 It might be. It looks very Davisey. I was just questioning if that's actually. The lighting is spooky. The lighting between the trees. How many ghosts are in that picture, Justin? At least six. No ghosts. This is this is not a paranormal program. I mean, it's hardly a normal program. This is the recording for the This Week in Science podcast. And if you are joining us right now, you are in for a great show. We are recording tonight, which means that anything that happens over the next couple of hours may or may not end up in the final podcast. But you get to see it all. So I hope that you do enjoy the show. Everyone, are we ready to do a show? Oh, is that tonight? It's tonight. We can do this. Yes, we can make shows happen. Yes, okay. Although my iTunes doesn't want to. It does not. Yeah, I heard that. At least we have confirmation that my mixer is working. All right, let's start the show, everyone. In a three. Oh, wait, let me check first. Identity four is my audio level loud enough? Are my even? Check, check, check, check. Justin, can you say something? Something, something, something, something, something, something, something. And we're testing one, two, three, to a tarot. To a tarot, to the... Vocal fry coming in loud and clear. Oh, boy. Listen, listen, when the vocal fry shows up, you know it. You don't have to wonder. I didn't wonder. I heard it. I heard it. I got it. You're slipping. You're slipping. Let's let you know. Sounds great. Okay, now we have the go ahead. Starting in a three, a two. This is Twist. This week in Science Episode Number 786, recorded on Wednesday, August 12, 2020. Twist explains the universe. Hi, everyone. I'm Dr. Kiki. And tonight, on This Week in Science, we will fill your head with tiny cleaners, giant alligators, and placebos, but first. Disclamer, disclaimer, disclaimer. People worry. What are they worrying about today? People worry. What are they worrying about today? People worry. What? Oh, the coronavirus is still experiencing exponential growth in the United States and politicians while canceling political rallies are encouraging children to attend in-person schooling. And there's a safety stimulus thing that's been stalled where there's like a hundred million people about to go homeless from eviction and global warming is still a serious threat. Yeah, but nobody's talking about that right now. Arecibo. Yes, yes. I know what Arecibo is. That's the world's second largest telescope located in Puerto Rico, currently tracking a very dangerous asteroid that is the size of five football fields or 80 tennis courts, if you prefer that. What do you mean it just got ripped in half by a loose tension chord thing? Okay, so maybe there is a good reason to worry, worry, worry. But one thing which you need not worry or fret is that this week in science is coming up next. I've got the kind of mind I can't get enough on every day of the week. There's only one place to go to- Good science to you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back. That's right, we are back. We said I'll be back and now we are back with science because science never sleeps and sometimes I don't either and that's probably not good for me because science says sleep is good, but let's talk about the science. Okay, I brought stories about white dwarfs, placebos, and we have a guest tonight to explain the universe to us. Oh god, it's about time. One wave at Daniel Whitson. The whole universe will be explained this evening. Awesome. Okay, Justin, what did you- You're starting with this show. We've done this interview first and then we probably wouldn't need to do the rest. I have the giant enormous alligators of North America. I have, ooh, I have a homelessness story that has no upside and then a thing about something about the research that's been done to keep us our brains from ever aging. I don't know if it's- You did you bring that story too because it's a neurology story. I don't know if you can look over and see if you've gotten that one snuffed in there. If it's about dolphins, I have a story about dolphins. No, not this one's in mice. Well, it's four humans. Okay, yeah, mine's about dolphins. We'll talk about these things just a minute later and more as we jump in. Oh, Blair, what's in the animal corner? I was like, oh, I'm not on this show. Great. Good night. Dolphins, mice. I mean, we already talked about all the animals. Come on. Okay, what's in the animal corner? Tiny cleaners that you mentioned. I have two ataras and shrinking fish. Shrinking fish. They must be related to my white dwarfs. Perhaps. We'll see. We will see. All right. As we jump into the show, I would love to remind you that if you are not yet subscribed to this Week in Science, you can find us all places that podcasts are found. We have a YouTube channel and we're on Facebook. Just look for this Week in Science. You can go to our website at twist.TWIS.org. Okay, let's jump into those quick gold stories. Hey, where there is water, there might be life, right? And could be, could be, maybe. Everywhere here, there is. Everywhere here, there absolutely is. Well, a series of papers in nature this week support the idea that a salty ocean, probably muddy and salty exists beneath the icy surface of Ceres. The ball of ice that floats just past the mass, just past Mars in the asteroid belt was imaged by the Dawn mission, which showed variations in this Texas diameter planet isimals gravitational field that are indicative of pockets of saltwater, which is very cool because it was thought that once upon a time there was an ocean underneath frosty ice surface, but they were like, well, it's probably frozen up and it's not there anymore. But evidence says that it is. So additionally, they have some high resolution images that also tell a story of these ancient impacts that occurred that cracked that icy shell and allowed some of that saltwater to seep up to the surface where it's visible today. And Dawn actually first imaged those these spots as white spots. They were reflective white spots on the surface of Ceres. We're like, what are those things? Could it be water? And indeed, they really think it is. Back in 2015 was when it was first imaged. The finding implies because it's water, saltwater that the conditions for life could be closer to earth than previously thought. So instead of having to send missions way out to Jupiter or Saturn, we could be going to the asteroid belt. That image of Ceres was one of my favorite astronomical images because the first one I got that showed the bright spot also made it look like it was a pyramid, like not just something that looked a little bit like a pyramid, but like a serious like Egyptian pyramid. And so for a while, it felt like we were in the beginning of a science fiction novel, you know, where they're like, why is there a obelisk, you know? It was pretty exciting. But, you know, then they took pictures from the other side and it didn't look nearly as much as the pyramid. Oh, they should have never triangulation and multiple points of data collection. They never should have re-imaged the face on Mars. They should have just been like, yeah, that's there. Deal with it. Yeah, some of these high resolution images, one of them, they've been able to determine that there is a mountain near one of the white spots that's like 21,000 feet, feet, meters, feet tall. I think my units of measurement are not accurate in my measurements. But it's a lot of units of big. It's bigger than Denali. It's very tall, very high on a little tiny Texas diameter dwarf planet, which is pretty cool. It's amazing. I think a lot of people don't realize how much water there is out there. Like we think of water as an earth thing, but really there's like huge amounts of water out there in the solar system. Of course, most of it is ice, right? But there's a lot of water out there. So there really are a lot of places where life could still exist in our solar system. That's incredible, right? Our water may have come from somewhere else. Oh, absolutely. Very likely did because early earth like probably boiled off most of its water. So we're swimming in, you know, oceans of melted comets, most likely. I like thinking of that. I'm going to go comet ocean swimming. I will remember that next time I go swimming. Yes. All right, Justin, tell me about these ancient alligators of North America. Okay, this is a new study. It's revisiting some fossil specimens that were previously collected and some new finds of this enormous crocodilian. It's sort of, it's a Dinosuchus, which is, they're calling it a crocodilian, although they're also going to say and to say that it much more resembles a modern-day alligator in terms of, but still, whatever it is. They found that this thing's teeth, finally. They found a sample of these teeth, which they are describing as banana sized teeth, which are pretty big. Those are some interopers, yeah. Those are really big teeth. And then you can start to get a feel of how, because you can picture a crocodile in your head. The teeth are not that big. So this is, you know, scaling up, you have, right. So it's 33 feet in length, this thing. You also, they revealed, this is published in the Journal of Ritibray and Paleontology. It also reveals that there were different kinds of them for different species that lived in the North America. There were two species that lived in West America that range from Montana to Northern Mexico. There was another that lived in the Atlantic coastal plane from New Jersey to Mississippi, which at the time they're saying this North America had, and this time frame, where is my time frame? 75 to 82 million years ago. There was a shallow sea that connected the Arctic Ocean with the Gulf of Mexico. So there was, which I did, that's fun fact, I had no idea that that was there, but explains the predominance of these, these giant alligators. They'd previously found remains of other dinosaurs, or of dinosaurs that had these bite marks on them that they hadn't been able to really connect to anything. And now they're sure, yes, this thing was eating everything. It could eat the biggest predatory dinosaur in its environment 80 million years ago. Not a problem. This thing was an apex predator and it lived in water and would hang out there. So, you know, dinosaurs, they needed to drink, probably, you know, probably takes a while for a dinosaur to get a decent drink of water, right, for that size. It needs a lot of melted comet. It needs a lot of melted comet to keep the dinosaurs fueled up. So, so they had to go near the water and then these things would be waiting. One of the interesting things that I kind of found about this was, or that they discovered in this, that I found interesting was they found these two holes at the front that they haven't really, it's a feature that they don't quite, they don't see on modern alligators or crocodiles today. It had this enlarged nodes area and these two holes that they can, I'm sort of picturing them though, if I'm going to guess and speculate here, that they have like nostril snorkels, because you can sort of see it already like the way crocodile or an alligator will sort of hover under the water with just eyes, maybe a little bit of nose up there. So, they can have a snorkel that went up even better and then you can really hide, because you don't want the predatory dinosaur to see you first. There's a chance a T-Rex or something could make the meal out of you. You really got to sneak up while being 33 feet long. It's a tough balance. So, modern day saltwater crocodiles, the largest of the current crocodilians, they can get to be about 20 feet long. So, not nearly this big, but still pretty darn big. And they also do have, they have the kind of the bulb at the front where their nostrils are. So, their ears, their eyes and their nose are all just above water and they can stay in very shallow water, these giant 20 feet crocodilians. And so, they blend in really well in the muddy water and a gazelle comes up to drink or whatever and bam. So, it's a pretty similar strategy, just I guess, extra large. Especially with those banana sized teeth, got you gazelle. Yeah, that's really something like, you go okay banana sized teeth, then like picture holding a banana. Yeah, that's one tooth. Do you have to have a very large head? Historic bananas. They ate everything. They ate absolutely everything. Whatever they wanted. So, what happened to them? Why aren't they around anymore? So, that's a great question. So, they don't know. So, they apparently so far, they just, they think they have disappeared before the meteor impact, that before the event that knocked out the dinosaurs, right? So, they don't have that as its end point. It seems to end sometime before this. So, who knows? Well, maybe we're talking a climate thing where the inland sea dries up. I don't know. They don't know. There has been speculation that there was climate change going on before the asteroid hit. And so, the asteroid just exacerbated what was already a slow decline. So, you know, who knows? There could be dinosaurs in Montana. And I mean, that's pretty far north for a big guy like that. But so, one of the other things they're saying, it was a big teeth. It was, they say it was kind of interesting because its snout was long and very broad, but inflated at the front around the nose in a way not seen in other crocodilian living or extinct. So, more of a snorkel. Well, the sort of the yeah, could have been the snorkel, but it's also showing that the snapshot that we have in our heads of the current crocodiles being unchanged throughout time. This is a very radically different part of that lineage that shows we got to keep thinking of everything being as evolved as us. Everything has had this much time to go through evolution and to make adjustments. Although, yeah, it looks like at least it's hunting practice. May not have changed in all of this time. Yeah, the sit and wait predator is an efficient method for sure. Yeah. Well, I've been sitting and waiting here to hear about these tiny cleaners. Oh, yes. So a lot of people don't realize that coral are animals, but hopefully listeners to the show would be familiar by now that I've hammered it into everyone's brain enough times. So corals are animals. They're actually little polyps. They, they look almost like teeny, teeny tiny anemones. And so they can their filter feeders, they can grab onto little particulates in the water like that they come out of the little coral shell and grab little bits and they can suck back in when they're, they're something swims by or they want to protect themselves or any number of things. So that's how a coral polyp works. And so this is a study from the University of Warwick led by Eidenhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. They wanted to turn this technology that we see in corals use some biomimicry and turn that into something that we could use. So they actually developed a one centimeter by one centimeter wireless artificial aquatic polyp that can remove contaminants from water. They have a rotating magnetic field under the device that drives a rotating motion of the artificial polyp stem that then results in a generation of attractive flow, which guides targets like oil droplets towards the polyp. And then a UV light is used to activate the polyps tentacles, which has photoactive active liquid crystal polymers that bend towards the light and closing the passing target in the polyps grasp. And then you can also release the target with blue light. So they think that they'll be able to clean out water but even more interestingly potentially is that they also think they could use this technology in medical diagnostic devices by being able to pick up and transport specific cells. Wait, wait. Specific cells? That's amazing. They're that tiny. They're that specific. I wonder if they would use, in order to catch specific cells, if they would use chemical attractants or, you know, like immunological markers or antigens to be able to do that kind of capture. I wonder how they would go about managing to pick out certain cells over others. Yeah. They probably have machine learning in there like everything else these days, right? Yeah, absolutely. You could learn from its experience. That and somebody needs to stir it with a hand crank to keep the fluid rotating around long enough for it to come into contact. That's probably, yeah, combination of technologies involved. Sure. Yeah. So little coral polyps cleaning the ocean, potentially saving your life. Right. That's amazing because corals are going extinct. So we have to make synthetic ones. Oh no. Our oceans are going to die and so are all the corals. Are synthetic trees that we're going to make that are going to be solar panels and also convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. We're just going to do photosynthesis instead. What's the type of fake world? Just start it all over. Biomimicry for the future. We will win. We could change our ways, but we could. So I was going to talk about, I was going to talk about the damaged Arecibo dish, but Justin brought that up in the introduction. I just mentioned it. I don't bring anything more about it. So just really you got the big details in the middle of the night on August 10th, a steel support cable snapped and it was pulled taut. So it went spring and then flopped around because there was a bunch of tension in the wire and because it's a steel cable supporting this massive 307 meter dish, it ended up destroying a 30 meter section of the Arecibo radio telescope. And so the pictures of it are awful. There's just bits and pieces of the dish on the ground and an additional antenna called the Gregorian dome was also damaged and the telescope is totally offline until repairs can be made and they don't know whether that's going to be days or weeks. What if the aliens are calling us right now? Well, if the aliens are calling us right now, we do have other telescopes that are radio astronomy telescopes that are looking out in the way that Arecibo does. And actually, as Arecibo has been kind of fighting for its survival for several years because there are larger telescopes now, there are more accurate, more powerful telescopes. Yeah, there's one larger. Yes. And there are others, but there are others in planning and so more sophisticated. Yeah. And so really, it's the funding NIH has not NIH NSF has pulled back funding. They are not funding it as much the University of Florida started funding it more. But now with this damage, we'll see. Hopefully it will continue to do wonderful work because Arecibo, it's amazing. And how much can it really cost? I mean, compared to a fighter jet or whatever? Yeah, no, it's so cheap. It's so cheap. So much less. It's, yeah, it's ridiculously. When people, we had one of the engineers from NASA, I know this is the quick story is right, but we had an engineer from NASA who did mission, who's talking budgets with us about what it cost to put like a probe on Mars. It was like, it was, we were talking to build this thing was less than a house in nighttime. Like to put a thing on another planet that can go explore was so ridiculously inexpensive. Just, it must be frustrating to be a scientist trying to plan these things. And to look out for, to look out for those potential asteroids that are on a path for our planet or not. But how do we know they're out there if we're not looking? Well, I tell you how we know, because I kind of left this part out of the disclaimer because it's more fun. Before getting destroyed, they had already determined through Iscibo that it was not going to be nearly as close of a swing by as we had maybe predicted the last time it came so it already did that really important job. But let's not forget that might not be the only thing that ever comes by our neighborhood. If we have a thing that can tell us whether or not we should be trying to do something or prepare, it's worth having around. It's worth it. Totally. Worth fixing. How would you prepare? I'd make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I'd finally think I'd, I think I'd finally convince my friends to go in with me and buy one of those abandoned nuclear silos underground. Or is that like the worst idea? You don't know what's going to flood. Maybe you want the highest mountain and then all that. I don't know. I don't know how you hide from a from a 80 tennis court wide thing that's coming towards the earth. You call Elon and go into space. Yeah. Well, speaking of more space stuff, 12 billion years ago, there was a galaxy like the Milky Way. 12 billion years ago, something a spiral galaxy ordered, not chaotic, very nice looking. Some something you'd bring home to meet your parents. It's super weird because we've never found anything quite as ordered that far back in time before. So this is, you know, a couple of billion years after the start of the universe. Sounds like a long time until you like got to form a whole neat little galaxy like that. Is this going to push back the age of everything? I don't think it'll push back the age of everything, but I think it just in terms of galaxy formation, it does pose some interesting questions as to what forces and Daniel, you can maybe correct me here if I'm thinking incorrectly, but what forces would be necessary to lead to an ordered structure as opposed to a more chaotic structure in the early more energetic phase of the universe? I mean, this is a period of time when that the galaxy had a large amount, the area of space the galaxy is in, there's a large amount of star formation, it's super active and normally when that's going on, it's going to be dusty and gassy and not only spiraled up like, you know, Princess Leia's hair buns. Yeah, and these spiral galaxies often form from mergers, like you get a couple little proto galaxies to come together and that angular momentum, you get those spirals. So it just takes time. I mean, like, how long would it take you to make a spiral galaxy, right? A very long time. In a billion years or so. So you're right, it's fascinating to look that far back and be like, wow, there already were galaxies because they run the simulations and they can't really explain how you get that stuff so early, like not just the galaxies, but also the super massive black holes in the centers of galaxies. Some of them are already like a billion times the mass of the sun when the universe is like a billion years old. And they just they don't know how to make them that big that fast. So it's fascinating. Yeah, the biggest ones. I was looking at some infographic that was showing like a six and a half billion or more like, like just, when you start to contemplate, those are talking about solar masses and those billions of that's a big collection. Because even one solar mass is ridiculously big, right? It's like, well, to us, to us. Okay, to us. Yeah, exactly. But to a big black hole. That's breakfast. Yeah. So but so what do we base this the age of our universe on, if not the the oldest structured things that we can see? Yeah, that's a great question. We do it a few ways. One is what is the oldest thing out there? But these aren't the oldest things oldest things out there are things like the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is even older. It's like 400,000 years from the beginning of the universe. But then we also we just look at the expansion where like the universe is expanding. Let's just run the clock backwards, you know, and C1t equals zero is. So there's a few ways that we measure the age of the universe. And the cool thing is they they mostly agree, you know, to within a couple hundred million years give or take. So that's pretty awesome. Sounds pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. That's very awesome. I keep wondering if there were ordered galaxies that far back, what does this mean for intelligent life in the universe? Yeah, just put that thought out there. All right, Justin, tell me a not very uplifting story. Well, we can't it's already. Well, I can save this one for the second half. Okay. We're already talking. We're already talking, knowing everything about the universe with the annual, I think we should just stick with it. I'll do the buzzkill story after the interview. First buzz, then kill. All right. So for those of us who do I have one more quick story for those of us who do want to live as long as we can. Well, Blair is very excited at this one. Yes, you are. So could we slow down aging if we knew what the indicators of accelerated aging are? Scientists have been trying to address this question by studying dolphins. Of course they were. Well, actually dolphins have lifespans that are long like humans. And so they make a great comparable species to look at. And so they did a longitudinal 25 year study. And they looked at 144 dolphins that were housed by the US Navy because yes, we all know this, the US Navy loves dolphins. They measured a bunch of stuff in the blood and found four markers that can be used to measure aging differences in dolphins, not in people, just dolphins, hemoglobin, lymphocytes, platelets and alkaline phosphatase. Alkaline phosphatase is indicator of liver function, platelets are a blood factor, lymphocytes, immune factor, hemoglobin, that's your red blood cells. And as people age faster, often there's they become hemoglobin deficient. And this is this leads to age related anemia. So these levels indicated faster or slowing aging dolphins. And if these same markers can apply to humans and are aging, then maybe doctors and others can look at stuff like hemoglobin to inform the development of treatments for things like age related anemia. So potentially these factors could go on to help us live longer lives. If we're dolphins. If we're dolphins. Yes, which I definitely want to retire to the US Navy's dolphin nursing home. That sounds like a great place to hang out. Well, if you've read David Brin's uplift novels, everyone would love to be a dolphin because they end up being uplifted to sentient species anyway eventually. So it's great. Yes. Did you just spoil the whole series right there? What? No. What? Me? That's an old book. Everyone has to have read it by now. Okay. If you just tuned in, you are listening to this week in science. And if you're interested in a twist shirt or a mug or other item of our merchandise, you can head over to twist.org and click on the Zazzle link. We have face masks also twist masks show the world. You care about them and that you love twists. All right. I would love to now finally really officially introduce our guest for the show. Dr. Daniel Whiteson is a professor of physics and astronomy at UC Irvine where he investigates questions related to the fundamental nature of our universe using experimental high energy physics things smashing together. Whiteson is a part of the Atlas collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider created an app to turn cell phones into cosmic ray detectors and has published several comics and books attempting to explain the universe. You might know him as Daniel from the podcast called Daniel and Jorge explain the universe. Welcome to the show. Thanks very much for having me on. You're welcome. Thank you for joining us tonight. It's just wonderful to have an expert in the universe join our show. I have it all encompassing expertise. That's right. No, we like to talk on our podcast about basically everything inside the universe. And so that's why we went with that very broad name. I think I think that makes sense. But how did you initially become interested in the universe? In the universe? Well, I live in the universe and I figured I'd like to understand it. And I have some questions and I never really got answers to those questions. You know, I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the home of the National Lab of the Manhattan Project. So physics was sort of always in the air. But I always had basic physics questions, you know, like, you know, you take a rock, you smash it against another rock, you get smaller rocks, you keep doing that, you just keep getting smaller rocks, or eventually do you get to like the smallest possible rock? Or does it turn into something else? So these are the questions I would ask as a kid. And so I never really got answers to those questions. I'm still trying to figure them out, you know, science is like just a group of people trying to answer their own personal weird questions about the universe or nature or whatever. And this is my personal weird question is, I want to understand things from the very, very smallest bits. Do you believe it's turtles all the way down? I would love if it was turtles, man. I want it to be something totally weird and mind blowing. I would hate if like some theorists came out, there was some idea for how the universe worked. And then we found out, yeah, that's true. I want to discover something strange, you know, I want to be like, actually, it is turtles. Oh my God, look at these little weird turtles waving up at us from the, you know, the plank scale or something. So that was a joke. But no, I think that there probably is a smallest thing. I think that there is an answer to this question. It doesn't just go on forever to smaller and smaller and smaller bits. I think there probably is a nugget, a basic building block of the universe that reveals like something deep about how the whole universe is put together, you know, I want like that level of answer. Like the constructor of the simulation, what pieces did he or she use? I'm going to, I'm going to steal that as a now forever interview question. What is your own personal weird question that you're trying to answer in your field? That's, that's like, that's fantastic. I like that thing. I'm use, I'm stealing it, but I'm going to use it in good faith. So you think there's a something? I think there's a something because, you know, we take the stuff that's around us. I and you were all made out of atoms and molecules. You break those open inside of those. You got protons and neutrons. You break those up. You got quarks and electrons. That's sort of like our current state of understanding the most basic building blocks. But we know that it's not it. We know that's not the final answer. First, because they're like weird patterns among all these building blocks that have no explanation, that are really strong hints that they're probably just made out of smaller bits. You know, like, you look at the periodic table and there are patterns in it, right? And before you knew that the periodic table was made of smaller pieces, you'd wonder like, how come these guys are all metallic and these guys are, you know, are inactive and whatever. You wonder what are all these patterns? And of course, now those patterns are just huge clues that tell you, oh, it comes from the structure of the atom, how they're put together. Well, we have the periodic table of the fundamental particles, six quarks, six leptons, and we see patterns in them, similar kinds of patterns, not the same ones, but in spirit the same. And we wonder like, why are there, for example, three kinds of quarks? Why, you know, why do the quarks and the leptons bounce each other electrically when there's no relationship between them? I could go on and on about all the weird things we see in these particles that tell us there must be something underneath that explains it all, something akin to how the atom is put together. That's a simpler puzzle piece. So there's something that this also puzzles me, and it's within all of this, there's always a point where I get to trying to understand it, and then there's a feeling that things are not consistent with time. There's not a persistence of things in a place going and traveling like we would picture a thing moving in space. There's inconsistencies where things are when it comes to our experiential perspective of time. How is time playing to trying to find a thing? It's a great question because we try to understand the microscopic world and we try to do it in terms of the things we know, right? So I say particle, you probably think tiny little spinning ball, right? Because you can only think about it in terms of things you know. It's like you drink, you eat a new fruit for the first time, you're like, it's a little key mixed with a grapefruit or whatever, right? So when you encounter a quantum object, the electron, you're like, well, what is it most like? The problem is, it's not like anything, right? It's like a little bit like a particle, it's a little bit like a wave, it's mostly like nothing we've ever seen before. And one of the ways it's weird, as you say, is with time. Like for example, particles at the quantum level, they don't go, they don't move, right? It's not like they have a path where like you were here and you were going this direction. So now you're here. You know, if you throw a ball, you say, well, the ball started here and it ended here. Therefore, it was at every place in between, right? Particles don't do that. They don't go. They don't smoothly move from one place to the other. They have snapshots. They're like, I'm here. I'm there. That doesn't mean I was in between. You could have like an impenetra barrier in between, no big deal. I don't have to be in between my locations. So like, yeah, it's mind bending. Blair, you look very upset at this whole concept. I mean, learning these kind of concepts in school, you kind of accept there's something that the teacher's not telling you like, okay, they're dumbing it down for me, but they know really what's going on. But they don't. Well, that's my favorite part is that, you know, random people who ask questions about this have the same questions that we do, right? Like, all these questions, what is the smallest piece? How did the universe begin? Those are the same questions that animate scientists today. Like, we would love to know the answer to those questions. And that's why I like to tell people that, you know, everybody's individual weird questions is what pushes human knowledge forward because people are just like, no, I must understand, we'll keep digging in the knowledge minds until I figure this thing out, you know, and so far, yeah, we don't know. I kind of like that analogy of like the magician being asked to reveal how they do the trick and just going, no, I really don't know. Everyone else here that worked every time. And then it wasn't my hand. I like first time I did it, I freaked out too. But yeah, I used it at parties as a trick. And it's both like frustrating because you'd like to understand it intuitively, but it's also awesome because it's sort of the whole idea. Like, we want to pull back a layer of reality and figure out how things really work. It'd be kind of boring if things were just like smaller and smaller tiny physical balls all the way down. It's much more fascinating to pull back a layer of reality and be like, what? We thought it worked like this way. That's totally wrong. It's completely different. You have to revolutionize your whole relationship with like the universe. You know, that's those are the moments in science I'm around for, right? When you figure something, when you see something, you're like, this blows up everything. Like that's what I want. That's my personal scientific fantasies to discover that actually are tiny little turtles or boomerangs or strings or whatever and make people go, huh? How can that be? How did that happen? So you, with the experimental high energy physics, you take these tiny not balls of things or and shoot them at each other and see what happens. Working at the Large Hadron Collider with the Atlas experiment, I mean, you're that this is where the Higgs Boson was confirmed, which was a major, major pillar of the standard model of physics theorized for ever. But then 50 years. Yeah, experimental physics finally gave the evidence that it's that that our standard standard models right that Boson was there. What has been happening recently at the Atlas? What is like, have we gotten anything that's kind of tantalizing as to, you know, the tantalizing weird turtle? Or is everything still kind of like this? We're fine. We are confirming everything. What's going on? Well, we have not seen anything weird yet, right? We have seen everything we expected to see, including the Higgs Boson, which is pretty cool. But we haven't seen anything new. And, you know, you have to remember that this is exploration. Sometimes you get a good hint for like what you might see when you go land on that alien planet. Sometimes you don't. And so we thought the Higgs Boson would be there. We found that it's that's cool. And then we had various ideas for what else we might see when we collided these particles. Because remember colliding particles gives you like a window into the basic universe. What happens when you smash the proton and the other proton together, you make this little ball of energy, and then nature gets to decide what to make out of that. It's not like chemistry where you rearrange the bits of the proton into something new, but you're stuck using the original bits. It's alchemy. You like it turns into energy and then you can make anything. You don't even have to know that it's possible. You just you just have enough energy and you can make it. So it's really like anything on nature's menu. And that's why we try to crank as much energy as possible. So every time you get like a new piece of energy, a new level of energy where nobody's looked before, it's really akin to like landing on an alien planet for the first time and exploring. You don't know if you're going to be met with a parade or there's going to be pink elephants or it's just like dust and rubble, right? But that's what we explore because we hope to find something weird and new. So that's a long way to say we found nothing yet. But it's exploration. So we never know what's around the corner. And, you know, we didn't know when we build it, if there were exciting discoveries waiting for us or nothing. Yeah. And so the power that the Collider and the Atlas experiment are working at now is the experiment not just I know not just with COVID, but is it shut down currently for renovation not renovation improvements? Upgrades we call them upgrades. Yes. Yeah, we run for about 18 months and then, you know, things break down and we have ideas for how to improve them. And then we turn it off and we warm everything up, which takes a few months. And then we go down there and we replace stuff and we upgrade stuff, we improve it. And then usually also they tweak the Collider itself to make it a little higher energy or higher rate, like more collisions per second. Because if you're looking for something really rare, like something happens once every trillion or quadrillion collisions, then you want as many trillion and quadrillion collisions as you can get. And so right now we're in the middle of a shutdown and we were supposed to finish that shutdown late this year. But of course that's been delayed due to COVID because people can't go in and work on stuff until sometime next year. But, you know, there's still a lot of stuff we're hoping to see and a lot of the stuff that we haven't even really looked at yet. Like we get so much data, petabytes and petabytes of data when this thing is running. It takes years to comb through it. There could be a crazy particle discovery like sitting in the data right now on this laptop that blows our minds and revolutionizes physics. We just haven't yet gotten around to looking at everything. Yeah, I saw something recently about a subatomic particle that had something like a three sigma significance that's coming out of the Large Hadron Collider. And it's like, okay, well it's it's so funny. I look press releases and I'm like only three sigma. I'm not talking about it until it hits five. Yeah. And there's a reason for that, right? Three sigma means it's unlikely to be a random fluctuation. But, you know, how unlikely it's like one in 10,000 or so. And we do a lot of looking all the time. So if you, you know, flip a coin, if you roll a die 10,000 times or you got 10,000 monkeys in a room, like you're pretty likely to get something close to Hamlet every day. And so we got to see something really weird and really big because we're looking in so many places all the time. And even still we haven't looked everywhere. You know, there's a bit of like, I don't know, theoretical blinders on the community in my opinion. Like the theorists have ideas for what we should see. And most experimentalists are going to look for those ideas and leaving lots of the territory just unexplored. And so I think that a lot of the stuff that we could discover, just nobody's looking for it because it's not cool right now. So the theory, if the theorists aren't publishing the papers on it, that's not where the experimentalists are going. There's no papers. So why should I dig in this other area? I'm not a theorist. Yeah, well, I think experimentalists should be explorers. I think we don't need to know that it's going to be there to find it. We just need to go sail out into the ocean and run into some crazy new continent, right? A land on a weird planet. We don't need to know it was there to find it. But we've gotten into like, big science and you devote a lot of resources and so it has to be approved and whatever. I even had the experience where I wanted to look for something in our data and they said, no, because there's no theory paper about it. So then I went and found some theorists and wrote a paper with some theorists about all right now, can I look in our data? And they said, yeah, now you can look in the data. And then it wasn't there. But at least you got to look. Exactly. When people talk about space exploration, it's not that I don't like space exploration. I think it's fascinating. But I also sometimes I'm compelled to say, but what about exploring our own planet? There's parts of the ocean we don't know very well. Now I'm going to have two. I'm going to want to say we need to explore our own planet. We also need to explore our own matter more closely. Yeah, but it shouldn't be an ore, right? Each of these things, we want all of them. They're not zero sum games. And it goes back to what you were saying earlier about these things are not expensive. We have all these opportunities in science where we could literally just buy knowledge. You give scientists 100 million bucks, they tell you the answer to this important question. Like, wow, why are we not doing that all the time? Give the scientists the money. Just give them the money and learn amazing things about the universe. It should be bipartisan. Everybody should be in favor of learning awesome things about the universe, great technological spinoffs, awesome economical feedback, economics revitalization. I don't get why it's not more popular. Right. So from Blair's analogy and what you've just brought up, the space program has brought us all sorts of technologies that have made it to consumer level where it is impacted society from the levels of research and government and policy all the way down to spam and velcro on your shoes, right? So these advancements are affecting us and that I'm sure from the technological advancements that are necessary for high energy physics, the Large Hadron Collider is one of the most advanced, if not the most advanced device on the face of the earth. There's also, what is it, LIGO and Virgo, the gravitational wave detectors. But to be able to do these things, technologies have to be created. Advancements needed to be made and those will end up making an impact. Yeah, and you never know. Is it going to be next year, in 10 years, in 15 years, you never know. But basic research has always paid off. In the long term, it's always a good investment. And also, it sounds like the data you've been collecting too, it's not like, oh, we did all these experiments and we didn't find anything interesting, so we're going to move on. That data is still there to be mined for the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years. And I love the description of it's just because nobody's written a paper on it. People can now write papers and go test it against some already done observations, which is not something that's been possible for me. How long was it with the Higgs boson found on paper until it was actually observed in nature? We're talking like, what, 50 years, 70 or something like this? 50 years. So now we have the observations outpacing, perhaps some of the theoretical, which is, that's kind of a fun thing because now there's already a way to test your hypotheses, test your findings on it. And you want to be, you want it to be that if somebody has a great idea in five years, you can go back and say, oh, well, maybe we have evidence for that in our data that we took. So absolutely, we're not just checking the data and then throwing it away, we're keeping it. And we come back and we look at it all the time, because people have new ideas. Like just last month, we had a new idea for like how to look for dark matter in the collective. Maybe we could be producing dark matter in these collisions and study it in this cool way. And so we're always coming up with new ideas for how to use these collisions because they're very general, how to use them to answer really interesting questions about the universe. Have you created an app to create dark matter or search for dark matter yet? I haven't figured that one out yet, no. Nobody knows how to see dark matter. It's frustrating because, you know, in dark matter, it's like all around us. We're like swimming in dark matter. Right, Iggy wants a Snapchat filter for the dark matter. I do. Dark matter, dark matter over there. That would be a Nobel Prize right there. You know, if you could see the dark matter, like that's, it's one of the biggest open questions in modern science. If you ask me, it's like, what is this stuff? We know it's all around us. In fact, we're probably moving through a wind of it because the earth moves around the sun, right? And so probably there's a dark matter wind in your face right now that you just can't feel. Or here. Or here, no. But tell us about the, I love the idea that you came up with for the cosmic ray detection with cell phones. How does that work? Why does it work? Yeah, that's a fun project. Well, we are, the earth is being hit by cosmic rays all the time. Cosmic rays are just particles from space. So like a proton, super high energy hits the earth atmosphere. Think of it like a tiny little asteroid, right? Big one killed the dinosaurs, tiny little proton sized meteor from space. And the cool thing about them is that we don't really know where they're coming from. And they have like ridiculously high energy, like much higher energy than anything we make here on earth. And higher energy than anything anybody thinks can make these anywhere in the universe. Like you ask an astrophysicist, what's the highest energy particle in the universe? They're like, all right, take a supernova, slingshot it around a black hole, do everything you can. They get to like within maybe a thousand of these, a factor of a thousand of these particles. So we see particles hitting the earth and we don't understand what or who can be making these particles. And so it's a fascinating mystery. And one way to study them is just to look at this, these big showers they make in the air. Particle hits the atmosphere and knocks into other particles, leaves these big showers. And the problem is that we just haven't seen enough of them. So we have really big detectors, one in Utah and one in South America, that are like 3000 square meters to try to capture one of these showers. But they're rare enough that you just haven't seen enough of them. And so I thought, well, wouldn't it be cool to be able to like build an earth size telescope to capture all of the ones that hit the earth? And that would cost a gazillion dollars. So we thought, well, can we do it using already existing technology? And so there is a piece in your phone, which is just the camera. And the camera is basically just a little particle detector, right? Like there's a piece over it where the photon gets turned into electrons. And then we use a little piece of silicon, and it stirrups those electrons out of the silicon. And that's a particle detector. We use the same technology at the Large Hadron Collider to look for particles. So we wrote an app, which when your phone at night, when your phone is like camera down, it turns on the camera. And if you see a little blip in the video, it says, oh, that was probably a particle. And if a bunch of phones nearby all see blips at the same time, that was probably a big shower of these particles. And if you get enough of them, you can like point back and say, oh, this is a big shower that came from over there in space. And so we had this fun idea one time like over coffee and we're like, hey, that'd be silly. I don't know, wait, maybe that's not so silly. I wonder if we could actually do that. And so then we wrote the app and we got it running and we did some calculations to see how many phones would you need to actually do science with this. And turns out you need something on the order of five to 10 million people to run the app in order to build a worldwide telescope that can do science at the level of these $100 million facilities. So I thought, well, that's a lot of phones, but it's a tiny fraction of the phones out there. There's millions of phones. Five million phones turned on every single day. So for sure, sneak it into the next Google release or whatever it would be set. So that was the idea. We wrote the app and now we are working to make it like more robust, not drain your battery, be high performance. We've put some phones into particle beams to test their performance. So we're gearing up to have a big wide release one that's like really ready. Is it just the same? Is it not enough of a blip to register as a photon that the camera would recognize? What is the difference in the signal from the cosmic ray blip from the normal photon that it detects? It doesn't look any different. And every time you take a picture, there are cosmic rays in that photograph. They're just like noise in your pictures. So if you put like black tape over the camera, then the photons can't penetrate anymore. Cosmic rays can. Cosmic rays still can, exactly. Muons and high energy electrons and all sorts of crazy stuff. Yeah, exactly. And we've seen some of these. If you go higher up in the atmosphere, there's more radiation from space because there's less of a buffer protecting you. And so if you're on a plane and you run the app, you see all these streaks from particles. Yeah, I know. Air traffic. Air travel is dangerous for other reasons, right? Not just COVID. I think I'm cosmic rays regardless. This is just not high on my list. Are you not supposed to use this app then when you're on a plane? No, you totally can. Yeah, totally can. The fact knows your altitude. And so it's very valuable data. Yeah. Very cool. All right. I'm going to take, I've got a flight coming up. I'll lock it in. Yeah, so that's been a fun project. But that's just sort of like a side thing. Like let's see if we can do this crazy piece of science for basically no money as a fun as a fun side project. Yeah, what's the name of the app? It's called Crayfus. Cosmic rays found in smartphones. So Crayfus. And you can find our website crayfus.io or just Google for it. And you know, we wrote a paper and we're not members of the cosmic ray physics community. And so we wrote this paper and put it out there. And they were just kind of like, what are you people doing? You're like, why not? Actually, I don't know. Half the community was like, that's a cool idea. The other half were like, you're crazy. That'll never work. So it was a lot of fun sort of sociologically, you know, to enter into a subfield adjacent subfield of science for you're not established. Yeah, and try and get traction of some kind. But yeah, it really brings out really brings up the different personalities of people, I would imagine. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You do so much, though. I mean, you've got your research focused, you're, you're you've got this kind of a project where you're kind of coming up with neat technologies and neat ways to look at different questions. But then you've also got science communication. You've been working with Jorge Cham for years now doing comics and a couple of books that two books now. And you'll also have a PBS program coming out and you have your podcast. How did you get so involved in in communicating science and like, you trip over Jorge one day? What happened? No, I just always wanted to share the stuff. I think it's really fun. I think everybody, I think this kind of wonder belongs to everybody, you know, like, what is everything made out of and how did it start? And everybody wants to know the answer to that question. Like, I sit on an airplane and somebody's like, Hey, what do you do? I say, oh, I'm a physicist. They're like, I hated physics in high school, standard. And then I say, all right, I'm just trying to figure out where how the universe started. And they're like, Oh, how did the universe start? You know, and then you connect to their questions because everybody wants to know these questions. So I thought it was like back in 2008, I was an assistant professor, and I was thinking, what's a better way to communicate this stuff than just like talking about it? And so I thought using comics and cartoons might be like accessible because comics are, you know, they take down your defenses. They tell you like, Hey, I'm not fancy. This isn't serious. We're just talking about fun stuff. But I don't have any artistic skill myself. And I was a huge fan of Jorge, of course, everybody in academia knows Jorge is like a celebrity. He's, you know, group, he's a group therapy, us all through through grad school. And so my wife, who's also an academic, she's like, Oh, why don't you just email Jorge Cham and ask him to do it? And I was like, you can't just email a celebrity and ask them to do a project with you. Like what am I going to email Brad Pitt and be like, Hey, be in my movie. Actually, it works. That's how that works. People are so afraid of approaching him. He hasn't worked in a long time. So I emailed him just cold emailed him and said, Hey, I had this fun project. Would you would like to collaborate? And he was like, Hey, that sounds cool. And so then we got started. And then we just had fun. And so we did a bunch of videos and a few of them went viral, like we put out a video about the Higgs boson just before it was discovered and went all over the internet. And that was really fun. And then we wrote a book called We Have No Idea all about like the big unanswered questions of the universe. And that was a lot of fun. And for me, like, you know, I'm mostly trying to be a research scientist and teach doing that whole professor thing. And all of these things are like fun side adventures. Like, sure, I never wrote a book before. What's that like? Let's try it. I don't know. For me, like, if any of these things, if I embarrass myself or fall flat on my face, like, I can just go back to being a physicist. So it's sort of like low risk. And I have like huge respect for people who like leave their day job and dive into and do these things full time because that's, you know, you're really taking a chance on yourself. I was never that brave. So we wrote that book. Congrats. And just did a wave. And so we've just been having a lot of fun working together ever since. And a couple of years ago, PBS reached out to Jorge and said, Hey, have you ever thought about doing a science show for kids? And he called me up. He said, What do you think? Should we try to do a science show? And I said, I don't know. Let's try it. So we put together a pitch for a show. And it's all about a bunch of little curious animals that wonder about the world and then figure out the answers themselves. They don't like go ask parents. They're like, Hmm, how do we think about this? Or how could we figure this out? And they use very simple basic science practices is for like five year olds to get them to think like, you know, have a scientific mindset and to encourage their curiosity. And we sent it in. And you know, like with grant proposals, you send it in, you expect to never hear back. But then they called us up. They're like, Okay, make this show. And we were like, What? I'm googling like how to make TV show. I wish that was a joke. We figured it out. And it's coming out on PBS next month. It's called Eleanor Wonders Why. And it's on PBS kids. And it's all about wonder and curiosity and the joy of discovery and figuring and figuring stuff out. And it's been a crazy experience, but a lot of fun. I think that's such a skill that I hope that we can teach to younger generations the figuring stuff out that curiosity. And, you know, it's not always in a book, like we were talking about at the beginning, the teacher, the magician doesn't always know the answer. And, you know, but there's still that, that process of figuring things out. And all of us can do that. I hope you have at least one episode of these little animals figuring out that the earth is round. And going through that process of confirmation. Debunking conspiracy theories. There we go. Yeah. The curriculum for the show is actually more life sciences, which is funny. It's not physics. But as you know, it's for five year olds. So it's basic stuff. It's like, is a rock alive or not? You know, why do birds have feathers? And the research I did is like, I walked around my neighborhood, which has lots of kids. And I was like, Hey kids, what questions do you have? And, you know, they told me about stuff like that. You know, they're like, did you know cats can have babies? Oh my God. And, you know, these little moments were like, your mind is blown as a five year old and you discover something like that. That's what we tried to capture. I feel like all the questions I get from kids, because I recognize you, is who would win? A shark or a tiger? And you're like, are there lasers on the shark? Because... Well, actually, they would never actually encounter one another in the wild. So really there's a problem with the premise of your question. But isn't there a shark that eats polar bears? I've heard that before. I'm sure given an opportunity, a shark would try to take a bite out of a polar bear. Not a polar bear, I mean like would also try to eat a shark. I think an orca must have at some point encountered a polar bear and made it turn into lunch. I feel like that has to have happened. Oh, it is shark week right now. So, you know, we're probably feeding sensationalist material into the ears and eyes of the producers right now. Yes. Someone in the chat room was wondering, I think you mentioned this kind of at the beginning, but someone in the chat room was wondering what you think the biggest or most interesting mystery of the universe is. To me, the biggest mystery of the universe is what happened before the Big Bang. You know, like we can dial back the clock towards zero. We don't even really know what t equals zero is because we're pretty sure that the rules of physics change as you get like that hot and that dense. So, you know, we can say like, oh, the universe is expanding or is and we can run the clock backwards, you know, to crazy density, but we don't even really know what that is. And we have no idea what happened before that. Like, was there some other weird kind of matter which gave birth to our universe? Was there a whole other universe just like ours that crunched and then created another Big Bang? Like, it bonkers to me that we don't know the answer to this question. Like, in a thousand years, I hope humans will know the answer to this question. And they'll look back at us and be like, what was it like to live back when they were so ignorant? You know, they didn't know this very basic thing about their own universe. The way we think about cavemen and cavewomen, like not understanding what stars are, right, the whole context of their life. We're just as ignorant. And so to me, that's one of the most fundamental questions because it changes your whole relationship with the universe. Like, if you knew exactly how the universe started, that could change how you live your life, right? That has real philosophical meaning. And so that's the kind of question I want the answer to. That's like, I could speak to the oracle. That's the question I would ask. Yeah, sometimes, you know, there are those big perspective changing questions where, you know, how is this research actually going to affect my life? How is it going to change things on a day to day basis? But, you know, sometimes it's putting things in perspective in a way that it does change things. And of course, we don't like answer those questions every day in particle physics. It's not like every day in mind blowing discovery, you know, mostly it's emails and, you know, this isn't working. Why does this code not compile? But occasionally, occasionally, you get those moments. Janet, you left the coffee on again. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So we have a whole bunch of show left. I am enjoying this conversation so much. But I hope that you will want to continue to converse with us about the science. Yeah, I'm happy to stick around and chat with you guys. It's a lot of fun. Awesome. In the meantime, where can people find you online if they want to do some googling and other things? Well, you can find our podcast. Basically, everywhere podcasts are cast. Daniel and Jorge explain the universe. And there's Daniel and Jorge.com. You can find our TV show, PBSkids.com slash Eleanor for Eleanor Wonders Why. I'm on Twitter at Daniel Whiteson. So, or just Google me. You can find me pretty much. There aren't that many Daniel Whitesons in the world. People will be able to find you. I think it's great. Okay. Everyone, this is This Week in Science that you're listening to. Thank you for listening to Twist. We are so glad that you are a part of the show and that you are here with us this week. You are the reason that we're able to do what we do every week, bringing you up to date and down-to-earth views on science, discoveries that happen, and hopefully together we can help bring a say in perspective to a world full of misinformation. It's pretty crazy right now, I gotta say. Head over to twist.org right now. Click on the Patreon link and, and, and, and choose your level of support. That's right. Be a part of bringing sanity and science to more people. If you choose $10 and up, we will be able to thank you by name at the end of the show. All right, we are coming back. This is Twist. We're back and it's time for our COVID update. That's right. Sad trombone. Okay, COVID update this week. We're just going to dive right into some stories. Hey, do you like mouthwash, Blair? I was told by my dentist that it's a hoax. So I don't use it. I just brush my teeth and floss every day. Every single day. Well, according to a new study, researchers in Germany looked at four different kinds of mouth washes that are found in pharmacies and also in, in stores that you can get over the counter. And they determined that while it doesn't completely stop your SARS-CoV-2 infection, it could potentially make it harder for you to transmit because it mouthwash kills SARS-CoV-2. So kind of like sanitizing your counters occasionally. Maybe it's if you have an infection or a reason to think that you're infected with COVID and you're going to be going to the dentist, maybe doing a little swish swish of the mouthwash could help reduce the possibility of you transmitting to other people. Mouthwash. So part of the problem my dentist has with mouthwash is that it's kind of a broad brush. So you could potentially be killing beneficial bacteria in your mouth. And so I think in this case, yes, if you think you have COVID mouthwash to your heart's content, but I think that was where at least some of my kind of concerns about mouthwash as a general daily practice come from is that maybe you need some bacteria in your mouth. Absolutely. We need bacteria. Some bacteria. Yes, yes, we do. But if there are viral transmission issues, let's see what we can do there. Yeah, get that virus. And in the question of whether or not SARS-CoV-2 is aerosolized, whether it's transmitted by just hanging out in the air of a room where somebody breathed, another study has come out just published in Med Archive this week, which is a preprint server. So take this with a grain of salt because it has not yet been peer reviewed. However, it does fall in line with several other studies that have been done. Researchers looked in a hospital environment in the rooms of patients who had been admitted to the hospital for potential COVID-19 infection. They found viable virus in the air of these hospital rooms up to about 12 to 15 feet from the admitted patients. So this was also without intubation procedures. And the question in hospitals had been to date when people who work in hospitals are doing intubation procedures, often pulling the tubes out and the airflow issues will result in aerosols with virus in the air. And the question was, is that the only route or is somebody who's infected just breathing virus into the air? The samples from the patients matched a nasal swab and also these samples that they collected from the room air at all matched genetically, indicating that, yes, infectious aerosols do get into the air just by infected people breathing. Well, I know that a lot of hospitals when they have the facilities have been putting COVID patients in isolated airflow rooms specifically. So I know that a lot of healthcare workers have kind of assumed that this is true from the start, but it's nice to see some actual science on that. Yeah, it's that, you know, the parsimony, I guess, or the, what is the phrase where you try and do the most careful thing to start with, as opposed to waiting for something bad to happen before you start doing something. Yeah. And abundance of caution, yeah. And abundance of caution, for sure. So Blair, I want you to talk about the story you brought. Yes, I saw. Because it follows, follows on this as to, you know, we should be wearing masks when around other people, because if you're breathing stuff into the air, but what is your mask story? So I saw a study that kind of concerned me, because every morning I go for a run, and I have a gator, one of those kind of buffs around my neck, and that's so that I can run. And then if I see I'm going to pass within 30 feet of a person, I'll pull it up, and I'll cover up, and then I'll keep running, and then I'll pull it back down when I'm far apart from everybody else. And so I saw this study with a headline, which always you have to be careful with these headlines, say, wearing a neck gator may be worse than no mask at all. Okay. As Justin pulls his up over his face. What? Let me read this. Okay. So there was a recent study that was published evaluating all these different kinds of masks. And the first thing that I will say is that this study was to find a method to evaluate masks. And so they found certain things about the mask they evaluated, but that really wasn't the focus of the study. The focus of the study was the efficacy of the process. What they found was that N95s were the best, of course. So the methodology seems to be good there, because that makes sense. It's because there were no droplets at all that they found on the other side of this math, if someone was talking through the mask. And then when people wore neck gators, it was actually, the droplet count was higher than if they were wearing no covering at all. So the theory is that it's because it's this thin stretchy material, it actually is breaking apart droplets into even smaller pieces on its way out of your mouth. So that's not good. So this is why they say that it could be worse than wearing nothing at all. But they only tested one kind of neck gator. They didn't look at all these other variables about them. And we've talked in the show before about using the candle test or seeing if you can feel the wind from your mouth if you try to blow through it. And if it is really thin, as some neck gators are, then these things weren't meant to be masks. They were meant to hold your hair back or soak up sweat around your neck or any number that would cover your face from dust, things that are not part of preventing the spread of a virus. So it depends on the specific gator. Use those tests to see what to use before you go out. And again, this is a preliminary study that actually wasn't even studying the masks themselves. They were studying the efficacy of the test so that then they could share this test so that people could use it all over the world to test their own masks. And so I really appreciate Kiki actually threw in kind of some of that information here in a rebuttal story for reasons you shouldn't trash your neck gator. And so one of them was yes, the study tested how masks, how masks are tested, not which one is best. So that's what I was talking about before. And also this was all tested with one person talking through the same mask over and over and over. So there's all sorts of untested variables there. And this is also just for talking. They didn't test for breathing. They didn't test for heavy breathing. They didn't test for singing. They didn't test for yelling, right? So there's all these general podcasts. There's all these different things that go into what makes an effective face covering. We also don't know if droplet number has anything to do with the risk of transmission as we were just talking about. So if it's aerosolized, then kind of all bets are off. And then we need to be testing something else entirely instead of the amount of droplets that show up on the other side of the mask. I'm still putting everything into context to the first analogy you brought to the show about wearing pants. So how would this... And you have to retell the analogy real quick and then explain how you think the gator would be an example of that analogy. So it was something I saw someone else publish on the internet. I did not make this up, but the idea was if somebody walks up to you and pees on you, right? So if neither of you are wearing pants, you get pee on you. If you are wearing pants and they pee on you, you get less pee on you. If they are wearing pants and you are not wearing pants, it's very unlikely you'll get pee on you. But if you are both wearing pants, it is almost impossible for you end up with to have pee on your leg, right? But if they're just wearing stockings. Yeah, or if they're wearing underwear and no pants, or if they're wearing a very loose fit sweat pant, perhaps. I don't know. But yes, anyway, this is where before you wear your mask, test its efficacy, try the candle test, blow onto your hands, see if you feel anything, and for heaven's sake, don't use a mask with a one way filter in it, because that does absolutely nothing to prevent you spreading the virus. So that's like Looks like pants with your fly down. Yes, that would be like wearing pants with your fly down. Exactly. Yes. So, yeah, so the mask, figuring out what's very understandable to me. Yeah. So the bottom line is everything easier to understand for sure. Yes, wear a mask, wear a mask, wear a mask, wear a mask. If you have multiple masks and you can maybe ditch the gator, perhaps do that or give your gator the candle or the or the blow test to see if it's going to be an effective face shield. But wear a mask. I think what this underlines for me is just how little we understand about this virus still and how it transmits and it's like, you know, causing gazillions of dollars of economic damage and killing people. And we still don't really understand this thing. It's incredible. I was just thinking about how not that long ago, we were all going, don't wear a mask. The medical professionals can wear a mask, but we don't need to wear a mask. It's fine. Just kind of stay far apart from everybody. And now we're like, oh, that seems so silly. Wear a mask. That was me too. We're learning more. We're learning. It's also very interesting because I'm about to take an 11 hour flight. And there is required that you have a mask. But the mask that you have doesn't have any requirements other than it is a face mask. It's designed to cover your face. It's not a scarf or you're not just putting a piece of cloth and holding it in the fight or something like this. There's a recommendation that you change your mask every three hours, I think it is on the flight, but that's not enforced. It's just recommended. So there's a kind of a loose thing about who's going to be, you're not going to be wearing pants on this flight. But I did acquire some medical grade masks enough to where I can have one on at the airport, one when we start the flight, one in enough to change throughout the flight, and get another one for getting out of the airport again. So I brought enough for this journey to be replacing them at a level that I don't think I would be replacing them casually. Are you going to wear a mask while you're eating your dinner? So that's what's really interesting. At first the rumor was that there was going to be no food. And then it turns out there is going to be a meal served. However, you're not allowed to bring food. And I think the idea is grazing. Yes, they don't want people like having the mask off and going, I'm eating. Here's one nut. I'm going to chew it for five minutes. They don't want that. But there is going to be this period where I suppose they I don't know if they'll do it in shifts of feeding people or they just run the cart down. And it's like, here's where none of this precaution mattered. And we just all take our masks off. Areas coming in from the outside and we're circling it. I think they said every three minutes something crazy quick like this, like they're pulling there. And which they've been doing on modern planes for a while to just prevent every three minutes. They just like roll the windows down. I mean, that's cool. It's something like that. Yeah, the air is constantly. It's constantly doing an air exchange and replacing all of the cabin air, which is something that's actually common in most modern airplanes. And they did it a long time ago just to prevent people all from worrying about getting colds on a plane. Because back in the days, it used to be you get the same air over and over using using air from outside the plane. It's very dry. And so that leads to drying out of your mucous membranes, which does make it easier for you to catch a cold. People start coughing because the air is so dry. This is a concern. Oh, this is me and my daughter did go out to a breakfast because they have tables now outside that are like 10 feet apart at this favorite breakfast place. So we took the risk. We went out. We did this distance. It's all outdoors. It's fine. And my seven year old busted me up because we ordered the thing. I was cutting up pancakes and getting everything ready for her. And then she just reached over and grabbed all the bacon off my plate and went without touching your food. And I started laughing, but I'd been eating. So I was so I just ended up coughing intensely. My eyes are wide. She's eyes are bulging. She's like, they're going to kick us out. They're going to kick us out. And then she does it again. And I'm just losing it. Tears coming down, coughing uncontrollably. Everybody who took the risk to go out even outside even with the 10 feet apart tables, they're all staring like where the family they were ever all worried about would be there. But yeah, the dry air could cause somebody to cough. You scared everybody back inside. Good job. Good job. I think I actually might have done a public service. Yeah, I think so. Thank you. Well, speaking about trying to understand the virus, there was a study out this week. I think every week a new study comes out where we find out a little tiny bit more that maybe will get us to the point of being able to control it or treat it. And this week researchers out of Northwestern University, they were looking at the molecular structure of the spike protein in the virus. The spike protein is what allows the virus SARS-CoV-2 to infect to bind to cells and infect them. They're using nanometer level simulations, so tiny, tiny measures of space, these little tiny things. And what they when they were looking at it, they found a positively charged site. It's called the poly basic cleavage site that's located only 10 nanometers away from the binding site on the spike protein that allows for the binding to the cells and the infection. And the positively charged site helps the spike protein bond more strongly. And so now because they know that it's there what they they designed a negatively charged molecule to bind to that positively charged site and it inhibited the virus from binding to host cells. So potentially if they can create a negatively charged molecule that can be delivered to patients, people who have been infected, it could potentially limit the infection so that people don't get as infected. So they did not expect to find the researchers say they had they were not expecting to find electrostatic charges having an impact at this nanometer scale. They were just not expecting to find it. But there we go. Physics in action at the molecular level. So Daniel, this this nanometer scale, is this tiny in your your line of work? Or is that is that still way macro huge scale? Yeah, that's like a football field for me. You know, like I can't even think about stuff that big. And honestly, one reason I got into particle physics is that it's sort of simpler, like you just get two little particles banging into each other. You don't have this whole like big swarm of stuff you have to understand. And it's folding and flexing. And it's it's just so much simpler that way. That's how I see it. But you know, my wife is a microbiologist here at UC Irvine. And she also has been studying COVID. And she's working on she takes samples from the wastewater treatment plant here in Orange County. Basically, she's looking for it in sewage, which is quite fascinating. Yeah. So and they've seen it so they they can monitor the sort of population level of of the virus without like testing anybody individually. Right, because everybody who's infected ends up the shot goes through and you flush some virus out. Yeah, you shed it into your stool and then it goes down the pipes. It's amazing how many new ways we're coming up with for studying this thing. It's it's a it's a so much innovation happening. I think it's fantastic. The Russians, they say they're innovating and that they have they have a vaccine that they are moving ahead with, apparently, according to a press release and Putin. Apparently, the report they've only tested it their vaccine on like 76 people so far, really not that many people. And but Putin says that his daughter one of his daughters has already gotten the vaccine and they are going to move forward with giving it to people, most likely a small cohort of individuals. But based on that we have no data, we knew that there was a clinical trial happening with this vaccine in Russia. But there they have been at the same stage as everyone else doing phase one trials, they have published no results. So we have no idea how efficacious or safe this vaccine phase one trial was, which is usually not to actually see if it is effective, but just to make sure it doesn't hurt people. Putin says it's fine. And so they're they're rushing right ahead. So Kiki, I have a question. What stops somebody from just injecting a bunch of people with saline with saline? Just like, yeah, just like, you know, just giving them fluids and being like, I gave them a vaccine. I would hope ethics. Right. But I'm saying if you don't have data. Yeah, yeah, we don't. I mean, nobody knows exactly, except for the people who are in charge of these various efforts, what's actually happening. Do you have some reason not to trust Vladimir Putin? I mean, I don't know. I just still I don't want to sound naive. But I feel like in the current state of the world, that we shouldn't be bid like trying to rush to find it in order to like bid so that we can make the most money. This should be, I found a vaccine. Here's the recipe. Everyone make it. You would think so. But there's going to be a lot of money to be made by the company, the country that develops the first vaccine. And so the company that is behind the Russian effort is called Gamalaya. And they have developed other vaccines before. And the vaccine that this SARS-CoV-2 vaccine is based off of is one that was being developed for MERS, but they have never actually brought it out of clinical trials. The vaccine is a two phase vaccine where they use adenovirus, which is a form of the cause these adenoviruses can cause the common cold. They use the first shot is adenovirus. I think it's adenovirus 20 or 26. And then the second shot is adenovirus five. The reason they use different adenoviruses is that if your body decides that it's going to mount an immune response against adenovirus 20, then if you give the second booster shot of the adenovirus 20, then it won't work because your body will have an immune response to it. And so using a different strain, adenovirus five, for that second booster shot can potentially allow for your body to mount a good response to SARS-CoV-2 and not necessarily against the adenoviruses, which are being used as vectors to infect your cells, to deliver the spike protein, to make your body mount an immune response against SARS. It's complicated. This vaccine is similar to a vaccine being developed by the Chinese who are still in, I think, phase two trials. But to date, similar vaccines have so far been okay. All the results from the phase one trials of similar vaccines around the world, they've been okay. They haven't had a lot of negative responses. Kind of like, here, take a Tylenol and call me in the morning. You know, a little bit of fever, a little bit of achiness around the injection point. So it's kind of a standard vaccine methodology. And so it could be fine. The vaccine could be great. And if they're rushing it forward, maybe it'll be all right. But at the same time, they really have not done the safety trials to know whether there will be a portion of the population, which when you get into large numbers of a population size, that could be a significant portion of your population that could have a negative immunological response. They haven't done those tests yet. Well, and isn't the other side of these, of the, I guess it's the phase three trials that most of these vaccines are in now, isn't that also to see how long the, anybody's hangout, like how long you are able to fight off the virus? Because the current thought is it be about six months, right? So you would need a booster or something like that. But we need to figure that out. Because if, if it's only going to be six weeks, then by the time you, you get everybody vaccinated, then it's too, it's spreading again back to the people who you vaccinated six weeks ago. So you need to know how long this thing is going to be effective before you do a full blown launch. Russian vaccine. Oh, I was going to say Russian vaccine is good two years, two years. It's just like they can't possibly know what the small, sort of the smaller side effects are, you know, like if you do a study with 5,000 people, you don't catch those that one in 10,000 people's head explodes or whatever. And that's sort of important. Well, right. And in order for us to get through this thing, we not only need to know what side effects are and how long it lasts, all this kind of stuff, but we need to project confidence in the process and, and that we know what the side effects are because otherwise people won't want it, which is a whole nother problem. That is huge. Yeah. And the, the, the negative press or negative public response, if it were to go poorly in Russia, that, I mean, that it could affect so many people's choices as to whether or not they decide to get vaccinated when one is available, where they live. I know. And mind bogglingly, we are already in a fragile moment in terms of like confidence in vaccines. I mean, not for the lack of any data supporting them or anything, but like just because of the way they've been projected and the craziness of the internet. So you're totally right. We need to be very careful and safeguarding our credibility as a scientific community. So thank you, Putin. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. A Russian researcher says. When it took the, when it took the mercury out of the, the, the vaccines, autism rates actually increased a bit higher in the subsequent years. So it turns out mercury prevents autism. There's no, there's no, there's no getting around it. There's, what was the other one that the, the vaccines are going to be created to make people less religious. So they're going to, they're going to tell people who they want to, I suppose, be their followers, not to do the thing that's going to allow them to continue to follow. It seems like there's a Darwinian just thing at play in some of this that is self-correcting at some point, at some point. My favorite take on it comes from Saturday morning breakfast cereal, that comic where they made the point that in science there's a higher fraction of people with autism. And so that means that actually vaccines don't cause autism, autism causes vaccines. Very good thought process. Yes. Yeah. Russian researcher says it's very easy to make a vaccine and very difficult to properly test it and show that it works. So take that as we will. I'm glad he finished with that part because that, yeah, that first part, okay. Well, it's a lot of confidence. Okay. Oh, I get it. Yeah. Now, it's hard to see if it works. Okay, that makes more sense. It's hard to see if it works. Yes. And as my cat is running around here, making a bunch of noise at my feet, my last COVID story has to do with cat drugs. Could be that drugs for your cat that are being developed to treat coronavirus infections in your cats could help your COVID-19. How could that work out? Well, one drug that's already in development called GC376, snappy name, it disables an enzyme that some coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, use to replicate. And when it's been used, it blocks other coronaviruses and can block SARS-CoV-2. We don't know if it'll work in people. It hasn't been approved yet by the FDA, but it's already in development for your cat. So you could just borrow your cat drugs. No, no, no, no, no, I'm kidding. Do not do that. The other is called GS441524, and it actually is a cousin of Remdesivir, which is a drug we've talked about a lot. It's the first one to have been found to help people's recovery time, to help speed up the time to recovery. And so it's an antiviral. And potentially could be useful. So your cats, they get infected by coronaviruses. The coronavirus can lead to something called feline infectious peritonitis, which is awful for the cats. And so as a result, this has been under development and research for a long time and might just help us too. Say thanks to the kitty cats, Justin. He's never going to. He never, he never would. If you just tuned in, this is This Week in Science. If you want to help twist out, why don't you leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform today? That would be super helpful. All right, Justin, positive news or mouse, I mean, negative news or mouse brains? What are we talking about? So I'm waiting actually for my computer to be able to load a word type document in the Google sphere to be able to tell you this story. But the premise is going to be like this. In 2019, Denver voters got to vote on some new public policy, which would ban camping in any sort of public area. And so what that, of course, primarily affects is homeless people. So the police started doing a dismantling of homeless camps in all public areas and in areas near waterway like rivers, because there were people living down by the river and underpasses and overpasses and down alleys and everywhere. They would clear out any sort of tents and sort of lodgings that homeless people had built and get them out of there. Well, they didn't really, they just got them moving, basically, is what would happen. So this is a study. This was two weeks ago, Colorado state patrol troopers cleared out nearly 200 residents and from one homeless encampment around the Colorado Capitol. So there was a study that was done by the Bell Policy Center COVID-19 eviction defense project that came up with some of this data to sort of look at what happens to homeless people. I'm sorry, the study was in collaboration with the Advocacy Organization Denver Homeless Out Loud and they had published in the Journal of Social Distress and Homelessness. They looked at police interactions with homeless people in the state of Colorado and the effects that it had on folks since this policy had been created and mostly it seems to be that people have been forced to go into hiding as homeless people, meaning they're still homeless. You got rid of their tent or their encampment or whatever it is, they're still homeless. They're still out there. They still exist. They have not been put into any sort of affordable housing programs or anything like this. So what those people do in order to get a night's sleep because they report being bothered by the police so much that they may only get sleep in two hour increments before being told to move again. As they go to more and more rural or hidden places and in those more rural distant and hidden places there's higher incidents of violence that take place when they're outside of the protection that they actually get from being within a city and having police who are preventing abuse of human to human contact supposedly. What's interesting about this too is this is sort of in contrary, this this policy was put in a place before COVID and currently there are 420,000 Coloradans at risk for eviction in the coming months. These are many of them may have voted for this tough love on the approach to homelessness are now themselves being confronted with the very real possibility of not having a place to live. This is where the the Bell Policy Center in the COVID-19 eviction defense project looked at and they were seeing that with the eviction moratorium that's been lifted meaning evictions are allowed to proceed now. The curb reduced or ended unemployment benefits there's is about 20% of our of the United States 110 million renters if you can imagine that's about a third of us don't own a home. 110 million 20% of that so what is it's it's an easy number it's 22 million people nationwide are preparing to become homeless by I think August which oh we're there it is August so yeah so anyway that's yeah yeah 10 years into the beginning of 2020 it's only August yeah August yeah so that's like a fun story. I think I've I've read social science papers before that have talked about how in the United States people who are living paycheck to paycheck usually don't identify as poor or low income there's a kind of there's a disconnect there where people think that they're middle class somehow we've all been kind of sold this idea that like okay if you're not like stealing bread for your family your middle class but like really there's a huge number of people in this country living paycheck to paycheck and when this huge disrupt happened and people's paycheck disappeared or changed drastically suddenly we were put in kind of a bad situation and you can see how people might not be making decisions as voters for this low income or poor identity that they don't think they have and now we're kind of seeing the result of that yeah good thing there's an election coming yeah but but but I'll tell you I'll tell you I haven't seen an administration that took housing affordability seriously I don't care Democrat or Republican any of that I haven't seen one that takes that is all I've seen is further commoditization so that as soon as that that 110 million renters I think it's probably that sounds like an underestimation I think it's more yeah I think that's way low but that's that's poor population so then you know that's like that's 110 million adults and then all their kids under it so maybe it's maybe it's like half of the families right or 60 percent of us made but the but the idea that you know minimum wage this paycheck to paycheck that lifts all of those boats almost immediately translates into rents increases so you've done really nothing to solve poverty at any level in any aspect when you do this so anyway I housing is to me just like mind-boggling that that is not we wouldn't need all this talk I'm just gonna rant I know we wouldn't need all this talk about free education free we could pay for education everybody could afford health care if housing wasn't commoditized and every time we have an economic during downturn we see more and more single family homes get purchased through wall street hedge funds and then rent it back in finitum to the american public they don't they don't you know oh well this is the conversation i'll stop i'll stop this is a different conversation but yeah this is wake up people you're all going to be homeless so any policy that you can do vote for right now that can help homeless people is for you at some point but i think american voters are aspirational they a lot of them like to think of themselves as oh i'm going to be up there i'm the next billionaire i want to allow billionaires to happen so that i could be a billionaire totally absolutely as opposed to the other perspective which is if i don't make it to becoming a billionaire what if everything goes sideways and i can't support myself you know instead of thinking of the you know the the rescue boat you know the way to you know i could vote for better policies for housing equality i can vote for better policies for managing camping we can vote for better policies you know they're you mean we should have a backup plan that's not being a billionaire like wow that sounds wise it's billionaire or bust for me man what's your backup plan the lottery actually you know my plan is i'm going to be a multi-billionaire so my backup plan is to be a billionaire well the wealth income disparity in this country reminds me very much of that infographic i saw on the differences in black hole sizes the spectrum of the black hole sizes where there's somewhere that are like all of the other black holes all put together don't amount to but a spec in that black hole is the difference between somebody who's a billionaire and a working class person who yeah are you saying jeff bezos is a supermassive black hole on our economy he's sucking in all the money uh so yeah i would say so well that's the problem right at a certain limit we're just we're going totally off at a certain limit that money just yeah goes into a black hole it doesn't come back into the economy so it's just yeah yeah yeah it's a perfect example that's something like food stamps or any other sort of uh social funds that you put out there for housing a hundred percent of that money stays in the united states and goes right back into the economy it gets spent immediately it drives further economy we didn't think of it spending we should think of it as an investment it's an investment in americans yeah it absolutely is every dollar taxes cuts that you give to a billionaire they put into wall street for stock investments which is buying single family houses and renting them back to people and raising the prices because now they put up you know property management something else in the middle and that's making people more and even if you have a tent it's no good anymore a stalagmite not a stalagmite geologist meets economics yeah we go up versus trickle down okay even pretty soon let's move away from the economy and yeah I mean this conversation is so important to so many of us and the current events of everything right now but it's it's stuff that we need to think about but let's dive back into the science fun and jesson you you had a mouse brain story i can you tell me i have to get back to it i have to get back to it because i have an unstable computer uh it's all that okay dropping uh out of existence and needing reboots at the moment so uh i have to go find refine this story but i'll i won't i'll have it in a minute is your computer running on a mouse brain it's running on a mouse brain or at the end we can go simulation a mouse brain simulation i'll save it for next week all right moving on to more science i have some shrinking dwarfs we were talking about the universe and the milky way like thing 12 billion years ago well curious thing about white dwarfs white dwarfs are stars that as they gain mass eventually at some point they implode and they turn into super supernovas type 1a supernovas so white dwarfs are these really cool stars and an interesting hypothesis that astronomers had for a very long time there was this size trend that they observed a long time ago in white dwarfs and they they thought they're like okay well maybe this backwards relationship happens that the more mass a white dwarf has the smaller it actually gets but they haven't had any data to support it until now researchers used the apache point observatory in new mexico and the european space agencies gaia space observatory to look at a bunch of white dwarfs and to look at the luminance of these white dwarfs basically measuring how bright they were and so then they're like okay this is how bright you are so this is pretty much how big you are but then mass they wanted to know exactly how massive they were and you can't get that from the light so they looked also at gravitational redshift how much light is shifted as it moves past the dwarf and as it gets stretched out into redder wavelengths they could determine whether the dwarf was more massive or not okay and so what they did indeed found find is that as they looked at a bunch of white dwarfs the measurements really matched the theoretical predictions white dwarfs with about half the of our sun's mass were about 1.75 times wider bigger than the earth and then those with more mass than the sun were about 0.75 times the width of the earth so as they became more massive gained more mass they got smaller and smaller and smaller so what explains this it's something gassy threshold going on yeah what they call it that the material electron gas becomes exotic and that the electrons in the white dwarf are what they call a degenerate electron gas and this is not a put down it's actually a term the degenerate electron gas the electrons in this gas has to squeeze together so it's the electrons pack closer and closer and closer together so that they have enough pressure to hold the star up so that the star doesn't just collapse under all that mass so it's this very interesting relationship that occurs that the more massive the star becomes the more packing occurs and so it gets tighter and tighter and tighter and smaller and smaller and smaller until eventually there is a limit reached and yes this the the mass of the star collapses and then you have a supernova but until that point comes as white dwarfs gain weight gain mass they actually thin down that's not happening to me during the pandemic no me neither white dwarfs are amazing and i think there's something people don't often realize about them is that they are stars technically but they're not glowing from fusion it's not like there's you know fusion happening like in the center of our stars they're just like big hot leftover blobs of stuff that are gradually cooling and eventually they'll just cool so so far down that they become what they call black dwarfs but it takes longer than the current age of the universe so we don't think there are any black dwarfs currently in the universe but like there will be an age of the black dwarf when eventually these white dwarfs become black dwarfs and that'll be probably it'll be at some point when the universe has expanded so far that we wouldn't be able to see them anyway yeah yeah and you know they won't be radiating as much because it'll be cooler wait yeah if there was one out there today could we see it yeah great question probably not i mean if it's out there and it's not actually a black hole it would still be radiating but just in like really long wavelengths so i suppose you could see it in the radio but it would probably be pretty faint so there's probably what you can do is set some limits on you know how many there could be otherwise we would have seen them but also theoretically we just don't expect them to exist yet because we're still in the early days of the universe wait a minute we're the early days of the universe yeah well we don't know right well the universe go on for another 10 billion years another 10 trillion years quadrillion years i mean we look back at like the beginning of the universe we're like oh the first few hundred thousand years like you know things are just getting warmed up this could still be warm up right aliens or humans in quadrillion years could look back and be like oh back then when the universe was still expanding and stuff was hot and dense you know we just don't know what the scales are here's a weird personal question uh how long how long until we can't see stars at least with the naked eye maybe at night like looking up well the planet won't be here but we're on a different planet but reasonably in within the same region of our galaxy and we look out which we won't be there because i'm talking when we can't see the stars how far this kind of goes dark yeah any couple any it's it's awesome but you're right the sky is getting darker right because universe is expanding and the expansion is faster than the speed of light so so stuff is falling off the edge of the observable universe right things are that we could see before we can no longer see but that's mostly happening between galaxies and our galaxy is gravitationally strong enough to hold itself together currently at least so most likely our galaxy will collapse eventually into our own supermassive black hole and we'll just be a big black hole and with a lot of other black holes scattered through the galaxy through the universe so eventually so we'll see the stars at night from the milky way we'll still get to see our galaxy stars in a very very long time but then at some point where gal other galaxies we're going to start to drop off that visible horizon and and those but i don't want to say goodbye to the andromeda galaxy oh no it's gonna say hi to you coming to say hi yeah it might stay in fact uh andromeda doesn't drama to have a bigger much much bigger black hole at its center oh yeah so that might be keeping us around it might bring us along all right yeah exactly i have a brain story and then justin if yes shocking i'll skip my sorry i'll bring it i'll bring it next week i'll bring it okay fantastic researchers at michigan state university found that even when people know that they are taking a placebo the treatment is linked to a reduction in brain activity that's indicative of emotional stress they got people to come into their study and this is published in nature communications they say the placebos placebos are all about mind over matter non-deceptive placebos were born so that you could possibly use them in routine practice so that rather than prescribing a host of medications to help a patient you can give them a placebo tell them it can help them and chances are if they believe it will then it will the researchers wanted to test these non-deceptive placebos to find out if they actually helped people in the experiment they uh they told people that this nasal spray which was saline was a placebo that it had absolutely no active ingredients but would help reduce their negative feelings if they believed it would and then they had a comparison a control group that inhaled the same saline spray but they were told that the spray would improve the clarity of the physiological readings that the researchers were recording and then they uh they recorded brain activity and found that the the placebo the the non-deceptive one where people were like okay it's a placebo fine it's not going to do anything it did basically the same thing that the placebo for the people who were told it would be doing something did it reduced emotional distress activity electrical activity in the brain so i mean there are a couple of questions here related to you know the correlation of hey you're looking at electrical activity in the brain is this really indicative of that emotional duress and is that really what you're measuring however the the the the idea that you would have the same exact or very similar responses when you're told that something's not gonna work as well that it will that you're being lied to your yeah i have two takes i have two quick takes on it one is that if i was being told you're getting the placebo this does not have the active ingredients i'm like yeah right you assume you're getting yeah this is like a double triple blind kind of thing where yeah tell everybody it's a placebo but you're the only ones that know later and find out and see then you see the difference and the other things we know that there are uh like super responders uh to placebo so there's there are there are some individuals who who heal uh from a placebo or go or find a really transformative thing whether it's their energy or the whatever was affecting that absolutely respond as though the treatment has worked uh so there is this this they might not have caught it in this study but there's there's this weird segment that they have to try to figure out how do i identify because they can ruin a drug trial if you get one of these people that has like this this strange sort of mental ability to go think that they're cured and healed and then the body kind of reacts like it is they can ruin a drug study by by showing that the placebo worked as well as the actual drug for for some of these individuals there was some there was some uh study about uh what is it what was it it was like a brain surgery or something this guy but they didn't actually do the they didn't actually do the treatment he was in the placebo control group and then suddenly the guy who'd been like pretty much bedbound was out skiing and yeah i remember i talked about that on the show yeah and he'd never gotten the treatment and they they'd gone back and they found like yeah there's a certain segment of people who absolutely respond to this but what what i'm wondering is this is a nasal spray right yes so are we sure just having more moist nasal passages makes you feel better yeah that's the discovery that i'm talking about right it's all connected like nasal sprays when you're when your sinuses are messed up it kind of messes with your brain and everything you're you're all disoriented maybe maybe actually this isn't a placebo maybe wedding your nasal passages is like good for you hey dr justin not a real doctor nasal treatment reduces stress based on placebo technology derived from science what's the package that we'll put that up there with the our face masks and the mugs i don't know i just started out there because your your nasal turbinates are supposed to stay moist so if i it's i mean it's a great point and it gets at you know is there a mechanism there's something happening what is the mechanism is it uh from is it you know from the brain going i feel happy or is it you know is is it that oh there's moisture in the sinuses for this particular study and that leads to a response in the brain and then maybe you know yeah what is volunteering volunteering to help science taking some time out maybe that's the thing that's giving you a better science feel good yeah i'm contributing to science right now i'm part of this very important study oh yeah i can already feel it i can already feel that working oh that's good stuff people should do this people should volunteer their time and uh energy just even if it's just downloading an app uh so that you can track the uh these high powered protons coming from space if we don't know where it came from like those that's like an amazing scientific project you could be part of what is the app again i just like i still got it how do you spell that app daniel uh it's crayfish it's like crayfish but without the last each okay crayfish crayfish from from a research standpoint though being able to use something like a non-deceptive placebo to have the same effect as a placebo but not the ethical conundrum that maybe a researcher would be under um that knowing that a non-deceptive placebo can have the same or a similar effect may allow studies to take place that couldn't happen otherwise because of you know potential ethical issues i mean to me it's it's rings a little bit just of like suspension of disbelief like you go in to see a movie you know it's fiction you know it's made up you know it's actors you can still get into it you still have reactions you jump out of your seat when the zombie comes out of the closet like there's a part of your body that has bought in even though you know you know as a fact that it's not true but you know you still participate emotionally so maybe there's part of that that's happening and it could be the participation that is the key that maybe it's the act of taking a pill the act of using the nasal spray that that participation like you said maybe that allows the some amount of buy-in whether or not it's deceptive yeah anyway placebos they're crazy we really don't understand them it's pretty awesome a very interesting effect that definitely needs to be taken into account this is this weekend science and we have made it to that point in the show that so many people wait for i know i do i know you do it's time for blairs animal corner with blair with blair what you got blair i have a story about tuatara's do you know what a tuatara is justin i got yeah i got one of those when i was like nine years old they had to choice the one big red button and like games weren't great but it was like still the best thing you could get no this is a tuatara it's it's a reptile um it looks like a lizard if anyone who was not a biologist or zoologist saw this animal they'd go that's a lizard it's not a lizard it's not it's a rare reptile from new zealand and it is the only remaining member of sphenodontia so when we think about reptiles we have lizards we have snakes we have turtles we have crocodilians and we have tuatara's they are their own thing and there's lots of debate about what they are more closely related to are they more closely related to birds and crocodiles archosaurs are they more closely related to turtles these this like kind of question mark dotted line or we don't know exactly where they belong on the family tree or do they belong to a shared ancestor with lizards and snakes since they look so much like lizards and so this is uh the first sequence of the tuatara genome and they have been able to kind of draw some conclusions from there so this was a global team of researchers they partnered up with maori tribes to sequence the tuatara and they found that they are in fact more closely related to lizards and snakes and that they diverged about 250 million years ago and that is a long time dinosaur this is a tiny living dinosaur oh my goodness so these guys have been separate from lizards and snakes for so long that this might be why this genome as far as they can tell is super unusual it has a lot of repetitive DNA segments that are unique to these guys and that have no known function yet yet that's the key they are predominantly nocturnal animals but their DNA carries a high number of genes that are involved in color vision which means they're doing something during the day so their their current theory is that it helps juveniles escape from predators here's the other crazy thing lizards live i don't know maybe if you're lucky 20 maybe maybe 30 years tuataras can live to be over a hundred years old wow so let's study that yeah so scientists examined some of the genes that appear to be used to protect the body from aging they found that the tuatara have more of these genes than any other vertebrate species they have yet sequenced so they got something going on in their genes that helps them live so long they also don't appear to get many diseases so looking into the genetic factors there could be pretty helpful um here in new zealand and that's where we run into trouble they aren't doing great and it's because of rats it's because of invasive rats so this is an animal that is being protected that's why the researchers worked with maori tribes to to study these guys safely and to and to study their behavior as well safely and so the more we can know about their genome and their biology the better we can conserve them since we we can understand what they need from us to succeed they used to thrive in new zealand but then about 800 years ago the first settlers brought rats and the real problem with the rats is that the rats will eat tuataras more quickly than they can reproduce because remember they live a hundred years sometimes it takes them over 10 years to reach sexual maturity and then they only produce young every two to five years after that so this is the whole problem with sharks too sharks need to get super old before they can have babies which is part of the problem why shark hunting can be such a big problem they can also be pregnant some sharks for multiple years before they get birth so it's a similar life strategy here that that they're yeah what i got the solution yeah we can get rid of all these rats on the island by importing cats oh great except for cats cats are already killing numbats and other native marsupers appeals to new zealand oh no yeah yeah why do these animals keep getting there humans ah i got blur yeah no i'm getting trouble for that one no that's no too late i think for that one but yeah so we have sequenced the tuatar genome we now think they diverged from lizards and snakes about 250 million years ago and have a lot of kind of a wealth of information located in this genome that is just waiting for us to study so there's that pile of data that has all sorts of cool stuff that hopefully we can all benefit from in the future maybe there's some great genetic code that that can prevent us from getting diseases maybe there's something else that can help me live to be 250 years old but the part about that though i'm a little suspicious about the diseases thing yeah is how many diseases is this lizard encountering yeah in new zealand are they like are they like throwing stuff at these lizards like they don't get this they don't get that or just they haven't they don't seem to be getting sick where they're at i i think it's worth that one yeah so so we don't i mean they're only they only live on new zealand so put put one of those uh two times in new york city uh living on the streets for a couple of months and then then look and see what diseases they actually can and can't what happens when they when they meet the new york city pizza rat right uh i think the new york city pizza rat would would win even faster the new york pizza rat would be at new zealand maybe getting so used to melted cheese they wouldn't want to eat it i don't know melted cheese it's not real mozzarella it's not they don't have that uh so that's why my story about the two atara but also i have i should have done this one first i have to end the show on kind of a sad note um climate change i have to talk about climate change um or more specifically the uh redheaded stepchild of climate change ocean acidification so we talk about all the co2 in the atmosphere we talk about climate change we talk about the warming planet we talk about the sea ice but also we need to talk about what happens to about a third of that carbon dioxide which is it gets reabsorbed by the ocean and it changes the ocean's chemistry so the it's it affects the overall pH of ocean water because there's all these little free hydrogens floating around so anyway uh this is a study from university of kinetic it looking at fish's impacts impacts on fish from ocean acidification so when we think about ocean acidification usually scientists aren't that concerned about fish because things like bivalves or sea urchins they are extremely sensitive to changes in pH but fish as far as fish researchers know etiologists know is they are active robust animals they have a fantastic acid base regulatory capacity and so they're not that worried about fish thankfully there are still researchers checking that hypothesis and so this was a study looking at a small shorter-lived fish called the atlantic silver side this is so they could study the fish across its life cycle across several independent experiments over the course of three years rearing them under controlled conditions from the moment the eggs are fertilized until they are about four months old to see if there were effects from elevated co2 conditions they tested co2 levels at two different levels present-day levels and the maximum level of co2 in 300 years under a worst-case emission scenario so basically they had to take this fish that already was kind of tolerant to pH shift because otherwise they'd just kill a bunch of fish in the lab they wanted some some fish that they knew could were hardy enough to handle this experiment and so um they they went for this worst-case scenario so they could kind of overcompensate for that and see okay really if the co2 levels just totally spike what's going to happen and actually these fish the the ones that were exposed to higher levels of co2 didn't grow as large so we could see potentially the extrapolation here is you could see global fish populations shrinking over the the course of this kind of longer longitudinal change in co2 in the oceans so this the reason this kind of caught my eye is that there have been lots of studies about mammals living at high altitudes shrinking from climate change and now let me clarify individuals are not shrinking the average size that that animal grows to is decreasing so in the case of animals living on mountaintops it's because they actually are getting pushed to higher elevations because it's too hot where they're used to being so they go higher up in elevation there is less oxygen in the air and so they have to kind of work harder to survive and grow and they don't grow as large so with in this case the co2 appears to just be a stressor that is reducing their ability to to grow up as large they also tech checked for a sex differentiation uh because we've we've seen with other things that different chemical cues yeah yeah can impact that and so um there was no impact on the proportion of males and females by high co2 so that is good but again if you rear these fish under ideal conditions and feed them controlled amounts of food you don't overfeed them then high co2 conditions reduce their growth in measurable amounts this is a deficit of about five to ten percent which in these teeny tiny fish is only a few millimeters overall but the results are consistent and that does impact biomass in the ocean yeah which does have overall impacts on ecosystems food webs all sorts of things not to mention that if this is something that extrapolates to larger fish that it could end up being a much bigger difference so what if I'm curious about this and I would love to contrast this we we had a wonderful conversation with somebody who is studying uh shark scale was basically like tiny shark teeth and looking at different uh ocean fish sizes uh going back in time I would like to correlate this with that because megalodon was the largest shark that ever swam the oceans uh was there at like a 400 what's it per parts per who's it uh that we're approaching now and and and the atmosphere so if the largest shark that ever existed existed in a time when there was a high carbon uh atmosphere then then something it must have been eating something well enough to to as as it usually comes down to with climate change it's all about time scales so that parts per million happened over a much longer period of geologic time and so the animals that lived in the ocean had a higher tolerance for that higher parts per million we're talking about in just basically a snap of the fingers the ph completely changing in the ocean in a way that animals are not used to and that being a stressor what's interesting is this study looked back at previous studies looking at fish size in relation to carbon dioxide levels where these previous studies didn't actually find a difference at all and what they found was these studies were not regulating the amount of food that they were giving the fish they were letting the fish eat their fill and so it looks like the co2 is a stressor they were able to compensate for that stressor with additional food but if you maintain the same amount of food that the non-stressed fish get with the stressed fish then they do not grow as large so it's it's all about these large scale changes that are happening quickly can animals adapt quickly enough to get used to this new normal can plants move fast enough to get back to where they're supposed to you know all this kind of stuff so this is exactly what this is about is in this kind of snap of the fingers climate change changing the temperatures on our planet ocean acidification changing the chemistry in the ocean in a way that is too quick for plants and animals to adapt to just like the white dwarves they're shrinking they're shrinking yes poor little fish poor little fish this it does remind me of a study looking at uh or many studies that have been looking at plants because plants take in co2 put out oxygen and the hypothesis has always been give them more co2 the plants do better and yes in some studies the plants do start to have greater biomass but they also start to have if you're looking at food crops potentially reduced nutritional content and it seems as though in in many plants there is a limit to the benefit of carbon dioxide so i think there's there's always some kind of limit that that we're going to run up against at some point but life is life is like very plastic in a way which i realize is a very oxymoronic thing to say life is very flexible i guess is what i'm trying to say given enough time time yes and that's really what it's all about and cosmic rays that's one of the things that induces mutation in life and allows it to try new weird stuff so we just we need more can we just can the can the iphone app do that i'll just dial the knob up you want more i got the control knob right here i'll just yeah cosmic rays but also just quantum jittering can also create mutation you're just making things up now no he's not it's true it's true molecular jittering i just love so silly all right so let's end this show on a fun good note i have a letter for our this week in science questions this week there is a what has science done for me lately comments included in this letter from eric combs what has science done for me lately well i went on a trip to munising upper peninsula michigan i don't know if i pronounced that correctly thanks to the hard research work of geologists i was able to learn about geological strata back in college thanks to chemists and other scientists we were able to learn about the elements especially those we see in geology iron manganese calcium copper what am i driving at well for me science can enrich and enhance the beauty of nature science does more than propel us forward technologically it can also help us find new ways to activate our pns to reduce stress and bring enjoyment to our existence everything from tiny arthropods to giant celestial bodies beyond our atmosphere yoga and body mechanics progressive relaxation and mindfulness science helps me appreciate the beauty everywhere around me even in these tumultuous times of civil unrest and kovat 19 knowledge is never a prerequisite for appreciating beauty but it can help enrich the wonderment of everything around us science needs us to be to continue to explore the world each day with awakened curiosity science question if science wasn't cool then why is it possible to spell to spell nerdy with the periodic table of elements nitrogen erbium dysprosium anyone want to take again a gander at answering that question i think he just proved it it's just nerd not nerdy is it right it's nerdy because it's dy sp oh is it okay it's nerdy okay it's nerdy that's right well tomorrow blairs answer i have a problem with the premise of the question right because science totally is cool it is it exactly always like its own mobius strip if we can always you know the universe itself is cool nerdy at the kelvin scale cooling at every scale at every scale life is just improbable and practical and possibly everywhere but also could not be anywhere else but here how how can we be on this planet for this limited period of time and not be curious about observing the universe how can we be on this planet for this limited amount of time as a sentient species and not want to learn everything that we can about it how can we fixate so much on things that are just transient details that we made up to help mechanically make it through a day when all of this wonderful stuff is out there and this is the one chance we'll have to glimpse it i don't know i think we should probably do well that i'm doing a science podcast so i'm maybe biased on what i find interesting uh to think about while being alive on the planet but uh maybe that's the answer to the fermi paradox maybe life is everywhere but we're the only curious ones everybody else is like who cares what's out there yeah whatever hope no i think we have made it to the end of the show on that note thank you for listening i hope you enjoyed the show thank you daniel for joining us tonight it has been wonderful to have you on the show to tell us about your work to talk with us explain the universe it's been great where can people find out about you you want to send them one place uh yeah just go to danielandhorre.com you'll find our podcast there great all right it's time for shout outs shout outs to fada for his help with social media and for for show notes in the youtubes it's always well done gourd for manning the chat room identity four for recording the show and i would like to thank all of our patreon sponsors and the burles welcome fund for their generous support thank you too i'm at the top of the list inside the bottom of the list donathan styles aka don stylo john scioli eric combs flying out giome john lee benrotha galey coffin maddie paren gore of charma jizaya zaynor mark shoemaker sarah for our donald mondes rodney lewis steven albaron john natsami john ratna swami dav fridel darryl myshack two pollock andrew swanson fred s 104 karin benton skyluke paul roenevich ben bignell kevin reardon noodles jack sarah chavis paul jason olds bryan kerrington matt bass joshua fury shonan nina lamb sue doster john mckay greg riley marqueson flowed gene telly a steve leesman ken haze howard tan christopher wrappin richard brendan minnish melisand johnny gridley richard porter christopher drier mark risaros ardee om greg briggs john atwood robert reedy garcia dav wilkinson matt sutter philip shane curt larson craig landon mountainsloth jim drapo alex wilson dav neighbor costy ranky matt ulyth matthew litwin eric nap e o kevin parochan eric luthan steve devald bob calder 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with a wave of my hand and all it'll cost you is a couple of grass coming your way so everybody listen to what i say i use the scientific method and i'll broadcast my opinion all weekend science this weekend science this weekend science this weekend science this weekend science this weekend science science i've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news that what i say may not represent your views but i've done the calculations and i've got a plan if you listen to the science you may just get understand that we're not trying to threaten your philosophy we're just trying to save the world from jumping so everybody listen to everything we say and if you use our methods that are rolling this weekend science this weekend science this weekend science this weekend science this weekend science this weekend science i've got a laundry list of items i want to address from stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness i'm trying to promote more rational thought and i'll try to answer any question you got the half can i ever see the changes i seek when i can only set up shop one hour it is coming you know listen to what we say and i am this weekend science this weekend science science this weekend science this weekend science this weekend science this weekend science science this weekend science this weekend and we've come to the end of another show we are here we have done it we made it all the way through daniel thank you so much once again for joining us my co-hosts have taken they're taking care just is taking care of himself taking himself for a walk that was a lot of fun thank you very much for having me on what an experience yeah i hope you had a good time oh yeah absolutely i mean i don't get to hang out with people and talk science as much anymore so this is great that's what that's one of the wonderful things about i think doing this is that we get to hang out and talk about science yeah week and yeah well that's why your show works because you guys have fun talking to each other so anyway thanks for letting me be a guest nice to meet you Blair and nice to talk to you yeah really it was super fun let's um cross over some time again soon let's do that this was really fun definitely have a wonderful night thank you i don't know justin took himself for the walk my droid welcome i'm glad you made it first time to see the video version welcome it will be it will be edited for the podcast Blair i just i just have this question and i don't know if it's gonna be different this question me having a question and i think people in the chat room you can help with this i really do you think justin is trying to make the show longer on purpose yes i'm like what is this tangent and what is that tangent and it's another tangent it's like especially the short the quick stories i think i think he doesn't understand i'm trying to keep you know it's like okay let's get through these stories before the half hour mark like that like get through all those stories before the half hour mark would be awesome yeah but i i know his my droid his tangents are wonderful i do love his tangents he's a thoughtful person and he's fun but sometimes i think i wish that the tangents could be saved until the after show because this is when i'm like yeah let's talk about whatever and meanwhile tomorrow i'm going to be spending half of my day which has already got appointments and other things going on trying to cut this show down to 90 minutes oh i like this identity force that justin's train of thought stops at every block in the city i think it does and we're stopping again he can probably hear us right now just i know he's he's no he doesn't have his headphones on he went to go i don't know i have to ask him be like hey hey i know i need a buzzer here's here's my other thing is like i would love to stay up till three a.m with you guys talking about science but i don't have to get up in the morning but i am here i am here for it and i love every minute of it but like there were a couple of those weeks that i went to bed at 11 45 and it was a problem it was a real problem yeah we don't like we don't want to cause problems we want to be rat holes are wonderful i know the rat holes are fun guess exact the three hour show it was fantastic but yes i think all of us were very tired the next day hi sady the cute sady she's wandering yeah she also doesn't like the three hour show because this is she's it's her bedtime she's like woman what are you doing to bed this is not what you do normally yeah where you are manager oh it's already thursday huh and you still have to do more business yeah identity for i try to do more business when the aftershow is wrapped up there's youtube things that i try to take care of so that you know the youtube algorithms will pick us up and all those things that i try and do after the show yeah yeah there's hi hello hello so what's uh what's the what's going on what are we talking about my question to blare is whether she thought that you're actually trying to make the show longer these days so so yes fun fact i have done my own independent study of the time that people are talking on a number of twist shows i went and started stopped and it turns out i actually talk less than the two of you come by faster yeah no no no no no no i am i'm third place in registered minutes on the show of speaking i do tend to extrapolate a a particular story but i also tend to bring about one less story on average than the two of you or two less actually yeah so i spend less time talking i but the but then this is like a crazy thing like my favorite part of the show is is delving into sticking with that subject and talking around it that's like my favorite part of doing this it's almost as if the stories themselves are seeds uh for that conversation that can then come from it so totally i do extend your each of your particular stories the topics that you bring longer than just the coverage of the story but minutes registered of talking on the show not including the aftershow which i seem to be rambling rambling on about uh i am the i'm in third place right now on average so i'm just gonna throw that out there keep that in mind you guys might want to tighten it up a little i definitely talk the most i bring the most stories but i also try and i try and make them tight bites and Blair tends to bring the same number of stories i bring plus the animal corner so it's you know i'm i'm i'm you know i usually bring two stories total i bring two animal corner and one short story yeah this is what i usually bring all right all right so maybe we're about even yeah but uh but yeah so go hard for charme thank you in the chat justin we were not talking mad trash about you thank you thank you yeah because justin can't go back through the chat and scroll up and see what was saying what we were saying oh my droid he has lovely tangents thank you thank you i don't know what says tangents and cosines if i if i can't tangent and sub-reference i have nothing to offer i do think though i think we need to like i think it would be nice especially when we have interviews to make sure like we were talking about this before that the quick stories are are nice and quick yeah because we're going to do that before the interview then i don't want them sitting around first totally agree and it's why i kick one of the stories out i only did one in that in that first because uh the first one already kind of had taken up what i felt should have been the time for two and i knew that the next one was going to turn into justin ranting because it's hot topics with me always right so so that's that's exactly why i kicked the that story to the second half and then i had to i lost my other story because uh normally i have them with your computer normally so so this is this actually technically isn't my computer my computer has been behaving much better i found a little bit of a hack for uh for the chromebook you hit control alt t then you write uh ooh either swap enable 2000 enable swap 2000 it puts a little bit of the hard drive into the like ram uh and it has sped things up so it's almost the workable can you say that again because my chromebook's really slow okay uh control alt t takes you to uh this typity word page uh okay and then you hit uh you type in enables swap it's gonna be swap enable i'm pretty sure swap enable 2000 uh which supposedly is going to use about two gigs of your hard drive which is probably pretty much all of it um and allows it to do some ram but you didn't have to you have to power off and restart your computer to get it to work so it's it has worked but this was not the problem tonight the problem tonight was for some reason i have been getting kicked off the wi-fi at this hotel which i've used many times this is not the first time we've seen this picture um and what's weird about it is once i'm kicked off it doesn't let me re-enter by going like pulling up the wi-fi clicking on that that wi-fi it the clicking doesn't work it doesn't allow it to go into that i don't know if that i think that's a problem something with the wi-fi here because it's never done that before i don't know something really glitchy going on anyway so i get kicked off and the only way i could get it i can't you know turning off and on the wi-fi closing the browser opening it doesn't work the only way i can get it to rework is by powering down the computer completely and restarting maybe it's an affect of using the hard drive as ram i don't know uh but pages were loading quicker until the very end at the very end things were still like a little laggy but much better than previous versions i think the ultimate thing is at some point i'm going to have to get a grown-up computer uh and i feel a little bit guilty having a chromebook right now because like every kid in america needs one to go to school yeah so so this this just happened my my uh my elder daughter's computer stopped working she's like i can't get it to power on it's been on the charger now overnight it totally lost power and now it won't charge and it won't start okay so we went to like four different stores to find a chromebook everybody's out uh luckily school yeah i just put it together the timing of this is terrible everybody's buying her fourth place we went had the exact one that we had looked at at the same store a different store that really didn't have so we got it we got the exact one that she wanted perfect so i got the old one because i'm like hey as long as it's broke i can't break it more let me tinker with it uh it was an odd model of chromebook that had the power button in a different place it had never powered down completely the entire time she donated so just it was just that she just didn't we had the wrong power button anyway so it works gave it to my youngest daughter now she has a chromebook so they both have chromebooks they're already both all set from for school perfect but yeah uh i might need to get a a grown-up computer at some point to continue to because this is like an ongoing frustration with this uh with this thing um yeah it's so funny though i the idea that it's it's the opposite of plugging it in the it help is like have you looked on the other side of the computer for the power button yeah well you know it was just the thing is i was very poor in my first like look at this thing because there is a button exactly where the power button is on every other chromebook but it's like this lock button so you can like i guess quickly lock yourself uh you know uh do that like change user thing you just hit the button but it's in the exact same position and i'm like doesn't make sense that they would use a different symbol on your one weird chromebook than all the others uh but it's an emergency she's got like this meeting she's got to do because she's like a kids in school like they're she's like a little corporate exec she's like i have a meeting at one o'clock i need a functioning computer otherwise i'm going to miss the meeting so we're like racing through like all over two towns four stores find it get her online off she goes to her meeting and then later the next day when i'm playing with him like oh there it is okay it works there you go it's fine which which turned out oh and i also got a new phone of course that i've been dealing with i did need to get a sim card but i didn't this was i did actually have to order a new one because my old one was out of date uh and they don't have the e one for this phone or through this carry anyway so my youngest daughter this week got a hand me down chromebook and a hand me down iphone it's not even close to her birthday i don't even think it's like never half birthday and she's she's like raking it in right now children's computers oh we're back in that role i think is it time for bed oh yeah hey there's done uh when are you leaving monday next monday oh man i sent you mail i hope you get it before you leave i won't am i i sent it on monday okay postal service i know hey i bought 150 dollars worth of stamps a couple weeks ago there you go us ps um so i'll check i'll look out for that uh also uh next time you see me i don't know what condition i will be yet yeah you're gonna be fresh to denmark i'll be jetlag you will be something crazy yeah it'll be one of those it'll be one of those do i take like melatonin and try to sleep in what would be the middle of my afternoon or do i just try to stay up until the next night and not sleep for a whole rest of the day and then just sleep naturally at the end of the night it's probably the better choice isn't that's what i usually do yeah just stay up and collapse just drink so much coffee that's what i usually do i just like pump coffee into my veins for like 36 hours straight and then well i have actually i used to be like a three cups a day coffee drinker and now i am one small cup a day and it's because i'm wearing a mask for eight hour straight so you i can't be just sipping coffee so i drink one cup of coffee with my breakfast before i leave for work and that's it that's all i get um once i start working from home again next week i might get back up there i need to i need to buy some like decaffeinated tea so i don't readdict myself to the level of caffeine i was used to before because i feel pretty good now like it's taken the whole summer but i feel like the one cup of coffee is doing me now just wait it'll want you to have more it does the coffee says you should drink more drink more coffee because in tight thank you but you know if if life plans go correctly then like in a year i'm gonna have to weed myself off coffee anyway so life plans oh the plans of life yes yes you will or yeah what is it that uh johnny says when you sneeze science johnny my friend jojo johnny oh jojo jojo he says i forget his name is johnny instead of saying isn't tight or bless you he says science that's great which is good i am there was one oh uh the ones that say like to health i like that because that's like oh i hope you're okay you know what is it the french attesue yeah to your to your health to your health attesue attesue well to everyone's health attesue hey guarabshama asks me uh what uh takes you to denmark all the time uh i go to denmark for the warm weather what brings most people most places love twoo yeah i may have been misinformed about the weather but stayed anyway here denmark warms your heart and actually and actually right now it is warm weather they've been having like uh 80 degrees 90 degree weather even 80 90 degree weather and fun fact about denmark nobody has an air conditioning no building has an air conditioning so when it gets to be 80 90 degrees it's like pork out yeah the the forecast for where i am right now central valley yellow county 100 103 105 107 103 it's going to be dry heat yeah what does that mean the heck it means it's not Florida where you feel like you just got out of the bath and then you're also walking through 100 degree heat and you can't breathe because it's so humid that's that's sorry to floridians that's the least by the way that's the least problem that florida yeah sorry to floridians again my cousin isn't ready ready said living with floridians they know my cousin is he took a photo of the thermometer on the wall he said it was 108 in the shade in redding it's too hot say excuse me she just she just bit the microphone stand and know my microphones he's like you're done now mom all right all right okay say good night Blair good night Blair say good night Justin good night Justin good night kiki good night everyone safe travels next week Justin we'll see you i hope that you're not too jet-legged everyone have a wonderful week we'll be back again next week with more this week in science we'll see you then