 We're all here. Oh my goodness. This is the first twist podcast broadcast of 2024 it's very exciting. I know we're off our normal schedule, but we're here and it's so exciting to have Justin and Blair back for the show I hope everyone who is in the chat right now is Ready to go and of course remember hit the likes the thumbs ups the notifications Subscribes share with all your friends on all the social media that you have scattered about to and You know if we have to edit stuff things will be edited for the podcast, but this is the whole shebang Are you ready to go? Let's do it That was so well timed synchronized. You guys are good. All right See if we remember how to do all this Starting the show in three two This is Twist this week in science episode number 955 recorded on Tuesday, January 9th, 2024 Twist top 11 science news of 2023 year in review Hey, everyone, I'm dr. Kiki and today we're gonna fill your heads with a Listful of the best science from 2023, but first Disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer The following program is an incomplete version of reality in which we are living all non-science related foolishness Fictitious nonsense has been removed so that we may present you with only the interesting Factual nonsense the past year has had to offer in short science in longer terms science and The year past has had a lot of it So let's take a tight 90 dive into some of this year's top 11 subjects here on this weekend science Coming up next And a good science to you to Justin Blair and everyone out there Welcome to another episode of this weekend science the first episode of 2024, which is really The last episode of 2023 because that's what we are reviewing today We're gonna go back and reminisce Yeah, a little reminiscence, but Right now though. I just want to state the extremely obvious We've got the whole twist crew together for the first time in several months And so I just want to express a little gratitude for Getting you two back together here with me so that we can have a really fun show I'm so excited to be here I welcome back I mean, even if it is just today, I don't know what we're doing Like I said in our just figure it out. Yeah Okay, so this week. Yes is our annual review of the year That we have just left It's our review show and as we review we're going to be not doing the top 10 but the top 11 big topics of 2023 and uh, why do we do this Justin? Well, we could have gone two ways when we first were thinking about doing a top 10 list Which is well The thing when you get to the end of a top 10 list is what was number 11? What's the one on the cusp? We want to know that one too. We want all the information The other way we could have gone is that well, let's just do a top nine list And that way the 10 can be a mystery and people can fill in their own But we ended up going the way where we did the more information thing in the less That rather than the less so you're gonna get a top 11 The stories from 2023 today And kiki you're muted. I can't hear a word you're saying because I was typing and this is sounds This is just you know par for the course any other things Blair that you want to add Um, I'm so excited to hear about the top 11 stories because I've been living in an alternate dimension of diapers and crying and all these things and so I Missed a lot of the science this year too. So this is a review for me as well It's because you're busy doing your own science experiment. Yes Yeah, yeah, what happened in science this year. So catch me up buddies It's a big catch up for all of us catch up Okay, as we jump in the show here today I do want to remind all of you that If you would like to you can help us out a lot by subscribing to this weekend science You can subscribe to us on all the places we live stream Weekly, uh, that's facebook twitch and youtube Or you can find us on your favorite podcast platform look for this weekend science also twist And we are on a bunch of the socials Twist science is what we're usually at So go look around and see where you can find us But our website as always is twist org and you can find out all sorts of information there and Get links to stories and show notes for every episode But now it's time for reviewing the science Are you ready? It's been a while Since we've done one of these and I can't remember Do we start with the top story or the bottom story? Do we start with 11 and count down to one? I can't even remember Count down count down you're starting with number 11 11 this year is a funny one It's you know, we were just going over these and and just to mention You know, there's this thing that we kept having on the countdown in previous years called covid but it's not really In the countdown this year because it's just there's there's nothing new. It's still there. It's it is still there actually but There's a big old wave right now. Yeah, but Yeah, but uh related to that because of the massive forced experiment that was covid We saw a bunch of stories this year related to workplace science And so because so many of us had to work from home suddenly and without notice and try to find Some way to still get our jobs done because that's what's important. I guess anyway Um, there's all these science and stage capitalism That are related to what happened to all of us as a result of that crazy social experiment and so There there were stories on both sides. Everybody's got to go back to work Everybody's got to stay home all this sort of stuff. But so as an example of that there was a whole story From stanford economists saying that return to office is dead Basically, a lot of people didn't go back to work ever and so there's all this new technology being developed and they Predict that a lot of people are going to continue to work from home Or the future Meanwhile, there were also stories about what that does to you So there is a piece of research that came out about your neural signaling based on zoom meetings Which if anybody listening has spent a lot of time on zoom in meetings, uh, you can kind of go into this stupor almost like you're you don't quite fall asleep, but you kind of sort of phase at The science about that so your your neural Signaling is different when you're in a zoom meeting than when you're in an in-person meeting Yeah And then to cap it all off one of my favorite stories of the year was actually that uh, if you just reduce People down to a four-day work week not increase the length of their days You just give them a four-day work week. You delete one of those days They get the same amount of work done and the quality of life improves So I just I wish that More people would see that story. I think that's a pretty important thing Especially because we talked on the show when we brought this story forward About how also that would benefit the economy if that's what you're worried about because if people have more leisure time They actually spend more money you know But it's neat to see kind of the the workplace science Coming to the forefront and starting these conversations and who knows maybe there will be Changes in the future to how we do work at least in the united states Where uh, there's this kind of standard monday through friday nine to five thing Yeah, yeah, there was also a story at the end of the year that tom merit brought when he guest hosted the show with me um related to The commutes of that people are making there's a bunch of traffic on the roads, but Nobody really knows why because not as many people are back to work So commute times are still long the freeways are still crowded but Not as many people are going back to office or aren't going back as many days per week. So nobody really knows what's going on Oh, maybe it's they're going to cafes and going shopping. I don't know. Yeah, there's some of that maybe but there's also um the there's a swelling a sort of backlog of Lack of growth that took place during the pandemic Where the u.s economy is adding hundreds of thousands of jobby jobs where people are going to work uh at new jobs and so What we actually are looking at Is actually a very critical lack of infrastructure Where a lot of people are still working from home and yet the traffic is not Any better? It just means that as soon as everybody's going to an office if that ever happens There won't be enough road for all the cars It's all it's just means traffic has gotten worse. We didn't build roads during the that's what they should have done Hey now that nobody's using any of these roads We should do all of our expansion projects that we've been planning and talking about and making your But then who works on those expansion projects? People who are working outdoors who are already people But this but this also I think this topic now brings us to our number 10 10 10 10 climate hope Which is uh that they're this last year actually Justin you reported on a couple of concrete stories Which would kind of relate to the building of roads the buildings that we build Concrete is a huge Emitter of carbon dioxide. How do we make it more sustainable? How do we make it better so it lasts longer? One story researchers started they determined The methodology for creating roman concrete, which is self healing. So there was a A large amount of heat involved, but It if we want to make self healing concrete that lasts longer So we don't have to rebuild stuff as often Using that roman idea or what they the technology the methodology they used as a starting point. It could bring us to Better building materials. Yeah, but you can still go see the coliseum Yeah, it was a couple thousand years ago or something This is like a really long time that things been standing The lifespan expiration date on most concrete buildings built today about 100 to 150 years And and then it's going to start just crumbling into dust But also along those lines There is a new methodology that chemists have cracked as well to make Carbon neutral concrete, which is very exciting. So That's also in addition to that. So we have the roman concrete, which is You know an old technique that could help us make better stronger longer lasting stuff But maybe it could be combined with the carbon negative methodology that researchers at washington state university have come out with and so The this made out of biochar and can suck up 23 percent of its weight in carbon dioxide from the air And then additionally in terms of roadways Electric vehicles really made a an advancement this year. There was Quite a movement in just generally more car dealers starting to offer electric vehicles we had the the Passing of the infrastructure bill that is going to be focused on on hydrogen For the economy, but it also going to focus on infrastructure development. Like you said, so there will be hopefully better electrical grids we had lithium air batteries, which are going to be better for storage of electricity, so some of these sustainable wind farms and solar projects will be able to actually store more energy for the grid better and more safely Our devices with these batteries may last longer And not need to take as much energy It could allow cars to charge faster go further distances and you know, there are all sorts of benefits to these new batteries that are being developed and then But the critical the critical thing you hit on there is that the grid You know And I hate pointing this out because I love the electric car. I'm a big fan Uh, but it is it is using electricity that is By and large still generated The old fashion way there are parts of the united states where if you have an electric car You're driving on coal But but there are fewer coal power plants Now and additionally photovoltaic solar power has become a huge part of our energy infrastructure And sustainable energies are starting to really make an impact and that it was actually One of the stories this year is that we kind of flipped there was a flipping point and sustainable energies actually started to Even out or overtake even some of the input from coal So and and and one of the you also have to make sure that the that the grid can support everything going on because we also As you just mentioned People are working from home running multiple computers Which take more energy than many households were built to suck before and then you also have a car being charged on the same home And all these you know Appliances some of them take more energy than they ever did before and so there is a potential to stress out a grid That wasn't quite created Appliances are much better. Yeah Some appliances Has basically replaced your refrigerator The biggest energy second house Right, but also because of climate change some homes have air conditioning that never had it before and all sorts of other things going on Right, but we also have we have more people installing Heat pumps in there instead of air conditioners in their houses. We also have Because of the capacity of electric vehicles and more houses being set up to have electric vehicles Electric vehicles can potentially also act as batteries to generate power for the house in the case of a need Time for power need. So the car is the whole thing that that's a whole thing Tesla wall which has been around for a while but the idea is taking all the energy storing the capacity of these giant lithium batteries and Using them to draw energy off peak hours Exactly, which is energy that's cheaper, but it's also because that energy is largely getting wasted Yeah, it's unused so but I feel like you know this year and even though uh, the the latest, um, un cop meeting, you know, wasn't extremely like inspiring part of it not nasa partnered with A bunch of groups to launch the us greenhouse gas center to share climate data And so they have a website that will allow people to And organizations to be able to understand exactly where carbon dioxide is coming from it uses all the satellite data from nasa and puts it into A form that is usable by organizations who are trying to help fight climate change and And help us do better around the globe so we can actually start understanding more about what's happening with the climate When and you know exactly what's happening. So we could potentially understand more fine details about you know Where carbon dioxide is being emitted and where it's coming from at certain times of day certain times of the year certain places around the world and I really think this you know, all of this comes together as kind of It gives me hope You know, it's it makes me optimistic more optimistic than the doom and gloom news that's like everything's getting hotter It's like, yeah, yeah, okay. We got that but there's a lot of cool stuff going on There is there is and it's it's good that it's happening because of course 2023 Hotest year on record. Yeah So I mean Again The good to happen Because the bad didn't stop Yeah, and I'm gonna take with me this my favorite year. Uh, this is one of my favorite stories from the year butterfly inspired a molecular paint that basically takes light and and it's not pigment based it's molecules that are grown and they're like calcium based but the molecules they're what they call plasmonic paint and It reflects light in a way that can lead to cooling is lighter weight than paint is more environmentally friendly in its development than then pigment paints and You know, this kind of technology is really the kind that's going to This is this is one of the things it's one of the things in our toolkit stepping toward the future of hope and doing things well Yeah I don't know. Were there any other hopeful things out there I think though we're coming on to what? number nine Is it time for number nine? Justin? What's number nine? I don't even can't see there Is that the synthetic biology? Where are we at? synthetic biology So so it's really a tricky one, uh this year Because I focused a lot of attention this year on medical And we have a medical section A lot of that medical section comes from genomics, but we have a genomic section And a lot of that a lot of that uh genomic section comes from ai, but we have an ai section So it's hard to like synthetic biology. It's hard to even find Where I can start or end to that conversation without hitting all three of the others like One of the things one of the things that uh And this is again, this is going to touch on other stories all throughout Is our ability to engineer a protein Which which again, we've used ai to even do not just predict what a protein could do But ai is now allowing us to take The function of a protein and back engineer how to design a protein to have that function Which means we can then touching the medical Reach drugable under previously undruggable diseases With drugs that are specifically designed to target them at some point. This is uh to me. This is artificial biology This to me. This is a synthetic manipulation And creating things within the body proteins of the tens of thousands of proteins that are in the body through Different uh methods of coming together and splicing apart and And and having different functions. We're now creating functions at that molecular level That we can put to work. Yeah, we're turning that corner from technology to tool Right and historically like we've also we've tried to mess around with bacteria microbes and it's like Oh, maybe we can make oil eating bacteria give them a gene, you know And you start with the function create the protein Or the gene and put it into their genome and there you go Yeah We need the micro do we need the micro organism we can just produce the The the enzyme ourselves To go direct and then of course, how do you get a lot of enzyme? I use the micro to make it But you don't have to apply the microbe to the To the source that you're trying to affect So it reminds me of the medical industry uh pharmaceutical and industry which For most of its existence would try to go find a plant And extract something from it and this became a medicine And now we're we're just like well, we'll come up with whatever Protein that we want we'll slap it into a chinese ovary cell and produce it at massive scales And now we can reach we don't have to we don't have to comb through the Amazon to find this plant and then cultivate enough of it to rent it, right? Now we can just almost at will Manufacture whatever small molecule we need And now we're we're just starting to hone in on On all an unlocking the complete toolkit Of being able to engineer A small molecule for every need within the body Yeah, and it's good. This is this is not going to be the year of and I see I'm already skipping subjects again I'll talk about it more in the medical. I'll talk about more in the medical But you also this last year you I think reported on the evolution of a minimal cell while researchers like evolved in the lab like a cell with the minimum number of genes required for life And they evolved it down down down down down and like in 300 days less than a year They were able to create that Towards the end of the year there was also engineered yeast. So it's an ongoing project where they've been trying to basically synthetically engineer the yeast genome make chromosomes and figure out which chromosomes are important for yeast and not important for their survival and they got down to Removing basically 50 percent of the yeast genome and the yeast are still surviving They've been doing that, you know by cross breeding yeast cells back and forth Taking out chromosomes putting chromosomes back in and just seeing what they what's needed and what's not And then there was also a stem cell research where for the first time they've been taking human stem cells Maybe I think they just took like, you know skin cells or something like that turned them into Stem cells and then they took those stem cells turned them into Human embryos So they're like now we have an organelle an organoid that is like an embryo But it doesn't have all this stuff for an embryo, but we can do developmental tests on it And so it's using all these lab techniques to like you said like really figure out A bunch of the questions that we've been asking for so long Yeah, I mean we're even down to the point where Okay, there's a protein that we've been trying to target as with drugs. That's really hard to reach It's it doesn't have good binding sites in it And it's like there's one it's actually this year, I guess, but it's just barely into this year There's a protein associated with elevated levels are associated with Parkinson's disease And they haven't been able to Target this protein because it's just doesn't it's Ah, what did I can't remember what they call it exactly? It's like amorphous or like it doesn't keep the same structure necessarily. It's a little bit of a rogue It's not they're not very standardized and the binding sites aren't good So we've failed and failed and failed at having a consistent ability to target this Well, there's a group that just came up with a technique that says Why even bother with the protein? What we're gonna do is we're gonna create a small molecule that can bind and degrade The mRNA that encodes for the protein later So now they're reducing the numbers of the mRNA that become the protein And reducing it before it's even the protein that's hard to target so So like we're we're like even even those Those things that we're now unlocking the abilities to conquer We were figuring out that with those that toolkit We don't even need to to fight the monster Right, we can just go crack the monster eggs We can go go down to the bottom of the ocean and smack those Godzilla eggs or whatever before we even have to fight the big monster So we like we're I would not recommend doing that by by the way, but you know, that sounds like a great way to start the monster movie, but okay We finally have the technology to take on some some of these These diseases that have persisted that we've had no answer to Just as we're going to target them in the way that we expected we would we find Actually, we can do this even better We can prevent the disease from even manifesting We can prevent it from getting to the stage where we're treating a symptom. We can actually prevent the causals or the associated the associated in that one at least with the elevated levels, but Yeah, but i'm going to do the caveat incredible time. Yeah, I think the caveat here though is like this is where the research is that and What we're going to see in the next years is the possibility of this going from animal You know animal testing to human testing and really seeing if these treatments are going to work more and more often But yeah, it's like taking the taking the synthetic stuff and the next this is like where We're seeing a phase shift, right? It'll start be more applied and more understand in the future Yeah, and again, this is more for the medical side that's coming later but this is why medical rated rated so high this year because Exactly what you're explaining like there's how many phases to a clinical trial like three or four Something like this and each one Half or or six sixty seventy percent of whatever they're trying fails As you move up the through the clinical trial process. So the ones that even make it to the end are such a small percentage of where you started but These tools that we are now using are so targeted That I think what you're going to see is More success we've cured we did this one technique and it worked and now we've we actually have a cure for four diseases Because this method can be used for any of them that have this particular Protein structure that needs to be targeted because now we're if we can hit the mRNA reports even a protein That's that's always been our big challenge is finding the the thing that will target the thing that will bind And the thing that will affect it moderate Moderate have changed in the levels of these proteins Wherever they are in the body doing whatever work that we don't want them to do Or increase numbers that we want them to do Now we're behind we're a step before that So then all of the all that trial and error part doesn't even he doesn't even come up That's why it's the robots. It's the ai. It's that yeah, it's all it's all more targeted exactly But this year this year was a Of a continuous stream of proof of concept that are that we've got that technology in hand now And so I think this year and next year like you're saying that the years to come We're going to see those those applications tested through clinical trials and Hopefully in the next few years cure all diseases something Yeah Save the environment with synthetic bacteria, whatever it's all going to be good It's great great great news. We're doing good things But we're also looking at the world around us. So number eight 8888 is biology, which is a pretty large term here But this is an area where we found out some really interesting things like that The c star is all head Um I was worried this happened while I was out um c stars they're They have bilateral symmetry, which a lot of people don't realize they think it's like a five pointed star that's symmetrical in five parts Like radial symmetry. No, it's bilaterally symmetric symmetrical because there's a mouth. There's an anus there's all the there's an um, there's a An intake, uh, I forget what it's called now all my years at the aquarium have lost me But there's there's the intake on the on the top of it where the like water It's not a siphon where the water goes in. Anyway, there is bilaterally symmetrical So a lot of bilaterally symmetrical things have a head so researchers wanted to find out Where's the starfish's head? And uh, they found out that it's more like they have five heads. So Wow, yep There you there you go The gene signatures associated with head development are everywhere in juvenile c stars expression of genes that code for the animals torso and tail sections missing so they're pretty much A true five head, I suppose um We also found out more mammals fluoresce Then uh, then we thought before but this is we were talking about this earlier. This is like This story keeps happening Oh, this mammal fluoresces So now you have to ask that question. It's that chicken and egg question of like do they um fluoresce because um Wow, my series talking to me They do they fluoresce because Do they fluoresce because they're trying to do a signal of some sort or um, is it just a by-product of the the The molecules that their hair is made out of like it's what's what's happening. Who knows anyway? um, so there was that one and then um More about what's going on in seawater. What was this one all about? Oh, the seawater soup kiki Yeah, um, so this one was toward the end of the year, but I thought it was a super interesting story is that there's just A ton of genetic information in seawater that there are these extracellular vesicles So we've talked about, you know, how many microbes are in DNA Yeah, but we've talked about how many microbes are in a drop of seawater before but it's not just those microbes It's actually like the microbes are using extracellular vesicles to send mRNA DNA you know to each other and share information and so really it's not just the microbes It's you're swimming in genetic soup So it's right and it's not it's not it's not really an accident It's part of part of the process see like processes. That's awesome. Not just whoops my dna's everywhere. Nope. Whoopsies There was also an interesting thing in uh zebrafish Where they discovered there is a method that is used in cells to send Activators Two other cells this is little tubulars that go out and extend and they don't quite know how they hand them off yet But they've witnessed the extensions of these little tubulars Where they're sending stuff to other cells that will activate processes in those cells. It's a form of cellular communication An activation of processes in other cells that hasn't been seen before that they didn't know existed Uh, which is like You know Now If you have to redo the textbook, this is an added Intracellular communication Uh pathway that they just hadn't been able to see previously Yeah, and they're yeah, and there's there's more of that as well. Um similarly the Exclusome Which is uh, I was gonna ask about this Researchers, uh, it's it's kind of like Um, I don't know. It's an organelle. They're thinking it's an organelle But uh, it's made up of DNA rings known as plasmids and it's a compartment in mammalian cells It's in the cell plasma But nobody's ever really identified it in specifically in the literature because you know, it's like DNA or in the chromosomes And it's and it's it's in the nucleus But this is DNA in plasmids in the cell plasma So, uh, yeah, so Do I say it do I say it say rewrite the textbooks people Yeah We also added a new organelle Uh, there's a uh phosphate storage organelle Or is that this one is this no, this is no it's not it's different. Yeah. Yeah, this is different But there's a they found an organelle that they just thought, you know Looking under the microscope for all these years looking at cells Yeah, it's oh, here's this thing that just it's like a little bubble. That's all Well, it's oh you see you see organelles and you see cells in a textbook and everything's different colors And it's very clear what different things are when you look at cells under a microscope It's all kind of the same color And it's kind of blurry and you're like, is this a bubble or is this an organelle? I just oh, is that just a little bit of goop or is that a new thing? What does it do? It's not always full. So sometimes it is a bubble But it's a uh, like a backup storage system for phosphates, which I guess is like part of the energy Uh component of a cell That uh, when the cell is stressed and you know resources are low it'll Send some to this organelle It's sort of like, okay. Here's our long-term storage Here we're going to throw throw everything into the bank here so that we can then Use it Sparingly coming out of this organelle But if everything's great and you've got a nice medium and your cells are fully fed and they're happy It's empty because it doesn't need it Man, I think he's been hiding in plain sight this whole time It's just you just had to have the right conditions to see it active That's what it all is. Yeah, right How to see it, you know the right tools to see it and then the right conditions to see it exactly and then we also um Completely upended our understanding of how purring in cats works. I know That's pretty weird. It's like it feels like it's a less active process than we thought it was and there's a whole um physiological piece of the puzzle that hadn't really been noticed before a fold in the larynx Which is really interesting Yeah, and there was other stuff related to cats as well like uh phylogenomics that uh analyzed cats anal secretion glands And found out that you know the different sensing that cats do is based on the microbes in those glands and they've so they've started Determining like the the microbes that that live in the cat anal sacs Oh, and they also discovered that uh, they also discovered that uh kids that have cats Have more than double the risk of developing schizophrenia Yeah Yeah, good old talk though Yeah And it turns out that according to that study They're it the negative effects associated with toxo and connected to schizophrenia And not good with dementia either. So if you Yeah, they are likely tied to develop developmental stage exposures So if you're later in life, you get a cat the That toxo thing might not be as Effective on you as if you as when you had a cat as a kid, but you haven't had one since you might still be more negatively impacted Keep your cats indoors. All right. Um, yes Murderers yes Uh, how about number seven? Are we ready for number seven? Yes, we are ready for number seven Which is astronomy this year Yes, lots going on in astronomy. We had several stories throughout the year related to mapping the universe. So There was a report start back in february where scientists released a map of the universe based on The dark energy survey and the south pole telescope And they found that the the universe is more clumpy than we thought it was there were Maps that were released later in the year of objects and dark matter in the universe the gaia exploration found that they had really neat lenses from core clusters that were Bending light or slowing it down speeding it up so that They could see things differently. But so they were mapping basic thermodynamics galaxy stars themselves that was later in october Let's see. What else there were Looking at pulsars they were able to determine the Very low frequency rumble that our universe is humming at There's a with great the gravitational radiation of our universe And that's all based on pulsar pulsar timing and that was like a 15 year long Study that was able to put that data together finally and as they look at it more and more We'll probably be able to no understand more about the Gravitational wave ocean that we exist in within space time Then towards the end of the year ligo our favorite Our favorite inforometer for gravitation looking at the the gravitational waves of the university University no universe Ligo has managed to make its measurements more sensitive in what they call They surpassed the quantum limit. So they are able to fine-tune either the amplitude or the frequency of their lasers to be able to Highlight different frequencies within that ocean of gravitational waves big long waves low frequency or higher frequency Um waves that they need to be looking at in different amplitudes Which so there's a lot of mapping and looking at stuff that's going on um Also, there's a study that proved once again because this had been uh illustrated back in the 60s But uh read looked at all the data all the informatics all the metrics and discovered that In fact women Make much more efficient astronauts And in fact This should be all women. Yeah, they should be all women and uh probably five foot two So that that tall Stocky astronaut that we remember seeing the right stuff all wrong. That's not what you want That's really not what you they take up too much space. You use too much energy required too much dehumidifying And de-heating and reheating. They're just complete energy wasters in space But a woman about five foot two perfect Perfectly suited for space They just need to make the suits her size right So speaking of going to space where are we going to go india put a lander on the moon? um Yeah, ula. I mean this just happened, you know before the end of the year They launched a test mission for us to be going back to the moon and then you know just Um yesterday right sunday yesterday They launched another one and to go to the moon and take a lander the moon there seemed to be some problems However, but we can talk about that one later because that's 2024 not 2023 But we're trying to go to go to the moon. It's all good. We'll get there Did we find somewhere where I think to somewhere to go there yet? Don't we have to build somewhere to go before we go there? Like I feel like we're just sending the robots. It's all robots Not people. Why don't you go to the cold desert? Oh, what's going to be there? cold desert We're not depending Why it depends you don't just face go to the ocean Can I make it can I make a call for the top stories of 2024? Hey science community. I would like the top 20 stories of 2024 to include ocean exploration next year. Can we attempt for that? I'm gonna just leave out the uh Sensational sub implosion. Um, anyway, that's I mean that's so wait last year that day is what we're talking about You know what you know what I heard you know, I heard about that though. I did hear some uh, some information It might be could I heard it was orcas? Oh, jeez I heard it was Ocean oopsies in the top 11. We'll talk about it later. It's by later later later. Okay um, there was Alma, which is another uh, The Atacama large millimeter seven millimeter array I really need to make up their mind They they found large or is it sub millimeter? You can't be both. It's all of it But anyway, they uh looked at a disc around a star v 883 orionis And they found gaseous water in that disc and so they're uh They confirmed that they can trace the origins of water in our solar system to before The formation of our sun that basically water has come from the interstellar medium over time, which is pretty incredible researchers also looked at a Galaxy that they've been checking out for a while a relic galaxy ngc 1277 And they didn't think it had interacted with his neighbors very much, but uh, no dark matter Why doesn't have any dark matter? Usually when the dark matter is missing or like whatever there's been some kind of interaction and The matter is the mass has been stripped away But uh, anyway, they have a puzzle there a galaxy with no dark matter and then we can talk about um The sample return stuff this year. We had uh researchers looking at rocks from Right Rygu The asteroid jack says Hayabusa to spacecraft returned in 2020 and so now this recent study Was able to determine that uh The basically the this isotopes within this bit of Asteroid that were brought back had a lot of carbon 13 silicon carbide and pre solar grains Which yeah, so before the sun again, so rag you what came from interstellar dust and gas and stuff from How stuff floating around and now at the end of the year we had the benu uh return benu nasa's benu asteroid Came back and they've been checking it out and In checking it out They've determined that there is a lot of carbon and water and uh, it's a very successful so far giving us An estimation of what the asteroids in our universe Contain What they got there what you got there asteroids but Anyway, we have some successes Maybe I don't know we'll see what happens in 2024 space is awesome Astro astronomy generally pretty great this last year So let's move on to number six six six six six six six six six six six six six What's number six? I don't have my my countdown is backwards Justin why don't you have the spreadsheet? I have the spreadsheet Oh, oh you know what now I have it. I was looking in the wrong place I was still looking at the... I'm like waiting. Human evolution. Yeah, he's with it. Yeah. We didn't find out anything about human evolution this year. No, we found out lots. Oh, okay. Where do we put on the countdown? I don't know. It's number six, but we got nothing. We have... Goodness gracious. There is wooden structures that were found in North Africa that look like they were... One part of this big timber was carved to fit another part of this big timber on it. It was found deep underground, so it was preserved. It's about 400,000 years old. It's older than we thought modern humans should be. It's in the wrong place for Neanderthals to be... We don't know who made it, but it indicates structure out of wood much older than previously thought. We've talked a bunch of times about all the strange places that hominins have ended up and the only thing that would account for a lot of it is if they had boats of some sort of flotation boats. And the problem with that is we don't have any evidence of it because apparently they didn't make them out of stone. So they deteriorated. Well, I'm sure some of you tried to make a stone boat. But they didn't get too far. Wood, bronze. You know, there's islands... I think it's... Crete or one of the islands off of Greece where they known Neanderthals were. But they also know that there was never a way to get there by foot. There's all of the Oceania islands, a bunch of them that never could have been reached by foot. Places all over the world where these sort of strange poppings up. But finding crafted wood structure 400,000 years old before any of the people that were even contemplated could have been playing around with a boat. Right. Really, really an interesting find. There was a bunch of Neanderthals stuff. I'm not going to bore you with the details. Understanding that Neanderthals were always much smarter than we thought they were. And then and then there's actually a recent study suggesting that Neanderthals and humans might have only split 400,000 years ago. Right. We're more closely related than we thought. That Neanderthals might have come back to Africa and then mixed and then we left or I don't know. So this whole thing that I was talking about at some point in the year earlier that Neanderthals might not be that the Denisovans might not be the hybrids between Denisovan and Neanderthal it might just be that we thought the wrong one was the hybrid. That the Neanderthal could be the homo erectus modern human hybrid. And because we found it first we called it a donkey and then kept finding mules everywhere. This is half this and it's half something else. That's really interesting. Yeah. If that timeline holds about the 400,000 year then the Denisovan side of things is much older. But there's DNA evidence within the Neanderthal that says it's older also which would make sense if it was a hybrid. And at some of its origin was much more ancient and more diverse for me. So anyway that's going to be a fascinating one because we're not getting into a whole thing. I didn't get to be part of this conversation at the time. I think we need to start looking at humans as a ring species which everybody just look it up. We'll talk about it later. But it's when basically adjacent communities can interbreed but if you take communities from far geographically away they cannot. So even though there's the California tiger salamanders like the textbook version of a ring species because once from neighboring counties can interbreed but if you take one from Northern California and Southern California they cannot create viable offspring. So they're all the same species but they have these distinct groups. There's something there too that you could have proximity over 1,000, 1,000, 1,000 severe where you could have this constant interbreeding happening but then there's genetic dissimilarities on other parts of the world. It's just something that I think would be really interesting to look at. I think there's evidence for it in a way that we won't talk about today that suggests that because the further the distance you get away there's possibly larger hormonal differences. Wasn't there also a study related to climate having had an impact on the distribution of humanoid ancestors? The earliest humans that would have been over a million years that were pre-homorectis that would have been in Europe all died out because of extreme climate and so there was already a replacement. There was also a tremendous amount of study that revealed the populations of Europe over different timeframes and some suggesting current modern humans got there much earlier and also showing that the population out of Africa into Europe and then there was an out of Africa into Europe that didn't make it and then there was an out of Africa into the Caucasus into Europe that did and there was very little overlap a lot less overlap of these different groups than they expected to find in some places. The human origin stories are continuing to be fascinating and of course there was some further confirmations I think that were made at the age of the Americas right it's one of those things like it shouldn't be surprising because the pyramids in South America are thousands of years older than the pyramids in Egypt it's not that it's not that the data hasn't been there for a while staring us all in the face the origins the Native Americans North and South date back much further than any thing that we have examples of current modern human populations in Europe or Asia. There's some suggestions also that because of the way that ice ages and glaciation and maybe use of boats and other things along coastlines worked that humans could do in eastern Asia and then they wandered across to North America then maybe they wandered back to eastern Asia they maybe went back to North America and then maybe also there was activity going across the southern oceans to South America so actually that one is interesting too because the the the suggestion of that also has a timeline wrong because there's these interesting things that they find in the Hawaiian islands where there's words for boats and they're using redwood they're using drift redwood and they call that goodwood to make boats out of and they call them something that's very similar to the Native American terms along the coast of California but what's interesting there is that those boats and those words existed on the coast of California thousands of years before there were any Polynesians taking to sea anywhere near Hawaii so what it suggests is that if the driftwood redwoods can make it to Hawaii then some poor schmuck Native American fishermen might have also gone the other direction which is also again much more likely of a scenario for those early contacts then for people who to come over and then name things after things that they found there and then go back and it's that big and there's been no genetic evidence of that connection yet right however however but there's interesting stuff however however we did find something interesting about Clovis culture this past year Clovis culture was this sort of at one point considered the earliest Native Americans they had these tools that you could big hunting tools for big game and then they just disappeared and they thought oh the Clovis culture died out the people died out like something climate event happened and there was this is the younger dryest big climate event but what they've discovered now is that those people survived they just stopped hunting big game because big game was gone and you see this giant uptick in fishing is the and if you look at the animals that survived the big predators that survived they were also ones that could hunt fish like bears bears survived younger dryest in North America where a lot of big predators were falling off because they fished and it turns out so did Clovis culture they took their big spear tips and we're like that don't need that started crafting smaller smaller tips things that were better for getting fish so it's not this it's not no longer a fall of a civilization concept but more just a technology transition to the climate change so much I love it we're I don't know there's so much more coming to we're I mean as we start looking for the different technologies and different evidence in the fossil record like we're gonna find all sorts of things gonna stop for a second and say just tuned in this is this weekend science we are reviewing 2023 with our annual countdown of the science news stories that we really liked the best if you love this show please head over to twist.org and consider clicking on that Patreon link and supporting us as a patron of the show if you choose $10 and or more a month we will thank you by name at the end of the show and there are lots of other fun little rewards for your support in addition to being able to know that you're supporting the most awesome science podcast live stream show that's out there also if you can't do that you can just help us get more subscribers that would be fantastic share today all right I'm gonna come on back right now and we are going to head to number five number five get some animal news number five is all about animal cognition you guessed it animals are smart and they're more aware of themselves than we thought that's all we can move on no I'm kidding there were a lot of mirror tests this year there was a lot of studies about animal awareness and intelligence and all sorts of things but in particular quite a few stories about mirror tests which roosters mice and cleaner rats type of fish all were able to recognize themselves in a mirror via the stereotypical mirror test which is where you put a smudge on them and then they kind of try to they see where the smudge is via a mirror and then they try to wipe it off on themselves so they understand what I see in that mirror is happening to me over here we'll throw out there a couple years ago we had a story about the mirror test on monkeys and how the test itself may be flawed because the way that we express sense of self may not be how animals express sense of self and so to make that assumption it's a pretty big assumption also assuming that an animal understands how a mirror works is not the same as understanding they have a sense of self so are you testing that they know what a mirror is or are you testing that they have a sense of self so it's complicated but you can I think you can very confidently say that these animals are smart and were able to make several connections between I see this thing in the mirror let me try to wipe it off on myself so definitely that means they understand that there's something that they have a physical body and that there is something that they can do about it right and they understand there's a representation in the mirror so that is something that for a long time we had only attributed to humans and then there were you know there were some exceptions oh humans and humans and humans and and now before we know it's gonna be who doesn't which animals don't which if a cleaner wrasse which is the evolutionary evolutionarily first vertebrate they have it is that something that is conserved throughout evolutionary history what I think so the cleaner wrasse they didn't they changed the mirror test a little bit and used photographs and so they found that the fish were able to recognize themselves in the photographs and so like you said it's this you know identification of self versus other which is really important for cognition and you know especially also for social species it makes makes them really interesting I so don't understand though because I'm convinced that if I didn't have a mirror I would not recognize myself in a photograph like if I'd never seen my you know like how is this what is what is that well they did some training and they were probably able to yeah they have to do all sorts of conditioning first so yeah that's the other question is if you found a human who's never seen their own reflection would they recognize themselves in a photo oh yeah that one's me I can tell because I have eyes up here well they're conditioned to it probably you have to do a mirror for a while and then you'd have to be then you'd have to kind of be like okay so I'm there I'm experiencing this with my baby right now I'm very focused on mirrors and I can't help but wonder like do you know that's you because you'll also like look at me in the mirror and look at me in real life and be like hey now there's two of you yeah and we know from like you said past tests that you know that what is a mirror what is this thing you know cats are just like I don't even care and so you have to figure out a way to do this right you know it's all about figuring out how to make it work at the end of the year the study with the mirror test with the mice was really interesting because they could the mice if they were raised in isolation away from other mice they would not recognize themselves in a mirror and this is after training to learn what the mirror did and to recognize you know this is what a mirror reflects things but they couldn't if they were raised in isolation they could only get it if they were raised in a social group so that in itself was just fascinating and gives huge questions related to like the development of the brain and self identification and socialization and how important you know certain you know how could this you know understanding figuring it out with with mice lead to us looking at changes in the brain that might help us understand disorders of brain wiring that make people more or less social right you know right and then like if you associate it with intelligence would you say that that mouse is less intelligent than the mouse that was raised in a social setting no just well but they didn't have the same enrichment yeah right they aren't conditioned to do the same thing that the other ones that are recognized the same things that the other one has right so it's this is where animal intelligence and and gets murky because yeah exactly what you're thinking like if cats don't if cats don't give a care about other cats ever yeah how are you gonna condition them to care about a mirror and then you can't measure their intelligence but that doesn't mean that a cat is less smart yeah then differently smart differently differently adapted there are different things that are important yeah try to put a cat in a maze I don't know they'll maybe figure it out they'll just lie down game the system yeah so I think like I said animals are smarter than we thought and are more aware than we thought that's like the bottom line always and I can't wait to learn more about that in the coming year so much so much should we move on to number four yeah number four four medicine which you really wanted to talk about Justin so but I kind of think I did okay so this was a very very wild year first of all there's this there's amazing stuff that has been discovered for the gut microbiota brain connection in relation to another subject that we're going to talk about later neurodegenerative I can't even say words neurodegenerative diseases but we'll save that one we'll save that because we have a teaser we have a spoiler we have a little section on that later this one I found very interesting the CDC center for diseases control did a study on depression in mortality and found that amongst the severely depressed smoking was better than exercise just barely at reducing overall mortality other factors being wealthy helped reduce the risk of death I think that could probably be taken everywhere but for some reason amongst the severely depressed smoking was actually shown to be beneficial now count to that with them also finding mortality estimates that don't ask whether or not people are smokers are likely massively increasing the calculated death risk of non smokers so if you've ever seen a mortality risk of your age bracket or your demographic your profession or whatever it is and you don't smoke you've got many extra years that should be thrown onto that because overall smoking this still kills you unless but it kills you less than anything else if you're severely depressed already so take that for whatever it's worth this was an amazing year like we were sort of teasing about earlier for finding applications for all of the knowledge that we have gained from the genomic field we have pluripotent stem cells that are now being designed as universal donor so that they can currently there are so many alleles and things you need your own stem cells basically so you don't get kind of like an organ rejection because it's foreign tissue so it doesn't get attacked by your T cells it has to be your own cells which means you have to have a budget to create your own pluripotent cells and now they've gotten to the point where we can develop this line that's going to be good for 2% of people and this other line will be good for 3% of people and you know stepwise just trying to get this sorted out but this I think it's Santa biotech they're a California company they have developed a universal donor stem cell meaning that they can take this and apply a stem cell therapy to anyone it's wild very well then what do we even need that because then Harvard University is doing this new prime editing and in their experiments they managed to replace I'll just call them defective genes or disease genes in mice, livers and heart tissue different parts with different ratios of success in living creatures genetic disease this is where in the future genetic disease prime editing can go in and change your DNA to where you don't have the ailment anymore and we did have the first treatments that are gene editing crisper based treatments that were approved this last year in the UK and the US which is also pretty amazing and it's just these are huge breakthroughs in the toolkit we'll just call it for fighting disease I mentioned the one where they were altering mRNAs before they encoded into a protein oh my goodness there's just so much there's just so much that is breaking in terms of the research right now a lot of it AI assisted a lot of it having to do with genomics and a lot of it targeted at neurodegenerative diseases yeah there was also the artificial kidney that was developed by UCSF so there's maybe a new bioreactor it was implanted I think into pigs but this artificial kidney kidney project is something that they're really optimistic about and they published on this and there was a first actual implantation of a pig kidney into a human and reported that the human has been living for two years with the pig kidney which was a pretty big deal this year so there's some neat stuff happening on that side of stuff yeah before we head to the next one and I was going to say toward the end of the year I reported on another story these little tiny biobots that it's kind of stem cell based but researchers in the group that had done the frog cell Xenobot research have developed what they call anthrobots and they took tracheal cells and they basically turned them into little medical robots without any genetic modifications and could be used in regenerative medicine these little anthrobots could be created from adult human cells and could create specific tools and they showed in their study that they could encourage the growth of neurons across a damaged region of tissue in a dish and wild stuff biobots and we didn't specifically mention microbiome but it's playing a role in some of this they've discovered that there is something in their early signals that they can find of Parkinson's disease that are already present in the gut microbiota of people with sleep behavior disorder sleep behavior disorder they're finding then of course has this component of altered microbiome which in certain percentage of those patients then manifests into Parkinson's disease now this is also they've this is sort of an interesting one too because then Alzheimer's disease they're finding the central nervous system which extends actually from your esophagus to all the way through your gut there is neuronal tissue they have found connections there that it may actually Alzheimer's might actually start in the gut and then migrate the manifestations that we see later in the central nervous system the spinal and then these things begin much earlier and that there's evidence of them in neuronal tissue within the gut lining and then there's all sorts of stuff finding that antacid use can be correlated to dementia right so that doesn't mean that antacids are causing dementia Alzheimer's Parkinson's getting related into these issues neurodegenerative disease but that it may be also just an early indicator that the reason people are getting prescribed antacids is because the microbiome has gone through a drastic change because that's an early signal of a neurodegenerative disease that's on its way that might be four or five years out is there any chance that's because stomach acid issues is something that can be easily fixed but unfixed can cause other health problems and so people are just living longer that otherwise would have died from stomach stuff you know what I mean so what was interesting in this study is that it was over they were looking at the onset of being prescribed antacids to a diagnosis and what it found was that window sort of followed whether you started in your 40s 50s or 60s the chance within five years that you were going to get a diagnosis was much higher and so what that means is that's the part that sort of indicates that like yeah you're treating a symptom that seems like it's completely removed from all of the disease that you might accumulate later it's sort of tracking behind the sort of leading indicator of a dementia that increased risk so you can be like oh don't take antacids they'll give you dementia and maybe because I didn't I haven't really ruled out causality that way but it's much more likely based on other things that we're seeing that there are changes in microbiota there are changes in gut because the neuronal tissue is lining your gut that it's actually an early indicator in that you need to start looking at higher testing levels more watchful looking for signs earlier post a need for antacid prescription which is such a strange thing because that feels like such a thing like you would take oh I've got a little upset stomach I'll take a thing whatever but if you're doing it consistently it may be the leading indicator of some greater change that's taking place and this talk of the microbiome the gut to brain connection does lead into our number three topic ooh number three neuroscience a whole bunch of stuff in neuroscience this year was cool and it kind of got at a lot of this I guess the brain's immune system how the brain cleans itself up the importance of microglia and astrocytes and so the relationship between like the immune system outside of the blood brain barrier and inside the blood brain barrier and how things get across that gap to be able to actually heal the brain researchers started looking at a technology that would like vibrate the blood brain barrier so that would kind of break it apart for a period of time to allow therapeutic molecules to get in to be able to affect the brain and maybe help with stuff they started finding also how important epigenetic signals are for aging in the brain and that to kind of create younger neurons that you can program or kind of fix the mRNA in the neurons to get neurons to be younger feeling one of the neat things related to the immune system is that for years researchers have been looking at what are called tunneling nanotubes TNTs and they help to create pathways for intercellular communication so sending proteins and other things back and forth but it was also suggested that they might be involved in helping neurons kind of clean out their garbage and so a study this last year showed that these tunneling nanotubes are actually really important for taking the toxic protein aggregates alpha synuclein out of cells out of the neurons and into and into microglia so taking out some of these toxic proteins that lead to Alzheimer's Parkinson's Huntington's and get them into the microglia that astrocytes, parasites and help clean them out it was also shown how important the health of our mitochondria are in making sure that our neurons are working healthily and really well. Mitochondria have been shown that if we could fix the mitochondria and a lot of those the ATP production that very often that can keep neurons going longer and a lot of degenerative issues are to do with the loss of mitochondria in our nerves as we age. Yeah and there was also a study this year about methods to replace mitochondria and so we're so close we still gotta live a little longer and then we'll live forever. Yeah they gave a molecule called Clotho to monkeys and it gave monkeys a nice little brain boost to fight aging a little bit we don't know if it'll work with humans in the same way but Clotho it worked nicely for monkeys so monkeys had smarter brains longer with this little protein there's one story that was super fun this year we always talk about synapses as being the important points of communication for the brain so neurons connecting with each other at synapses but there's this idea that was developed this year looked at C. elegans and what they showed is that there's kind of more extracellular movement of information short distance again the microglia the glia that are around the neurons assist in a lot of this transfer of information but there's more of a wireless nerve network like Wi-Fi is what they call it Wi-Fi for neurons and they have a map of it that's been unveiled so not just synapses are important for long distance communication in our nervous system there's also this other system that's outside the synapses that has an impact on up regulation down regulation look the brains were complicated once again then we gave it credit for we try to simplify it is the brain smarter than we thought it was every year we find out the brain is way more clever there's more stuff in there yeah researchers use deep brain stimulation to help people suffering from traumatic brain injury so people who had been car accidents significant you know incidents that led to loss of motor ability loss of memory that were really significantly impacted they found that deep brain stimulation was actually able to get people to the point where they could once again read a book and follow the plot remember you know go take a class learn a language leave the house you know so there was it's a very small sample set but this deep brain stimulation really helped the areas of the brain that they were stimulating to regain function just super cool we had a brain cell atlas that was released for human brain cells we're mapping all the different brain cells that we can find in the human brain there was also a mouse brain cell atlas that was released that had so many it's all have we really identified all of the cell types I don't know lots of mouse brain stuff going on and then the big one this last year that was pretty cool were animal cells and human cells to create brain organoids so that we can study brains not in brains but then the brain in a dish there's lots of brain in the dish stuff going on playing Pong and creating computers pretty much from or incorporating brain organoids with technology so that the brain organoid reservoir can then do artificial intelligence type computing and they the most recent study published in the beginning right that's the question is it what yeah so potentially it adds a little more biological messiness to the structured aspect of current artificial intelligence algorithms models and silicon based systems because to be clear when we're talking about artificial intelligence at this point we're talking about the billions years of evolution that led to a human brain that really like only started to figure stuff out that at a high level over the last you know couple thousand years yeah I mean you know it's just where other than animal intelligence we should just leave humans out of it for a minute just leave them out no reason the whole rolling the dice and having a hormone controlled user interface for a brain to function is just been the way it's you know we've just removed we've just sort of removed some of those we have all this stimuli for the brain just dedicated to the function of the body and you know in procreation and feeding itself getting resource if we leave all of that out my goodness the brain can do a lot of things that we have barely barely tapped right but again there are these parts of it that we haven't really understood so if we start creating these bio computing systems you know we got to maintain those mitochondria right you have to maintain how do you make sure that they're signaling correctly do you need to have supporting cells like the microglia and do you need to take into account some of these extracellular like neuronal wifi systems that we're just beginning to understand and describe so yeah how we create these and use them moving forward like right now it's still very simplistic and we have yet to see where it will go but yeah brain into dish now it's turning into brain computer in a dish such exciting stuff brains brains brains neuroscience brain computing where are we going to go next we just have to wait and see and the best way to see things is with the James Webb Space Telescope which is number two number two well to be honest the only stories that catch my eye from because I can't stand look I can't look at another picture of something in space I'm sorry I've seen too many colorizations and mockups and things I can't tell the difference anymore however the thing that always catches my eye and Keaton has been thrown at my eye over and over and over again this year last year oh here's a here's a giant galaxy that's so old that it makes the universe older right so many times this has been founded again hey an even older bigger older more older bigger galaxy that shouldn't be there was found again is it the story that I read last week or the month before that do they just keep rehashing this same story I get it's important no it's a different story every time it's ridiculous it's ridiculous that's hilarious it kind of is we're talking about oh there's an organoid that was hard to spot that we found and it does a thing and there's these tubes from cells and neurons that are doing stuff well all these tiny things I get we didn't understand the tiny things I thought that we had figured out the universe the big thing that we look at with the telescopes turns out we're way off we're older bigger now the the big bang has to be longer ago or maybe it didn't happen what's going on Keaton yeah that's the new one right maybe the big bang didn't even happen or maybe there were multiple big banks I don't know yeah I love the fact that this new evidence that we we knew this telescope because of the way it's going to it was going to be looking at the universe was going to be full of new information and we didn't really expect this kind of an upset though or at least it wasn't publicly talked about a lot but the idea that there were so many things fully baked like the Milky Way solar system like really close to when we think the big bang happened like that's it it's a little textbooks must be rewritten that we're looking at right now it isn't textbook needs to be rewritten but it's also like I think such a big win for the experimental science because we've got a and I love my my physicists I love my theoretical physicists out there they're forging tremendous paths through modeled universes of with the mathematics complex mathematics simple mathematics they put all the kinds of mathematics in there and they get these models and they can do they can discover all sorts of things about the from quantum to quantum but none of them went like oh hey I added it up oh yeah we've only counted half the universe is age so far like nobody was saying this well maybe somebody but we didn't get to hear about it and it just means that we need more experiments we need more detectors we need more telescopes we need to keep looking at things you know and it also suggests that maybe our idea of possible evolution of life I mean James Webb has found the oldest organic molecules far far away and then all the water that you were talking about in the floaty space dust the pre solar intergalactic space dust whatever the Drake equation was right changes throw it out the number of habitable the time of evolutionary possibilities the building blocks we didn't even talk about building blocks we discovered building organic building blocks are everywhere water is everywhere time is much deeper planets are everywhere they're probably all wet life likely is abundant the only problem is it's still very far away in both time and space absolutely yes that's it that's the yeah that's the big thing but what's not far away in time and space is what's right here that we're creating and was what we call the number one story of number one number one artificial intelligence we can't deny it everyone 2023 was the year of everybody becoming aware of these machine learning algorithms what we call artificial intelligence in a more colloquial way but there it was the year of controversy it was the year of people realizing of the multiple uses of this technology it was the year of predictions it's the year of really starting to take a look at our technology that we are developing and question how it's going to affect us humanity and culture as we go into the future so we've got deepfakes right so there's the question of media social media people whose voices the pope wear a puffy puffy coat yeah did that actually happen you know there are accounts all over that are deepfake accounts of celebrities doing things there early in the January AI was reported on that from Microsoft that after just 30 seconds of exposure to an audio file their learning model could replicate your voice that's their valley algorithm AI can write science papers but not really well and it makes up a lot of stuff and references and so you know baby you shouldn't just depend on AI for that kind of stuff but it's the thing about AI it can't go out of the question oh I don't understand this part oh can you re-explain no it just connects dots so there is there is a way to use it properly but anything can be used well or not it's not in writing it's in interpreting the data that you say here's the only data to look at anything up inference no guessing only what I've given you here do not make anything new and so using it that way and actually making stuff new one of the things that is very healthy that I think I already mentioned is starting using AI to create proteins where you don't just like predict the way that this encoding mRNA can get folded into the protein and then well what are the we've been doing that predicting proteins that can be made predicting these oh and then try to find a use for these instead it says hey here's the function I want this protein to have here's the binding sites I need here's the things I want it to interact with build it for me and it's like reverse engineer building it it's also AI is also doing predictive things for looking at basically what they're calling the fingerprint of other proteins so that it can tell what are those binding sites are based on its components and maybe and guess how it's folded and guess how it is constructed so that basically what these tech now what the AI is reading now is that toolkit again that we keep talking about for I'm thinking of in the clinical sense that toolkit for creating druggable targets where no druggable target existed before right and inventing the drug that can do it by AI it's not not guess and check not not running through but but designing specific targeted without off effects ways to target illnesses ways to target other proteins to create effects in the body now that that that's the good side and I love that you know the prediction also of gene modifications so we understand how gene and its amino acid sequence can lead to a certain protein structure and understand how that protein structure will have certain functions and interactions with transporters with other proteins with you know receptors etc you know if you change it what will happen instead of doing experiments the AI can actually help you predict when it's going to be bad when it's going to be good when it's going to be helpful when it's not going to be useful there's lots of great stuff and you also said something really interesting there that that just occurred to me as you said it is that okay so now we've we've back engineered the function we want the protein to have now we know therefore the structure and the genetic elements that that proteins going to need to to create and we can actually go back and say well then what synthetic organism can we make that could produce a large amount of these right then we're back to the synthetic biology again and now we're we're creating a synthetic biology to incorporate our engineered targeted back or back engineered targeting oh my goodness yeah and then you can you no longer of course you need all the data you need to all the data about what you need to target and how these things interact and guess who's helping with that AI AI is taking the massive data collected from single genomes single cell genome sequencing MRA captures and figuring out what's in play what's interacting what's affecting what to the point where then we can do the targeting and then back to the thing that can produce the targeted thing and then the organism that can mass produce the thing that's the target like yeah but it's also helping us understand more about ourselves and so kind of related to neuroscience with the the algorithms that we're using in the systems that we are putting into place we're teaching AI to recognize language and to understand the underpinnings of language and that's coming back and cycling back into teaching us about how language is created in our own brains and impacts our thoughts and our and how we are able to think if we are trained in a particular language growing up and it's also helping us interact with animals in the environment and ecosystems maybe like they had a conversation with a whale recently thanks to AI they're able to figure out certain dip thongs and and vowels in whale whale sounds and it's also helping us understand syntax and information that is contained in bird song so maybe that's what AI is good at right is pattern recognition which is basically what that is so that they're not they're not really learning the language of the animal they're recognizing sonic patterns and repeating them back but what is what is language but repeating patterns that have some context it's I would argue language is a lot more complicated than that actually but and it's why there's a basis in it but it's yeah and it's also why on the touring test and other tests given to these algorithms humans are still better at being human than algorithms we're still we're we're still beating them now by much some of the other the high level gpt's these days but but yeah humans are still doing all right we're still more variable we're adaptable we're not as limited as some of these learning models are to date so we're still better at being human we're better at humor we're better at being comedians than robots we're better at being us than AI and so that is the good news yeah yeah there was one other AI story I wanted to mention from this year too that I thought was really interesting which is that kids can judge how relatively smart certain AIs are like they think Alexa is smarter than Aruba for example but they also generally think that AIs deserve kindness you shouldn't yell at them you shouldn't swear at them you shouldn't hit them and that the younger children believe that more than adolescence now is that just because like you lose your your desire to be nice to AI as you age or is it because younger children are being raised around machines in a way that the older children have not right so we don't know the difference there because that's tricky right now because like everything that we're talking about I mean it's built off of oh the entire from the first computer up to the you know just mathematics and blah blah blah blah as a history we all stand on the shoulders of giants everything we're talking about watched this this last year like everything we're talking about is making these discoveries in this last year is on the is it you know the first round of the AI at the beginning of the year and then what AI was doing at by the end of the first year that it was really already revolutionarily different and that's why we were talking about whether not to make AI number one this year and about how you know AI is going to be a big deal moving forward too but the difference is that in 2022 you didn't have to question every piece of text or every image that came across your desk on the internet and go is this real and you didn't have the resources that AI gives you to be able to process data right so there's the good and the bad but there's it definitely feels like 2023 is the year that suddenly access to AI and AI tools exploded and it changed the way things will be in the future moving forward I just want to point out that anybody who didn't think curated media wasn't already a form of deep fake before what was it you said Pope in a puffyjack or whatever like in my mind in my mind there is almost no difference between the deep fake and the curated version of media that we've been seeing anyway like how reality TV isn't real yeah or like how celebrities present themselves as sure but the difference is that someone could deep fake your face onto something or the pdiddy r kelly that's the difference like there's things this year though the screenwriters the actors and their strike that went on so long this year one of the big sticking points was their likeness and it became a huge issue this year because of deepfakes because of AI because of the potential for the studios to have the rights to a person's an actor's likeness and then go on to create other programming where they're not paying them anymore they're just using their likeness because it's been signed away in a contract and so it became we've been talking about that possibility for a long time and this year it really really hit I mean what's to stop you Justin from not accidentally agreeing to a term and condition on your Facebook account or whatever online and then accidentally now your visage can be used for things right and this point out you have already describing the music industry you're already describing the existing the pre any of that recording industry film industry you're actually already describing how it's been which is what's so wild about it like there have been a couple of people everybody remember when Prince changed his name to a symbol right that was a move to reclaim his identity so that he owned his recordings and that he could profit off them there were recording artists who made record companies multi millions of dollars absolutely because they signed away almost nothing out of it but there were also limitations to it whereas in the past once you're done recording albums but if you accidentally allowed that recording company to have rights to your voice and style forever they could make new songs with your voice that's been produced through an algorithm which is only slightly different than the way it was before but it's just another step what they're addressing though I agree but I think what it's forcing us to do because of the accelerated nature of that is it's forcing them artists and industries to reassess how business has been done because they're going to exploit me and have other artists record it and come out with 50 different remastered albums that I'm not part of that I don't see any money for but that was going to take my lifetime to get exploited and you're right now it's everyone it's everywhere and we all need to be aware of how AI is going to now we are aware it is part of everyone's life now this was also this is funny this is the conversation that was taking place when the Vaudevillian juggling family was going to be on film was going to be filmed for the first time because then their fear was well they film us once and they can show it over and over again and we don't have to show up to town and put on a show anymore we've been here before we just need to look back then and do the same or improve because we've actually seen it before it's not completely new it's more just the speed at which all of this has become available and the access that the internet provides which is good overall means this has to get figured out kind of quickly there's kind of like climate change hopefully we'll act on it faster climate change yes I think it's interesting that in the space of 12 months we've seen a complete turnover in how this all works and so yes it's requiring a lot of conversations to happen that might have happened over 10 or 20 years and now it's happening over 12 months it's wild it is and I do want to take this wild moment to remind you that this is this weekend science we have just finished our top 11 countdown if you're listening remember that we made a calendar for 2023 and if you haven't gotten it yet you can head to twist.org and click on the Zazzle link and that will take you to our Zazzle store where you can get your own twist 2024 calendar full of flares art and and enjoy that for the year we've been through a little ups and downs with that calendar but it's finally back it's there in the store and you can get it it's there believe it or not yeah so let's end this show with a few of those little MVPs that Blair wanted to bring that are kind of animal corner areas of conversation yeah so I brought three reminders of some of my favorite animal corner stories of the year too that I brought before I bowed out for the year but one that surfaced while I was on leave so first I just love that there was all sorts of research and feces and fur found in the pacific northwest woods to decide that yes Bigfoot is not real and in fact is a black bear or many many black bears more likely so DNA analysis says you're seeing black bears which if you saw that video that I think was also this year of the sun bear I think it was in a zoo in I think it was in China I don't remember but bears stand weird sometimes so there was this whole above that the sun bear was a human in a suit but really it was just a bear being a bear and in fact it seems like Bigfoot could also be bears being a bear and people seeing them through the trees and going what is that thing that is standing like a human just bear my other favorite story they did actually I think it was on the show that I did with Brian when it was all animal corner show it was all about dinosaur lips turns out theropod dinosaurs may have lips they've decided that because of a look at tooth enamel tooth enamel is very thin theropod dinosaurs and so if there was no lip to cover up those teeth they would damage desiccate and wear very quickly so the expectation is that in fact T-Rex's got big old lips and wild this one just came out in November I don't remember who talked about it on the show but it was it was you it was Kiki talked all about I guess nobody's really watched one particular type of bat copulate before because they were all surprised to find out that the seratine bat seratinas they have copulation without penetration which is not something that you are used to seeing in a mammal in fact non-penetrative sex has never been documented in a mammal before this it seems like their very large copulatory organ their very large phallus is in fact so large that it would not fit into a female and instead it just kind of matches up for the transfer of sperm similar to how birds and lizards copulate similar to what is called a cloacal kiss but since they do not have a cloaca it is not that so I guess we need a new term for it so I'm interested to find out what they decide to call this in the textbooks in the future but yeah they also evolutionarily I want to know why this happened it's because the bats all subscribed to an ad they found in the back of a magazine it turned out it worked a little too well and it lasted longer than four hours and they didn't go to the doctor but no evolutionarily there has to be a reason that their phallus would be so large that it wouldn't fit into the female appropriately like why there has to be a reason and I really want to find out why yeah there were hypotheses about the females themselves they have a tail membrane which the researchers think the females might actively use to protect themselves from males that they don't want to mate with and so maybe it has to do with an adaptation of the organ to push the membrane out of the way to gain access to copulation but my favorite quote from the interview and the materials related to this research from the researcher is that quote we are trying to develop a bat porn box which will be like an aquarium with cameras everywhere great you go researchers figure it all out and once you've figured that out now we need to figure out what other bats do this is it really only this one bat or is it a larger pattern I'm so curious hopefully more to come on bat sex methods in 2024 you'll hear about it more colloquial kisses in 2024 for everyone I feel like maybe both both sexes of the bat both made a wish both wishes came true at the same time this is how the cards have fallen this sort of this sort of selection into this awkward situation and I think this does it for our wonderful review of 2023 so if you know people say oh what a terrible year thank goodness we're in a new year whatever there are so many great things that came out of 2023 in the sciences and so I hope to continue in 2024 bringing positivity and optimism about at least you know the curiosity we have in the world and the things that humans can accomplish in looking more deeply into the universe we inhabit and the other hand too 2024 could be so bad that you'll actually miss 2023 and it won't be a year you wanted to get back you're like oh let it be 2023 some more we don't know yet we have no idea you could always say like oh it could be really worse than 2023 oh my gosh yeah but we're going to be talking about 2024 tomorrow night which is Justin's morning for Thursday morning for Justin doing our prediction show for 2024 every year we do predictions hopefully Blair will be able to join us we don't know it all depends but for right now I just want to say so good to have both of you back and to be talking with you I'm really glad that we could do this show together and thanks everyone who did show up for this show that was not at the regular time who's been watching live right now thank you for being here in the chat room and and watching yeah and for all the people who do help us out every year thank you Fada for all of your help on social media and the YouTube channel show notes thank you to Aaron Moore others who help keep the chat rooms nice happy places to be identity 4 for recording the shows I know this year this show particularly was an off time so I've got it covered Rachel thank you for helping to edit the show and as always our Patreon sponsors I have to say thank you so much for helping us get through the year and for supporting this show thank you too Erin Anathema Craig Potts, Mary Gertz, Teresa Smith Richard Badge, Bob Coles, Kent Northcote Rick Loveman, George Chorus Pierre Velazarb John Ratnaswamy, Carl Kornfeld Chris Wozniak, Vegard Shevstad, Donathan Styles A.K.A. Don Stilo, Allie Koffenregen Shoebrew, Sarah Forfar Don Mundis, P.I.G. Steven Alberand, Daryl Meyschak Andrew Swanson, Fred S104, Skyloo, Paul Roenevich Kevin Reardon, Noodles Jack Brian Carrington, David E. Youngblood Sean Clarence, Lam John McKee, Greg Riley Dave Leesman, A.K.A. Zima, Ken Hayes Howard Tan, Christopher Wrappen Richard Brendon Minnish Johnny Gridley, Clemmie Day G. Burton Latimore, Flying Out Christopher Dreier, Greg Briggs, John Atwood Rudy Garcia, Dave Wilkinson, Rodney Lewis Paul Rick Ramis, Phillip Shane, Kurt Larson Craig Landon, Sue Doster, Jason Olds Dave Neighbor, Eric Knapp Lon Makes, E.O. Adam Mishkon, Kevin Parichand Aaron Luthin, Bob Calder, Barjorie Pauley Disney, David Simmeling And for those of you out there who do want to help support us for the year to come you can head over to twist.org Click on the Patreon link and you'll find information there about how to support us through Patreon There's also our Zazzle store as well if you want to purchase merchandise like our calendar for 2024 that is available, like I said And again, tomorrow night we're predicting the year to come and we're looking forward to tomorrow night we're predicting the year ahead so don't miss it Because we will be back tomorrow, Wednesday, January 10 which already it is today now where I am 8pm Pacific time or 5am Central European time on Thursday Broadcasting live from our Twitch, YouTube and Facebook channels Do you want to listen to us as a podcast? Just search for This Week in Science where our podcasts are found If you enjoyed the show, get your friends to subscribe as well For more information on anything you've heard here today show notes and links to stories will be available on our website www.twist.org where you can also sign up for news letters so you can find out when the next show will be Yeah You can also contact us directly email kirsten at kirsten at thisweekandscience.com Justin at twistman and at gmail.com Or me Blair at BlairPrabazz at twist.org Just be sure to put twist T-W-I-S in the subject line or your email will be spam filtered into last year 2023 I don't know You can also hit us up on the well this is we call it twitter still I don't know 2023 had a lot of changes where you can find at twist science at Dr. Kiki and at Blair's Menagerie we love your feedback if there was a topic you would like us to cover or address a suggestion for an interview at Haiku that comes to you tonight please let us know We'll be back here tomorrow and we hope to join us again for more great science news And if you've learned anything from the show remember It's all in your head Science is the end of the world So I'm setting up a shop Got my banner unfurled It says the scientist is in I'm gonna sell my advice Show them how to stop the robot with a simple device I'll reverse below the warming with a wave of my hand And all it'll cost you is a couple of grand is coming your way So everybody listen to what I say I use the scientific method This weekend science This weekend science This weekend science Pew pew pew pew pew This weekend science Last year in science Next year in science This year in science Alright And if you're still tuned in we are now gonna switch over to current science We're gonna do a whole new episode back to back I'm gonna go We went over our tight 90 we put the show together in the hour before the show And so we've been here over three hours now Really? After showing I don't know about that much you guys Yeah I got a scoot Yeah Blair's got some Bambino probably to go hang out with for a while Yeah Oh Arnaud is predicting we'll finally have the universe of flu vaccine this year That would be pretty cool We got RSV vaccine last year Who knows And Patrick you're saying you've missed us, thank you We've missed being together and doing this show The temporary part is something that we're trying to work on So we are discussing how we're gonna make this year work with Justin's new work schedule, Blair's work schedule family schedule my schedule We're having conversations So be ready and we will let you know ahead of time what will be happening but we may be changing the time of the show from Wednesday nights And it's not because of my work schedule it's because of plate tectonics Yes No No human construct known as time and time zones Also when I'm awake and you're awake at the same time At the same, yeah There's the activity, yeah, circadian rhythms in synchrony and all that kind of family life activities in synchrony Hey Patrick P you gotta tell me when you have changed your tectonic plate proximity because you won't be that far away Right, is Patrick moving? I heard a rumor I heard a rumor Eric Knapp, thank you I apologize to everyone for the holidays but you can't do much about it when you've been hit by a bug virus etc and yeah slowly coming back with my energy levels I'm probably gonna ghost it on the couch light out on the couch for the next few hours actually right now this is probably the most standing up in activity that I've had in one period of time for a while so I gotta go rest but I'm coming back strong everyone and yeah, tomorrow night 8pm pacific time I think it's either 29 hours or 5 hours I gotta figure out we'll look at a clock and hopefully Blair you'll be able to join us we'll try and make it maybe a tight 60 show so that tomorrow night if that works I don't know I'll do my best I'll keep you posted we'll do what we can but Justin and I will be for sure here tomorrow night or morning wherever you are we're crossing our fingers that Blair will be in person as well but thank you everyone for joining us for this show and being here and we're so happy to I'm happy I'm hoping I'm talking for Blair and Justin as well just so happy to be back doing this it makes me happy thanks everyone for your support remember stay happy stay healthy stay safe stay clever and stay lucky I gotta stay lucky I predict we'll see you soon