 All right. I think we are live. Check in our chat room to make sure we have we have affirmation from our chat room that they can see us and hear us and all is good. Wait for that one moment. Yep. There's the confirmation. So let's start this show in 3, 2, this is twist. This week in science episode number 765 recorded on Wednesday, March 18, 2020. Who has the Mars maps? I'm Dr. Kiki and today we will fill your head with virus crocs and flies. But first, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. If you went outside today and you're not essential staff, why? Maybe you haven't heard we are in the midst of a global pandemic. A virus has gone viral despite not getting any likes. So we all need to come together to fight it by staying as far apart as possible. And while the world is reeling from the reality that nature still exists, that we are still very much connected to nature and that even the smallest form of life, a life form that doesn't even check all the boxes for the normal definition of life can bring about consequences that shut down civilizations the world round. One thing that can't be shut down. That's right. It's this week in science coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. Every day of the week there's only one place to go. Good science to you Kiki. And a good science to you too Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of this week in science. We are back again with more science to fill your mind. That's right to suit all the curious thoughts that you've had. That's what we're here for. And that's why we love coming back every single week this week. Justin has been trying to join us but his internet is not cooperating. He's out on a farm in a bus. So I don't know. Maybe he'll join us at some point during the show if things come together. All of the electrons align. But until that time we are going to have a great show no matter what. I have stories about COVID-19 so that we can talk about some of the big news that's gone on the science for the last week. And also some transplanted limbs. Blair what is in the animal corner. Oh my goodness. I have erasing memories. I have crocodiles. And for the very end of the show I actually have some positive news about the coronavirus. We have time. Fantastic. We like positive news here. Let's have a little bit of positivity and optimism mixed in. We also have a melting T-Rex with us this evening. We are going to start our show with an interview with Dr. Fred Califf, the third. And he will be talking with us about mapping Mars which is very exciting. Whether or not he remains in T-Rex form certainly does depend on the strength of the batteries in that costume. Yeah it's all about the electrons. It's all about the electrons. Okay as we jump in I would like to remind you that subscribing to the Twist podcast on your favorite podcast platform, YouTube or Facebook is going to bring you twists each and every week. That's right. Every time a new episode is published it will come to you because you're subscribed. So search for this week in science or visit twist.org but now it's time for the science. Okay Fred Califf has a PhD in Mars geology and according to his Twitter bio he works with Insight, the Mars Science Lab on Curiosity and the Mars 2020 mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Mapping landing sites in return for food. Is this is this the way that they pay you at NASA? Yeah okay okay okay the joke was fun. You know the amazing thing about dinosaur costumes I don't tell you is that they have humans inside. They're also very hot. They're very warm aren't they? It's like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. Oh my goodness the scariest butterfly I've ever seen. Anyways yeah so I'm a geologist by training but I was always into mapping. It's kind of the skill I have to do my geology looking at pressure impact craters on Mars. And yeah so I came to JPL about eight years ago and worked on landing site analysis for the Curiosity rover and from there got hired onto the mission. I did new mapping to help track the rover as well as every place that we do science. Whenever time we find a rock on the ground I do my best to always have a rock in hand. I'm a geologist right. Is that a regular rock or is that a Mars rock? I wish it was a Mars rock. No it is a regular rock. It's a piece of granite from my hometown because I grew up on a piece of granite pluton. Actually that's really true. Anyways long story short. Yeah so I'm there and I so I work on the various rover missions. I've also worked a little bit on insight and basically I think going to Mars I try to I'm more or less involved on the surface things. Nice and on your bio for NASA it says that you are the keeper of the maps. Yes. What does that mean? What does that entail? I take all the maps from the team and I stick them in a box and I say mine. No. I basically it's keeping track of helping keep track where the rover is every day. So every time the rover moves we need to find out where it went. It kind of keeps track of itself but if we don't tell it where it actually is it forgets. So like some days it's like I'm here and we go no you're over here because if we didn't do that eventually that over here would be like a kilometer away. So I help make sure that base map is assembled and was put together and then we track the rover every day as we as we move along and then I also keep track of all the rocks that we do science on. So I'm going to take a picture of a rock or shoot it with like chem cam laser to get the chemistry or put the arm down to take a picture of it or drill. We want to know where that is so that over time we can build up the science story of you know here's where we landed here where the rocks were like okay then we went to Yell Night Bay where the rocks like there now at Mont Sharp how have those rocks changed over time. So I just kind of I kind of do the the geometry to figure out where all those things are for various instruments. So here on earth we have satellites that allow us to use GPS and even with GPS when I call you know a uber or Lyft or one of these car services sometimes they want to pick me up halfway down the block. You're on a bridge but it looks like you're actually in the ocean. Right right yeah. So how do you I mean the fact that we have GPS here and it's inaccurate at times how do you manage that on another planet where we don't have satellites. Well we do have satellites. Do we do we. Well we do yeah we have five satellites Mars Odyssey which is about oh boy 20 years old Mars Chronos orbiters about 10 to 15 Maven Mars Express ISRO from India and I'm probably missing one but I don't think I am. So about five satellites in orbit but they don't have GPS. I mean they you could kind of make a GPS out of it but it wouldn't be super accurate. So our GPS system has 25 ish satellites that are constantly orbiting in different orbits and and at any one time to get your location you need about I mean you need a minimum of three you really want eight at one time. And so they have all these different constellations there's always like eight satellites overhead. On Mars you're lucky to get one maybe two at the same time and so you just can't get that same position accuracy. So we don't do GPS. Literally myself and one of the person Dr. Tim Parker were a localization scientist and so we keep track of whether we we are the Martian GPS for the rovers. So basically we have a very high detailed base map of where the rover is and it's the pixel size about 25 centimeters per pixel. It's like the size of a laptop and then we take images on the ground and we literally just match them up together manually and say okay you know this rock is that that rock and then orbit and this that's creator is that creator and so we use that to actually locate the rover on the surface and we do that every time the rover drives. It's a very manual process it's it's kind of an old like you know like pick this here pick this here triangulate and get a location. However we are usually within 25 centimeters 50 centimeters at most of any time the rover drives. So more accurate than GPS on earth but you know a very manual process. Also we don't drive that far and and how but you're saying that you know sometimes better where the rover is than the rover does. So that's how you're figuring it out than how is the rover figuring out where it is. Okay so the rover inside has a an IMU an inertial measurement unit. So basically when it moves it can measure that motion but it has a certain level of accuracy to that. So it can tell like when it's moving forward or to the side or turning and pivoting and it can go a certain way and get an accuracy of let's say five centimeters. Like let's say you can drive 10 meters five centimeter accuracy it drives 20 meters it's you know maybe 25 centimeters it's 40 meters it's a meter off and then at the far that we go the more it gets off. So eventually when you're driven kilometers like we have we've driven almost 20 kilometers you would be off by five kilometers if you didn't have anyone to like scooch it around to the right place. So you know for short drives it's not a big deal but for longer drives it really becomes an issue. So it's almost like an odometer kind of? Well yeah it's a little bit of that we actually do count the spinning of the wheels the the revolutions of the tire of the wheels and that gives us one measure of distance but we tie that with also the direction of where it moved and then we also try to look at like every it'll drive it'll take a bunch of pictures and then it'll drive again it'll take pictures again and try to see like like oh I think that rock is that rock that means we moved 10 centimeters I thought we moved 15 okay I'll make a correction. But just eventually the time is just not as accurate as manually every once in a while doing the physical match. And you know and it's actually from even from a computer vision standpoint it's really difficult because we're you know on the ground you can see things that are like a centimeter you know you can see a little pebble you know you could see this you could see this little fossil that existed if only it existed on Mars oh my goodness like you know we all win awards yay but you know when you try to compare that to something like you know can you find this on this piece of paper you know from orbit no you won't you just you'll never see it so it's just tricky and so the rubber has the same problem of trying to keep itself together and knowing where it is. Have you ever been in a situation like thinking about how the wheels could spin have you ever been in a situation where it's slippery rocks and the wheels kind of spin and yes that odometer is going but no movement is happening and yes yes yeah absolutely um uh not often um but occasionally we do cross some bigger sheets of sand or areas of sand the one I could think of uh for curiosity was um Hidden Valley it was a big valley actually is it it's somewhere on that map there down towards the bottom yeah that's okay oh yeah you have to have to go up uh let's see yeah uh Moonlight Valley Hidden Valley sorry I'm pointing at your screen which you don't see um that's okay actually I don't think it's actually it's not labeled there um in any case it's a it was like a street sized uh width valley filled with sand and we're like oh well just drive right over it'll be fine and then we got halfway through and then row row row row row you know wheels were spinning we're like oh we drove across and we looked we're like oh no we didn't um so it does happen not often because generally we try to drive on ground that's pretty firm and doesn't slip a lot but you know everyone's so well stuff happens um but you know we've always backed out and been able to to get out get around it so so we've been good that way but yeah sometimes on a rare occasion we do think we've driven 20 meters we've driven 20 centimeters and then we have like oh oh okay let's rethink what happened um but mostly we you get do you do you get the images back and you go we're not where we thought we were going to be yeah based on that we're just this is way way off and we have to figure it all out again yes exactly and so after every time we drive we always take images at the end because we need to know where we are we may think we went 20 meters and when actually we went you know two um critically important makes a you know changes the whole mission uh at that point you know what we're going to do the next day yeah what what kind of things are important so you in in part of your your role you're finding these uh these landing locations so the landing site for the mars 2020 mission insight what is important for a landing site and how do you figure out what these spot where these spots are um well two parts um first part of the science has to be interesting we've really been doing the uh uh fall the water it's been kind of NASA's mission so we've looked for places that maybe have been former lakes like gale crater um where curiosity is um same thing for gooseup crater where the spirit rover uh the murrow rover uh spirit landed or where opportunity landed which was um they thought was like a sandy shallow sea in renany planum um jezero crater also a um they should seem to be like a a crater filled with the lake and then a a river delta at the end emptying into the lake so anywhere there was water um now we're really looking for um a little bit more than just water but actually evidence of past life um which is really hard to do um you know even on earth it's hard to find a piece of rock and drill into it and take that out and find this ancient microbe from two billion years ago um you know and sometimes we get some results and sometimes like I don't know it kind of looks like that thing um and so they look at you as the keeper of the maps and they say just you know throw a tack at it and tell us where the life is we're gonna land there yeah pretty much um but you know not just one place there are a bunch of places on mars um 50 100 um places that people put time and studies in and looked at it from orbit and say oh well I think the water flowed this way and we see these minerals and that means it was this type of you know this type of environment oh well maybe microbes could grow there um so we um so that's one part but the other part is simply we have a limit of physical capability the engineering part um so we have to land below a certain elevation mars because mars atmosphere is incredibly thin it's six thousands of earths so you know you have to go really deep close to the surface before you get enough um uh air essentially um on mars to start to use things like parachutes uh in fact um it's so thin it's so mars is kind of um uh it gives us always a bit of a problem because it has enough air that um atmosphere that you will burn up if you just try to fly straight in um however it doesn't have enough uh atmosphere to use a parachute to slow you all the way down till you just glide down and then just pop at the bottom so we use a combination of parachutes and rockets um to slow ourselves down till we can land um so in that case we have to land below a certain elevation on mars so that limits parts of mars other parts of mars are super dusty you can't land in really dusty areas either a because we will get too much um dust on solar panels um or it's simply everything's going to be covered for dust and we won't see anything and we might never be able to drive through it it'll be like um they call it the fufu dust it's so it's so porous that you would just be like you know like a foam pit you know you jump in a foam pit you're like oh i can't get out it would be something like that um some version of that so the technical name fufu dust the technical name is fufu dust we have lots of technical names like that um and lots of acronyms um but uh yeah so so those you know those close off essentially whole areas of mars to landing so we try you know so we kind of exclude those out and pick the science areas or outside those areas and then we design towards um uh where those science targets are and we also try to keep close to the equator um so it's warmer um the farther north of south ego the colder it gets and then it's just um use a lot of energy and then we can't do as much science you know we have to like sit there all day to do one science observation if you were way up north um so anyways those are the kind of things we use to help pick a landing site on mars right a little science a little bit engineering the combination of the two how do you how do you know looking at pictures from the surface what the actual i mean as a geologist how do you how do you go about figuring out the characteristics of the surface just based on pictures sure um whether it's fufu dust or right or not yeah um uh different instruments different data so sometimes we just take pictures just like we do on earth um uh you know from orbit and we can tell the landforms and we compare those landforms directly to landforms we see on earth um so earth analogs kind of tell us things about what happened what's happening on mars um you know we see things that look like lakebeds we see things that look like river streams that are meandering um you know we see volcanoes we see glaciers um or evidence of glaciers um so we do that directly earth comparison um the other part is that we you know we can look in visible light to look at shape and form and morphology we can also look at chemistry so if we see rocks um you know if we see carbonates that tells us something about how those rocks were formed um if we we can also look in the kind of the heat version of of the uh invisible spectrum so we can look at the heat signature so if we see um uh rocks are really bright during the day but then they're cold at night well that's probably sand so that tells us something about the material properties if it's the opposite it's cold during the day but warm at night that means it's probably a solid rock and so we can use that to kind of tease out what the how the rocks were made and um how they're put down and how they form um you know so we kind of have to piece all these things together and sometimes we do a lot of math we do say like well what if you had a volcano that had a lot of silica for the lava and you combined it with a lot of nickel and um not a lot of nickel but uh something else and then you put them together um you know what would be the result and what would the landform look like and so we can do those comparisons as well um it's really tricky it's it's it's a lot of detective work um more so and sometimes there are things on mars which are simply different and we don't know when it takes a lot of poking at problems and you know um i think there's quite a few people who will admit that um you know 10 years ago or even five years ago this is what my phd was on by the way it was completely wrong um but that's but that's okay you know that is science and especially planetary science you know we're yeah we kind of go out on the limb a lot of times and and that's okay you know we have to push it a lot of uh directions to finally narrow down to where we think it's actually happening that's fascinating yeah i'm just i'm what what have been some of the the most surprising findings that you've been a part of oh boy um i think the most surprising one is um uh in gale crater where keresa river is um uh you know we expected there to be evidence of water um and some geology that had water but the more we look like we see everything like water was everywhere in gale crater which may be a surprise but the more we look at mars the more we see that water was all over the planet um you know we think of mars right now it's you know it's cold it's rusty it's dry there's no atmosphere almost no atmosphere very inhospitable and we used to have like these little pinpricks of ideas that there was water on the surface and now it's basically like it was just everywhere and now you know we we don't argue where the water was we worry about maybe you know was it ice or how long did it last you know if it lasts two billion years you know did water come out yesterday on the surface or was the last time we saw water was two billion years ago or three billion years ago so we're kind of like arguing some of that minutia but you know water was everywhere and a gale that was certainly so um and then i mean the the big discovery was like we went to you know we wanted to find evidence of a lake and see if it was habitable and that's what we found you know we drilled and yellow knife bay um the rocks even when they everyone when they drilled the rocks um they turned into a powder and that powder was green now or greenish or grayish um all the other rocks we had we had drilled or or um scraped on mars um were red and so one of the geologic tests for any rock is to do a street test which is literally just taking a rock and rubbing it like on a piece of um uh um porcelain um that and it just scrapes the rock and you get a powder and that powder tells you about the rocks so if the powder is red um generically for mars they're saying it's very oxidized which means it's not a very habitable environment your your um your rocks basically the water that put those rocks down are gonna they're like acids they're gonna eat up life um so these rocks were streaking kind of green grayish which that told us there was a a reducing environment which means there was less oxygen which means it was more like water from a lake on earth um and then we measured the the mineral elements inside the rocks that we drilled and they were filled with all these cool nutrients that early life would have loved so you could have taken like you know some earth microbes at your way back you know three four billion years ago on mars found a lake thrown them in they probably would have been happy so that was like that was it was exactly what we wanted to find and it's what we did and that you know and we did it within 300 earth days um you know so it was just like you couldn't have asked for anything better we did it like almost immediately you know um you know mars likes to eat spacecraft we've been very successful um with the us missions as of you know 1990s on um but you know any day um could be the last day of the mission so um to get a science return to get the primary science return um is so important and we really found it and we you know our predictions were right and and and that was pretty awesome and now it's now everything and not everything is gravy i mean we still we hadn't gotten to the mountain yet mount sharp it's five kilometers tall it's a big stack of rocks that we think tells the history of mars and we're literally driving from the bottom to the top and in geology that's the oldest rocks basically up to the youngest rocks and that's what's really um exciting about gale crater why we went there because we maybe look at mars history in this one section um so every day you know every day we can go higher up mount sharp um senior rocks we're just learning something more about the whole planet um so super exciting um but yeah but how far up how far up have you gone so far uh we are about well for the whole height of the mountain we're maybe 20 ish percent okay something like that 30 percent we're about um 200 meters above the landing site um so we're we're kind of still at the bottom um but we're getting there we're we're making our way up and uh like from orbit we're our whole point was to go to the mountain um but we couldn't land on the mountain it was just too rough so we landed right uh like 10 kilometers away and so we've been spending all these years just trying to get to that point um even though we found really cool stuff at where we landed which was the best um but you know we really wanted to go to the mountain so we're taking our you know we're trying to work our way up and uh yeah so it's pretty exciting yeah so we're like 20 percent of the way um we will only get up about um i'm gonna throw out a number 40 percent of the way um simply because the top is too rough however the the top of the mountain is mostly all the same material as far as we can tell so we're excited to we can get to that point where we go from what we think is wet mars the bottom of the mountain to the interface where we get to dry mars i mean done did it um perfect you know um yeah but much longer i mean you're only you've been there several years and yeah our 20 percent i mean do you think there's any possibility i mean the engineering of curiosity is amazing yeah yeah well you know yeah well we have to trade um science today science tomorrow which one do you want you know so you can stay here and do all this great science but it's in this small area um or you can do a little science and then do a little science a little science and do a little science up here and get this bigger picture so we have to balance that um yeah engineering wise the rover is doing awesome um you know had some issues we had some issues with the drill we had some issues with the wheels um you know we solved those problems that's what jpl does um so we've been doing we've still got all the instruments basically working um uh at 100 percent um some are a little degraded but not so much that we're not going to get some amazing science so yeah you know uh i think we can do it um we just have to you know keep our uh i don't know masked in the right direction something like that the cameras point in the right air direction something like that um yeah that's a goal everyone wants to go higher um it's just a matter of you know science day science tomorrow yeah yeah that's it you have to really figure out where what you want and what's more important to your goals and absolutely yeah really figuring that out for as far as what's going on right now we've got uh insight that has also had some issues it landed it landed great ended up pretty much yes right where you wanted to be is it still doing well what are you what's your role with insight since it's landed uh my role was very early in the mission uh since i was keeper of the maps i was the keeper of the map because slanders and move um the idea was that we wanted to know um in front of the landing in front of the um the lander um where can we put down the seismometer size and the heat probe hp3 in this area just in front of the rover like like the size of your desk um where can we put those instruments where they will get the most science and where they can um operate for you know forever until the uh they stop decide to stop working um so i helped map out that landing area and then um developed a web-based tool to um help scientists look at the different areas and engineers and decide where those instruments went um so once that was done um so they found a good place to put the seismometer nice quiet place and went to put the heat probe and then you know my job was done and i walked away um per se um yeah so they're they're doing really well as the seismometer um size is doing great um we're seeing all sorts of weird earthquakes and or sorry mars quakes mars quakes yeah coming from mars there's a bunch of papers that just came out in science and talk about how you know we have these mysterious rumblings we don't understand we have other things which we think are active um faulting active uh mars quakes i can't stop myself um mars quakes happening there's also things we're what we're really looking for is something some big event that will happen um somewhere near us so it'll it'll send a seismic wave all the way down to the core and come back so we can see what the interior is like haven't had one yet but um we're waiting for that um but yeah it's it's returning all sorts of great information about the um the formation of the crust how thick it is and just how active mars is right now you know we we didn't we can only make an assumption like we didn't know like you know the you know um we always think about on earth like earthquakes like oh there's horrible things but they also tell us about what's moving and what's not um on the surface it's that you know for earth obviously you know for humans it helps us decide you know where can we live and where can we save but um on mars it's about like what's the how thick is the crust how how big is the core doesn't even have a core that was the thing that blew my mind on that you know earth has a metallic core mars we don't know it could have a completely molten core nothing solid it's just a big ball of hot goo um it's weird right i would never have thought that that was a or there's a core but it's solid and it's not moving and it's frozen all the way out to the surface frozen in a in a rough sense you know um we don't know but that's why it says bombers there um hb3 um yeah had a bit of a rough time um you know we've only drilled about uh that far down into the subsurface um with a literal drill with curiosity so we have ideas what the subsurface is like but we don't really know um so we're like oh this area looks like it has two or three meters that we can get down into the surface put the heat probe we can pound down and life will be good and then it went down about that much and it stopped um so mars is tricky um but right now so we we literally have um let's see props um if this is the heat probe we've actually put the tip of the arm with its scoop on the end and so we're kind of pushing it down and letting it hammer and as it hammers down we kind of push a little bit more a little bit more a little bit more to get it as deep into the soil as we can um because we really want to measure the heat coming from the center of the planet and because that tells us about how active it is but we can't do that until we're down pretty far uh well pretty far now it actually it's not that far it's only about a meter or two and we can start to feel heat from the planet but um we're not going to get that deep we don't think but we're going to keep trying um so it's just made to take us a little bit longer but we'll see you know uh first it's so fascinating first time we ever tried yeah digging on digging on mars the surface where you landed there's there's a rough there's a hard patch and the question now I would imagine is is it like that everywhere is it just this area is it is is it is it dappled right right yeah yeah yeah um you know and just uh you know we're an area that's uh was originally a very old lava field and so we see on the surface there are lots of rocks everywhere um so it doesn't but in the area we're kind of in this little depression um that we think has a lot of soil but it could be soil mixed with a lot of big rocks and so if there's just a big rock below the surface you'll never see it the surface looks smooth as glass and then you go dink and that's what we're kind of worried about but we don't know yet there's lots of things with a probe and how it hammers and you know and how it touches the soil and does it touch the soil enough to actually push down versus push up when the when the little hammer like because the hammer goes down and then back up so it has a little recoil and so if it's not touching the soil it actually will bounce out and it did that a few times because we were like oh it's going down awesome then went ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding and so you know we're just like why are you doing that that's ridiculous um but just physics we've never done it before so you know just keep trying new things yeah i that's gotta be the most fun is the unknown nature and the exploration and the you know the on-the-spot troubleshooting as well because of because of all the unknowns absolutely um you know i mean i'm more of a scientist and engineer at least in terms of um uh my day-to-day uh but the engineers yeah i mean they love this stuff they they love to figure things out and they they do it really really really really well um so yeah i mean but it's also you know frustrating of course you know you imagine there's some science and you're like hey bro just go down i want to get my science um but you know we do the best we can yeah there's that animation there where we're uh putting the the scoop on the tip of the tip of the probe just to give it a little bit of pressure to sink down um um yeah and so that's uh uh Perseverance our soon to be launching rover in July that's right it was named Perseverance that's the name of the Mars 2020 mission yep and uh yeah so we're all pretty excited yeah are you excited about the landing location can you tell us about the the landing spot for Perseverance sure um so Perseverance is going to Jezero crater uh which is uh slightly north of the equator um and it is a a 45-ish kilometer diameter crater um it used to have an ancient lake so we can see a stream that went into the crater and then went out the other side um and at the entrance point there's a huge river delta um which we're very excited about so what we're hoping is that um either the lake had some kind of organisms or um organism floated down the stream and were deposited in the lake um so so it has a lot of clays in it um a lot of also a lot of carbonates which we don't see in a lot of places on Mars um so we're hoping that you know wherever that's there is organic related or at least may preserve the organics um so those are the things we're kind of looking for so we're going to land in this ancient another ancient lake look at this ancient riverbed see if any um ancient organisms were preserved inside that river delta or maybe within the carbonates themselves um that's our goal and so then we're also going to once we go there and just a general background I was like this area is kind of used to be very volcanic so there's a lot of heat and we have heat and you have a lot of water so the water was liquid and so those combinations of heat you know warmth that kind of keep you moving or doing something and then the water really is a a great combination of terms of um microbial life um you know it could be you can have water but maybe frozen too cold and then you just can't do stuff right you know you go up to uh the arctic and what do you want to do you want to sit in your cabinet all day um microbes you know put on a big puffy coat right yeah yeah it's a fire yeah yeah um no hot chocolate on Mars it's very sad um so uh but the heat is good is a good thing so we're really excited there's a place where we have kind of these two elements uh but yeah so the rover's going to go there and collect samples at all these places we think we um have organic life um or in the cases of some of the instruments like Sherlock and Pixel they can actually or even supercam um they can actually look at a rock and see if there's organics in the rock which is a totally new capability in terms of like visually seeing them um and then we'll take certain samples we'll put them in little tubes um we'll drop them in a certain place on a surface and then a whole another mission called Mars sample return we'll come collect them put them in a rocket put them to orbit and another spacecraft's going to swing by grab them send it back to earth and then drop it at drop it home i didn't what i i did not think we were ready to get samples back oh we're we're so ready um yeah we uh perseverance will literally drill samples we'll collect it you know a piece of rock about like this stick it in a tube seal it and it's gonna leave it somewhere on the ground then yeah then let's say your mission has to land there it's probably gonna be another well the plan is to have another we call a fetch rover it will literally just drive from the spacecraft go get the samples bring them back and then stick them in a rocket that rocket yeah it is a gopher that rocket takes off again goes into orbit another spacecraft has a swing from earth grab that come back home and another spacecraft that is going to detach and then land somewhere and we collect the samples um super complicated but no we're we are all in they're complicated but yeah uh you know the most complicated part of this rover is that whole sample handling system because it literally like it takes it drills a core it sticks it inside the rover does all these things there's actually there isn't a little mini arm inside the rover and all in the belly and all it does is like it grabs a sample and turns it around and takes a picture and seals it and then when it's ready it'll take it and then drop it on the surface um it's super complicated and everything has to be super clean and you know it's in the side of the rover we can't go you know put a wrench on it later it has to work all the time a hundred percent um so yeah that's just that's just that's just getting the rock and then we make sure it sounds like the rover is like eating it digesting it and like pooping out the sample ready to go um that's pretty much it yeah yeah it's that that that um an analogy has not gone unnoticed or unmentioned um in our daily exercise yes i didn't want to break it out but yes we're gonna poop out rock samples leave it to our zoologist yeah yes yes yeah fascinating it is a robot group and and and the great part is we want to go collect it and bring it home i don't know that's what we biologists so happy look at all the poop i collected it's awesome and hopefully there won't be any microbes inside of the robot that ben gets in the sample well well that's exactly it that's right um yeah so we do all these um very intense cleaning exercise and we have a certain minimum amount of microbe or organic microbe but really organic material of any type that we're allowed in the system so uh yeah no it's gonna be super scrubbed um and then some so yeah yes that'll be yeah that'll be amazing are you responsible or are you part of the team that's responsible for marking where each of these little poops ends up um as they're dropped when you put it like that way um no uh actually yes i will mark all the rover poops um yeah no i will um in fact they will be um probably some of the best documented locations on mars um we have to um you know we need to know exactly where it is because the other rover has to come and find it um so yeah no we will know down to the millimeter exactly where all those tubes are um yeah so yeah yeah part of my job my uh my job on the mission is kind of like i do on msl i'm i'll be a mapping specialist one of two yeah um myself and uh dr. Nathan Williams we will help keep track of where the rover is um the areas where we want to do science where all the science happened um and a lot of these um all the information what what pictures we took of the samples and where they are we'll go into like a we call it dossier um which we'll go back to scientists so that we can when we get the samples back here's what we learned from mars um from the instruments now goes throw your instruments at them and you know um do all the awesome science you can do that you do on earth that you can't do on mars so yeah that is so cool that's just a i think this all the way it all works together is just fascinating all the details that need to be figured out um right now as we're in the middle of this covid-19 crisis the growing crisis and more and more people are staying home now i these are robots that are on the surface of mars yep who who's watching the robots well everybody's at home well um didn't plan it to be this way um but uh so um when the mission first lands we kind of bring everyone together um it's kind of work out the very early days of the mission so we kind of talk easily with each other um but after 90 days we actually all go back to our own universities so um in general the the the mars missions or any any plant tree missions really works from remote operation so we do have a bunch of engineers who kind of work together at jpl um but you know it's all on computers um we do a lot of meetings um but it's certainly the case that we have you know we have webex or zoom you know we dial into meetings all the time we're actually um used to working remotely um you know sometimes even like okay i'm going to make a little thing um you know sometimes at a meeting you don't really want to go to like you know like it's going to be an hour meeting they need me for five minutes i'm just going to dial in for my office so doing remote operations is actually pre-natural for a lot of the mission operations people there are only um a few details that we're trying to work out this week in terms of um people who need like you know a certain machine and can they log on to it is there enough internet connection to do this complicated task um but otherwise we're kind of you know we were kind of set up um i didn't it didn't take much i mean for me personally um to transition to working remotely in fact a lot of times i will um because i live um so you know jpl's in pese in california i'm in hindu beach california which if anyone knows is a good 40 miles away and not fun in the middle rush hour of traffic no sometimes you know if i if the operations is really early i will work from home or stop somewhere get a coffee do some work at you know wait for rush hour to finish wait for rush hour to finish and then go in so remote operations is kind of built into our um our dna in terms of how we run things so in that sense we're and that's since we're very lucky um that we were kind of prepared for it um there's still our um and the robots are used to working remotely the robots are always used to work remotely yeah like there's like whatever it's just another day um yeah but we do um yeah so we're so we're still takes a little bit transition because there are people who need sometimes need to be there but you know like everything social distancing if you get instead of having 40 people in the room you can have two you know you've solved a lot of problems there so yeah we're making do you know but then but you know that's just mission operations you know which is like 20 percent or 30 percent of jpl the rest is people you know who have labs and things like that and so you know there's uh you know tricking us that way um you know you can't can't put 10 people in a in a small room um you know doing the the things that they do um so yeah by the way for mission operations we're we're actually we were very easy to transover it didn't take more than a week and we were like okay we're good we got this figured out yeah we're good yeah so keep them going in terms of landing sites and places that we have plans to go and places that you're looking at and obviously you know mars very well maybe as well as the back of your own hand but could you have uh could you have if you could choose a place that you would go to land on mars where would you go uh you mean like sending a human or just that you or just just in general oh is there is there a spot that if you had the choice you okay oh i see oh where would i send the next mission um wow that's a tough one um i i mean uh valice marineris is probably uh it's pretty exciting it's the largest uh valley in the solar system uh it's as long as the united states is wide um certainly much deeper than our grand canyon um so lots of history there um boy i i you know i like all of mars it's kind of hard um but i also i mean the other thing is like um you know uh there i mean like uh if we were talking about humans i mean like i would send them to gale crater i think it's very exciting or um uh for a bunch of reasons um but you know i'm a little bit biased uh because i work on that mission a lot that was kind of my my my uh big mission to join um yeah but i think like uh going to some of the volcanoes get some of like we don't we don't go to really like almost every rock on mars is um basaltic or volcanic to some way shape or form chemical wise um but actually visiting a volcano would be pretty exciting a lava flow um you know doing some measurements there um uh going to the polar caps would be a pretty exciting drilling in some ice are you looking at the ice layers and seeing what's in the what's you know what what is in the ice column um especially deep into it i think would be exciting as well um but yeah or almost anywhere right it's hard hard to pick sometimes um some more exciting than others but it's like it's all good um yeah i mean i would love us to go back to abusive crater which was like um very interesting and like these weird digitate features which maybe are like hot springs like well are they you know i'm gonna go there and crack one of those off and take a look at it up close so stuff like that yeah so now i'm wondering okay if you physically could go to mars yes would you yes in a second i want i want yes i want to come home though not one way with our you know no warp drive or anything like that right yeah our current science right if you could go to mars would you go i would go i would go yeah um there are people who would and i don't blame them um i would go i would probably um uh cry and or pass out the whole way up and the whole way down um but you know it's fine um i'll deal um no i would love to go um i do i definitely want to come home but yeah the question just would i go absolutely yeah it just would be too exciting i mean you know people say like oh you're gonna be bored six months waiting to get there and six months coming back i'm like yeah but i'm going to mars man like none of these are i can touch all those rocks i want to touch every day when i look at the monitor um you know it i just i would do it um for better or for worse i don't know if i would want to go it seems yeah well in the chat room in youtube is asking and who would you need to convince to let you go that's really that is a good point first nasa if i get past nasa then the higher order you know uh my family of course um uh oddly i know this is weird but because she's a scientist also not a mars scientist but environmental science so when we go out you know like i'm talking about the rocks she's talking about the plants it's a perfect match um but uh we she's like oh yeah i'd let you go i mean i know you'd want to go so we we have agreement you know i have the the mars pass i don't know um the mars given the opportunity go to mars free you know it's very important to uh have that discussion at some point never gonna happen but nevertheless um yeah no i think we'd be okay but i mean you know i have i have two boys so that would be a little tough but you know depending on the day they might be like yeah go to mars dad come on depending on the day you might be like yeah see you later yeah that's right right you go to all this uh homeschooling situation happening i'm out you want some social distance thing going to mars never come back this has been just wonderful thank you so much for joining us and talking talking to us about mars and mapping and all of the stuff that you're you've been working on and we'll be working on this is it's your excitement is palpable oh well thank you thank you thank you for having me on it was a great time and thanks for you know bringing the dinosaur always always we all need a little bit of levity where can people find you online if they would like to follow you and your mapping adventures uh sure uh i am on twitter at circular c i r q u e l a r um it is my personal account is not an asset account so um beware you know it's it's half mars and mapping and half um probably shouting but um but uh yeah but you're feel free to follow me and uh you know i uh i certainly uh bring the science when i can't fantastic thank you so much have a wonderful night thanks we are gonna move along with the rest of our show thanks so much for joining us take care you too thank you everyone this was dr fred califf and we are going to move on with our show we've got some science in the second half stay tuned for a little bit more this week in science thank you for listening to twist you were the reason that we are able to do what we do every single week bringing you up to date and down to earth views on science and sometimes out to mars views on science discoveries and with your help we can do even more together that's right we can bring a sane perspective to a world full of misinformation head to twist org right now click on the patreon link and choose your level of support be a part of bringing sanity and science to more people also i would like to i think that's what i needed to do that's what i needed to say you can you can share twists with people that's what we want to do we can't do this without you really we need you we need you and we're back you're listening to this week in science yes you are we're back and dr califf you're still here do you want to talk science with us or are you just going to listen uh i was just going to listen um but you know whatever okay if something if something is interesting to you feel free to okay type in we're going to keep going okay is this thing on that's right always assume a hot mic all right jump into back into the science we are going to talk yes about covet 19 because that is at the top of everyone's minds right now and there is some very interesting uh science around this disease this virus that we are dealing with at the moment so first last week we had a quick convert we had a conversation and blare you asked about how safe your mail was to handle and just about that same day i think it was that same day a preprint came out that has now been published in the new england journal of medicine on aerosol and surface stability of sars cov2 as compared with sars cov1 now sars cov2 is the virus that causes covet 19 the disease we're dealing with right now sars cov1 was the virus behind the sars epidemic now in their findings they discovered that sars cov2 the covet 19 virus is a viable in aerosols for up to three hours but that was the duration of their experiment so they don't know if it's longer so three hours there is a reduction in the infectious particles in during that time so that it does reduce but it's still viable in the air for three hours now surfaces where is it where is it viable a lot more viable on plastic and stainless steel so they looked at plastic stainless steel copper and cardboard plastic and stainless steel they found that it was viable for up to 72 hours on plastic 48 hours on stainless steel this is why we want to wipe down surfaces copper it was only viable for four hours so copper has antiviral properties that break it down and keep it from being keep it from being viable for very long cardboard which you could associate also with you know amazon packages or your mail paper yeah paper it was viable for 24 hours so they measured a viable sars cov2 for 24 hours after so if you really want to feel safe when you're getting your mail maybe you know let it sit for a day yeah i mean or spray it with lysol i don't know i guess it depends what you're trying to protect yourself from right because if you're worried about you know people were saying they were worried about packages from china right which at this point first of all it's everywhere but it it takes more than 24 hours to stuff for stuff to get here from china so that's not so much a concern even most mail i would say it takes more than 24 hours usually more than 24 hours to get you so really the only person then you have to worry about is your mail carrier which you know i've been seeing people being very careful so hopefully that's you know that's not too much of a concern but uh yes if you're very worried about it leave it leave it overnight just let it sit overnight there you go this is different from what i heard a couple weeks ago yes but now we actually have a study that has looked at this and now we have some information to inform our actions which that's why i like science it tells us things so now i'm going to demand all of my mail be delivered in copper envelopes put it in the copper container please you really want to send me that spam go ahead put it in the copper envelope some of all those mailers it's going to get really expensive really fast um and then let me dive into i'm going to jump into this story now about our new reality that we're kind of looking at uh we are staring down the barrel of a very serious potentially societally changing epidemic that an analysis came out of a team from the imperial college London on SARS on COVID-19 and how it will potentially spread if we enforce certain ways of dealing with it whether uh we use what they called mitigation strategies which is just very light social distancing telling people who are 70 and older and have health issues that make them more likely to get the disease telling them to socially isolate and then specifically picking people who have the disease or who have tested for it and getting them to isolate or be quarantined mitigation is less impactful on society as a whole their other option was suppression which in is basically what china has undergone in taking its society and putting it and italy as well putting their society under lockdown and massive social distancing practices to keep people apart um reducing the sizes of gatherings uh this model the the the end of the story is that the thing that worked in their computer modeling of the disease was suppression even with mitigation that would work partially we would still overshoot our healthcare infrastructure's capacity especially in the icu and for ventilator machines which and we would end up even with mitigation having um at least a million deaths in the united states and so then the suppression everything's great you suppress and then the disease goes away it doesn't spread it seems really nice but the problem is if you ever stop suppressing the population still is not immune to it so the disease comes back again and so they say that we have to suppress this model suggests we have to do suppression tactics for 18 months or which is the first estimate of when a vaccine will be available that is so long yes that is so long but i was i follow some amazing people on twitter and was reading the feed of an individual named trevor bedford who is a researcher up in washington and he has been on the front lines of looking at the genetics of the of this virus since the beginning since the outbreak in seattle and he has some thoughts about this uh this paper that's out of the imperial college this the modeling that they've done they don't they only look at a few possibilities mitigation or suppression and a little bit of a little bit of variation within those two possibilities but what he says is that if we really buckle down in terms of technology we may have a chance at not having to suppress as heavily that if we do something that is more like south korea's response in just testing everybody and tracking down the cases making sure that everybody who has it or is connected to somebody who's had it self isolates or core self quarantines then that we can stop and lead to suppression in a quicker and easier way but testing he says is the main the main strategy and so he just says we just need to put all of our his one of his tweets here says the first strategy revolves around a massive rollout of testing capacity we believe that a significant proportion of epidemic transmission is due to mild and maybe asymptomatic in fact infections and that a lot of transmission may occur in the window before symptoms develop these routes can be reduced by a huge rollout of testing capacity if someone can be tested early on their illness before they show symptoms they could effectively self isolate and reduce onward transmission compared to isolation when system symptoms develop then he goes on to say the second strategy that he that he has been reading about is related to cell phone location data which people may have issues with related to privacy but according to some some researchers who have been considering this option through cell phone location data we would be able to combine that data with data on known positive cases to alert possible explode exposures to self isolate and get tested so there's also another strategy of getting serological assays run on people to identify individuals who have recovered and are likely to possess immunity and those people could return to the workforce and keep society functioning so if we tested those people which we haven't started doing yet his last his last tweet though I think is the most important together I believe these and other case-based strategies can bring down the epidemic this is the Apollo program of our times let's get to it yeah I mean the important thing about that is that what all the scientists working in all the different ways to try to tackle this problem need is one thing and that's time and that is why I'm working from home right now that is why everyone is working from home right now because we are trying to give them time and I'm it's hard but I'm happy I'm happy to do it yeah and I I always think it's um you know me or you know maybe I'm maybe I'm healthy maybe I got a mild case but maybe my next door neighbor can't have that and the next person and the next person you're like you just don't know you don't know who can who can write it out and who can't and what you know and I I think for for me personally I'm like I'll I'll bite the bullet let's do it you know I mean the I read that study or parts of results that study and I'm like okay that's the hill we have to climb start climbing you know it's not going to get better you can you can sit at the bottom of the hill as long as you want but if you don't start climbing it you'll never get to the top so just like curiosity just like curiosity that's right it all comes around and I also have to say I you know I'm at the end of my second day of working from home and I can't believe how hard I'm finding it already because I am such an extrovert I'm used to like popping over to my co-workers desk and bouncing an idea off of that and it's just it's been such a change for me an intense change but I also have been spending all day on zoom meetings and social media and email and listening to podcasts and there's all of this amazing technology that we have to stay connected I cannot imagine what this would be like without the amazing connectivity that we have and so I'm I'm trying really hard to focus on that and recognize that you know Netflix added functionality for us to be able to watch movies together and pause and chat while we're watching movies and I think I I have hope because I do feel like our society is is rising to the occasion I see social media being used for the right thing to applaud people for staying home to support each other to deliver groceries to people who are over 65 I we gotta we gotta make it work and the way to do it is to stay hopeful and reach out and reach out to people who you know are having a hard time hello so um yeah we're and I apologize for not reaching out more because I've been training for this isolation my entire life I work in my basement I've been training for this I mean I'm happy to go on the browser and look at rocks of Mars I can't touch them anyways there's no difference to me I'm on Mars every day that tactile item already yeah yeah one more story on the COVID front that is actually exciting news there is an NIH trial along with a company called Moderna who they are trying the first human clinical trial of a COVID-19 vaccine at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle the first dose was given this last weekend they are going to be testing not the efficacy but just the safety and the response to of the body to this new vaccine in 45 young healthy volunteers who will receive different doses of the vaccine now this vaccine the reason they've got something so quickly and other other groups are working on similar things uh is that it's a an interesting type of vaccine called an mRNA vaccine mRNA is messenger RNA and in our cells messenger RNA is little bits of of RNA that goes from the DNA out to the ribosomes to get translated into proteins and the idea behind the mRNA vaccine is that we can plug the a little bit of viral mRNA that is the antigen that we want our cells to recognize and to get a immune response against and then our own cells take that mRNA and start treating it almost like a virus itself taking that mRNA and making copies of it it's turning out more copies making little pro little viral proteins that then the body recognizes and says that's not okay and mounts an immune response so it's a really interesting idea that it doesn't it just uses the machinery that viruses use to copy themselves already the interesting or i guess the questionable part about this is that this particular type of mRNA vaccine is as yet unproven they have not done a lot of animal trials i mean really when were they going to have done that so i mean this is a brand new disease to to humanity so they haven't been working on this for a couple of years they've been working on it for a month or two and so these human tests that are going on are going on concurrently with other animal efficacy trials so they've already shown that it that the mice respond and it doesn't the mRNA vaccine doesn't make them sick and because it doesn't make them sick they're they're gonna test that aspect of it in people now the next question is what kind of immune response is it going to elicit in people we have absolutely no idea and that after this first part of the clinical trial happens then we'll have to do the actual efficacy trials and this and then get into manufacturer and so if this vaccine works if that's 18 months from now but we started the first clinical trial which is something exciting yeah clock sticking at least right yeah clock sticking there are and there are a bunch of groups working on different kinds of vaccines the mRNA idea is an exciting one there are other mRNA vaccines for different diseases kiki will be right back this is her usual computer crash that happens right around this time every night there we go and she has returned you're still muted though i'm back i just have to hit all the buttons i have to unplug my usb thing and then i have to unmute myself because it yes but it's been these mRNA mRNA vaccines are very exciting because once you have an RNA or a genomic sequence you can target very specific segments of RNA to be able to create a vaccine and it's something that can be done very quickly it's like it basically as soon as you have the genome you can move forward on it which in in the world of diseases and vaccines the faster you can get something to market the better it's very exciting yeah blair i've been talking too much about covid and all this stuff you want to tell me something about about uh animals should we move into the yeah let's talk about some animals shall we have some fun animals we got some possible hope on the vaccine front there for covid but let's have some happy animal time yes it's time for blair's animal corner i was waiting i was waiting for just to say what you got blair i was like oh no oh i see Justin oh and then he disappeared anyway but second well um perhaps quite apropos i have a story from tokyo metropolitan university about how drosophila uh fruit flies have given us the clues to potentially edit or remove traumatizing long-term memories what oh what so after a particularly rough self isolation you might be able to delete this from your memory bank what isolation i don't remember it anymore well anyway um and believe it or not the big key to this mystery lights let me explain yeah please do what as i'm here bathed in them so as we know particularly shocking events traumatizing events can be consolidated into long-term memory and through that process new proteins are synthesized and neuronal circuits in the brain are modified and so that's stored and so active maintenance is required to keep those changes in your long-term memory banks and that protects them from the constant cellular rearrangement and renewal happening in the brain the way that's happening we're not entirely sure we don't know exactly what the mechanism is behind that but knowing kind of the background of the basics of what's happening there with long-term memory and also knowing that light impacts circadian rhythms mood cognition these researchers in tokyo decided what about memory and light and so for the fruit flies for them to be able to test this on them they had to expose them to trauma now the trauma that these fruit flies experienced was something called the courtship conditioning paradigm which is where male flies are exposed to female flies that have already mated which means they are not having it and the mated females are so unreceptive that the males show stress and no longer attempt to court females so that is apparently a very traumatic experience for them um so then they took these traumatized fruit flies they took some and they kept them in the dark for two days and afterwards they showed no reluctance to mate but those that they left on the normal day night cycle were still traumatized which means the environmental lights somehow modified their attention of long-term memory they also made sure to adjust their experiment to make sure this was not due to lack of sleep so flies on a diurnal cycle were slightly sleep deprived to match the the flies sleeping habits in the dark so that it was the same so um they were able to kind of make sure that that's exactly what was going on then they were able to actually look molecularly what's happening so they looked at the pigment dispersing factor pdf which is known to be expressed in response to light and they did find that pdf regulated the transcription of a protein called c amp c amp and cyclic amp yes and they know that that part of the brain in insects is implicated in memory and learning so they think that this is the molecular mechanism through which light affects long-term memory so would it be that i mean does this will this have implications basically to do with circadian rhythms and or is it something more more basic than that like i don't feel happy i'm going to turn off the lights now so it shouldn't impact emotion directly because it doesn't appear to be hormone related it doesn't appear to be you know receptor related so it doesn't appear to have to do with actual mood and it from what they can tell it really looks like it is impacting their ability to remember the traumatic event but that being said these are flies they do not live as long as humans they do not have as complex memories as humans and their impulse in relation to that memory might not be as complex as things that we might be trying to impact in the human brain so this is not to say go sit in the dark for a few days and you'll forget something bad that happened to you but this is just i can tell you that doesn't work right it's actually probably yeah it's gonna make you worse probably um but it might mean that we have an idea of how to impact long-term memory storage in the brain with light it's possible that could be isolated and controlled for therapeutic use in humans a million years from now it's very far away but it is a very clear connection between exposure to light and memory interesting yeah that's fascinating i wonder yeah i wonder at some point if they will if there will be some aspect i mean i know that we're using light to control neurons these days with optogenetics blue light so i wonder if there's some other aspects of neuronal control or you know for maybe not at the complex level of human behavior changing memories but in terms of research tactics to be able to study certain aspects of memory maybe that maybe it'll have some influence i don't i don't know this is very interesting well and then you start to wonder should i be studying outside in natural light will that help me remember things you know so should i have my computer monitor and my screen pointed at me while i'm scrolling reading about covet on twitter at 10 o'clock at night when it should be dark which is a whole nother point which is a big part of your brain's memory system is knowing what to throw out and what to keep and if we're bombarding ourselves with light that we shouldn't be are we keeping things we're not supposed to be keep this could move back and forth in all sorts of crazy ways so just knowing that light and memory is connected is an important first step so yeah i mean we're we're diurnal animals we're animals impacted by circadian rhythms it all makes sense to me but it all makes sense blairs pretty blairs tying it all together i still need some help but yes all i heard as a geologist was they made in cell flies and then they fixed them what i thought was a pretty cool i was thinking about that too sorry there's a little too much truth there um i'm a geologist you know i don't have DNA and mRNA and circadian rhythms i can say the words but that's where it ends kind of well if you don't know about that i'm guessing you might not know too much about temperature dependent sex determination which is one of my favorite things to talk about um no i do not uh yes so that's when when we have babies they are born male or female based on whatever chromosome they get from their father because that female is xx right so they always get an x chromosome but then they the they either get an x or a y from their father and that makes them a girl or boy x x y right but different animals have different ways of determining sex at birth and turtles for example um the hotter it is the more females hatch in their nest temperature dependent sex determination which is why for example since climate change some sea turtle populations especially on the equator are becoming over 80 female which is causing some problems but this is a study not about sea turtles but about another type of animal that has temperature dependent sex determination that's right it's crocodilians the animals that have been on this planet for a very very very very very very very long time they have outlasted two extinctions two giant extinctions the mass extinction in the cretaceous period when that you know they killed all the dinosaurs 66 million years ago and another one in the eocene 33.9 million years ago that wiped out a lot of marine and other aquatic life so these guys have figured out pretty well how to survive that being said they also have temperature dependent sex determination and the warmer the eggs the the more likely the eggs will be male so they have the opposite differentiation of turtles but their ability to survive in the past and their likely ability to survive this giant event of anthropogenic climate change is most likely due to their hands-on parenting approach this study from university of baths milner center for evolution and it all comes down to how they care for those eggs so remember the turtles that i talked about before they lay their eggs in uh usually a sandy nest um and then they just kind of leave them and the eggs are off on their own but um with crocodilians they actually will arrange a nest made out of deadfall and other things uh rotten vegetation and they will kind of make the perfect nest and they're very good at curating that nest to be the right temperature and um they actually are not beholden to any geographical location either turtles usually go to the best net the beach where they were laid where they were born and so um they they're kind of tied to that location but crocodilians can lay their eggs wherever and their geographical location does not impact their incubation temperatures which most likely is because they're so particular about creating that nest in a particular way so their temperature fluctuations for their eggs are actually way less than what the turtles experience so they're being so deliberate about their their nest making means that their populations aren't being impacted by climate change and their temperature dependent sex determination in the same way they actually looked across 20 different species of crocodilians across the world they looked at the relationship between their latitude um their body size their reproductive data like egg mass clutch size and incubation temperature temperature and they really found that these temperatures were pretty consistent so they're really good at what they do as parents that's cool i mean it explains how they've survived so long especially you know through mass extinctions that did have major climate climactic temperature changes i mean it they they have a strategy that allows them to abide like the dude yeah and when when i talk to kids at work about sea turtles they always get really upset about plastic pollution because that's always what you hear about right with sea turtles as the is the plastic bags and the straws and stuff like that but i try to explain the reason that plastic pollution is such a problem for sea turtles is that um i'm i'm always reminded of that episode of the simpsons when mr burns goes into the doctor and they try to show how he had all of the diseases and they were all trying to get through the door at the same time and they were so it's it's like that it's you have all these different environmental stressors you have poaching of turtles you have climate change impacting their their birth rates of the different sexes and then you also have plastic pollution and this kind of triple whammy is really devastating their population so if you take out even one of those their population has an opportunity to bounce back and that's really why all these things individually and together are having this impact so the idea here is that by having not having to worry about climate change impacting the birth rate of the different sexes of crocodilians that is one less thing to worry about where they can potentially get through this crazy thing we're going through now and that's really what they want to look at is that the current rate of extinction has us leading up to a mass extinction event larger than what killed the dinosaurs so anticipating that researchers want to know what is going to make it what's gonna make it and why what are their strategies yeah yeah so their hope is that crocodilians will once again survive through another mass extinction because of their amazing parenting skills that being said there is still human induced threats on crocodilians pollution habitat loss flooding poaching all these sorts of things are still important and still impactful i don't want to reduce that in in the conversation except to say that this is one huge impact on population dynamics that they don't have to worry about it's interesting yeah i mean i'm also thinking that they don't like to eat jellyfish so the crocodiles also aren't going after plastic bags out in the water but and i will also say you're right it is one less thing it's yeah that's cool yeah at crocodilians a lot of people don't realize are aside from being really cool and that's why we want to keep them around they're actually keystone species they're really important in their environments for a bunch of reasons their population control but most of them also are slogging around in the muck and when they do that they dig with those big muscular tails channels that water can flow through so aquatic animals can live in those spaces when water levels are low so they have huge they're they're basically architects in their environments on top of everything else pretty important that's really cool i totally random thought i was thinking about dinosaur egg clutches and how they're the way they put their eggs if that had anything to do with sex determination on their on their species as they develop their sorry just tell us no it's very possible absolutely yeah we don't know the answer to that we also know though that there are other things like ostriches they will actually arrange their eggs very particularly so that the egg is in the middle so it is likely to get eaten or interesting wow so there's other dynamics happening with how a nest is uh organized as well wow yes very cool nests versus dinosaur nests and now i'm going to take us out of the animal corner of crocodilians and climate change and into the world of limb trans transplants because yes and yes and please continue yeah this is important and it's super interesting researchers publishing in scientific science advances this last week they used a method that is employed by tumor cells to trick the body of a transplant donor uh the the body of a transplant recipient mouse into accepting the limb uh from a donor so these yeah it's just fascinating the way that they've done it so they determined that there is a molecule that tumor cells use that is called ccl 22 and ccl 22 is released by tumor cells and it tricks regulatory t cells into basically recognizing the tumor cells as self and that they shouldn't be attacked basically saying look i'm like you it's a it's a nice it's i don't know it's like it's a little a little a fake mask to to trick the body nothing to see here nothing to see here exactly they're using the force and it's called ccl 22 these aren't the cells that you're looking for or they are the cells you're looking for that's it yes so they synthetically created ccl 22 they transplanted the limbs of brown rats onto the bodies of white rats and then they gave all of the rats uh they gave the rats anti-rejection drugs for the first like 20 days and then gave them an injection of of the ccl 22 in one of three doses a low dose a medium dose or a high dose then they stopped the immunosuppressive drugs and waited to see what happens they gave another dose of the ccl 22 at about 41 days and they found that the limbs that were in the group that got the medium dose of the this not a drug but the protein that was injected the medium dose led to the donors the limb lasted for over 200 days with absolutely no rejection after immunosuppressive drugs were stopped versus the low dose of the of the of the protein uh the limbs fell off after and were rejected very shortly after the immunosuppressive drugs stopped and also interestingly in the high dose group the limb was rejected at about 60 days so there was a sweet spot there in the amount of protein that the T cells liked that the T cells recognized and then they wanted to see they wanted to really find out okay these limbs have been on this recipient for a while what is the body recognizing and so then they transplanted they did skin grafts from other naive mice that had not been involved in this at all and skin grafts from the bodies of the brown the brown mouse donors and the body rejected the skin grafts from the the mice that they hadn't recognized as self and they accepted the skin grafts from the the owner of the limb that they had received wow yeah so the immune cells in the body started recognizing started started recognizing the cells in the limb as self and uh they they lasted for a very significant period of time so they're calling this they're calling them recruitment micro particles is the therapy that they are using that seems to be very interesting we don't know exactly how far this will go whether someone brought up the fact another researcher brought up the fact that in tissue from living donors the body responds to it differently than it does tissue from deceased donors so they don't know if there's going to be a difference in how the CCL 22 works if they're looking at living versus deceased donation materials but at the same time this is a very promising avenue because if you can reduce the amount of immunosuppression that goes on in transplant recipients you're going to potentially improve their quality of life significantly but anyway it's very exciting we this is just the first study and who knows maybe down the way the immune immunosuppressive drugs will just be in there for a little while and then you'll just have to get a regular a regular shot of of your CCL 22 so that your body continues recognizing your transplanted face as your own could be important could be important you know the important things in life I hate when my face sloughs off in the morning I blew it back on yeah I mean if you're nick cage you got to do what you got to do that's right that's right face off we're getting in there let's do a couple of quick stories but first I just want to let everyone know if you're interested in a twist shirt or mug or other item of twist merchandise you can head to twist.org and click on the zazzle link that is where you can browse all sorts of wonderful goodies items that are in our store quick science news can humans detect magnetic fields the answer the answer is kind of yes but we don't know it so there's a new study out in a journal called e-neuro which is available to the public so you can you can read the whole study researchers set up a very elaborate system in which to test their in which to test their their question of whether or not the brain itself whether neurological signals within the brain respond to magnetic fields they put people on a non-magnetic chair on an isolated floor in a room with acoustic panels merit coils that was wrapped in a Faraday cage with an e-g machine to measure their brain brain activity and they found that when they turned on magnetic fields in certain directions that uh corresponded to nodding the head or turning it from side to side that the brain the activation of the brain changed accordingly and it had very specific activation changes in response to the changes of the magnetic fields however the people who were sitting there in the box wrapped in a Faraday cage they had no clue everybody everybody who came out said what magnetic field I didn't notice anything nobody noticed anything but their brains did so what's going on and why is it simply that the magnetic fields are uh affecting the electron of the electric currents electrochemical currents in the brain is it simply some kind of capacitive effect or is it that there are little magnetite particles in our brains that are responding as some kind of evolutionary holdover from the past well what makes magnetic fields like everything right like this is how that's how sharks figure out where animals are under the sand and stuff like that right is electromagnetic fields and stuff right yeah well the earth has electromagnetic fields because of the dynamo in its center um so there's that big magnetic field uh but then uh live yeah living living just a heartbeat makes one right so so that's what I'm wondering is if you know how right hand rule around uh electrical wires right you can you can kind of tell you can kind of tell when someone's like looking at you behind your back that's the kind of thing I'm wondering about is if this is an evolutionary thing to know where other living things are in relation to you it's like a six set I know that's like a very far jump but I'm just I'm feeling like since it is life is an electromagnetic field that it could be a subconscious thing that our our bodies and our brains are just aware of because of that I guess like I mean I know like about pigeons tracking in the magnetic field but I the question is like what's that sense organ that they have that we don't or sharks have um what's the other one and like you know or or is it one of those like vestigial things like maybe we used to be able to detect a magnetic field to some sense but it is long since disappeared because we don't it's not our primal you know we have eyes they're binocular vision and and uh hearing which override any of that past sense I don't know but it's interesting but yeah it's very interesting apparently we can perceive them so what does this mean and what else do we need to learn right what's going on there and you know as we are in my last story for the night as we are in this very anxiety inducing period of time in society I think this particular study is particularly apropos parent-based treatment as efficacious as cognitive behavioral therapy for childhood anxiety basically this study found that if your kid is anxious it's just as good for the parents to go to therapy to treat it as it is for the kids because they find that very often hey it's the parents who are perpetuating cycles that induce anxiety in their children well and as an educator I can also speak to you know modeling proper technique or around parents to try to you know encourage them to change you know or try something new with the way that they respond to certain things that their child does so I could see how this is similar how if you're if you're modeling how to respond to anxiety as a therapist to an adult that then they can kind of use that to model to the child too yeah yeah if you're if your child's anxious and then you get anxious from your child then you're just building on that like a wave on a wave right so if you can model the calm I would say they can pick up that calm or try to yeah pull it together pull it together Blair what are your last quick stories here oh you know just uh Legos live a long time um yeah especially in my house yes well the floor where I step on them University of Plymouth asked the question we've all wanted to ask how long does a lego brick last in the ocean they they did this um I have some issues with the methodology but ultimately they measured the mass of individual bricks that they found on beaches and they used them um in x-ray fluorescence spectrometer to figure out the age of the individual pieces based on the elements that were used at particular decades in the creation of Legos and then they used items that were still in package if you have those Legos from the 70s and 80s still in their packages it could be used for science to weigh them against these ones that they found on the beaches and they found that they think that Legos can last anywhere between 100 and 1300 years in the ocean and that seems low to me that's great it's hard plastic um because then they're just Legos and then they're not being micro plastic they're just being Legos in the ocean yeah so my problem with that mainly being you know I could talk about this forever but quick news my main problem being that this is only a 50 year old Lego that they're testing and degradation is not always linear sometimes it's asymptotic sometimes you know so how do you how can you model this mathematically to know how long something's gonna last when you're looking at the course of 1300 years based on a 50 year degradation anyway Legos last a long time I will also throw out there that Legos are looking at making hemp or other plant-based plastics to be released by 2030 so they are looking into this it's a pretty cool instead of oil-based yeah so that it could degrade if it ended up in nature um I mean plastic is plastic when it's plastic yeah there's there's potato-based plastic and these things we know are better so it's yeah the more we know no actually no so like there's the there are the potato starches that are make that make plastic-like products that are meant to biodegrade and then there is plastic that is made from soy from corn from oil from you know hemp it all gets turned into these polymers that become plastic it's just I think the big issue it's not what it turns into when it degrades because once it's plastic it is the molecule that is used for that plastic based on the long chain pollen polymer that's in play it's where it comes from is it coming from oil is it coming from soy is it coming from hemp it where is it coming from I think that is the bigger issue right yeah I think there's yeah there's a few steps along the supply chain that are concerns about how it's being made and if there's byproducts but isn't there also a difference in the in potential inhibiting and when it gets into animals things like that hormone pathways and things like that that they can be I don't know depending on I mean as far as I'm aware it's the if it's it's the it's the molecule what is the molecule that you're that you're dealing with what is I mean plastic is a very broad category you know what is the specific molecule that lego needs to use to make its legos so that they're durable and can last for 1300 years in the ocean isn't that the other side that it's also like how long it lasts I mean if it was any plastic but it only lasted let's say hits water and it lasts a day right and totally dissolves I mean that would be great in some ways I mean unless it's releasing some other byproduct right but I think that the how long it can last before deteriorates is also that other thing because if you know if everything if all the plastics get the ocean water and just and dissolved no problem per se unless it was releasing some some other chemical some other byproduct that was in the plastic itself well and what does it all mean sure yeah yeah yeah breaks down into other chemical which thing can be picked up in other ways but in terms of that like micro plastic issue and you know little bits that can then get into lungs and be internalized as opposed to being flushed out or um yeah well anyway uh lego's last a long time and then uh my last my last story is uh is less of late breaking news and more just I want to leave everyone with some good news while we're hearing all the bad news all day every day while we're stuck in our homes this is actually from goodnewsnetwork.org and they um compiled 10 stories of good news relating to COVID-19 the first we already talked about which is the vaccine that was delivered to volunteers in seattle that's uh underway two distilleries across the united states are making their own free hand sanitizers to give away for free yes three air pollution plummets in cities with high rates of quarantine and I saw today dolphins are in venice right now which is crazy and they can aren't in boats in the canals so the dolphins are yeah four john john's hopkins researcher says antibodies from a covered COVID patients patients could help protect people at risk we talked about before five south korean outbreak is abating as recoveries outnumber new infections that i think the most day in a row six china celebrates several milestones of recovery after temporary hospitals close and parks reopen seven australian researchers are testing two drugs as potential cures eight this is just more social fun stuff uber eats is supporting the restaurant industry by waiving delivery fees for a hundred thousand restaurants that's livelihood to a lot of people out there they're helping out with that nine dutch and canadian researchers are reporting additional breakthrough research on treating the virus and 10 you can google ways that you can help people and businesses during the outbreak so while you're stuck at home if you're not working 12 hour days from home if you have some free time there's lots of things you can do from home to help so cool there you go a little bit of news before you guys all go and open up your browsers and see all the bad news again no i'm going to do the google good search yeah i'm going i'm going to google for good at least one a day right one one good search a day yes absolutely and i can add that i'm opening up a new line of dinosaur style personal protection equipment there we go so that you can be entertained while you're in the hospital perfect yes oh we've come to the end of another show i hope all of you are staying well and finding the positive linings in all of all of this thank you so much for listening i hope you enjoyed the show if you did share it with a friend time for some shoutouts fada thank you for your help on the social media on show notes for the great challah bread that you gave me this week that was amazing gourd thank you for manning the chat room and identity for thank you for recording the show it just all these this help cannot be done without you i'd also like to thank the boroughs welcome fund and our patreon sponsors for their generous support thank you to paul disney ed dire stu polyc andrew swanson craig landon ed philip shane ken haze charlene henry joshua furie steve debel alex wilson tony 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science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in 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 make us get understand but we're not trying to threaten your philosophy we're just trying to save the world from jeopardy and this week in science is coming away so everybody listen to everything we say and if you use our methods to roll and i die we may rid the world of toxoplasma oh because it's this week in science this weekend science this week in science and This weekend science, science, science, science I've got a long list of items I want to address From stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness I'm trying to promote more rational thought And I'll try to answer any question you've got Well how can I ever see the changes I seek When I can only set up shop one hour a week This weekend science is coming in a way You better just listen to what we say And if you learn anything from the words that we've said Then please just remember it's all in your head Cause it's this weekend science, this weekend science This weekend science, science, science This weekend science, this weekend science This weekend science, science, science This weekend science, this weekend science This weekend science, this weekend science This weekend science, this weekend science This weekend science, this weekend science And we've come to the after-show I've seen him in the chat Never made it. He had a he had a quick Cameo with his well-lit bus in the background. Yeah, he has lots of string lights in that bus cute It did look cute. Yeah Yeah for a quick moment. So somehow the internet was not agreeing. I don't know what aspect Wasn't playing nicely And and no, you don't need 5g Justin. Nobody has 5g That isn't a thing yet That's right. It's not a thing Yeah, I read something somewhere that like a lot of their like Apple and some others They're like we have 5g, but they don't Yeah 5g yeah, my post-it note is 5g Then I put it on my phone and I say see I've got 5g on the outside Great yeah, thanks for your sticking around and oh, yeah I learned so much. It was great. Yay fantastic lies and lights and crocodile eggs and Sex determination by temperature and yeah Grinding arms to other people for fun. No, I mean not for fun. Not for fun It's what we do yeah, that's what we do Once the kids stop laughing at the word sex they get pretty excited about how weird that is Yeah Yeah, yeah, you have to kind of get over that hump first and then you try to explain it and then they go wait what? Sorry. Yeah, huh? Yeah, like I'm sorry the temperature Decides that yeah And then there are other Animals where they actually have three sex chromosomes and then there are other animals where the male is the hetero zygote Or the the homo zygote and the females the hetero zygote. It's like ah, so like Komodo dragons. That's my favorite thing is that Komodo dragons the females are the Hetero zygote so they're like the equivalent of XY. I think it's like YZ or something like that Okay, and the males are the homo zygote. So they're I think they're ZZ or YY I don't remember but anyway So when the females do parthenogenesis, which it is of itself an insane thing that the females can clone Themselves and basically have virgin birth, right? Then it is always a male Because that's the homo zygote. So the idea that it could be a genetic clone of the mother but Be a different sex. Yeah Interesting. Yeah, huh? So cool. And so they I get yeah, oh boy to my questions. Uh, yeah, the whole Sequential hermaphrodism thing where you know, like one day I'm female no male because I need to be and it's like it's really Yeah, it's like things are flexible. We need sex chromosomes if you're a clown fish or a sheep head Yeah Sheep head as well They go they go opposite too, which is really interesting so they're both fish they both have this sequential hermaphrodism But the the clown fish they start male and they become females when they get big The sheep heads are the opposite So there will be one dominant male in an area and a bunch of females And then when the male dies the biggest oldest female becomes the male Wow That's a lot to unpack Ah Interesting. Well, I think what's really interesting with all that is like it's fascinating that we have sex chromosomes when like We don't really need them. I mean It's like just interesting that different species different lineages have been like, okay We're gonna do the sex chromosome thing and then others are like, no, we don't need that We've got this we've got this other way of dealing with it Yeah Yeah, there's no, uh Yeah, it like they were all evolutionally viable, right? So they just all still exist. So they're all All potential solutions Exactly Um ed wants to know about um Sadie my dog and Social distancing so you're allowed to take the dog for walks So I actually appreciate that in like all of the the press releases about Shelter in place in san francisco in the bay area and all this kind of stuff You can still go outside and go for a walk Yeah, and they also always include specific pet items Which I also now as a pet owner really appreciate because you might not think about it otherwise But they're like, yeah, you absolutely can walk your dog. That's totally fine. Um, so yes I I take my jog for walks I take myself for walks because as you could probably I'll tell before I'm already going insane inside. So I'm going for walks multiple times a day Um, she cannot stay with an outside of six feet of me. No, she's on my feet right now Um, but we wipe down all of her paws at her belly because she's so low to the ground Um, every time we get back in Not that like corona virus is like on the floor. Yeah I don't I don't want her dirty paws on my couch She's gonna be tracking corona virus into your house I don't know about that although We do run into other dogs And especially we have a we have a dog park on grounds And it's been very interesting that we'll go over there and there'll be two or three other dogs in the dog park And all the humans there's this like unspoken understanding that none of us are going within six feet of each other We're being very careful and like dogs are like why Yeah, but so I threw a ball and it like went under somebody else and they got up and picked it up and threw it for the dog So I wouldn't have to go near them like everyone's being really good Um, but at the same time I'm kind of like, yeah, but like we're all touching the dog. So yeah That's a whole other study, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah transfer transfer transfer as far as we know Dogs can't dogs can't carry it But if it's if if it was It's a droplet on their fur. Yeah, and then I touched the dog and then yeah somebody else touched the dog So yeah, so it's still I'm still washing my hands religiously, but yeah, I know I am too I mean, I don't even want to guess how many times I wash my hand the day now. It's it's ridiculous I mean, also, I feel like, you know, like once I'm in my house I'm Probably safe right in terms of like I've washed my hands and you know with my family and you know I mean if they're sick, they're sick But maybe one of them is like well, I can still wash my hands and then I won't be passing it on per se Or vice versa. So it's it's interesting to like you're saying like the mail like what do I do about my mail? Like someone had to touch my mail, right? And they're like, what do you know about that and Yeah, all those things That's what my kitty kitty is showing me her belly right now He's like she's just out of arm's reach and she's rolling around on the floor showing me her belly I can show you here's here's oh Come on. Don't all right. I have to lock you so you don't rotate Okay, right there. Can you see there we go? Oh, yeah. Oh boy So she's that I'm working for my home. She just hates it. I know she's like I'm gonna lie on your feet all day long I'm like, oh, you're up for a rude awakening whenever this stops Um Uh, but also my Partner works in emergency medical services. Oh, wow Yeah That's that's hard So He's on the front lines of this get it. Yeah Yeah, so that's the other reason I'm trying to be really careful about social distancing is I I'm not gonna tell him not to go to work. So Oh, right, of course. I mean he needs to go to work more than anybody needs to go to work He needs to go to work so I Here I am Yeah We all do the best we can right? Yeah. Oh, yeah I uh dropped something off at my parents house a couple weeks ago or last week And I I like talked to my mom through the fence from 10 feet away. Oh my gosh It was so weird. It was like, okay. Goodbye Yeah Yeah, seems odd, but I don't know. I mean like the whole 18 month thing like, you know what? If it's 18 months, it's 18 months, but It's just just good do it Yeah, yeah, it's honestly If I may the thing that's kind of scary for me is that I work in a Cultural nonprofit and we're gonna zoo zoos aquariums science museums Now they are places that also need our help now I see a lot of posts about restaurants and stuff like that Which also yes 100% those people need your support But these places that physically can't be open to the public But have people on their payroll like myself. Hello But also in the case of aquariums and zoos have animals that we have to feed and care for Yeah, right that, you know, normally we depend on our visitors to help pay for that. We're nonprofits but um, they you know, we also count on memberships and stuff like that and donations and so If if you have it go go move go over to those people's websites I know a lot of cultural institutions are putting up free materials to help Teach your kids at home and all this kind of stuff and if you can support them in turn It's a it's a really cool thing to do because if we're really closed down for 18 months It's gonna be tough for all of these cultural institutions to stay afloat for 18 months without visitors Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean just yeah, you can't you can't really turn off all the lights, right? I mean or turn down the heat you've got animals. You have to keep healthy and feed and oh, yeah I want to show you my pet dog. Oh, yeah, this is the this is spot He's pretty feisty, yeah, but you know, uh, he's he does like his his petting and stuff like that You don't let him lick your face. I don't think did you can you get him from boston boston dynamics? He never licks my face. I I can't reveal that but maybe Maybe Yeah, uh, yeah jpl participated along with a bunch of other a group a team group in the Subterranean robot challenge where they basically They have all these things like different challenges one was like a driving challenges Like can you make an automated car? Um, another one was like a disaster challenge where you make a robot would like Go through a disaster area with like pipes falling down and can you move it aside? And this one was like going underground into like a mineshaft or something and and search for objects and then Have robots like go out of the line of sight and still keep driving automatically Operating and then come back and transmit like what they found um and uh jpl with mit and case and a bunch of other people um one first place So that was pretty exciting, but they they literally like they went through one round And then boston dynamics to give them a spot and we took spot. We're like, oh here Here's our here's our findings tracking software and in hardware stuck it on top And we sent it in and we won a first place because of pretty much because of that Because we like wow like spots really good about walking over things and going downstairs And one of the big challenges was going downstairs and spot was just like Looks looks walks right down. No problem. The other robots really struggled Um, so it was anyways, uh, it was really kind of cool Um, man was like they brought them out into the auditorium. So we get to like walk around them and uh, you know Play with spot and it and actually it's you know, it's basically like a headless dog. So it's kind of weird I've always thought about about big dog too. Like I want to put a head on it so bad. So I know where to look I want to know where to look it in the eyes Doesn't matter it front and it's back is could be it's back and it's front. It doesn't matter I simultaneously really want to meet these things and also know that I'll probably spend most of the time screaming if I do Yeah Well, they they like it has some like automated program and it just was like running around in a circle and Doing all these like tail wag like motions and it was cool and creepy and like Do I sit do I run do I go forward? I don't know But um, it's always I always find it interesting like they They um, you know, they tried to make the legs like Like a human would be um, in terms of how the uh, the the knee bent But they wound up putting it in reverse and that worked better for some reason Um, that was a better way for them to figure out the mobility, which is always Odd to me, but uh, anyways, yeah, they're really fascinating That that I remember watching motion Yeah, I watched one of the uh, the I think it was the disaster response competition where they had to open doors and And That was the heart. It was so funny. There was somebody put together a compilation Of all the robots in the competition trying to do this thing and it was like one robot after another was like falling over Yeah Not making it and so it actually that video made me feel a lot better about the state of robots If I'm close the door I have time I have time. Yes Yeah, as long as the boston dynamic robots aren't after me. Oh my goodness. Yeah Yeah, well there Way more advanced than you'd expect You would want them to be But then again, of course, you'll see those videos online like oh this robot cut this thing out of the air It's like yes, that was one out of a thousand tries that actually succeeded So I like, oh, thank you. All right. Good. We're uh, safe for another I don't know 10 days or whatever Yeah I always like to joke up, you know mars is the only planet entirely inhabited by robots Um, so we're safe in that way for a little bit You take a lot of smart robots and we we send them to another planet so they can't take over Yeah, I like to think about that though that that just like All these eventually there's going to be so many robots on mars that are just passing each other. Oh, hey, carl How's it going? Yeah Is they have they have their we have our own mars colony already. It's just all robots That's right. It's all robots and there'll be so many robots someday You'll be like like they're like humans want to land and they're like robots. No This is ours. No, we're good. Go to Europa Yeah, you're covered in weird stuff. We don't want here. So just get out humans. You're weird You're gooey. I don't like gooey Anyways, I know people want to go to space, but you know, there's so much there's a good argument to be had that spaces for robots Yeah, that's where the robots thrive You know, they don't breathe. That's a big help. Um, they don't need to eat per se I mean energy they need energy certainly, but they don't need food. Um, they never they never want to come back Right. I mean they they're happy out there. Yeah doing their job Yeah, like everyone's like, you know, I was like, oh the mars rover. Why don't you bring it back? It's like because it was built for mars. It is not made for earth It would not last on earth for very long. I can't survive here dad. I'm not meant to be here You're not my real planet. Um, you know, uh, yeah, so they're really they're made to they You know, in a sense they love mars, you know, I mean, it's it really is a place for them So they really we wouldn't want to bring them back per se other than the fact that it's super expensive It would be terribly difficult. Um But uh, yeah, we'll just bring back their poop. Yeah. Yeah We only take their excrement that's all we can do back up their poop. That's good. Yeah. It's a trade, right? Give us science and we'll take your poop. I don't know. Um, something like that Which one is the one that um, sings its happy birthday to itself every day. Oh, uh, curiosity. Yeah, there's um, uh, the uh, chemman, which is the uh, It's a x-ray diffraction instrument. Um, so basically it has a little sample container where it puts the rocks in the the the ground up rock and it and it vibrates And when it vibrates they shoot x-rays through it and they can look at the different minerals The patterns that the minerals make in an x-ray shape. Um, but because it's a vibrator, you know a vibration object It can, um, you know make different tones And so they they played essentially the right frequencies to to have it sing happy birthday So this is what I'm wondering about though. It's like who is like, oh, let's let's not launch it yet Let me just finish this one thing I'm gonna make sure that that it can sing happy birthday. You can sing yeah, um I don't know, you know, you gotta keep yourself entertained Um, I I don't know who originally thought that that was a good idea. Um But uh, yeah, it happens. Um, that's very funny. That's something that someone decided to do before Yeah, we we do lots of things. Um, the the the fun thing I like to tell is about the the wheels on msl on curiosity Um, the original wheels used to have the letters jpl written on the wheel And so, you know, when you would drive along you'd be like printing jpl all over the surface Um, well, uh, someone found that out at at nasa headquarters and like no no no no you can't do that labeling We're like, okay so instead we put a whole pattern On the wheels and the whole pattern happens to be Morse code And it also happens to spell j p and l So Happens to we strictly, uh, still print jp on the surface all the time. Um You know, but uh for fun. It's it's it's navigation marks. We need to we needed to to calculate how far we've driven Yeah, but um, you know, it's okay. It's fun. Make your mark on Mars. Yeah. Yeah. Have you written your name on Mars yet? No Not I licked this rock although not anymore, you know, because uh social distancing Right. Um, but anyways, um, we don't have this social distance from rocks rocks. Yeah, it's definitely rocks on Mars But if I lick a rock and then what if someone else licks the rock that's anyways, um Sorry too many people licking rocks too many people look at only actually probably licking rock is the The least of the worries because the geologists are separated enough from each other that it doesn't happen Yeah, we just can't congregate together. Otherwise, we might have looked the same rock. It's Not an improbable number. Um, almost not even jokingly Because that's what we do. Um, you know, you gotta taste the minerals. It's very important. It's an extra It's an extra sense. Um, yeah, literally Yep tastes like hematite. Mmm. Rusty red Mostly yes Mostly that Mostly that. All right. I'm gonna head to bed and Do the do the evening things. Um Blair, I think I'm good for tomorrow not tomorrow Next week the next day The next the next one was that was that the one that you originally weren't going to be at? Yeah, but everything's cancelled Yeah, yeah Yes, yeah So I was organizing a an in-person science communication conference called science talk And then we went oh, that's and it had a bunch of satellite events around it So Wednesday night, we were going to open registration on Wednesday And we had an event on Wednesday night and then the conference was Thursday and Friday and we had an event on Friday night and Then now we're like everything is cancelled, but I'm still doing the conference just virtually now. So That'll be Thursday that'll be Thursday and Friday. So I should be able to do the show Wednesday night Well, you could also you could you could push the Wednesday night show As a science talk affiliate event couldn't you as part of the virtual Sure We did it in conjunction in a live show at at um Alberta rose last year in conjunction with science talk. So like there we go It would actually be a way for us to support science talk again Just there we go. There's a great idea Blair All right. Well, good night everyone. Nice meeting you. Thank you so much. Have a lot of fun Take care. It was great to meet you tonight. Thank you so much. Good night. Great. Good night All right, Blair's still there I'm still here smiling Yeah I'm we're gonna go to bed. We're all gonna be healthy All the things have said like keep to your routines while working from home Like that's the first thing that goes away when you you're like number one I'm working from home. That is not my routine So I I recognize maybe in a week. I will be Ready to wake up at 5 45 and do my morning workout and then get in the show and then make but I'm no Also, because I've just There's a lot going on and I feel like I have this like low level anxiety and I need extra sleep You should let yourself sleep yourself right now And then eventually if I could get back to Normalizing my schedule, I will but otherwise Oh my goodness. Yeah, I mean They the the schools are closed and so Kai is home from school and his spring break was supposed to start next week So right now it's kind of like early spring break. And so I'm finding myself Oh, we don't have to get him to school at 8 in the morning and so I just Don't get up as early as I was getting up and now I'm finding. Oh, it's 8 30 And I'm still in bed and I don't want to get out of bed Yeah, yeah, my routine is my routine Be I think I mean because I have Kai home Yeah, and Marshall's home. So like I usually am alone all day long Right Like I'm alone alone I am the queen of the castle and now I'm like there's all these people in the house and they have needs Like they want me to make them lunch. What is that make your own lunch? Kai's old enough. He can make his own lunch I know we'll make myself a taco Is he is there is their distance learning happening yet or is this point? Is it still like, uh, we're figured it out Yeah, it's still too early. Um, but I assume after Probably after next week because that next week supposed to be spring break anyway I figure after next week they'll do something because they've closed school for the entire month of april at this point Yeah, oh dang. We haven't done that yet School is closed until april 28th Wow Well, governor Newsom did say, uh He's like, I won't be surprised if school doesn't come back till the fall Like suddenly everybody Suddenly all these children just they don't have get to go up a grade Look at you doing third grade again. I feel like that's Oh gosh Well, that's I'm trying to develop Things that teachers can use right now with my yeah time at home. We'll see but Uh, I have a lot of friends that are teachers I see them on social media setting up their own little distance learning nook and Trying to have regularly scheduled class time once a day where they get to meet up with the kids virtually It's Yeah, it's it's an interesting world. But also again, like imagine even five years ago this happening All these video conferencing softwares and and the speed of internet and all this kind of stuff Was not where it is now And that would not even have been an option Yeah, but it's pretty amazing that the technology that zoom is absorbing it as well as it is right now Yeah Absolutely. Yeah that all these platforms are yeah, it's Fingers crossed it stays that way. Yeah I'm trying to decide if I like my white balance or my blue balance Do I like to be rosier Am I too orange? I should go I need to go to bed. You need to go to bed. We need to get our rest because You know going into the dark it will make the bad memories go away. Yes Let's erase the bad memories Go to sleep go into the dark. That's right. Um All right, hopefully we'll be joined by Justin next week. Hopefully Yes, if Justin is still He's not around in the chat room anymore telephone pole or something by his bus and Yeah, well, he seemed to jump in at one point. His video was there. So I'm just I don't know. I'm wondering if we can work on it this week But yeah, well, I'm around Yeah We need to be Oh Ali you're watching the show. Oh my goodness That's awesome Alison She she runs science talk. She says we can totally do twist next week as a pre sci-talk event. Thanks Blair We can have a separate chat room just for the sci-talk attendees That'd be fun H neck Work overnight. Oh, no, no bad memories I hope everyone has a wonderful night. Um It was it was a good science week. Hi Ali. I see you in the chat room That's fun. I love that I love it when I'm like, I know that person. I know that name. Hello It's what the whole our twist chat room is and more and more often. I'm recognizing names in our youtube chat room But yeah That's awesome. There's some I thank people for joining us Yeah, yeah Yeah, Blair enjoy working from home if you do need a conversation or anything, you know a zoom coffee or something Let me know. Yeah, okay Yeah, coffee wine Uh-huh. Exactly. Yeah Exactly. Let me know. I mean like I said, I've been training for this. Yes It's the it's the actual interacting with people. That's the difficult part. No, I was reflecting I feel like this is when you really tried you really learn Who the extreme extra birds are Through this Yes, because it's the person who's texting you five times a day asking how your day is going. Hey, that's me I'm doing that Hey Like I took a break from um My work today just to FaceTime my mom so I could show her the dog Because I was just like So Anyway We're gonna get through it We are gonna we're gonna look back on this time and hopefully we're gonna go, you know No matter what those in charge may have done or not done Communities banded together Yes And and protected those at risk I'm really hoping that that we can look back with pride on this time I think so. I hope so My fingers are crossed Yep, so far I've seen very good positive things. Hopefully it just gets better Communities bonding together. Let's do that. Let's all work together to get through this together Yep, okay All right, and with that Good night Blair. Good night everyone. Good night Kiki Good night Kiki Good night everyone Thank you so much for watching the show tonight and we do hope that you stay sane Stay safe stay healthy and try to find ways to put a smile on your face every day We'll see you again next week For more this week in science. Good night. I gotta hit the button again I keep forgetting to hit the button again. You just keep waving Blair. Are you sure? Are you sure?