was kind of like the same piece of land has been set aside for trees and a million people have bought that two acres. Right. You didn't know it, but I bought you a target grade on the moon and named it after you. That's great. That's so amazing. EasyJet apparently, yeah, but what's happened is in the meantime, there are corporations making changes. The fast food chain Leon no longer buys carbon offsets from one of the projects in the study. EasyJet is now working on new zero carbon emission aircraft technology. And so they've moved where they're actually putting their money. And this might actually be a better place to put it. So put it in the technology instead of the mushy, squishy deforestation area, carbon offset area. And from this Guardian article, Barbara Haye, the director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project who's been researching carbon credits and trying to work in this area for over 20 years. Her comment at the end of this article is just on the nose, is that I started studying carbon offsets 20 years ago, studying problems with protocols and programs. Here I am, 20 years later, having the same conversation, we need an alternative process. The offset market is broken. So of course the offset companies are going to debate it and this is a Wild West kind of situation, but it's- There's a huge amount of pressure from governments for it to work on paper anyway, because as we've discussed before, they've already dedicated half of the world's current agricultural land to growing two trillion trees in the next 30 years, but it built no infrastructure behind actually getting it done. Yeah. So along with this though, we need to get- They're gonna reach a goal? Right, we need to get- With this little effort? Yeah, we need to get working on this, however, because another study out of Lawrence Berkeley Labs has determined that with increased climate change and the intense storms that are going to be coming with more climate change, we will have what is called more wind throw. And that's when you have really big storms with lots of wind that come through and pick up trees and pull them out of the ground and throw them around. So the storms are gonna be tossing the trees around. And so even if we have programs like Vera, who want to have the carbon offsets in the Amazon, we're gonna have these massive storms coming through that potentially are going to be uprooting all of those plans. And so this is an entire- Uprooting, I get it. An entirely different area that needs to be taken into advantage, taken into account in these carbon offset prediction models. Landsat eight has examples of wind throw. They show these large up to 1200 acres, sometimes larger areas that have been blown down, just trees uprooted and knocked over and blown down. And then you have new growth that comes up afterwards, but of course that new growth is not the same as those old growth rainforests. And so there's time for it to repair and recover that is not going to be adding to what we need from the rainforest as part of the lungs of the earth and part of the water process of the earth and all the things that the rainforest is important for. So we gotta take various things into account. I don't know, electric cars, that's another story. They're gonna be great batteries for our transition to an electric future. Your electric car in the garage, you're storing energy in it. And if everybody's doing that, we've all got good batteries. That can be part of the grid. So anyway, there's positive stuff out there. It's not all negative. So in that too, it's like people have already started using Tesla batteries. Now they have to get the wall, the thing that they've even taken out of the cars and you can install it in the home as a battery backup as a storage for solar or whatever you've got going on. So yeah, being able to trickle charge those cars when there's a peak availability of electricity. Also, do you do this in the homes? You can charge homes that have these batteries. They charge overnight when electricity is not in high demand, so the electric charge costs when they're using them later is less, but that also means more efficient use of electricity were out of manufacturing. But this whole story that you bring up, what we need is a seat at the United Nations for the nation of nature. Right. A corporate and nation's state. Of nature with representatives who can be like, here's what we need. There's no seat at the table for any of this. And this is part of the problem is that it's being left to all the, it's going to go in a corporate profit model. Right. If we make it a corporate profit model by which we attempt to rescue the planet from this. If you don't put nature in the conversation as part of the interested party. Ecology equals economy. Yeah. Conversation, yeah. Separate the two. We need some voice of reason. I don't know, how do you start a country that's everywhere? Well, you have to have a GDP, right? Which nature has. You can quantify it. Yeah. How do you start a country that's already everywhere? Yeah. And claim that's the nation I represent. The one that's everywhere. We'll work on that one. We are going to work on all of this. I know all of you out there are going to be contemplating this for the next several days. But in the meantime, I hope you think about how much you love this weekend science. Thank you so much for joining us. We still have a few more stories to go. But as we're sitting here for a moment, I would love to ask you to head over to twist.org and click on our Patreon link and choose to support us $10 and more per month. And we will thank you by name at the end of the show. We really do appreciate your support. It is the thing that keeps us going. We can't do this without you. We love the science and we hope that you do too. Now we will move on to some other kinds of science that we like. It's the animal science. Oh my goodness. It's time for Blair's Animal Corner. With Blair. There we go. Just all. By pet, milliped, no pet at all. If you want to hear about animals, she's your girl. Except for giant pandas and squirrels. Got Blair. I have hot e-kidnas. Hot. They're hot. They're physically hot. Climate change is happening. E-kidnas are heating up. They live on an island. What are they gonna do? What do you do when you're hot? I like to... Struck down the boulevard, knowing it. Yeah, okay, fair enough. Go for a pool. Find myself some shade. You might sweat a little bit. Oh, I don't like doing that. E-kidnas can't do that. If you were a dog, you might pant. They can't do that either. E-kidnas can't sweat or lick, also because they're covered in spines. But they can't do any of those things to help with evaporative cooling in their body. And so it's been thought for a long time that they're pretty much just boned when it comes to climate change. They're in trouble. So they have nowhere to go. They're on an island. They can't deal with the heat. What's gonna happen? Well, some scientists took thermal video of e-kidnas in the wild, short-beaked e-kidnas in bushland, which is about 170 kilometers southwest of Perth. And they wanted to see how these animals exchanged heat with their environment. Turns out they have some methods to cool themselves down in the heat, which e-kidna biologists didn't previously know. The, they will actually move their quills around, which is really cool. So their spines, when they're kind of tight to their body, they hold in heat, they retain heat. When they kind of loosen them up, it exposes the skin in between the individual spines. If you look at a porcupine, the quills are very, very dense. If you look at an e-kidna, you can see skin. They're like, they're more sparse. And so they can open up their spines and they also can expose the spineless areas on their underside and on their legs. And that can improve the evaporative cooling. It can improve just kind of exposure to air that allows for a heat window and that's heat exchange. And so that can cool them down. But what is more exciting is that they can actually blow bubbles from their nose. They blow them up so big, they burst over their nose tip and wet the tip of their nose. And then as the moisture evaporates, it cools them down, cools their blood. Makes, so their nose tip works also as an evaporative window. So this is a really wild thermoregulation technique, but specifically this is actually conservation wise. This is important to know because it does mean that e-kidnas can be active under hotter conditions than previously thought. And so this can actually adjust predictions of how they will respond to a warming climate. They're still not the best adapted for where things are going, but they're gonna hang in there better than previously thought. By blowing snot bubbles. Yeah. Nature finds a way. Love it. Wow, so would we expect then that they would blow more snot bubbles, that they would need more water, that they would need like how will this affect their physiology if they have to be doing this to keep cool more often? Right, so that's the push-pull, right? Is that every time they do that, they're losing moisture in their body. So are they gonna be able to get enough moisture to keep that up, to be able to continue doing that? Are they gonna have to be active less during the day, during the heat of the day, because they have to go high because it's just too darn hot? There's still a lot of research that needs to be done, but this is a new factor in the e-kidna research and their response to climate change that was not previously discovered. The kidna snot bubbles. Yeah, pretty cool. I actually wanna see the snot bubbles. I think you can do that. Really? In it? I do. Is it like a bubbly nose? Is it like a bubbly bubble? Does that mean my toddler's trying to? Right. Could be. Trying to reduce his temperature with those snot bubbles. Oh no, he does excessive drooling. Oh yeah. No. That's his technique. That's just, there's teepers coming in. They're all in. They're all in there. Oh jeez. He has, he has got like all, he got them so quick. And I don't, I don't know. I almost wanted him to be studied because I feel like it's. You have too many kids, child. There's more coming in. Gotta watch out. So speaking of climate change, other ways that animals are in trouble from climate change, they have to respond. And they have, in the way that many animals respond to climate change is they move to spaces that are more favorable to the conditions that they evolved in. And so for some animals that's easy for other animals like those that live on islands, not so easy. And so there is actually a pending change in the US Endangered Species Act by the Biden administration that would make it easier to relocate some of the most imperiled species to places where they're not previously been recorded. So an example of that is the Tristrem's Storm Petrals, which is on Northeastern Hawaii's Turn Island. It's six feet above sea level. No. Yeah. So it's not long for this world. It's gonna be gone real soon. And so researchers are looking at relocating 40 chicks to artificial burrows about 500 miles away on Oahu. So this would be kind of a proof of concept to see if they could move these individuals, have them establish a home base there. And the goal would be that when they migrate away, they would return back to that new home when they were old enough to breed. And so that would mean that they could establish a functioning population in that space recognize that they're gonna lose all of the other ones on that other island. So interesting, the whole issue here is that... Is there already? Exactly. So state wildlife officials and scientists suggested moving some species, struggling with climate change to areas that they might be well-adapted. Specifically, Republicans in Western states, including Montana, New Mexico, and Arizona are against the proposal, saying it could wreak ecological havoc as invasive species get purposefully introduced. Very interesting to hear Republicans worried about ecological havoc. But anyway, it's interesting. It's an interesting conversation and it's nuanced because while on face value, that's true. You don't want to intentionally introduce non-native species to a space. That's like in a vacuum, right? But recognizing we have ruined everything already. Like nothing is as it should be. The climate in the space where the animals are is not what they're supposed to be. The place you're moving them into is no longer suited for the animals that live there. So it's all a mess. So we're just trying to recoup what we can here. So if you can trust the ecologists and you can trust the people whose entire life work has been focusing on these ecosystems and studying them, we can make some ditch efforts to save species that are going away. As long as it is ecologically focused and not species focused. And that is the thing that is really hard to figure out just by looking at this on face value. So again, you have to trust the institutions that are trying these things, which is a hard thing to do because who put cane toads in Australia? Like, oh yeah. So we're not always good at that systems thinking. So it's really hard to have that vote of confidence to be like, yeah, go for it. You know what you're doing? But at the same time, do you let species disappear if you could save them if there is suitable habitat nearby? And they just haven't been found there before. This is, we were talking about this recently with Tuatars. So again, an animal that is almost extinct could go in a space. It is a space that is already messed up by other invasive species and climate change. So recognizing it's not a perfect system, can those in charge of these decisions make the right call to save ecosystems and bring species in that are not going to upend other species? I don't know. I mean, we can't even do this with ourselves. No, I just wanna point out on the political frame of this that this situation is not unique that they would suddenly care about one aspect of the thing. Ignoring problems and arguing against the solutions is very much on brand. Yeah, you're right. Regardless of where or how the subject is that is before us, ignoring the problem, arguing against solutions, very on brand. And again, another reason why we need a community of just nature. Right, yeah. So I think it's actually very sad but necessary component to mitigation. Mitigation is a very sad but necessary component to the coming global warming situation because we're going to be needing to do this. We're talking about this one species on this one island but it's going to take place microbiome by microbiome across the planet that these considerations are going to be needed. Anywhere from where trees grow now to where they used to. What needs to live amongst those trees to survive needs to move. The things that they feed on, the things that feed on them, everything needs to, and nature has always been able to do this seemingly, seamlessly at times and sometimes abruptly over really long time spans. You know what nature's going to do just fine. Things are going to survive, just not all the things. There's going to be a lot of things that die because they can't just keep up. We're in a mass extinction. Yeah, it's a mass extinction. They happen all the time on this planet. It's just going to be another day on Earth. This is the seven. Yeah, so there'll be adaptive radiation after all this. The question is, yeah, whoa, what hand are we going to put it in? So we have had a hand in causing the extinctions. Can we have a hand in saving species and ecosystems? Or are we just going to make it worse? And just to keep in to also that later radiation, you know, a lot of these bird species may have evolved over 23 million years to get to the point where they're well adapted to be on this island. You know, we're talking about time scales of rebound that we must assume happen without us. That must happen after humans. After humans. Well, but the problem is sea level rise isn't usually this fast. So like there'd be time for some of them to survive and get lost and be vagrants and show up somewhere else and establish a new populate. But now it's just like, bam, your island's gone. And the question is, with these species relocations, can we move enough individuals to get past population bottlenecks which would themselves be a problem for that later radiation? Would we be moving enough individuals to make it any different from those random single vagrants who end up by themselves in the wrong place, right? Yeah. And once you move them to Oahu, are they gonna be like, oh snap, there's all this resort food and they completely change their entire, yeah, their entire habits? Yeah, and then, you know, they're like, oh, the people died. And where'd the resort food go? What? Well, there are right now, there's, I think we've discussed this on the show before, five island nations that are petitioning the United Nations for some sort of documentation or legal framework for them to continue to be nations once they no longer have soil. Yeah, virtual. They want to maintain their fishing rights for their waters. They wanna maintain their voice in the world as a nation, a state of people. What you do is you make a Roman concrete island, right? There it is. So, just build a pipe. Build a pipe. Build a pipe tower. Yeah. Can you keep adding to it? Yeah. Yeah. Oh man. Hey, we're joking, but they were talking about creating a flotation system in one of these nations. I believe it. Like, this is like, it's not, they were being forced to confront the thing that we almost jokingly, flippantly say like, oh, that's gonna be tough. They're actually like, yeah, we need to figure out a way to keep our country on the planet, on the maps. Yeah, where are they going to be? What are they going to do? These are peoples, right? Waterworld. Yeah. What's gonna happen to Salt Lake City when it starts killing everybody with its arsenic clouds, right? And where they're not able to ship enough water through airships to replenish Great Salt Lake. You know, there's all sorts of things going on. It's, you know, Cadillac Desert and Waterworld all over the place. Okay, not to bring you all down, but this is the Seeking Science and we're really glad you're here and you know, the animals, they're very important to all the things. Yay, nature. Okay, so we ask that you head over to twist.org and if you would like a calendar, we are selling them as DIY PDF printables. You can click on the link on our website and get yourself a nice printable calendar for 2023. They're really, really wonderful art by Blair and if you haven't done it yet, get yourself a calendar. Supports twists and it's just really neat art to have on your walls. Justin, what stories do you have for us? All right, a real quick one here. Norwegian archeologists have found the world's oldest runestone. 2000 year old sandstone inscription was recovered from an ancient burial ground northwest of Oslo. Apparently it was either discovered or removed because there's a rail system coming through there so they went through and did this big excavation. Found something that they're dating to 2000-ish years old. Predating the oldest currently known runestone by a few hundred years. Carbon dating of bone and wood found in the grave beside the rune suggests it was inscribed. Between year one and maybe 250 AD, these are often found at grave sites much later during the Viking era. Runestones are stones that are exactly what they sound like. Stones inscribed with runic letters of the ancient Scandinavian alphabet. So far though, the translation seems to be lost. Retranscribed into the Latin alphabet, the inscription is basically a total Norwegian nonsense. I-D-I-B-E-R-U-G. I-D-I-B-E-R-U-G? Maybe, hmm, maybe? Which is apparently utterly meaningless but also could have been a common name at the time. Nobody can be sure. Being the earliest example of a written language in Scandinavian by hundreds of years, it is also the earliest form of language that may not even translate well to later runic writings. It could be slang or a swear. It could be anything. It could be anything, they have no idea. The fact that it's a grave marker, yeah, you can maybe jump to it's a name but it doesn't translate and they haven't, which is also fun, especially if you are somebody who has been studying runic writing. Now you have an older example in it. It's not fitting or it's not easy to transcribe. Now you have a mystery. They wanna find more of these, of course. And they're going straight to display. It's gonna be on display in Museum, Cultural History in Oslo from January 21st to February 26th this year. So people will be able to go take a look at it themselves. And really encouraging news. Well, okay. I gotta be careful how I set up a story. Really encouraging news and then I'm reading an estimated 90% of deaths from breast cancer due to complications resulting from metastasis. So this is the process in which- Yeah, is that encouraging? What? Well, yeah, I gotta get to the end of the story. Get to it, okay. So this is where cancer cells break down tissues from where they are formed and then they travel through the blood or lymph circulatory systems and they form tumors in other parts of the body. Breast cancer is always erased to remove cancer before this happens because there are not good options for therapy or curative options once it is metastasized. Once it is these cancer cells are floating throughout the blood or lymph system. So cancer cells use protrusions. Let me say they look like little feet in invadopodia to degrade the tissues that they then allows them to free up and travel to the other organs. This is based on previous research at Bar-Ilan University Israel, revealed two important clues about the formation of invadopodia. The level of two proteins, PYK2 and Cortacutin, suspiciously increase when the cell is entering this malignant phase ahead of metastasis. But if the cell lost its ability to produce one of them, PYK2, no metastasis was observed whatsoever. So in this recent study spanning on the previous findings, they discovered the mechanism which the protein interaction affects the formation and defined the structure of the complex between these two proteins. Researchers narrowed it down to a precise segment of the protein involved in the interaction between the PYK2 and the Cortacutin, Cortactin, excuse me. Small segment, peptides was then synthesized in the laboratory and administered to breast cancer. It's in the lungs in the mice, but it's the analog cancer bearing mice. They synthesized this peptide successfully and with the place where it from the PYK2 and basically flooded the zone with this peptide. What happened was the other protein that the PYK2 was interacting with took up these just these little peptide portions and it stopped metastasis. The other protein, it basically ran interference. So got the one protein and the other protein and this one's like, oh, if I just had a little bit of what you've got over here, I could go and start the process of metastasis down the road and instead it got these little segments that fulfilled its desire to connect but without the rest of the components needed to fulfill its role. So pretty amazing. It wasn't 100% successful but it was a very high rate of reduction and metastasis. So what they're doing now, they've only used 19 of something like 1,000 amino acid building blocks that are in this connection zone. So they're now focused on transforming this peptide into a better drug candidate. They're trying out different sequences of the amino acids. They're testing so they can get a very specific target of the binding site. Also critical because the other binding sites that may be similar to this could cause side effects in a drug if it were produced based off of this. So this is very, this is like the most encouraging. I know we're always talking about trying to avoid the cancer research down the road story but this is the first one that I've really seen attack metastasis at a mechanism level. Which is that as opposed to just a, oh my gosh, we're going to... After the fact. After the fact, yeah. We're going to give you treatment, yeah. Yes, this is, or it's treatment because they're not successful but they can be extremely invasive and extremely, this is when you get into full body chemotherapy, running chemotherapy drugs throughout your entire system to try to halt the spread. This is the first one I've seen where it's like, okay, we actually can see now what we think is the mechanism that happens before metastasis and we've developed a peptide that can be administered that can block that from happening. Now they just need to perfect it and get it into drug trials. And so this is five, seven years away probably. That's great, but... Meanwhile, everyone learn how to do a self-check. Men and women, it's not hard to do. You know, they never bring that up to men. It really should be. Men don't get it as often, but it is... It happens. They should. It's a big problem, yeah. If we want to produce it. I have such little muscle tissue on my body. I'm such a rail that I would just look in the mirror and be like, oh, that didn't belong there. I could see it, I wouldn't even need to feel for it. But yeah, I guess men too. Yeah, so the next big state of this is to move from mice and try and figure out whether or not they can actually create it. Staying mice a little bit longer. Yeah. Perfect it in the mice model. Yeah. Get that effect that they have seen. When I say great when we reduce, they even aren't sure that metastasis happened afterwards. But they can tell that it was highly effective. Yeah. But now to perfect it so that it could be used in a large system without causing downstream effects and to be more effective. So really encouraging. This is one of those things about cancer that if this could be stopped, cancer wouldn't be as big a deal. Like really would not be as big a deal. It wouldn't be as much of a ticking clock, yeah. Yeah. If you can get rid of the metastasis, that's the really big issue, right? It's the biggest game. It spreads to other systems and starts, yeah. Localized, we can usually handle when cancer appears in a local area, it can be simple as extraction. There's a bunch of therapies that can break down or inhibit tumor growth in a localized organ. That's the thing we can do now today. This is the one thing that we have in itself. This would be huge. So anyway, this is a story to keep following. Hopefully, I hope my seven years is way too far out. I hope they get tremendous amounts of funding and excitement and parallel research that is on board and really move this forward quickly. Right, because it could affect more than just breast cancer. This is looking at just that metastasis generally. Can we stop it from spreading? Yeah. Well, moving on from cancer and metastasis, I have a couple of stories related to epigenetics and aging. One of the things related to aging is you start getting achy joints and part of achy joints is osteoarthritis related to your cartilage. So researchers have been trying to figure out whether or not we can use information gleaned from stem cells to be able to find factors that might lead to an understanding of how to turn back the clock on that cartilage. Because one of the things that we know about cartilage is that it just doesn't get the blood flow that other tissues do, and it's hard to repair. So if your knees go and the cartilage in your knees go, you're like, oh, well, gotta rebuild my knees, that's it. But what if we could have drugs or other treatments that got around surgery to enable the restructuring of old cartilage to make it work once again? So these researchers at USC just published their work in aging cell, and they were looking at particular factors, one particularly called stat three. It turns genes on and off. It's an epigenetic factor that regulates when aspects of cartilage cells are turned on or off, and there's another molecule that's involved called DNA methyl transferase three. It interacts with stat three. When stat three gets inactivated, this DNA methyl transferase three gets really hyperactive and starts adding aging marks to the DNA, and that progresses osteoarthritis. So what they've determined from their work in mice is that if they could keep stat three activated, this could potentially keep cells thinking that they're younger or maybe even turn back the clock a little bit. So they did a bunch of experiments to see how they could up regulate stat three and kind of return it to a younger profile, and they found that they could, which is really great because it suggests that, oh, hey, we can get some of these cartilage cells acting young again. But the bad news here is that even though we can control it epigenetically, these younger cells, the cells that kind of go, oh, I'm young again, they don't know what to do with themselves because they are in an older tissue, huh? And so because they are younger cells in an older tissue, they become potentially tumorgenic or they create weird tissue that doesn't match the rest of the tissue. And so it created a worse problem in the mice eventually. Ah, kids today. It's true everywhere you go. Yes, it always has been. It always has been. So more to look at and more to understand. And they've worked on aspects of this previously. So there have been other studies looking at rejuvenating cells related to Parkinson's disease and dopamine neurons and oh, you can't just put a young cell into the brain. You have to tell the cell what to do. So this is a starting point. And eventually they'll probably figure out other markers that will epigenetically allow them to control the reeducation of these cartilage cells so that they can be young again. So that's a very important thing they bring up is a lot of the communication in tissues is between local cells. Yes. So why can't these young cells just listen? Well, they do, but they're not, it's like a grown up telling a toddler what to do. And a toddler's like, I don't want, I'm fine. I'll be kind of doing it. Toddlers having a tantrum on the floor of Target. Right, exactly. I'm gonna do it for a little bit, but I'm tired now. Or I don't really want to do that. I don't have an attention span like that. Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is also what cancer is. Cancer is cells that have stopped listening to the cells around them. They're ignoring the stop growing signals. Yeah, we're out of room. We're out of room, I said we're out of room. They're ignoring the communication of from the other cells around them. So I'm wondering if somehow this is, if they can just improve the listening ability, which is, I know, like a very analog what this, we're doing a lot of. You need to make them younger, but not too young. Right. Just a little younger. Just a little younger, just so that you're not decrepit anymore. Or just make the whole body younger. Just do it all. And so on that note, there's another study out this last week that's been all over the news. People have been excited about this paper looking at epigenetics in mice. Researchers at Harvard Medical School have taken the Yamanaka factors, which are a series of factors, Oct4, Sox2, KLF4. There are genes that are active in stem cells that are known to revert stem cells. Revert cells. So you can add the Yamanaka factors and other things to a skin cell and turn it back into a baby skin cell or a neuron into a baby neuron. And you take them back to these younger states, right? And so stem cells, the cells that can potentially are gonna propagate and grow into the tissues, they're young and it's great. And you want to have as many nice young stem cells working in your body at all time to make sure that you're not aging too much. So over time, the stem cells themselves, we've talked before about the telomeres at the ends of DNA that start to shorten. And so because the little aglets at the end of the, the telomeres at the end of the DNA start to shorten, suddenly you start getting errors all over the place and proteins are in the wrong places. And DNA that's supposed to be tied up is opened up and DNA that's supposed to be opened up is tied up and genes are getting expressed that shouldn't be expressed. And suddenly your skin is wrinkly. Suddenly you're getting older. Suddenly you have memory problems. Suddenly you have osteoarthritis and there are all these things happening. You're aging because your DNA is breaking down. Oh no. Right. So these researchers have published their paper involving these older mice and they had, it was in cell and in this study, they took mice of the same genetic background and they took some of them and had them have sped up DNA breakage. And they ended up with mice that were the same age but one mouse looked old and another mouse didn't look very young actually. And in this, in what they did they also realized that they could then give the mice these Yamanaka factors and they called them the ice mice. These ice mice had their vision, their glaucoma repaired, their epigenome started becoming unscramble, their tissues and organs returned to what could be considered more youthful states. And the lead author, David Sinclair, says it's like rebooting a malfunctioning computer. It's set in motion an epigenetic program that led cells to restore the epigenetic information they had when they were young. It's a permanent reset. And Sinclair has gone as far and you know, scientists can sometimes get really excited about their discoveries and really overstate stuff and Sinclair's been on Twitter and he's like, this is, if it's correct, we're gonna cure cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, you know, really it's the epigenome DNA breaking and if we can fix it and give it a reset we can solve everything. My first prediction of the year, my first prediction of the year, here it is. Longevity has been solved, reversing of aging. Just this year. I predicted this would happen however, part of my prediction was that they would not tell anybody about it, because the ramifications of everybody living forever is really gonna be bad for the planet. I think that's another issue there. And the economy and society in general. Also only some people will be able to afford it. So then only certain individuals will get to live forever. Then it wouldn't be so bad. Except if you think about the people that'll be able to afford it, that's not what you want. That's what they want. That's not what we want. Well, I'm gonna be friends with those people then because then maybe if I do their bidding long enough they'll keep me around a little longer. Can you imagine that though as a perk for a job? Also this will give you access to longevity. Yes, our benefits package include an extra 30 years. You'll just be working for those three years. You'll be working for us the entire time. You're young. You're gonna say you can do it. Who needs your tire working? It'll be every five years, you'll get another five years. It's not a retirement package, it's a reworking package. Oh my God. Forever working package. I think I'd rather die. Yeah, there's a limit to the amount of... Depends on what you're doing. If you love what you're doing, I mean, I could do this show forever. Well, you don't do this for 40 hours a week. Yes, but in the new benefits program it'll be required. Yeah, so there is another study as well. Also not yet peer reviewed, the cell studies peer reviewed, they did this work, we're able to somewhat repair aging in these mice. There's another paper out in bio archive, the pre-print server by a number of researchers called Gene Therapy Mediated Partial Req Programming extends lifespan and reverses age related changes in aged mice in which they essentially were able to allow an age equivalent of 77 year old mice to live longer. So same gene therapy, the Yamanaka factors systemically delivered AAVs which are adenoviruses encoding inducible Yamanaka factors, extended the lifespan by 9% in mice. And in human skin cells, they observed significant epigenetic markers of age reversal potential to a healthier state. So the question is, is this work, the kind of work that can be turned into a treatment that can help skin cancer? Is this the kind of thing that can help glaucoma? Is it the kind of thing that without surgery, we can help with age related disorders like Alzheimer's and others that are very complex disorders, but yeah, like you mentioned, Justin, there are economic and other social concerns as we look at the extension of life. Yeah, and does it affect everything? I mean, if I am now a young man in my 20s in terms of vim and vigor, which also tells me my age, what am I saying? You're a 70-year-old, yeah. And yet I still have horrible arthritis and Alzheimer's is still catching up to me and like, is it going to affect everything? Hey, if it gets rid of the wrinkles and I'm like, great, but still have a bad back. I don't know, you know, how much of this rejuvenation is outward facing and how much of it is actual internal health changes? You know, more is better. Right, but and considering the effects of the younger cells in the osteoarthritis situation, how much of it is actually going to be beneficial? Like are there deleterious effects on the body system by reprogramming cells and making them think they're younger? If I'm here when I'm 77, I will take that. I'll take that, right? Will you? I'll take it. If my ligaments are great, but my bones have turned to dust. Well, that's dusty old science people. I think we've come to the end of another episode. Have we done that? I think so. Certainly, certainly we made it through. Thanks everyone for listening to another episode of This Week in Science. I would love to say thank you, shout outs to a number of people, identity four workaholic out there. Thank you for recording the show. Fada, thank you for your help on social media and the show descriptions that you are so helpful with week after week. Gord Arlaur, others who help with our chat rooms and making sure they're nice places to be. Thank you for all your time in there. And Rachel, thank you for editing the show. And of course, as always, I do want to especially thank our Patreon sponsors. Thank you to Teresa Smith, James Schofer, Schaefer, Richard Badge, Kenton Northcoat, Rick Loveman, Pierre Velisar, John Ratnaswamy, Karl Kornfeld, Karen Taze, Chris Wozniak, Dave Bunn, Bigard, Chefstead, Hal Snyder, Donathan Stiles, AKA Don Stilo, Ali Koff and Gaurav Sharma, Reagan, Derek Schmidt, Don Munda, Steven Albaran, Darryl Meischach, Stu Pollock, Andrew Swanson, Fred S. 104, Sky Luke, Paul Ronevich, Kevin Reardon, Noodles Jack, Brian Carrington, David E. Youngblood, Sean Clarence Lamb, John McKee, Greg Riley, Mark Hestonflow, Steve Leesman, AKA Zima, Ken Hayes, Howard Tan, Christopher Rappin, Dana Pearson, Richard, Brendan Minnish, Johnny Gridley, Remy Day, Flying Out, Christopher Dreyer, Greg Briggs, John Atwood, Judy Garcia, Jay Wilkinson, Rodney Lewis, Paul, Rick Ramis, Philip Shane, Kurt Larson, Craig Landon, Sue Doster, Jason Olds, Dave Neighbor, Eric, yeah, Eric, Eric, Eric, Eric, Eric, Eric Knapp, EO, Adam Mishkan, Kevin Parachan, Aaron Luth and Steve DeBell, Bob Calder, Marjorie Paul, Disney, David Simmerly, Patrick Pecoraro, Tony Steele, and Jason Roberts. Thank you for all of your support on Patreon. And for anyone out there who is interested in supporting us on Patreon, head over to twist.org and click on the Patreon link on next week's show. We will be back Wednesday, 8 p.m. Pacific Time Broadcasting live from our YouTube and Facebook channels and from twist.org slash live. Hey, do you wanna listen to us as a podcast? Perhaps while you work out your bones and muscles and cartilage so you can live forever? Just search for this week in Science where podcasts are found. If you enjoyed the show, get your friends to subscribe as well. For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes and links to stories will be available via our website, www.twist.org, where you can also sign up for a newsletter. You can also contact us directly, email Kiki at kirsten at thisweekinscience.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 starting line or your email will be spam filtered to an island that is about to be underwater. No! You can also in the meantime hit us up on Twitter where we are at twist science, at Dr. Kiki at Jackson Fly and at Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback. If there's a topic you would like us to cover or address, a suggestion for an interview, a haiku that comes to you in the night, please let us know. We'll be back here next week and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news. And if you've learned anything from the show, remember... It's all in your head. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science, it's the end of the world. So I'm setting up a 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 below the warm up in your way. So every skin science. This Week in Science. Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news that what I say may not represent your view. Listen up everybody, it's the after-show. Just... We are joined by our guest, Mr. Felix. Hello, Mr. Felix. Somebody's almost ready to read show notes. I heard him chime in in. He said, what? Very much in there. Talk for science. Talk for science. He's like, talk about the haikus that come to you in the night. Little baby haikus. I would like to see them all. Felix says, I will touch your keyboard. I'm gonna make all the things happen. Oh yeah, he's very much into technology. What kid isn't? Geez, it's so stimulating. So we're gonna bounce. We're gonna go grab some breakfast. Good, yeah, go feed some babies. I'm gonna bounce on to my mattress then. You can do that as well. Oh, should I already say it? You guys wanna talk about any of the after-show or you could do... I'm not here, there's no after-show. Is that what happens? No, I mean, unless we have something that's merely that we need to talk about, but I mean, seriously, I would love to stay for an after-show, but I mean, if you're going, we can all go, and that's okay. It's all right. I think it's very exciting that we got to see Felix this morning, so that is great. How do you see them? Can you say hi? Hi, Felix. Hi, Felix. Hi. Hi. He can't hear us though, right? No. No, he probably can't hear you. That's it, yeah. Hi, I'm waving. Hi, Felix. Hi, Felix. Hi, Felix. Hi. Hello. Hello, Felix. Hello. Hi. Hey. He's like, oh, what is happening here? He's confused. Yeah, he's just waking up. So go ahead and say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Say good morning, Justin. Good morning, Justin. Good night. Hi, Kiki. Good night, everyone, and good morning, Felix. I hope everyone has a wonderful day, slash night, sat, slash week, all the things that you're doing. Thank you for joining us for another episode of This Week in Science. We'll be back again next Wednesday, P.M. Pacific Time. Let us know if there's anything in the meantime. You want us to know us to know about, but we'll be back. Don't eat wild fish. Thank you for your time. Stay safe, stay healthy, stay curious. I love how you're always searching for that final word. Stay curious, don't eat wild fish. Don't run with, remember not to run with scissors, everybody. That's right. I got the things. Don't teach man eat fish, he day. Don't, don't undercook your eggs. This is it. I like my stapler. Okay. Everyone have a wonderful week. We'll see you again next Wednesday. Good night, morning.