 Retreat. I gotta get my annunced. Okay, we are live. Does the chat room see us? Are we here? Are we there? Let's see. Let us see. Let us see. Oh, we are live according to the chat room. So it is time for us to start our show. Is everybody ready? Starting in three, two, this is Twist. This Week in Science, episode number 718, recorded on Wednesday, April 24th, 2019 inside Project Drawdown. Hey, everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki, and tonight on the show, we are going to fill your heads with growing genes, glowing gonopods, and solutions. But first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. You only live once. A phrase often accompanied by a decision to do something bold or indulgent or just short-sighted, such as a tattoo that says, You only live once when the acronym yellow would have has the suffice and taken up a lot less space on your neck. But is that really true? Do we all live just once? Ask anyone with a neck as anyone with a neck tattoo might tell you, No, it's not true. We live every day, which is each our own personal forever and only die once. But try encouraging your friends to do the bold, indulgent, or short-sighted thing by shouting, You only die once, and you're likely to get a lot less stickers. Humans have for many generations been treating the planet as if all that could possibly matter is that which is immediately mattering to them, as if humanity only lived once, to accurate the consequences. And now, the consequences are setting in like a yellow neck tattoo with a job interview. Nothing against neck tattoos here, by the way. But if you're going to get one, maybe don't base it on a meme to sing, the longevity. And so we current humans living at the current height of history's consequences have choices. We can make the changes needed to build a better future. Or we can all get neck tattoos that say, This Week in Science, coming up next. All up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I wanna know what's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. What's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. Good science to keep you in, 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 to talk about all the science that has been wondrously filling our cups, right? The science that is bringing us knowledge, understanding about the world. What is this amazing tool bringing us this week? Okay, I have stories about rare variants for height. Brains saying sentences and we have an interview on climate solutions that is sure to have an impact. Justin, what do you have for us? I've got good news, bad news. Why global warming is bad for baby penguins and reindeer looking to the ocean to survive it. As well as an ancient Peruvian beer festival that lasted for 500 years. Wow, was it called Portland? Peruvian, not Portlandian. Oh, right. Yeah, then I would have CBD in it. Blair, what is in the animal corner? I have some perverse millipedes and some very clean mice. Perverse and clean. I like it. Let's take it to the show. Everyone, as we jump into the show, I want to remind you that if you have not yet subscribed to Twists, you can do that. That's right. We have a YouTube channel where you can subscribe. You can also subscribe to our podcast. We are available all places you find wonderful podcasts. You can also just visit twist.org for information. Okay, let's jump into our show right now. Right now, I would love to introduce our guest for the evening, Dr. Jonathan Foley. He's the executive director of Project Drawdown. He is a world-renowned environmental scientist, a sustainability expert, author, public speaker. His work is focused on understanding our changing planet and finding new solutions to sustain the climate, ecosystems, and natural resources that we all depend on. Jonathan, welcome to the show. Great. Thank you for having me here today. I appreciate it. You're welcome. It is wonderful to get you on. So close to Earth Day, did you celebrate this? I did. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like Christmas for environmental scientists, right? Except we all have to work. But it's the 49th Earth Day, next year will be the big 5-0 for the Earth Day Festival. And it was kind of cool. It was founded in 1970 by Senator Gaylord Nelson of the state of Wisconsin. And I was really, really lucky to get to know him a little bit before he passed away and to get to know his family. Because I was a professor at the University of Wisconsin and I held the first person to hold Gaylord Nelson chair of Environmental Science there. And really amazing guy. He was so wise and such a great leader and really thoughtful about big picture issues. We could use a bit more of that today in our politicians and he was an inspiration. So Earth Day is a big deal for me and for a lot of people I know. Yeah, so you worked in the research side of things for many years. How did you end up making that step into working now as executive director for this climate action organization? And you also worked through the years to found different institutes within universities. How did that progression take place? Yeah, it's weird. I mean, actually, well, I'll go way back. I was one of those kids who wanted to be a scientist in utero basically. Every waking moment of my entire life I knew I wanted to be a scientist in one kind or another. And I thought I wanted to be an astronomer actually as a kid. But then I went to college and started studying astronomy and physics. And I thought, you know, given all the environmental issues we have, and I was always very touched and moved by the environment. I grew up in rural Maine near the ocean and the forest and the lakes. And I just kind of realized, you know, those other planets are great, but they're not going anywhere. This planet is actually in crisis and maybe I should focus on that. So I switched my graduate work to atmospheric science and oceanography. Just kind of a little branch of physics, if you will. And I focused a lot on climate change and I was a professor for about 20 years at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Minnesota. And along the way, realized that traditional academic departments weren't really set up to address the problems we have. There were two focused on one narrow discipline. You know, academics have disciplines, but the world has problems that transcend those and cut across those in lots of different ways. So there was a real need to kind of create new kinds of organizations that did science and social science and even humanities and the arts and bring them together. And more importantly, though, is not just connecting the bits of the ivory tower but to build bridges out of it and into it and out of the real world. So, yeah, I set up a couple of centers focusing on like global sustainability and environmental issues. But along the way, I got more and more frustrated by traditional academia. I mean, I liked it. It's brilliant. Lots of great people. I felt like, you know, we needed to make our biggest difference out in the broader world, not just inside the ivory tower. I think you can do both. So about six years ago, five years ago, I left academia and ended up running a museum in San Francisco, the California Academy of Sciences and did that for four years, which was a lot of fun. But I ended up finding most of my time was spent on like fundraising and kind of dealing with city politics and stuff, which is fine. And so I was thinking now, like, what do I want to get back to? And so now we run a environmental science and education and advocacy NGO. So it's a little bit of all three things. We do our own science, but we also communicated and do education, but we're also trying to influence the world to get moving on climate solutions. So it's kind of a nice culmination of things I care about, like, you know, doing science, sharing science and making it relevant and important to the world, but focusing on a single issue of how do we fix climate change? And that's what we're going to do. I really hope so. We're going to try. We're going to try. We're doing our part. There's only 7.4 billion other people and a bunch of trillions of dollars we have to work with. But yeah, at least our little word is focusing on that. But I think we're making a difference. We're making a little dent in this big problem. And I think together, if a lot of us do that, that's the only way the world changes, anyway, is when lots of people try really hard at the things that look impossible and they turn out not to be. Think about, I mean, you know, a lot of people think, oh, my God, climate change is impossible. How could we possibly change this? Like, you know, I bet a lot of you grew up the same way. But I grew up believing so passionately that, or not passionately, but so convinced through my childhood that everything, you know, like that we would die in a nuclear war. There's always been a war with the Soviet Union. It doesn't even exist today. Gay marriage, that would never happen. An African-American president, crazy talk, you know, stuff like that legal pot, you know, that's crazy. That'll never happen. And everything we thought was not possible, not only was possible, they're inevitable. So I think it's only in the rear view mirror of history that we can really see how change happens. And I hope that's the same thing with climate change. It may look impossible now. I'm like, yeah, tell that to apartheid, Soviet Union, tell that to the Berlin Wall, or, you know, prohibitions on gay marriage. All of those things toppled and changed because people worked very hard at them. And they probably weren't sure it was going to work out, but they did. So let me ask then, because you're talking about these kind of big picture things. It took a long time. And, you know, I have my own experiences in just trying to teach climate change in classrooms for the past six years or so. I've seen the number of hands just raising when you go, who here has heard of climate change with kids of any age? That number has way increased. Do you think that you have seen, in the amount of time that you've been working on this, kind of a real shift or movement of the needle in your experience already? Oh, yeah, absolutely. And the data support this too. And you know that very well. I'm sure you follow this through Noki and other things. Yeah, there's only about 7% of Americans today who, well, let's put it this way, basically the round numbers 100% of Americans have heard about climate change. If you haven't heard about it already, you're not going to. I'm not going to bother with you. Of the 99.9% of Americans who do know about climate change, only 7% of that actually think it's a hoax or it's not to be believed. It's all a bunch of hooey. And I think half of them are paid to think that. And, you know, the others just have some cultural filter, which is no amount of science will ever change. That's just decided that, you know, they just don't want to believe this. I'm like, great, it's about the same number who think the earth is flat and whatever. Okay, great. You know, they could be my friends and neighbors, but we're just not going to talk about that. But we got 93%, let's say, of the country at two varying degrees believing and worrying about climate change. So I want to move on now. Like, hey, we believe now, what are we going to do? So that's what pressure drawdown is about. It's like we're not nothing. We never go back and say, here's the physics of the greenhouse effect. And I'm going to imitate Al Gore and show CO2 molecules. So we've done that, been there. We're now saying, let's move on. And we start from day one. Talk about, so what are we going to do? How can we solve the problem? And the good news is we actually have all the solutions we need already to solve the problem. There's more than enough to do it. There are more tools coming aboard every day. We just haven't bothered to do it. We need to change this in politics. We need changes in policy. We need changes in business practices. We need changes in capital and investment. And we need changes in our own behavior. But if you do that and multiply it out over about 100 technical solutions, which we've reviewed and analyzed to death, the math works. We can not only stop climate change, we can eventually reverse it. Not in our lifetime, but we can bring it back to a natural state and start today. And we can make sure we avoid the worst damages in the future. So it's kind of amazing. And that's where I want to focus our communication next. And so, yeah, you believe now, what are we going to do about it? Yeah. It's like in the past, people would debate whether smoking causes cancer. And now we're going to help you quit. Now we're going to help you move on. It's one thing to talk about the problem and get people on board with it. Great. But unless you move to the solution, all you've really done is talked. And that's a necessary first step. But I want to get to the second step. It's actually now let's move on to solutions. So how do you and Project Drawdown assess these various solutions? How have you come to the determination that these 100 solutions are the best things that we should be working on? Yeah. I'm going to grab a prop. Hang on. Awesome. So we have a prop. We have a book. So this came out about a year and a half ago. It's a book simply called Drawdown. And it's edited by my predecessor, Paul Hocken, who is the founder of Drawdown. Now we're going off doing some new projects. And I've come in to kind of take the organization to the next stage. But in this, they basically summarized the work of about 80 scientists who worked on this over the course of three years in different, mostly there were like postdocs and grad students all over the world contributing their time, helping to do this kind of review. What they did is, and it's so crazy, this has never happened before, but these folks went through about 100 different solutions to climate change have been proposed and used the same tools, the same kind of yardstick, if you will, to measure their financial kind of dimension, like what would it cost, as well as the efficacy on reducing climate change, like how much carbon would it avoid going into the atmosphere? Believe it or not, nobody had ever done that before. It kind of speaks to how science can be great, but sometimes we get siloed. So the people working in electricity were doing their thing, using their kind of scenarios, their units, their kinds of models to estimate how would we affect climate change? The folks over here working on forest were doing something a little different, people working in transportation, yet another thing. So people were comparing apples to oranges to kiwis to grapefruits to pomegranates or whatever, and Dryden was the first time anybody had tried to do it systematically across these solutions in a rigorous way that also kind of did a what we call like a meta-analysis of the literature where you kind of analyze the results of the results of all the different scientific studies. So we compiled thousands of different scientific studies and assessed them and looked at the spread of results to get a little understanding of the uncertainty but also kind of what the averages were. Anyway, that was pretty cool. So that was an amazing body of kind of scientific work, but more importantly to that, and I think you all appreciate this, it was written in a way you could understand. Like this crazy report on climate change solutions became a New York Times bestseller. It's the bestselling climate book, I think, since The Inconvenient Truth. And it's like, what? How did a bunch of nerds write it that became a bestseller? It's because, well, they made it accessible and readable and Paul Hocken, who edited the book, Catherine Wilkinson and others who wrote huge sections of it had a real gift for language and made it accessible and kind of inspiring. We talked about hope and sort of fear. We talked about possibility and opportunity and doom and gloom. We focused on the solutions, not just the problem, and we showed where collaboration was necessary, not just conflict and more fighting. And so I kind of spoke to people's kind of technical desire to like, hey, can we do this? Like, we're like, yeah, and here are the numbers. But more importantly, I think it became a symbol to people like, wow, hey, we can solve this. I don't know how many times I've heard people say, yeah, I bought 50 copies of this and gave it to all my friends at Christmas. And I'm like, really? Wow. I mean, they're sitting on a lot of, I mean, well, they're countless companies, NGOs, and organizations I've been visiting lately where they said, oh, yeah, everybody gets a copy of this in their first day of work. We give it to all the employees. I'm like, really? Wow. I had no idea. So it's been kind of cool. So it's kind of when you do good science where you synthesize what we already knew and take it up a level, but then you spend an equal amount of time communicating it. You can have a really big impact. So I really, really think that's great. We're now redoing all the science behind all this. And we're going to actually be updating all the solutions annually from now on. But we're moving away from a purely book platform because books are great, but they're kind of expensive to put together. They take a long time to get out. They, you know, they get a little obsolete pretty quickly. So we're going to be switching to all digital, a lot more social media, a lot more short form video, things like this. So stay tuned. Drawdown later this year will be unveiling a lot of really new, cool stuff and taking it out into the world. And is that part of your, the fellowship program? Yeah, we have a fellowship program where about every year or so we announce the competition, well not a competition, but like a selection process for drawdown research fellows. And right now we have about 20 research fellows working to update the individual solutions and we have five senior fellows who kind of work year after year after year coordinating across the individual cohorts of fellows. And it's a really nice model. It's a little bit like, a graduate fellowship, if you will, but a short term one. But what's nice is people can feel like, hey, my work is contributing to a peer reviewed paper out here. Cool. Some people want that, but hey, people are actually reading this stuff. I can send this to my mom and she could read it. That's kind of cool, you know. If your barber and your mom have heard about what you're doing, you know, you're on to something. That's pretty cool. So. That is. Yeah. I love all of these solutions. We talk about new scientific discoveries all the time. You know, we're constantly bringing up, you know, new either technological advancements for solar panels or sustainable energy or, you know, we're talking about aspects of climate change and things that are changing. But I took a quiz this week that was on CNN that was put together through project drawdown. And, you know, I consider myself a fairly well versed individual on these kinds of subjects. And I will have you know that I did it very poorly on this quiz. And I'd love to find out to talk about why some of the things that came up as much more important came up that way. So in this, in this quiz, you're supposed to rank various solutions and for instance, on the food level is supposed to eat a plant heavy diet. We talk about that all the time that eating a plant heavy diet is going to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Yep. And that is one of the biggest things that you can do. But that was not the number one. Is it the clean stuff? No. Food waste. Well, on the food sector, it's number three overall of everything. So here's the funny thing. So you know what, Kiki, don't feel bad. Everybody flunked this test. It was actually very, very hard. I'm like, I'm a type A. I can't fail. Come on. No, but everybody fell. I mean, I run the organization and I got like a B plus practically. It was very hard. And maybe we should have made it simpler like, you know, hey, just look at, you know, how does food matter to climate change? To kind of get warm people up. That's probably the one feedback we got on this quiz is probably jump into the advanced, the AP level class right away. And we should have kind of ramped up to it. But it kind of tells you how much we talk about the science of climate change. We often talk about the problems, but people actually don't know much about the solutions. That was kind of the point of this. For example, most folks, when they hear about climate change suddenly, oh, right, renewable energy, that's the solution. And then they jump to solar panels and windmills and stuff like great, but you're actually now narrated to renewable electricity. And electricity on the planet generates about 25% of the climate problem. All the electricity generated on the planet from burning coal, oil and gases, like 25% of climate change's contribution. Food, land use associated with food and all that is also 25%. Those two together, electricity and food are half of climate change. And yet how much attention does food get versus solar panels and windmills and batteries and electric cars? Nothing. So that would have been the first sort of question like, hey, is food bigger or equal to or less than electricity is a problem for climate change. And 99% of people said, oh, it's much less. The answer is they're equal. Which I think is so funny because electricity is something that a lot of people don't have agency over where their electricity comes from. But everyone has some sort of agency over the food that they eat. That's right. Exactly. And that's what's really cool. A good point because different kinds of players like policymakers at the state level and at your public utility commissions, maybe your city, they really control a lot of the policy for your electoral grid. By the way, it's not Washington, DC either. But it's not you at home much except, you know, conserving electricity in your home. So we have a role to play, but you know, there's infrastructure is making, there's infrastructure is capital. It's kind of complicated. Food is the same way a little bit, but surely we can affect a lot of our food waste and what we decide to eat. That is, you know, there's nobody in Washington telling us what to eat. So why don't we, you know, food has actually got a lot of, again, a sense of agency to it. So if you want to tackle climate change, it's about a quarter of electricity, about a quarter of its food, a quarter of its like industry and buildings and infrastructure, and a quarter is other stuff like buildings and other things. So food electricity are the two biggest ones, transportation, a couple other, you know, weird little things people forget about like, like making cement. When cement cures and makes concrete, it releases a huge amount of CO2. It has nothing to do with energy. It's just CO2 coming out of the chemistry of, you know, calcium carbonate. And that's kind of cool. It turns out if cement was a country, it'd be the third largest emitter of CO2 on the planet after China. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty big. Yeah. Well, the same could be said for food waste too. Food waste would also be number three in the world and then cement would be number four if those were countries. So I never understood the food waste thing though. Well, because it's, isn't it then just food production at some point? Yeah. Because how do we get away from the food that we didn't eat? Yeah. You're right. The logic here is that food waste, if you reduce the waste, you could then stem production. So what it's implying, and that may or may not be completely true every time. So food waste is basically the problem that we grow about, let's put it this way, 30 to 40% of all the food grown on the planet, not just in the United States, on the planet is never, in rich countries, it's because we throw it away as a consumer or in our supermarkets and stores and restaurants. In poor countries, it's about the same number and it's mostly because the farmer couldn't even get it to the marketplace because it rotted, spilled. Yeah. Yeah. Well, where the train broke down or the truck never showed up or it got a flat tire or you don't have a cell phone so you don't know when the truck's coming by to pick up your product or whatever. So that's a lot of work too. And it's obviously a double tragedy to lose the food and the poor farmer lost income in a very tough part of the world. So we need to work on that too. But anyway, the idea is if you can reduce food waste from 30 to 40% down to like 5 or 10%, let me know that 30 to 40% means 30 to 40% of all the land used to grow food on the planet isn't necessary. 30 to 40% of all the deforestation caused by growing more food isn't necessary. Or fertilizers, or water, or chemicals, or machines, and transportation, refrigeration, all of that. About 40% of it is completely wasted. It'd be like, it'd be like you, I grew up in Maine, a cold place in the winter, it'd be like, oh yeah, my house has a bigger furnace in it. But I've closed the front door and shut the windows. You know what I mean? Like, you know, waste is huge. Like, you know, 40% of the effort is never even used. Surely we can do something about that. So the biggest solutions to fixing the food system isn't local food or organic or whatever. Those are important too. But number one and number two by far are food waste and less meat, no matter how you grow it. Those two together are huge factors in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and everything else from egg. And by the way, on agriculture too, a lot of people think the climate change emissions tied to agriculture in the food system are because of food miles, moving food around. Nope, that's almost insignificant. And actually Walmart can move food with lower carbon footprint of 1,000 miles compared to you moving it from the farmer's market to your home. Because they do a huge volume. So I don't like that fact by the way, but it's true. But neither one of them are that big. It turns out the big drivers of climate change from egg and food come from clearing rainforest to grow more food. That's number one. Number two is methane coming from cattle and rice fields. And number three is nitrous oxide, which isn't greenhouse gas people forget about. But it comes when we overuse fertilizers and it combines in the soil and releases this very potent greenhouse gas out of the soil. Those three things are huge. Everything else like chemicals used in egg, energy used in egg, moving food around. They're like a round off error compared to those big three. So it's deforestation, methane and N2O. And people hear about methane. Oh, hey, since you guys love weird animal facts and stuff on here, I know you do. Remember, kids, cows don't fart methane. They burp methane. It comes out the front end, not the back end. Because they're ruminants. They have to digest all that weird crap in their four stomachs with water. And that incomplete digestion is burping methane out of their mouths. So when politicians talk about cow farts and climate change, they know nothing about climate change. They don't even know anything about cows. They don't even know which end of the cow you're talking about. And if they're from, like, Wisconsin or Vermont, they should be voted out of office immediately because they've got to know about cows. Come on, cow people, come on. So you talked about cement a little bit, but something else that came up in that quiz was that it was going to be cement production. And I was making my votes for cement being bad and let's make it better. And it was bad, but more impactful to our atmosphere are refrigerants. That's true. It's number one of all the climate change solutions out of 100. It is the top climate solution is the gases used in the coils of air conditioners, refrigerators and freezers. And nobody ever talks about it. Back in the 70s, we used to talk about chlorofluorocarbons, those nasty old CFCs that were in refrigerants and aerosol cans. They're kind of miraculous chemicals, it turns out. Chemists love them. Engineers love them. But we found out that those chemicals leaked in the atmosphere and they destroyed the ozone layer. Oops, bad. Let's get rid of them. Montreal Protocol, we're phasing them out. Okay, we replaced them with hydrofluorocarbons. HFCs, instead of CFCs. And they don't destroy the ozone layer, but guess what? CFCs and HFCs, anything with a fluorine at a minute, turns out it's a really good absorber of infrared radiation, therefore a greenhouse gas. They're thousands of times more potent molecule for molecule than a CO2 molecule is. So they're kind of the forgotten greenhouse gases, but it turns out, leaky chlorofluorocarbons or hydrofluorocarbons, those gases leaking out of mainly air conditioning and cooling equipment coils are pound for pound the worst contributors to climate change by far. And there are a lot of them kind of just dumped in landfills around the world. In fact, the other day I spoke into it, the company that makes like TurboTax and a bunch of accounting software. Nice company. Who just put their taxes in or like, we know. Yeah, we all know those folks. Yeah, they're a good company. They're nice folks. They have a climate change program where they're trying to reduce their energy use, they're using renewable energy and all that. They've cut their carbon footprint down enormously as a company, but they have a little bit left. So they wanted to offset what was left and they were going to plant some trees, put up some solar panels on schools, good stuff. Yay. But then they read drawdown and said, oh my God, refrigerants. So they worked with a team that sent engineers and community development experts to Ghana in West Africa and created a community based project that helped local folks go recover air conditioning and freezer and refrigerator equipment in giant landfills in the slums in the country of Ghana. And they went and recovered all of the gases out of those refrigerators and air conditioning. A lot of them were dumped by European countries or Israel or South Africa, kind of as the giant landfills is dumped everywhere. They wanted to recover those gases and then destroy them so they couldn't get into the atmosphere, preventing a lot of extra climate change for less money than what it cost to put up solar panels in Mountain Africa. So it's kind of cool. So yeah, a lot of people don't know about that. That's one thing that always drives me nuts too because that is, there's the easiest possible solution to avoid because if you go six, eight feet down, it's 57 degrees all year round. It's 57 degrees and just 10 feet down or even that far down under your feet. So you could have an air-moving tube system installed underneath every house. People used to drill wells for water. You could drill a cooling well in your backyard by going down and having a pipe run through it and having it vent into your house like your normal air conditioner would and you could cool it all year long without any of these gases. Well, that's right. I mean, actually, a lot of people were moving to these so-called heat pumps and cooling pumps. They have ones that used to be geothermal. Like you're saying, people could use the air-coils in the ground under their homes and in the winter time. Open up a skylight. That heat in the house will rise up and it pulls all the air in. There's a zero energy solution to this. You don't even need to run fans. It's not going to work for everyone though. Well, in a really cold place you actually need to basically be working what's called the Carnot cycle. It's like they would use a heat exchange mechanism. It's like an air conditioner run in reverse. Looking at the temperature gradient between your cold house and, let's say, Vermont in the summer and a 56-degree soil below you. It might be 50 below outside, but it's 50 degrees in the soil that enthalpy gradient, if you want to get nerdy, is what drives the heat exchange. But then you can reverse it in the summer time and use it like air conditioning. But it turns out Japanese companies like Mitsubishi and others have learned how to do this with incredibly efficient air-based heat exchanger systems. These are called heat pumps that can actually just do it from the outside air now. A lot of people are getting rid of heating units that use natural gas and are replacing them with electrical, which in the 70s and 80s would have been a really bad idea, but today it's actually very efficient. And if your electricity is generated by solar and wind to run that machinery, you can do it completely carbon-free. My older brother has a completely carbon-free house in rural Maine. He runs completely off solar panels on his home, all the heating, everything. Everything. There's no gas at all, hot water, cooking, everything. And it's kind of amazing he's planning to plug in his car next and stuff. You can do this. And it didn't cost much more money, really. It's a pretty good deal. So it's within reach. We're getting closer. And there's news out this week also that some researchers, they published in Nature Communications on a new compound that could potentially replace these HFCs and HCs that you're talking about. Ooh. I haven't seen this yet. It's a solid compound that is... Hmm. ...that they've developed and they've developed and they've developed and they've developed and they've developed and they've developed and they've developed and they've developed and they've developed that they've developed that is able to absorb the heat and it works on compression and expansion and thermal changes through the fluid and all that. But anyway, brand new, brand new. And so the idea, the hope is that it would be easy to implement and not too expensive and that maybe not older systems but newer systems could be constructed Well, that's really cool. That even... Some people are using just old-fashioned ammonia too as a cooling fluid. It's not as efficient. You know, from the thermodynamics of it, but it's like safe. It's there. We can use it. It's not a problem. But also just making sure even if you use hydrofluorocarbons and chlorofluorocarbons or, you know, don't let them leak into the atmosphere. Don't just dump them into the air. So that's something that we could... There's a lot of... There's just one thing too and I think about half the change is really like, let's not do stupid stuff anymore. Yeah. Like, you know, we don't really need... How many people really need a big SUV? Really? You know, I mean, how many people really use those things? Do we have to use old incandescent light bulbs? I mean, basically, you're using a toaster as a lighting source. It's heating a wire up to generate light. That's insane. We don't need that. We have LEDs now. We got better stuff. Yeah. Even the internal combustion engine, do we really need that? The electric cars are vastly superior technology and they'll be cheaper than gas cars within three years without any subsidies. That's incredible. So, you know, we're getting better technology. We don't need to... And throwing away 40% of our food, tearing down the Amazon to grow soybeans to ship to China to feed to pigs. Like, what? I mean, there's a lot of stuff that we do is inefficient, wasteful, and kind of dumb and doesn't make our lives any better. That is about a half of what is the sea being smarter, being more... And the other half is like, let's be innovative. You know, like, hey, wow, we can generate good things we need. I like electricity. I think it's a great thing. We're having this conversation thanks to it. I like, you know, hot water showers. I think they're wonderful. I don't want to have cold water. Oh, yeah. The goal is never... The goal with the sustainability is never to give up anything. Right. Right. To have all of it, but in a way that doesn't impact. And that's the thing. That's... I think that's what the goal of science shouldn't need to be. We can have solutions where we get to maintain a life that we enjoy, with all the benefits that science has brought us without creating the negative impacts. Right. But you know, we need... You mentioned sustainability which is kind of the word we all like to operate under. Two funny things about that. One is like, that word sucks. Oh, it's a lie. Yeah. Well, no, but I mean, like if you went to, you know, like, hey, how's your marriage? You know, and so we said, well, it's sustainable. It's sustainable. Dude, I'm so sorry, man. You know, they have counselors for this. You can get help. I mean, that's terrible. You know, I think we need marketing people to help us kind of like, maybe it ought to be like, you know, I don't know, thrive or live well, but without destroying the planet. I mean, but the second thing that makes it so shocking is like, no, in the etymology of like the western languages, like the Greek and Roman roots of our languages there was never a word. Ever. Nobody ever thought of a word that says, how do you run a civilization without destroying it? They never thought of it, but other cultures around the world, not all of them, but many do have concepts like this, whether it's seven generations or whether it's, you know, Gaia or, you know, other things we kind of, kind of, you know, people running the world right now. I think some of our culture is broken. We don't even know how to talk about living well in a world without destroying it. The fact we don't even have language that is kind of strange to me, but I guess we have to invent that, like a whole bunch of other new things. But your point is like, when we get to a sustainable world, and I think we will, we're going to look in the mirror and go, like, why did it take us so damn long? This is awesome. What the hell were we so worried about? This is freaking great. You know, why are we so worried? And I think there is a word. I think there is a word. I think there's a word which is stewardship, which is taking the world as it is and handing it off to a next generation in more or less intact fashion. You know, and I think that's the, I think that's the part that's been missing in the culture, as you say, not having a focus on a word or a defined meaning for this, which is that we haven't really had these conversations about handing that world, the world as we found it off to the next generation preserved. Here we enjoyed it. We didn't ruin it. We didn't tear it down. We didn't burn it to the ground. We just lived here and handed it off to you so that you can do the same. And that's the part that is sort of missing. What I think is really interesting, in particular about Project Drawdown, but about, in particular, the climate solutions that have to do with empowering women and making sure everyone has healthy food available and not wasting food and all these sorts of things is that there's this kind of Venn diagram that I feel like has not really been talked about until now, and that is the connection between taking care of our environment and solving these problems related to climate change and social justice. Because so often people have told me, I can't talk to my sixth graders who aren't sure where dinner's coming from about climate change. They have bigger issues. And it's this idea that it's actually all connected that I think is what's going to push this forward faster and in a better way, is where you start to connect those dots between social justice, between empowering people and getting to the right place on climate action, where those things overlap, I think is the part that I'm most excited about. I think you're right. I mean, in some ways, but absolutely because there are synergistic challenges and solutions. And thanks for mentioning that, too. Like in Drawdown, we actually are number like five and six solutions are like family planning and empowering women and educating girls. And we have another solution around indigenous communities because they're like, hey, it turns out that indigenous communities steward their land better. And they tend to have more carbon and more biodiversity and they suck more carbon out of the air for us. Who knew, right? Well, of course we knew, but hey, that makes sense. But I do worry if we go too far of putting too much in the sink, if you will, kind of a kitchen sink. Like the Green New Deal is being talked a lot about and it combines a lot of really good things like environmental solutions and social justice and economic development. So great. But if the rhetoric around that, I worry the Green New Deal sounds too lefty now and it's going to leave behind like no Republican could possibly vote for it. And given how polarized we are and that didn't used to be the case. And so I'm wondering, you know, where do we find like maybe is it helping farmers? You know, that's a bipartisan. You know, maybe we can chip away at these environmental social justice problems where we can build bridges not create walls. I'm not a big fan of walls, you know. But it's, I just worry about the rhetoric of Washington. Like, you know, I really strongly believe the social and environmental issues are into my connected. But sometimes people use these as political wedges to divide us and both the left and the right are doing it right now. We may pick a side and like one more than the other but they're both trying to polarize this. Let's be honest and vote for me, not the other guy. And I'm like, hey, look, this atmosphere doesn't give a shit. Oh, did I say that on here? Give up. It doesn't care. And we have to find solutions whether they're, you know, red states or blue states, small towns or big cities. And ironically, you know, Republicans throughout American history until very recently anyway have been the environmental party, frankly. Right. It was Richard Nixon who founded the EPA who signed the Endangered Species to have a Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act and so on. George H.W. Bush, the first President Bush was the best, I think science supporting president we've had in our lifetime and budgets for science were the least interfered with and the highest adjuster for inflation we've ever seen. And you know, you think that today, like what? But it's true. So I kind of hope we can find these social and environmental solutions but ones that can not get bogged down in politics and worry. I love the aspirations of a Green New Deal and what it's trying to do but I worry the framing of it may alienate automatically 50% of the people have to vote for it. Yeah. I think that's fine though. I think that's okay. I think that's okay. My biggest fear this whole thing is for I'm going to finish by that. My biggest fear in this whole thing has been for too long there wasn't a push too far to the left or too far in the favor of the environment because what over and over again we see was when there's a group that's pushing beyond that boundary, beyond that limit, they shift everything that direction whether or not they are successful. Yeah. And so to have at least somebody going out there and saying these are the absolute things that should be done to address this, it can move it in that direction even if it's not successful itself. It doesn't bounce away from that direction. Yeah, that old Overton window thing. Yeah. Good point. Yeah, well, well point. Yeah, it's complicated stuff but as we're I guess the point is we shouldn't think about environmental and but if we and but the point just made earlier too is also like we have to be thinking of the intergenerational you know, kind of obligation we have and we all inherited the work of thousands of I mean something like a human being what do we depart from the great apes about six million years ago, right? So something like 300,000 generations of something that ended up being humans have been walking this planet and each generation made the world a little bit better and we certainly benefited from that. You know, you and I didn't have to indent fire or the wheel or the internet or whatever it was all kind of waiting for us but we also had a pristine planet for most of that time and now we're going to be the first generation in history to I hate to say this but we're deliberately and consciously leaving a degraded future for our children and we're doing it fully aware that we are doing it no politician or leader around needs now I mean, come on they can't say they didn't know they just have to say well, I didn't care and I don't think that's true I think they do they're just feeling you know, we do care and that's why things like draw down and just saying how do I get started where can we get some traction on solutions it turns out despair is a really bad strategy for making the world better and if you don't believe in a better future you can't build it I'm always reminded like Martin Luther King never said I have a nightmare he said he didn't I have a dream of a world that's better it may be challenging for a lot of us right now like oh gosh I don't know if I can get to that world but everybody kind of knew in their gut yeah, that's better it's going to be hard and we may not be perfect on the way but we should ultimately try to get there same thing with like the environment and intergenerational and sustainability like hey there's a better world out here we can get there if we choose to there's nothing stopping us from stopping climate change except ourselves there's nothing stopping us from making a better world for our children except ourselves so I say do it let's go do this let's make that better world and it's totally there and we just have to make our choice like every generation before made a grand choice about who they were and what they stood up for that's our turn and I'm going to get there get there too what is one thing that you want our listeners to take home with them what one thing that they what is one thing that they should do don't give up don't lose hope hope is a completely essential part of the solution to climate change I'm not being a Pollyanna saying it's all going to be fine we just have to let the market sort it out or technology no hope is an active verb it means to get up in the morning look look a problem square in the eye knowing you may fail but you get up and do it anyway it's courage it's hope mixed together it's like making the world better for a moral imperative that we want to be the people who leave a better world to the future I want to be a good ancestor I want people to 100 years from now to look at our time in history and say yeah they almost screwed up badly but a few people rallied together inspired the rest and they pulled it off just on the brink and brought the world back to a beautiful future and here we are the recipients of that incredible gift that incredible insight an incredible body of work that billions of people pull together to pull off I want to be part of that and I think we all do so I say hope and courage and equal proportions is what the world needs and don't let anybody tell you different where can people find you online and find more information about the solutions that Project Drawdown offers yeah well you can find Drawdown and all the stuff around it on drawdown.org which is our website and a book you can go get an almost fun if you like there you go thank you and then me personally I'm on all the little interwebs in various places as global eco guy on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and even LinkedIn I guess so if you want to follow me I'm happy to but probably Twitter is the best place for that and if anybody wants to you know send me a question or something on Twitter I'll try to respond that would be wonderful and we will put links on our website as well so that people if they're listening to this later they can find a link and follow you easily well thanks thank you so much for joining us this evening yeah thank you Jonathan yeah thank you thanks for doing this show too this is great anything against more science out in the world is a good thing so thank you for your work thank you we keep trying we like the science we keep trying to talk about it get other people interested you know keep it up we'll have a good night then good night have a wonderful evening thank you cheers that was Dr. Jonathan Foley from project drawdown and again if you're interested project drawdown.org or global eco guy you can follow him on Twitter it is now time for us to take a break we'll be back with science we've got all sorts of science news lined up for you for the second half of the show so without any further ado I would love you to stay tuned for more this week in science you can't explain the things you've heard from all that intuition the libraries that shows the way to go new conclusion the methods of hypothesis and patience are the only things I need put on a pair of goggles and go looking for the things I couldn't see the answers lie somewhere thank 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couldn't see and we're back with more this weekend science oh yeah we are back I've got science but before we jump into that it is time for this weekend what has science done for me Lee Lee what we're just this is the reason we didn't take the singing act on the road is on well what has science done for us lately well for Todd Barnell it grabbed him up short and forced him to re-evaluate his perceptions Todd writes in your interview with Dr. Helm was fascinating I was hooked at the get-go since she is from the home of Pluto too and yes all of us here still considerate a planet I was drawn in deeper as I had never heard of the Newston and the whole topic was terribly fascinating but then we got to marine debris for the last 17 years I've had the good fortune to work with Native American environmental professionals across the country on waste management and other related issues I have, shall we say rather strong feelings when it comes to waste of various types and the effects that it has are on land waters and communities the conversation took some unexpected turns for me that led to my stopping as I walked home and saying out loud WTF but then the scientist on my shoulder said whoa buddy shut your mouth open your ears and pay attention to where the studies are leading it wasn't a comfortable experience by a long shot but it has led me to read more to question my assumptions and to remember that when it comes to things being black and white well those are penguins not situations in real life once again science reminded me to not get too comfortable with the fact also penguins also have pink on them I'll just say real quick mine's not all of them and who sent this in again Todd Barnell Todd thank you so much I love that you had this reaction that an interview on our show could have brought you not only new information but as you said a new perspective this kind of letter this is this is why I do this and to recap for the audience really quickly the new standard he's talking about is a vitally important ecosystem that's right on the surface of the ocean it's not very deep but it's very important to the ocean's health and it tends to gravitate around those areas where the debris the plastics the plastic islands are forming so that the argument for picking up and collecting that plastic to remove it from the ocean while it sounds nice is highly disruptive to this vital ecosystem that follows the same pushes of current that the plastics follow and it actually has a net negative effect on the ocean by removing the plastic totally unintuitive not the thing that we would have felt or thought without having those facts having that understanding that Dr. Helm brought and so that's why it was such a challenging unintuitive and fascinating interview and story I highly recommend everyone if you are up to it going back and taking a listen or if you haven't heard it looking for it I will put a link to that interview in our show notes so to make it easy for you to find in conjunction with this wonderful thank you Todd thank you so much I really appreciate it everyone out there continue to bring us the science stories from your life what has science done for you lately we want to know let us I want to know what y'all thinking again there's a reason this is a talk show people I'll sing if I want to I'm not I'm not going to just continue this trigger this thong in my brain wormhole yes please please please send us your stories about what science has done for you lately they really fill this show and us with a lot of joy and I know a lot of you really enjoy this part of the show too Kirsten at thisweekandscience.com is my email if you want to send it to me there or you can leave a message on our facebook page facebook.com send us a message there so we can keep filling this segment of the show with your stories now on to the science alright how did you get to be so tall right it's a question well my dad was really tall my mom is not I started very small so I ended up in between and we've got this vague idea of how tall you're going to grow but you know doctors aren't always right because wait they don't know everything about the genetics behind why we grow to the heights that we do in fact there are lots of genes responsible and although we know that the heights of our parents are important and probably make up about 80% of the basis of our height based on twin studies and other studies that have been done on family lineages they determined that they went looking for the genes and over many years we've done various studies looking for the genes that actually determine how tall we're going to be and several years back there was a genome-wide association study but it's numbers that it found didn't add up to the amount of influence that genetics should have on our height and so people kind of went is our idea of heredity and genetics broken somewhere is there something we don't understand and there have been a few other studies where these genome-wide association studies they look at many many genes using single nucleotide polymorphisms snips from the genome not actual whole genome not looking at the whole genome but just these little bits and pieces to be able to determine what changes from generation to generation and what genes may be responsible it's given a good sense of how genetics are responsible but not the whole sense and so some researchers who just published a study in I think it's in bio-archive and it's in publication right now it's supposed to be published in Nature I believe but the it was published in the bio-archive preprint server researchers from Kings College London they said okay genome-wide association studies not giving us the full picture let's look at whole genomes from over 21,000 people good sample size good sample size we're not going to take these little bits and pieces we're just going to look at these European descent people 21,000 whole genomes compared them and looked at the differences and the similarities to find what may be responsible and what they determined is that gene variants are actually very important they add up in little bits and pieces to make up what was missing from the genome-wide association studies and their result actually equals the hypothesized the expected estimate of genetic heritability at around 79% for height because the rest of it is environmental factors right? that's part of that because this was like this I don't know if it's not science but when the Americans went to Europe to fight in World War II they were extremely tall compared to the people there even though genetically you could say this was largely Americans were largely European descendants but it was because of the beef and corn raised Americans nutritional supply growing up so that's the 20% that's the additional possibility but genetics determines about 80% of your height potential but there have been these questions since there are hundreds of genes responsible what genes may actually be making the difference in a person's height and so it's these the total amount of rare variants and it's not these other genes that are more responsible and so what they say their next stage is to do is to go and find out which of the rare variants are important for the height they also looked at body mass index BMI and that had a little bit less but it did align with the hypothesized genetic contribution for BMI which is about 40% and so they looked at these things but they want to look at which rare variants actually have the most influence and then not just for height and BMI this was kind of a proof of concept to show that the ideas behind genetics are not broken but indeed they're hiding they're hiding in there exactly and they are they're but genetics and the influence based because various genes work together and they influence each other a lot of these rare variants they look at are actually not genes that code for proteins but actually are genes that code for transcription factors that affect how different genes how much protein gets produced by different genes so a lot of these rare variants influence the proteins that you want to do stuff later hopefully they asked the question and didn't just go with height I went through a physical therapist once that told me I have an unusually long abdomen which I bragged about for almost a day before my best friend says that is the nicest way anybody can say you have short legs yes they don't break if your legs were longer they just said you were tall they don't break it down unless it's un-proportional are we comparing the same genes with people with very long legs and short torso as we are with our long torso and short leg rather but that's not the question the question is I mean that's just how your genes worked out to make you grow so that's heritable that comes from certain genes that grew at certain rate made proteins go at certain rates during different times during development whether or not no it's no but it's a trait amongst people from Sicily too it's also like you will see traits from the people of Bergen arguing oh that it like you're just talking to talk at this point and I like I was making a point but go ahead I don't know what the point was you're trying to make because when you're talking about the genes that are responsible there are hundreds of them that work together to create the genetic contribution that 80% that goes to being this is what genes are responsible for in your height versus the 20% of environment and now we know that there are more genes out there than we knew about before and the question is which of them are really important for the trait of height and which of them are possibly being elected against through natural selection like maybe some of them are being weeded out and aren't as important to height as others because maybe they're harmful in some way and so how can we take these gene variants and look at them to potentially get drugs that can target height to allow people to be taller can we do that but even beyond height and body mass index can we use these rare gene variants to address diseases that's more what I was thinking is that the height thing is fun to talk about but really this is about genetic indicators where they're hiding elements that we don't know about that's really the moral of the story it sounds like now it is you got it but also for the little kids whose parents say drink that milk so you'll grow up big and strong now no that's a bunch of who we 80% decided by DNA no more milk mom no drink your milk 20% no that's still a pretty big what's 20% of your height that's many inches yes I mean for myself personally you know Justin's talking about his abdomen versus his legs I have scoliosis which is curvature of the spine and every time I've gone in for an X-ray the doctor inevitably says oh if your back weren't this curved you'd be at least 3 inches taller you're like I know see insult you're adding this to the injury there we go and then moving on from from height and body mass and genes let's talk about creating speech that's important important and we have talked on the show previously about research to create brain computer interfaces that interface with the brain to enable to enable speech so the idea is that at some point in the future individuals who are unable to speak for whatever reason as long as areas of their brain are active that could try to produce speech that you could have a brain computer interface that would allow these people to interact through speech with the world and so we a few months ago I brought up a I brought up a story where researchers had used the kind of vocoder and neural network technology that's been used by Apple to create Siri's voice to enable the recording of vocal sounds and also neural activity related to those sounds to get computer to produce speech sound so we listened to it and it was creepy it was creepy creepy it was creepy definitely in the uncanny valley side of things but the we could understand it read off numbers and we could understand the majority of those numbers and in fact people were able to understand those numbers at about 75% accuracy and so this study looking at a different way of decoding neural signals this it's a different team the previous study we talked about was from Columbia University this study is from Columbia University of California San Francisco the researchers instead of taking input from the Columbia group used the sensory system the auditory cortex and use the neural signals of what the brain was hearing this UCSF team had epilepsy patients with interfaces that were actually hooked into their motor cortex so there were little needles little detectors in their motor cortex during brain surgery had them say sentences and they picked up the motor cortex's activity of what the motor cortex would be making the vocal apparatus the mouth the tongue the epiglottis do musclarly musclarly do during sound production they used those signals that would have gone directly to the vocal apparatus to produce sound they used those neural signals to get their computer to pump out sound and so they did a number of sentences that were created and see if I can get one here for you oh it's not loud enough maybe oh I have it turned down hold on that's my problem the proof that you are seeking is sign millable in wolves the proof that you are seeking is not available in books I got some of it the proof that you are seeking is sign millable in wolves kind of sounds like somebody has a bunch of marshmallows in their mouth they'll leave it in by smashing the process ship building is a most fascinating process and so the results of this study which it really has jumped things forwards in a sense because they are instead of doing individual words and having the computer create individual words from this neural activity they are creating sentences so natural speech at the rate of natural speech is at about 150 words per minute and they were doing it in real time so it wasn't bringing activity recorded and then put out of the computer later they are creating a real time brain translation process and in doing this subjects who listened to these sentences were able to accurately translate and understand the sentences about 45% of the time amazing but overall the number of words that could be understood not complete sentences translated but number of words it was about 70% accuracy so it's not perfect but it's also really not that bad so here's what I'm seeing last week we had a story about pig heads where they were able to keep pumping happening so that the brain was having circuitry that was working out so basically the whole idea if you want to go crazy far into the science fiction realm of the head and the jar kind of the beginnings of that potential stuff paired with this you have a talking brain you have full on krang capabilities here I'm also curious to see if I sing better in my thoughts well they were not able to get inflection yet so I feel like you'd be really good at auto-tune to one note that's right auto-tune you could auto-tune, that'd be great that's what auto-tune is for so the researchers why detector? it's a telepathy machine oh my goodness you can contact I didn't think about that you could reverse you could reverse engineer it so you could talk to somebody in a coma and maybe hear a response there's a whole bevy of things I want to flip the table that's insane yeah there are so many things that it should they get this technology really off the ground it could it could have huge impacts the addition what are babies saying? I don't think that would work yeah because they don't know how to speak yet no but they recognize words what is your dog able to communicate if they don't have to rely on the vocal chords so Justin I don't know if you heard at the very beginning that this is the it's not us thinking of the word it's the brain telling the mouth to move is what they're recognizing they're recording from the motor cortex which is sending the signals to the muscles so what you have to have had even if you have I don't have the ability to speak you would have had to have the experience the understanding the neurons are firing but the body is unresponsive in this scenario the neurons are still firing as if they were operating the machinery and that would be able to still communicate yeah so somebody who's become paraplegic for instance should have the motor neurons firing in a way that would have affected speech and allowed speech to happen so would still be able to communicate so this would be something of an improvement over Steven Hawking's voice technology it would definitely have helped someone like him interesting from this article that I'm reading here in addition to the study one participant was asked to speak the sentence by miming the words in his vocal tract so not actually saying the words but miming them and the computer interface was able to synthesize intelligible speech from that miming so it suggests that they really are getting at it and they found that even though they didn't work with any patients who had speech disabilities this is only looking at like five individuals with epilepsy but with no speech disabilities they did find that the vocal cord and vocal tract movements were similar enough between individuals that they could develop that they may be able to develop a universal decoder so it wouldn't have to be something that is unique to each person yeah that in itself would be pretty amazing so they're going to hopefully move on to clinical trials testing the technology in the future yeah the future is today well it's not today it's tomorrow-ish it's right now now okay for most people the future happened a long time ago and they didn't notice yeah and also big drawback to this is that you have to have a pretty big invasive brain implant so technology for brain implants needs to improve or technology enabling us to record from outside the skull easily has to become more fine-tuned and exact so right about now it's not going to be something that everybody's going to want because there's a lot of wires and cables and you'd have to put a pretty big hole in your head or you take the brain out and then put it in a jar that's accessible that's right we talked about that alright Justin what do you have? of all the creatures that could make good public ambassadors for global warming climate change penguins are pretty good everybody likes penguins what about baby penguins baby animals are always better well baby penguins are dying off in record numbers thanks to global warming sorry bad news this is the bad news good news segment I'm doing this week this is the bad news part emperor penguins at the haley bay colony in the wettel sea have failed to raise chicks to adulthood for the or even adolescence for the last three years running and now the colony itself is pretty much gone which is a big deal because until recently the haley bay colony was the second largest in the world with the number of breeding pairs averaging between years somewhere between 14,000 and 25,000 making them at any given year 5 to 9% of the global emperor penguin population so what happened to these poor penguins changes in sea ice conditions the emperor penguins need to have a very stable ice upon which to breed and it has to stay that way from April when the birds first arrive until December when the chicks sort of go off on there self sustaining penguins for the last 60 years the haley bay site has been stable so this is where penguins have been breeding on mass year after year in 2016 after a period of rough weather sea ice broke up as soon as October just a few months before the baby penguins were ready to go out on their own and so they pretty much all died and this happened again in 2017 and it happened again in 2018 and each time pretty much all the babies were dead and now the penguins aren't going there anymore that's what I was going to say the adult group is shrinking not just because they're also dying but because they're going somewhere else and that's right, so the good news in this is that there is a neighboring group of emperor penguins and their numbers have swelled the penguins moved a lot of them did they lost three generations of offspring before they realized that this was not going to be sustainable because again what keeps happening to them is at the beginning and through most of the season everything is fine it's just shortened at the end when the young penguins are not quite ready thrown out to the cold cold world which is actually where penguins live that's how they are in the cold cold world but if it's too early they don't have their waterproof feathers yet and they're still fluffy that's problematic the penguins are dying which is really sad also another global warmish story Svalbard reindeer these are short thick round smallish reindeer the northernmost living reindeer on the planet they are less active we picture reindeer pulling sleighs or running around like caribou reindeer are caribou I picture the one I picture the Alaskan caribou and these herds are running full tilt these ones not so much but they've noticed that they have been doing something recently in the light of global warming they've started to add seaweed to their diet these are I think Norway adjacent reindeer and they've started switching up their diet to include the food from the sea which isn't the thing they've done before but this is one of these things we're going to start seeing more and more which is the animals on the planet changing behaviors changing diets those ones that will adapt to this climate change in order to survive and it's probably not a bad idea if we do it too I remember a while ago we found out that arctic deer of some sort they were scavenging meat they were eating carrion they had a lot of plants around when it's very very cold but it just shows that all these animals that we consider to have very specific diets it's because it's what's around and when there's other things around they'll figure it out I do wonder if the seaweed diet is giving them everything that they need so they're not able to get their normal grasses it might actually be better I would imagine it's nutritious but I wonder if it's giving them what they need if they have to eat more of it or I would love to know how it's affecting their nutrition a reminder to everybody seaweed is not strictly speaking a plant it's an algae in terms of the nutritional we eat it we eat it but it is very different from eating grass very different yeah absolutely I wonder how that would affect them interesting oh hey is that it then? what time is it then? what time is it? it's time for Blair's Animal Corner I have some mice who want you to take your shoes off before you come in the home what? so this is from the University of British Columbia looking at how mice can eat they can't eat they can't eat they can't eat they can't eat they can't eat they can't eat British Columbia looking at how mice like to live quite a long time ago now I think we talked on the show about how a recent study on at the time recent now a long time ago was studying on laboratory mice that we were holding at the wrong temperature and that it was stressing them out and that might affect research about those laboratories yeah because it's kind of similar. They were looking at how mice like to live. This, again, from University of British Columbia, looking at the way mice usually are housed in laboratory conditions, which is in just a single space, like a box or a simple cage, one small open space. And then they also took some of the mice. This is a 15-week study. They took some mice and they had them in three compartments that had connections. So they had their one space, or they had these three separate spaces. And they found that it looks like mice really like to have a quote-unquote, on-suite bathroom. Yeah, so they found out that the ones that were in these three individual spaces made a real effort to use separate enclosures for nesting and for defecating. And even the ones in single compartments appeared to make an effort to keep them separate, nesting and waste within that one singular space. So this is interesting because, like I said, in laboratory conditions, it's one space. That's really it. And so if this is something that they'd prefer, this might have an impact on future studies. This is also interesting because it might have some sort of implication for reduction of disease transmission and this kind of emotion of disgust for feces and urine that we hold, if this permeates through the animal kingdom to a much earlier common ancestor. It would make sense to think that pee and poo is gross because it could get us sick. So evolutionarily, that is a trait that makes sense to conserve. So if there's this desire to keep separate where you sleep and where you poop, and it's way back in the evolutionary tree, this is something that we we need to start looking at in other species. And in particular, what I think this is most clearly leading to is a stress hormone study with these mice. I think that is the clear next step. It doesn't say anything about that in the press release here. But I really feel like that has to be the next thing because if we are deciding, if science, if scientific community, the scientific community that uses mice suddenly decides, uh oh, we have to house them differently, the science behind that should be, is this affecting the the output of our research? Because if it is, that's at we absolutely need to give them separate laboratory space. We need to give them their en suite bathroom. If it is not affecting research projects, I think still this means this would make them more comfortable to find a way to relegate that stuff to a separate space, give them the proper nesting material and dividers and whatever it is. But if we can identify how they are most at ease, if this is indeed affecting research, if there's some sort of compounding variable coming from this because they're grossed out all the time. If the compounding variables made it to the news, exercise is good for your heart if you sleep in your own feces, news of the 11. Yes, exactly. So it's this question of have we been doing tests on stress hormones and disease transmission in mice when they're already stressed out about disease transmission because they're pooping where they're sleeping? Yeah, and part of the study shows that they don't build these nice nests when they are in dirtier situations. And so not having a nice place to sleep is going to affect probably their general health and well-being and lead to further stress. And so there may just be this feedback loop situation. Yeah, going on. Yeah, absolutely. So on one side, we have this question about the efficacy of our of our rodent studies in the scientific community. On the other side, this really interesting evolutionary question, when in evolutionary history did life decide, I don't want to poop where I sleep? And did it happen many times? Did it happen one time? And it permeated through the animal kingdom? We don't know. It's a little bit built into the design too. Of? Yes, yes. Absolutely. We put the other end at the other end for a reason. Snails have it rough. Sounds out right over their head. Not everybody had it figured out right. Is that? That's unfortunate. So that's, you know, their torsion, the way that they're twisted in their shell, pretty much right on top of their head. That's unfortunate. Glad I'm not a snail. Also, you should be glad you're not a millipede. Oh, yeah. Glad I'm not a millipede. Why? Too much money spent on shoes. That, for sure. This is a study from the Field Museum with Virginia Polytechnic Institute and University of California, Davis, looking at how to identify near identical millipedes about half an inch long, brown, otherwise looking pretty similar. What they found was that these millipedes have some sensitivity to ultraviolet light. So they were able to see things would glow different colors when they were looking at them in ultraviolet light. The idea to look at ultraviolet light makes sense. There's lots of other invertebrates that glow under UV light, like scorpions, for example. So this is a good way to start looking at this. So if you're trying to identify and speciate, like try to categorize a bunch of these half inch long millipedes, there's not a lot of options. When you think about electron microscopy, that's problematic because in order, I guess I didn't realize this, in order to use a scanning electron microscope, you have to cover your specimen in a thin layer of gold so that electrons bounce off of it. I must have forgotten this. And then the detector picture showing where the electrons deflected. The problem there is that that often destroys specimens. And the millipede specimens that the Field Museum was looking at were very old. There was one that was from 1887. And they are scientifically valuable because they have not yet been categorized. So they didn't know how to identify these millipedes without damaging in them, which is where this UV light comes in. They also used a brand new methodology in combination with discovering the fact that UV light is part of this equation where they took a camera, they put it on a motorized lift that allowed the camera to move towards the specimen in teeny tiny increments. With each movement, a different part of it came into focus. And then they would have between 10 and 70 pictures picking the software would pick out what was in focus and it made a nice collage. So that way they were able to not damage the specimens at all. Once you shine UV light on that, there's even more stuff that becomes apparent. What stuff becomes apparent, you ask? I'm so glad that you asked. So millipedes, they don't have quite the thousand legs that it sounds like they do from their name. These individuals in genus pseudopoly desmos have around 70 legs. That's enough. It's enough. And here's a little sex ed lesson for millipedes. Male millipedes sperm comes out from an opening behind their second pair of legs. Their seventh pair of legs are called... Is that from the front or the back? From the front, I think. Oh, maybe not. Maybe from the back. That's a really good question. I don't know. I'll check. We'll revisit in the after show. We'll edit it in later. Fix it in post. The seventh pair of legs are called gonopods and they're adapted for transferring sperm to the female millipedes vulva, which are behind her second pair of legs. So it looks like he dips his gonopods into his ejaculate, which is a bluish liquid, and then goes in search of a female walking around with sperm on his legs. Their gonopods have special features specific to their species. They have little knobs and bristles, kind of like a toothbrush, sorry, that helps them kind of hold on to the sperm, but it apparently also helps with the transfer. But where this comes into the previous conversation about cameras and identifying species is that they are specific to these species, and they are easier seen through UV light. They're not sure if the sperm liquid has to do with the reason they show up so beautifully in UV light, or if it's just part of the structure of their bodies. But as far as they can tell, they can't see. Millipedes don't see well at all, so they're not seeing the difference in the light. They don't know if they can see color. So most likely this fluorescence in UV is an artifact or byproduct of the chemical makeup of the cuticle covering the gonopod. It might make it stronger, it might help it catch the sperm, no idea. But so far they have been able to, just with this new technology and being able to use the UV light, they have been able to sort these specimens into eight species, which is actually four fewer species than they had previously recognized. So it's the opposite of describing new species, they were able to put some of them back together that shouldn't have been separated out into separate species to begin with, all through the magic of UV light and sperm-covered legs. So biological artifact and wonderful scientific boom. Those images are really, really nice though. Pretty amazing. Yeah, and for those of you, if you are listening to the podcast, there are images available and we will have a link in our show notes if you want to go check out the link to the release and the images. They're beautiful, glowing. They look, I don't know, they look like flower parts almost. Yeah, so it looks like, yep, the legs start at the head, I was correct. Okay. Yeah. So they're opening to their sperm or their sperm receiving areas are very close to their face, which is very interesting. Which makes it convenient too, because then you don't have to look back as far to make sure you're good. Yeah, yeah. Very close to their face, the sperm is released near the face. And spread over the legs. Right over the legs. Yeah. There you go. There you go. The more you know, the more you know, the look you'd walk in sperm. Yeah. Yeah, which actually makes sense because they grow from the head out. They gain segments as they grow in age. So that would make perfect sense. So you could have a 60 leg, a 65 leg. Yeah, it shows how old the millipede is. There you go. Very interesting. Thank you very much, Blair. Let's jump into our quick stories to end this show. Yeah, let's roll through it. Southern California, we know gets earthquakes. Well, it gets a lot more earthquakes than you ever thought. Researchers looked at earthquake data from recorders that were spread out over Southern California between 2008 and 2017. They identified more than 1.8 million previously unknown earthquakes. These earthquakes are little tiny earthquakes, little baby earthquakes, as small as 0.3 magnitude on the Richter scale. And they have estimated that in Southern California, that means that there is an earthquake happening approximately once every three minutes about give or take, every 174 seconds. So even though you can't feel it necessarily, the ground is continuously shaking under your feet in Southern California. Yeah. Solid ground is a bit of an oxymoron, turns out. Yeah. All together, the California Quake Catalog was missing some 1.6 million earthquakes. Missing earthquakes, the more you know. And moving on from earthquakes to Mars quakes, the in-site lander on Mars has been digging into the surface of Mars to try and record sounds coming from the interior to help us understand what is going on in the inside of the red planet. Originally, it's been recording the shaking of its seismometer from wind on the surface of the planet. But today, NASA released the recording of what is potentially the first Mars quake. There is a, and there is an actual recording that you can listen to. Should we listen to it right now? Ah, should we listen to this Mars quake? Please, please, please. It starts out with the sound of the wind. But not any wind. Martian wind. This is Mars wind on the seismometer. And here comes that slightly more intense noise is what they think was a Mars quake. And then they have, that is the sound of InSight's robotic arm. Now, these sounds, the Mars quake is not from tectonic activity like happens here on Earth. It is more from the planet slowly cooling over time and the crust cracking as it would. So it's not plates moving over a liquid mantle necessarily. It is just a slow drying out cooling and shrinking and cracking of the surface of the planet. And then my final story for the night. Yeah. My final story for the night. Researchers published in Frontiers and Psychiatry. This is work from the School of Social Work at Ariel University and the Interdisciplinary Department of Social Sciences at Bar Ilan University. Researchers showed people seven seconds from Spider-Man two and Ant-Man. And those people who were afraid had phobias of spiders or ants became less afraid after watching these these Marvel movie clips. I remember lots of ants and Ant-Man, but I don't remember any actual spiders really in Spider-Man. Were there a lot? Not a lot. No. So every Spider-Man story is the Spider-Man origin story. I don't know why they can't move on from how he became Spider-Man. They always have and then he gets bit by a spider and everybody wants to show that spider and it's the only spider that you see. Yeah. But every movie is the origin story. You see it every movie. Yeah. It wasn't a significant reduction in phobia, but about 20% reduction. And the researchers say that these results open up a new direction in the efficacy of positive exposure, which should be further considered because it's not scary. It's potentially fun for people to expose themselves to these things that they are normally afraid of, but it's in a not threatening situation. So, unthreatening situation. Unfortunately, people who saw the movie Wolverine had a higher incentive of being mauled by Wolverines. That's right. It's very unfortunate. Very unfortunate. Justin, you got a story? Yeah. So this is a thousand years ago-ish. The Wari Empire stretched across Peru. And Peru is big. I don't know if you've ever looked at the Peruvian region on a map. It's basically the eastern seaboard of the United States from New York to Jacksonville. They lasted this empire for 500 years. So we're just, what, a couple ticks over 150 here. And this might still make a designation. But this is 500 years of a relatively stable society. Eventually, this gave rise to the Incan civilization. So this is pre-Inca. Question is, how did they last so long and over such a large territory cohesively? And the answer that the researchers came up with? A steady supply of beer. Apparently, is what did it? Quoting voice, this study helps us understand how beer fed the creation of complex political organizations, says Ryan Williams, associate curator, head of anthropology at the Field Museum of Chicago. Lead author of the study. We were able to apply new technologies to capture information on how ancient beer was produced and what it meant to societies in the past. So somewhere around 20 years ago, they discovered a brewery in the mountains of southern Peru. It was a full-fledged production house of beer, like a micro brewery in some respect, says Williams. Since the beer that they brewed, they're called chicha, was only good for about a week after being made. It wasn't shipped anywhere. People had to go during a festival to the brewery to drink it. And they did. They came from all over the region. All of the political elites, all the people who were important, or those who wanted to be seen and see others, they would all go to this one brewery for this festival. And they would drink from these three-foot-tall beer steins that were made to look like either important figures in their history or leaders or the gods that they held there. Quoty voice again, Williams. People would come into the site in these festive moments in order to recreate and reaffirm their affiliation with the worry lords and maybe bring tribute and pledge loyalty to the worry state. So basically, yeah, beer kept an empire together for 500 years. They had an annual beer festival. They're like, come drink the beer. Pledge your loyalty. We're happy. So the way that they discovered, too, they kind of know what was in the beer. All they have is these shards, these clay shards were the vessels that the beer was held in. But what they did was they shot a laser at these shards and removed a tiny bit of material with the laser. Then they heated that tiny bit of material up to the temperature of our sun, broke down all the molecules that made it up. And from there, the researchers were able to tell on the atomic level, atomic elements that made up the sample, how many there were there, and that information told researchers exactly where the beer, what the beer was made of, where the clay came from. And what they narrowed it down to is a, oh, where is it here? A pepper berries is something that I don't know. These scientists are really taking home brewing to a whole new level, trying to figure out how to brew their own ancient beer. Yeah. The clay was made locally. The pepper berries are a spur-drought-resistant crop. So the beer supply could remain even in times of drought. The food supply could go up and could go down. Corn could go up and could go down. Game could go up. And all these variables, the pepper berry is like a weed. It doesn't even care if it gets any moisture. It was a stable crop that was used to make the beer, so that the beer was always there. So 500 years of Chichabir is a solution to a longevity in the society. Yeah. For science, 718 episodes in their hand. Blair, did you delete your last story? I didn't have a last story. That's all I brought. I thought you had one in there. Okay, that's it. That's all we wrote then, all we spoke. I would love to say thank you to you for listening to this show, for watching. Thank you to FADA for helping with social media and our show descriptions on YouTube. Thank you to Identity Four for recording the program so we can have a podcast. Thank you to Gordon MacLeod, Ben Rothig, others who assist in keeping our chat room a kind and compassionate space as we enjoy science together. And I would love to take this moment to thank our Patreon sponsors. 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And if you can't watch live, there are episodes archived for posterity. Thank you for enjoying the show. Twists is also available as a podcast. Just Google this week in Science in your iTunes directory. Or if you have one of the mobile type devices, and have we checked? I think I've said this three times. There may be Droid apps. Twist for Droid probably doesn't work anymore in the Android marketplace. And just look for it. Just go to Apple. Look for this week in Science. You'll find us. For more information on anything you've heard here today, really to get to the bottom of that whole situation with the millipede legs, you will be able to find show notes on our website. That's at www.twist.org, where you can also make comments and start conversations with the hosts and other listeners, maybe about your local climate story. Who knows? Yeah. Or you can contact us directly. Email kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinScience.com, Justin at twistminion at gmail.com, or Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org. Just be sure to put twist T-W-I-S somewhere in your subject line. Otherwise, your email will be spam filtered into oblivion. You can also hit us up on the Twitter where we are at twistscience at Dr. Kiki at Jackson Flying at Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback. If there is a topic you'd like us to cover or address, a suggestion for an interview, a 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. Yes, but if you have learned anything from the show, please, please remember. It's all in your head. This week in science is the end of the world. So I'm setting up the shop, got my banner unfurled. It says the scientist is in. I'm gonna sell my advice. Show them how to stop the robot with a simple device. I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand. 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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. So 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 your way. You better just listen to what we say. And if you learn anything from the words that we said, then please just remember it's all in your head. Because it's this week in science. This week in science, science, science. This week in science, science, science. This week in science, science, science. This week in science, science, science. This week in science. This week in science, science, science. After show, oh yes, there's a baby to announce. Everyone. Is it me? No, it's not you. Minion Pamela, who has been with us for years and years and years, has a new baby. She's been pregnant for nine-ish months. She's been listening from Australia for a very long time and Ed from Connecticut has said that she had her baby. Brand new little one. That's very exciting. Very exciting. Congratulations, Pam and to your new daughter. Congratulations. That's wonderful. You're going to be in for the work. I know Pam. Pam loves that stuff. I don't know how Pam is like a never-ending font of energy. How are you still tired? Yeah, it was a long day. Sounds like a long day. I'm coming with a photo show a bit. It's a little long. Just a little. What else is going? Oh, my mic is quiet tonight. Darn it. I didn't realize until the show was underway. I know. It's got, yeah, it's coming down. And last Friday, there we go. Hello. Uh-huh. Fudge buckets. Yeah. Also, the swear was at 8.44, just so you know. Thank you. Oh, sad. That's good identity for, I have to cut things anyway because the show's too long. So hack, hack, cut, cut. It was a good show. It was a good show, but I have to cut off at least 15, 20 minutes, I think. I had a really fascinating chat with somebody who studies hydras. Hydras? Oh, fun. I think we should have them on the show. They have a paper that maybe can be published. And we might maybe try to time it for that. But I'll give you more deets on that. But I did not know how amazing this creature is. Yeah. It is, it is, it is amazing. And so we will talk about this in the future show. No, you got to send me the deets. Yep, I will. Actually, I did already. Yeah, I sent you a text, our group text. Oh, that doesn't count. With a link to the lab? And if we went, then that's when somehow we started the travel arrangement conversation came right after that. But if you go back to the beginning of that thread in the text, there's a link to the lab and it's pretty amazing. You're making me do work to track this down. Nope. I can, I can send it again. No, I don't, I don't, it's so funny. I don't, I do a lot of stuff from my phone, but I have this weird, I like sitting at my computer and have, I'm like, it's an email and I can look at it in a big browser and then I can do things. Yeah, I can send my text to your email. That would be perfect. That'll just put your phone in an envelope and send it. That just send me your phone. No. Hydra's sound fun. Yeah. There's a science writer, Andy fell, who I know from years back who works in the UC Davis public information office and he messaged me. I think it was through Facebook or something. He messaged me and said, Hey, is Justin and Davis, I've got some, some researcher I know as is has somebody coming to visit blah, blah, blah, whatever reason he was like, he's like, I'd love to introduce him to Justin. And was that where that came from? Okay, cool. I still don't and Andy didn't tell me anything about the lab or anything. I was just like, okay, there's Justin's email. And so yeah, so I had to look into the, I had to look into this lab and I had to look into Hydra's. And I cannot believe that this isn't something that Blair has brought every week. Because Blair, this is your wheelhouse. Yeah, but like, what's yeah, what's the what's the what happened this week in Hydra's? No, it's not what happened. You're right. But well, there might be but we you need to be tracking this because Hydra's are basically working. This will be the the interview later. Basically, they're made up of stem cells. They regenerate themselves every 20 days. And they can possibly potentially live for thousands of years. Yeah, yeah. So when they always say like, Oh, jellyfish are immortal. No, no, no, no, no, it's the Hydra. The Hydra is the one. Yeah. And you, as I understand, do have this desire to not die. It's true. It's true. You're just going to have to rub Hydra's all over your face. No, I'm just going to put my brain in a jar. It'll be fine. I'll be a human krang. It's totes fine. This is one of the, yeah, every once in a while you cross on it is just I had no idea that this existed. Oh, yeah. I had no idea that this was a thing. I had no idea. They were in my biology books in high school and college. Yeah. So we now have a contact with somebody who studies them and is has a paper somewhere in the status of maybe getting published. Cool. But we should have this conversation. Yeah. I kind of had it already and I want to share with everyone because it's really cool. That's awesome. Nice. And they're so cute. I like it. They're cute. I don't know if I'd call them cute. They kind of just look like water cactuses. No, no, no, no, no. I got to see it like in person. They were waving at me with But you know, you look you look for Hydra in Google images and hail Hydra. Oh, it's like dragon, Marvel, mythical Hercules, constellation, Greek mythology logo. I mean, I still haven't gotten there we go. You have to go animal. Yeah. Hydra animal water. Yeah. There's water, water hydra there you and even then water. It's like dragons and other things. Yeah. Hydra animal. Yeah. That's funny. Here they are. They do kind of look well. It looks like ice. Why did I stop? I have so many pictures of Hydra. The mythical it did come before here. Well, the name for it. I mean, that's probably why these things are called Hydra with its multiple heads, but it's not heads. They're not that cute. I think they were one person. I don't know what picture you're looking at. Oh, so cute. Hello. Hi. Hello, TV daddy squid looking things. My little squid looking thing is a little there that guy with a little tentacles tentacles tentacles tentacles tentacles tentacles tentacles I don't think I could eat tentacles. I'm gonna say good night, Justin. Great. Good night, Justin. Oh wait, before you do, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. I've got Blair's potential travel information. Justin, I need to travel. I need to send an email to the people. So what do I got to do? You need to figure out what day and great time to leave Sacramento to go to Santa Fe. All right. Give me until Saturday. Okay. I need to. I know you need to call family. I totally blanked it. I mean, yeah, reach out. Yeah, reach out, find out if there are rounded abouts and let me know what kind of flights you want. Okay, I need that and then I can make things happen. Okay. Yeah, that is it then. Okay, no more busyness. Go get sleep, everyone. Say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. Thank you for watching. I'm sorry my volume was low. I did not realize it. I will see you on Friday at 1ishpm twitch.tv slash Dr. Kiki if you want to talk about science and everyone else will see you next Wednesday for more This Week Inside. Have a wonderful week.