 It says we're live. Now I have to wait for the signal from the chat room. It's like the bat signal, except it's the chat signal. I have a slight fever tonight, so I'm drinking my tea and I'm going to- Do you really? Yes. Oh no. This is why the internet is wonderful because I won't get any of you sick. That is true. We can have a wonderful conversation. I'm still getting over my fever from post-mission. Oh, man. We'll talk about that. Yeah. It looks like we are live. The chat signal has gone live. So we are going to start this show in three, two, this is twist. This week in Science, episode number 659, recorded on Wednesday, February 21st, 2018. Mars-like conditions. I'm Dr. Kiki, and tonight on This Week in Science, we are going to fill your heads with a Martian, depression, and wine, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Space, the final frontier, that and the microbiome. One lives in us, the other we may one day live in. And yes, yes, I know we already live in space and are thriving as a species on a habitable planet in space, but it wasn't always so. We spent billions of years evolving to make it habitable. When I say we, of course, I don't mean us. I mean, all the life forms that came before us, we are but the recipients of evolution's bounty, not the creators of it. If we humans cast a long shadow, it is only because it is so late in the day. Now, we are reaching an age of opportunity to truly test what no one has tested before. Can we survive on a less habitable planet, an inhospitable planet, unaided by billions of years of habitable evolution? Can we translate what we have learned here on Earth to the rest of the cosmos? And if we are to try this, if we are to make the attempt, and if we are to succeed, it will be because of This Week in Science. Coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I wanna learn everything. I wanna fill it all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I wanna know what's happening. What's happening. What's happening. This week in science. What's happening. What's happening. What's happening. This week in science. Yeah, science to you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin, Blair, Ryan, and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We're back once again to talk about all the exciting science that has occurred that we wanna talk about on this show. That's basically it. That's what we wanna talk about. Today, I have stories about gender differences, a bit about depression and wine, because you know, I'm gonna wine a little bit. And we also have an interview with Dr. Ryan Kubrick. And that'll be in just a few moments. Justin, what'd you bring? I've got one really big story about ancient humans. And there's other stuff if we have time, but this is a really big story. All right, I like really big stories. They fill up the show. Blair, what's in the animal corner? I brought snap, crackle and popping shrimp. And I brought some skin bacteria. You just stay right over there in your recording area. Stay right over there. Bacteria and shrimp. Stay over here with my bacteria. Yes. All right, as we jump into the show, everyone, I want to remind you that you can subscribe to the Twist podcast on iTunes and Google Play, podcast portal, Stitcher, Spreaker, Tune In. You can find us on YouTube and Facebook. And the way you do all of this is looking for this week in science. You can also go directly to twist.org. Twist.org to subscribe, super easy. And without any further ado, I would like to welcome our guest to the show, Dr. Ryan Kobrick is an assistant professor. Let's see if I can speak this evening. He is an assistant professor of space flight operations, formerly commercial space operations in the College of Aviation at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach and principal investigator of the ERAU Spacesuit Utilization of Innovative Technology Program Laboratory, which is the suit lab. He's the chairman of the board and president of Yuri's Night, which is a nonprofit organization with the aim of connecting hundreds of thousands of people around the world to celebrate and honor the past of human space flight while building a stairway to the future. We all like that. And he just recently participated in a mission to the Mars Society's Mars Desert Research Station. Ryan, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. It's great to have you on the show. Thank you so much for joining us. I saw some Facebook posts from you a few weeks back prior to your Mars mission and it piqued my interest. And so I'm glad that we can have you on now that you're back, hopefully from a successful mission to learn about what you have done. So just to get started, can you tell us a little bit more about what you do? Sure. Well, what I do most of the time is I'm a professor at Embry Riddle and very busy with our program and teaching courses and running our lab, the suit lab. Gotta have a cool acronym. That's why I came up with the Space Utilization of Innovative Technology Laboratory. It's part of the, I guess, the key parts of having a lab in the space industry. And so we look at how to improve human performance for space flight. So in particular, we have an interest in both EVA and IVA. EVA is extravecler activity where the astronauts outside of the main spaceship, usually wearing a spacesuit on a surface of a planet or it could be in zero G like working on the space station. And then IVA, intravecler activity is when the astronauts inside doing activities might be science maintenance, could be all the above or all at the same time sometimes. So we really care about how do we make astronauts efficient? How do we make sure they can serve their energy and figure out what's the magic formula for how much workload they can actually handle physically and mentally. And so within the lab, we look at things like range of motion, how much the body can actually move with a space suit or without a space suit. That's kind of the main comparison that we look at. But we also look at ways that we can improve even data collection out in the field. So we can definitely kind of talk about that obviously from the recent Mars simulation that I was just a part of. It was over at the Mars Desert Research Station which is in the middle of nowhere, Utah. It was actually my fifth rotation out there in my sixth Mars simulation. The ones that occur in Utah are usually two weeks long. They're very short. So you're not, you do get isolated and you are kind of, you're very remote. But the key is the location is very close to a Mars like terrain. It's an ancient lake bed, the geology, the biology, radiation, the type of experiments that you would conduct in the field. They're analogous to ones that you would do on the red planet. And the operations of day to day and how you balance your, not just your schedule but your diet and everything else are really important to figure out. And so by having these short two week rotations, they can try lots of permutations of different crews. See what might be the right stuff for a future Mars crew, which personality traits kind of rise to the top as being the most value for a crew. And really the problem solving that's involved with being in that kind of environment. The other simulation I did was actually a 100 day Mars simulation in the Canadian Arctic. And that was at the flashlight Mars Arctic Research Station on Devon Island. Again, that's analogous to being on Mars because it's an impact crater. So that act exposes layering of the history of our planet. And so that comparative planetology of looking at the history of our planet is the same thing you would do on the red planet. And up there, there's no life. I think we saw one bird over four months and maybe some lichen on the rocks, but that was it. No polar bears. We did see polar bear tracks at one point but both of those locations are run by the Mars Society. And so their goal is to obviously get humans to Mars and this is one of their hands-on activities. So obviously directly spoke to me as an engineer, scientist who likes to be getting their hands dirty or the glove in this case was something that I felt like I needed to go back to because it's been, it had been almost 11 years since my previous Mars simulation. So going back now as a researcher as opposed to 11 years ago as a student, what's the difference for you? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, when I went the original bunch of times, I was a grad student. So I was looking at what potential research areas we could look at and how you would train a crew from Mars. So I was working with the Mars Society Canada with a program we developed called Expedition Mars or Exploration Mars. It's been over 10 years. So I don't know that. Mars, that's the, that was the, what we remember. And that was a great program to be part of learning about what it takes to how do you train a crew in the field? But now I'm bringing, you know, research topics that are partnered with NASA and other companies. And I wouldn't mind just kind of going through those projects. People might be interested in some of them. And I can also show some pictures a little bit later on too. But just to kind of go through them at kind of high speed here. The first one was actually a dust experiment with the NASA Glenn Research Center looking at dust load. So how much dust gets into the habitat through the airlock? Because the astronauts are gonna be in and out of this habitat all the time. And every time they do that, they're gonna bring dust in from out in the field. Utah is a dusty environment. Mars is very dusty. The composition is different, of course, between here and Mars. But Mars actually might have a lot finer of a regolith and the small particles of dust might be a lot worse. And so the reason why we care about how much dust gets in the habitat is that not only can it affect equipment, get it dirty, clog things, prevent things from functioning, maybe even short circuit things, but it has a huge impact on our health. It would be the same as exposure to asbestos or possibly other toxins in the air that would get into your lungs and into your tissues, irritate your eyes. So on the moon, they actually had a major problem with dust that kind of led to my PhD research in Colorado on lunar dust abrasion, where the dust, there's no weathering on the moon because there's no atmosphere. So micrometerates smash into the moon, pulverize the minerals, turn them into glass-like shards. So on the moon, it's essentially this half meter of regolith that's just made up of all these fine-grain glass-sharp particles. So they stuck into the Apollo suits, they scratch visors. They were covered in it, got into the habitat. It was actually pretty dangerous. It actually led to small leaks in the suits. The quit was getting obviously dirty. Some of the controls they couldn't read through their helmet. And that was just for a nice short excursion. So if you imagine us going to Mars for a long duration, that's filled up, the wear and tear is gonna be a lot worse. So it's really important to understand what's going on with all the dust dynamics. So along those other projects that I conducted with the Final Frontier Design, their spacesuit company out in New York City in the Brooklyn Navy Yard was looking at their gloves. They're called, let me see if I can share my screen. It's better to show it off. I don't even know how to share my screen. I'll figure that out as we go. There we go, fair screen, application window. Let's go with hangouts. So you're gonna get that picture and a picture and a picture. Let's see. Can you choose the window? I hope so. Are you guys seeing a photo here? Seeing black right now, black. Okay, just give it a second. See if it pops up for us. It says it's sharing. Okay, so. Hit lies. Yeah, oh well. So I can't, unfortunately my camera's on the laptops. I can't like turn it around at my own screen. I could hold up my phone, but that would be a little excessive. So let's just turn off the screen sharing. So I can point to where those pictures are located for people to help them find it. We are testing these gloves. They're called TMG, a thermal micrometeorite garment. And it's the outer layer that the astronauts put over their pressure suit to protect them usually in an environment like around the space station from micrometeorite impacts and from the thermal extremes. And so I was wearing them out in the field for all of our simulated days or space walks to see how they would wear and tear. So that was pretty cool to get to wear real space gloves during the mission as well. The two other main projects that I ran, one was on space suit range of motion. So we were looking at how the range of motion differed between someone not wearing a space suit and someone wearing one of these simulated spacesuits. And so the most notable things are usually in the shoulders. They're not pressurized simulated spacesuits, but they are heavy. They weighed I think 25 pounds and 35 pounds. And we usually use the 35 pound ones because they had a better, I guess you could say look and feel to a real space suit. And so it's a lot of equipment. And then if you add in all your field equipment, one of our crew member Sarah Jane Pell actually had a Insta 360 camera and adding that and everything else added another 25 pounds. So she had 55 to 60 pounds of gear in space suit on during her field work. So we looked at range of motion and we also looked at EVA metrics. So GPS data, how much distance was traversed, the different types of spacewalks that we were conducting, biometrics as well, like heart rate, respiratory rate and everything else. So we had our hands full and glass full, whatever you want to say, we were busy. Those were just the projects that I brought. Each of the investigators brought something as well. Everyone was alumni from the International Space University. And that's how our crew was put together. We had a selection from applicants that brought or suggested their own professional research. So our crew came together based on them already having projects being in the Mars simulation. Do you know how crews are usually chosen at the Mars Desert Research Station? Yeah, it is a little bit of pay to play, but there is, I guess a SNF test. Is this like a real team, a real project? So teams would apply as a group usually and the applications are ready for next year already in starting, that'll be starting in November. So it goes through like roughly November through April because it gets way too hot in the summer in Utah. And the Mars Society will look at those applications and selects based off of previous experience or their experience, those projects. And I think that they usually have more applications than there are spots available for. And then if individuals are interested, like if you don't have a group and you're thinking about, hey, I really want this cool experience, then what you can do is apply as an individual and they can see if they can fit you onto one of the crews, because some of them might not apply with a full group of six. So you might be able to fit someone on or two people on a group of four or, you know. So there's a few different ways of getting involved with that. I've just been told that there's an echo. Uh-oh. We didn't have earlier. So I'm gonna just stop for a brief moment and see if we can troubleshoot that. Are you still hearing me through your headphones? Yep. Yes, okay. And now the echo is gone, is it? It's gone because it's very light. Is there sound coming out of speakers? Not... I don't know. Hello. Hello, check, check, check. Check, check, check, check. Yeah, I think it's gone. That's weird. Blair's video popped up while I was talking. So maybe it came through hers because usually it goes to the speaker, like the... Yeah. Huh. I don't know. Okay, we're good. We're back to being great. Yeah. So, Mars, Mars, Mars. Oh, now you have an echo again, Kiki. Hopefully it's not too bad. Yeah, Blair, you talk to Ryan for a second. Okay. Oh, yeah, I can hear myself now too. That's very interesting. I'm checking my settings right now. It looks like... It looks like my settings are normal. I don't know. It could be from switching back to the screen share, but... No, I don't think it's from the screen share. Okay. That wouldn't make sense. But it's after we start talking for a while, the echo goes away. Okay, let's just talk really loud and really fast. So Ryan, for me, has not echoed at all. No, Ryan has not echoed. No, it was just you, Kiki. And then I'll make a little bit Blair right there, but I don't hear myself echoing either. Nope. This is great. Oh, good. Hot Rod, you're echoing too now. Sorry. Is the chat or not echoing our conversation? Echo, echo, echo. Okay, we're just getting... This is part of the Google Hangouts magic. So I think we may have to deal with a little bit of echo and hopefully we'll overcome it with persistence. Yes, yes, yes. Okay, so back to where we were. You were talking about the Mars missions and how people get selected. So I'd love to know what it's like day to day. You've told us about your research and what the projects you were working on, but what is it like to simulate being on Mars? Sure. So the easiest thing to talk about is kind of the schedule, at least as a starting point. So coming from our household with the toddler and not exactly having perfect nights, if you will, and maybe not actually us, not necessarily sleeping to the night, I joked that I was gonna get to have my two week Martian getaway, so I could get my night. And I was wrong about that, just because of the comfort level and things like that, but our schedule was very flexible, but we were all kind of keen workaholics that knew we only had a limited amount of time in this unique location. So what we would do is we kind of have our eight o'clock or 830 briefing, and usually we would do that with breakfast. So it was just very casual, like this is what we're gonna do today. These are our objectives. And so everyone was clear what the major things that needed to be accomplished during the day. So there's no surprises later in the day, like, wait, why are we doing this study? That's what William talks about. So that communication is really important. And so we usually had two of these EVAs or field space walks per day. So one in the morning, and we would start that roughly at 10 a.m. We'd always say, we're trying to get out the door at 10 a.m. in the air. But we were like 15 minutes late. We were just fashionably late for all our space walks. And they usually last, excuse me, three to four hours. And then there would be kind of an overlap between the two groups where we would have an evening, an evening, excuse me, an afternoon EVA. And so like one group would be having lunch and getting ready for their afternoon in the hab, where the other one would be finishing up their EVA and then coming in and having their lunch, kind of a late lunch. So it is pretty hard work. After all that, it's rough five o'clock, six o'clock because we're not allowed to be out in the spacesuits after dark. And at that point we're kind of, I guess you could say winding down or kind of cleaning up a few things. But our crew somehow got into the habit of not really doing an earlier dinner. And from seven to nine, there's kind of this window with mission control or mission support to check in, write reports, answer questions, tell them what's going on, what problems might be occurring in the habitat. And usually we ended up spending that entire two hour window writing these reports. So we actually didn't eat dinner until like nine o'clock at night every night. At that point, I would then go down into the lab and do even more work, especially on the dust detector experiment because I had to change the filters every time I ran the experiment. And so I usually didn't get to bed till like 10, 30, 11 at the earliest meeting, I didn't actually get to sleep till midnight. So it was two weeks straight of that kind of a schedule. You're on Mars, right? Yeah. You've got to get all of the work done while you can. But presumably you're coming home again with this one. Yeah, exactly. You rest when you're back on earth. So the architecture for a Mars mission is probably going to be different than that though. Most different architectures we've looked at for Mars would include a long surface day. You might hear things like the Mars 500 study where they locked people up for 500 days in Russia to look at the human factors and group dynamics. And that year to two year window, if you will, might be the optimal window. I mean, of course, colonization we're moving there, right? We're going to be there a long time. But for that longer duration, you wouldn't be out in the field twice a day. You wouldn't even be out in the field once a day. I like to say an EVA today keeps the doctor away, but realistic exercise if you weren't out in the field. And also, these spacesuits only have a certain lifetime. So they're going to be directly tied to the science that needs to be conducted. So if there are 10 or 20 specific science sites that need to be done repetitively, then the suit use would be targeted for that. And of course, for maintenance. And you would try to have a maintenance specific EVA where you would pile on a bunch of repairs at the same time. The only difference is that you're dependent on your life support on Mars. So some things need to be fixed immediately. So I think one of the biggest traits of not just a crew, but the mission support and everything else is flexibility and adaptability to things that are going to go wrong and things that'll change. Yeah, I can't imagine. There's got to be a difference though in the mental state that goes into, I know I'm going to be coming home in two weeks or even a hundred days. And this is a return mission. And if there's a breach of our living quarters, I'm still going to be alive because there's air here. Yeah, absolutely. That psychological boundary is available in other analogs that we see out there. So right off the coast of Florida here, we've got a curious reef base. And NASA actually run week to two long simulations called NEMO, that's an acronym. It's like NASA extreme environment, something, M-O. And mission operations, I believe. And those ones specifically are dependent on their life support. They're underwater, they're 60 feet underwater, they're saturated. You can't just rise to the surface in an emergency kind of situation. So I mean, you could, but then you'd have to go right into a decompression chamber. And that's a lot more realistic to being dependent on your life support. And for the International Space Station, it's no coincidence that the missions are six months long is because that's the approximate time we would be in zero G to get to Mars. And that's obviously a real space mission. But it's also an analog for preparing for a Mars mission. There's a lot of other Mars places around the world that are doing theirs, but of course they have the same advantage of if something goes wrong, you can still breathe the air. So there's a major base that was set up in Hawaii, the High Seas Program, that was set up by my colleague, Kim Benstead, who I was in the Arctic with for our 100 day mission. There's now one in Poland that they've set up. Mars Society Israel just finished their simulation in the Mac-Tesh Ramon crater. And I know I'm figurating others, but there's a lot of professional programs too with like the European Space Agency, with their Pangea and Caves program, and also ones here in the U.S. with, oh boy, I'm gonna forget it, but it's a center and it's an indoor basically lockdown that they do about 30 days for. The name might come to me, but the point is there's a lot of different ways and different variables that you can test for a Mars simulation, and the idea is to how many of those can you actually mimic to get as close to a Mars mission as possible? So 10 years ago I kind of half-joked that the best way of doing a Mars simulation would be to launch a crew to the ISS for six months, then have them land in the Arctic for two years, and then launch the ISS for another six months, and then come back home. Wow. And the problem there is that they can still talk to home with a short delay where on Mars we might have a 10 minute communication delay each way, meaning that if I were to talk to you guys, it would take us 20 minutes to get a signal back and forth. Oh man. So that's a very real hardship that a crew is gonna have to face with their friends and family, and so we did simulate that during our mission, a 20 minute delay. That was, I had to record videos for my son and for family members and vice versa. They had to try to record videos, but our bandwidth was minimal there. It was slow and we actually bought extra data and we couldn't even use it because the bandwidth was too slow to even use the data. So those are real limitations that have to be remote locations. That's the best service provider available in that remote Utah. And I'm sure that there are way more expensive satellite subscriptions that could be done, but it kind of helps with the simulation too because it pulls you apart from that ability to communicate and find data at a fingertips like a quick Google search or whatever. Have to get back to flipping through the card system at the library again. Yeah, so the one thing that we did for our Arctic simulation 10 years ago was that we assumed that the Google index would be updated every night to your mainframe. So you Google, do a search and see that top level, but then it would take 20 minutes for you to click each time. So the way we work today, we don't work fully synchronous anyway. We were kind of in a generation work style of we click on a bunch of things and we let them load. Like we want that video in HD, so we let it sit there and load and then we go do something else while that's loading. And so if you have enough of these tasks open, then you're, if you can get into the right work, have it cycle of course, because it's hard to do that. You could actually get to a point where you're constantly able to get information that you need. It reminds me of dial-up for sure, you know? Where the lines of the image load slowly over several minutes. Yeah, it felt that way a little bit too. Where are we with the state of our technology currently? Was it while you were in this mission that SpaceX launched the Falcon Heavy rocket? Yeah. So they're now looking at their BFR, right? And so this is gonna bring down the cost. It's going to also be huge and really enable us to shoot things out into Mars orbit really easily. But that's getting there, that is not living there. So realistically, where are we in the technological process of going to Mars? If we wanted to basically jump on the school bus and just get there and basically survive the school trip, if you will, if we could do that. The chemical propulsion hasn't changed that much in 60 years. And it would be great to have a faster ride, but more realistically, it would be better to figure out how we can adapt the human body to deal with just the longer duration mission. Radiation will be an issue, that's one of the topics. But, you know, that's kind of hard to deal with because you can kind of handle solar particle events because you can get some warning on them. But galactic cosmic rays are coming from every direction in all the time. So that dose is gonna happen no matter what. And so that has to be an acceptable risk that the astronauts take when they go on one of these missions. So technology-wise, you know, not quite there. The proper, even having the proper vehicle to land a large amount of mass on the surface of Mars is still kind of under development. We don't really know if that's the next step of if the BFR will actually do that or not. And I'm not even gonna speculate, you know, I hope it happens, but I don't know when that will happen, that's not a short timeline at all. But between the Falcon Heavy and even the SLS, even though it'd be only every other year, we have large vehicles to get infrastructure into space to figure out how to actually solve these problems. And as you guys might be aware with the new kind of direction coming out of the Space Council, the newly appointed Space Council, the target might be the moon first anyway, as it goes towards Mars. And I'm definitely in the camp of Mars is the proper and ultimate destination. But personally, I mean, I've done all my research on the moon and I'm a lunatic. I've spent a year on the moon on the research base, you know, doing, even if I was a space janitor for a year, that's cool with me. But I've always, you know, I've always looked up at the moon and dreamed about it. So for me, that has a better connection to just on a personal level, but on a humanity need to think about our, not just our survival, but our eventual learning and expansion that Mars is definitely the destination that we should be thinking about. Yeah. And if in the timeframe of your being able to go, would you go? To Mars. Or to the moon. Yes. So for with Mars, it all depends on life. So I kind of feel that at this point in my life that my kid or kids or whatever happens with our family need to be at least 18 and capable adults of making their own decisions before I run off and do something crazy with that. So it might be a mission that's realistic more and the upper levels of my career, if you will, or the upper. And by then I'll be half bionic anyway, because whatever half a meal go to Mars, I guess you could say, or you can send half me in advance, just as anyway. I think that that's more realistic. And so I'm not like, you know, when I all these opportunities kind of pop up for getting people signed up for different Mars activities. You know, Mars one was one of those to try to get people excited and signed up and become part of the selection process. I wasn't, I didn't even apply for it. I just didn't think it was the right thing for me at the right time. And if you look at, of course I wanna be an astronaut when I grow up, but if you look at all the astronaut selections and things that have happened, it's all, it's not just about your passion, your career and doing what you're passionate about, but it's all about timing. And there is that luck factor of when those things happen. Luckily, I'm a dual citizen. You can see that represent one of my two countries here in the other USA. So I know that the women's gold medal match is going on right now. So no matter what my team's gonna win, so that's pretty awesome. But, you know, being just, just, you know, with my background and everything else, I just kind of completely derailed what I was thinking about there, but it was a good, I got excited about hockey. Sorry. But the, with the Canadian selection, that's what I was getting. It was, it just recently happened. They picked two people. The last one before that was eight years ago. I'm in my upper 30s, so if it's another eight years, you can forget about it. I'll be too old. But I might have one more shot with like the US program, you know, just given statistics and everything else, but again, it depends on timing and what they need. They might need three geologists in the selection. And so it doesn't matter what your background is, because the timing might be completely off anyway. So it's great that people are going out there and getting all these cool spaceflight experiences, because they should, because the experiences that better connects them to what I feel is our future as humanity is in space exploration. And not only does it better attach them to what the experiences might be like, but helps them communicate to others what they might expect or what the future might actually unfold to look like. Yeah, and it's also just they got to send geologists. Yeah. Oh yeah. It's great pilots, pilots are gonna be great on the trip, but then once you're there, like what are they gonna do? They're gonna play golf. They got no idea. Definitely. I mean, the people that are on the mission, especially for the smaller pre-colonization type needs to be very specific and aligned with what we actually wanna get done. And to be honest, they're not just gonna be geologists. They're gonna be geologist entities that are also have a side hobby of putting car engines together. It's not, it's, how they used to say like jack of all trades, master of none, whatever, none. Well, I kind of think it's the other way around. It's more like the PhD of all trades and maybe the master of one or none, I don't know. But they're gonna have to have a lot of talent, that's for sure. Cross interdisciplinary talent. Right. So do you have advice for the youth of today who are coming up and getting excited by things like the Falcon Heavy launch and they're seeing the new space industry starting to just go for it? Yeah. Well, the youth today and their lack of rap music, not so bad. So if you're youth of today and you're watching and listening, my suggestion is to definitely look at which areas you're most excited about. Are you excited about the rockets? Are you excited about the spacesuits? Are you excited about the satellites and the communication and getting better bandwidth and high speed in that part of technology? Are you interested in the arts and how we portray that message through entertainment? Whatever specific areas that you start to gravitate towards, ha-ha, gravitate. Look into those more, get involved with them, try to find things that you can do that are hands on to, or gloves on to get even more energized about it so you can learn more about it. And I think that's the best route you can take. There are of course things that are space-like that everyone always recommends. Like if you talk to an astronaut, they'll tell you scuba diving is one of the closest things that you can do to kind of learn about breathing and underwater and life support and how the body deals with oxygen and nitrogen saturations. And I definitely agree with that. Scuba is awesome. It's great for simulating moonwalks and everything, which we've done in a study abroad program in Greece on the bottom of the GNC, which is awesome. Right, and then it's your excuse. You're like, I'm going to go to this beautiful place to go scuba diving for science. Astronaut training, yeah. So yeah, go scuba diving. It's astronaut training. Get on a roller coaster. It's astronaut training. I mean, it's important too. If you think or want to be an astronaut when you grow up and hopefully everyone still does a little bit, it's good to know what your limitations are. Are you going to find out that you're claustrophobic? And so you might not want to over focus things that are related to the human side of becoming like an astronaut on space flight. Or will you discover something about yourself that might make you the next, you know, the first person to walk on the surface of Mars? Because you've got that extra little thing that no one ever would even thought of. Yeah, I know so many people who wanted to be veterinarians who saw blood for the first time and fainted. You're like, well, got to find something else. So yeah, you need some practical experience. And if you're trying to go to space, you can't just go out there. So what's the closest thing? Absolutely, that's so interesting. I think that's really good advice. Now you've also gotten interested for years. I mean, the first time I met you in Colorado, you were getting Yuri's night going. It had been going for a few years and you were at the forefront of getting people excited about the history of humans in space. Yeah, so Yuri's night, the World Space Party happens every April 12th. It's coming up and it celebrates the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin, 1961. It was also actually the first space shuttle flew on April 12th, 1981. And so the creators of Yuri's night, George and Loretta Whitesides and Trish Gardner came up with this idea to bring people together around the world to celebrate human spaceflight on this kind of cosmic anniversary. It also happens to be Loretta's birthday so that probably influenced why. So inspired by this date, but that's part of it, right? It's your personal story that leads you to these activities. And so parties around the world celebrate in all different ways. There's everything from like barbecues to star parties to at NASA Ames, they had a giant concert with Pharrell and Nerf and that would have been awesome to go to. That was almost 10 years ago now, that particular party. And so yeah, in Colorado, I was involved with getting students involved with SEDS, the Students for Exploration Development of Space. And we ran a party at the bar where we had live music and we got bands that were student bands to play so they could get exposure and it was all done. Basically everything was done for free so we could get, we wouldn't have to charge cover and offer this party space experience. We were also involved with this planetarium's astronomy day. So we had like a thousand people coming through planetarium. We actually got astronaut Joe Tanner to talk about his Hubble mission. So we were showing the connection between astronomy and human spaceflight through their astronomy day. And then of course, how we connected was through the conference on World Affairs and having an opportunity to have someone like Loretta be a speaker there and also talk about the importance of human spaceflight and celebrating and bringing together artists and engineers to have this common link between not just our past and space but our future. I don't know, looking at where we are now I think we've got a big future in space. There are some people pushing really hard to make sure that we don't just stay here on this rock. Yeah, and I think patience is a big part of the industry. It's like different programs kind of get put on the shelf. I knew that when I finished my PhD and it was all lunar dust related. I graduated in 2010 and that was right when the constellation program was ended. And so the whole idea of lunar exploration was basically gone, but I knew that it wasn't gone. It was just being cycled to the next shelf and now it's coming back. So people that are involved in the space industry be patient or if you're just getting into space industry get be patient because the pace that you would want it to happen at is even though things are happening pretty awesomely rapidly right now it's probably not as fast as you think it's gonna happen. So all these big milestones that are happening boosters land, twin landings of them. Oh my gosh. Cool stuff, it's awesome. But yeah, just kind of keep an eye on the news. That's my other advice is to basically have your finger on the pulse for the space industry and that's a great way to know what might be coming up next. And I guess finally you had mentioned the International Space University. Can you tell us a bit about that? Sure, the ISU, the International Space University has I guess you could say three core programs. One is a master's program. So it's a year long in Strasbourg, France with a three month internship placement that occurs during it. So I did my internship placement with the X-Prize Foundation in Santa Monica with Peter Diamandis and that was back in 2003 up to the X-Prize wins of 2004. So I went back and got involved again. So really cool stuff. And they have a summer program that actually travels around the world and it's unique so they can offer it basically by roaming, it's like a roaming summer program. And it's like an intensive two months of team projects type work with like a hundred students from around the world. Most of the students for these programs are post undergraduate. So they're either in their, not necessarily have an undergraduate degree but are in their professional careers or just going into the master's level or maybe going back for a master's. Southern Hemisphere program that's currently being run in Australia. And so all these programs are a way of giving people the interdisciplinary knowledge to make them stronger, stronger workers or worker bees if you will in the space industry. And so the nickname for ISU is the Space Mafia because it's such a close kind of great connections and opportunities that exist. And I mean, our whole MDRS crew occurred because Renee, our team lead, Jerifi was a ISU alumni as well. But this is the third mission that she's put together of all alumni. That's neat. So you can get involved with the International Space University and that'll bring you right into the space industry, the new space. You get you those connections you might need. I think most of the connections I made were in that one year. The starting point at least for connections were in that one year. It helped being in Santa Monica with Peter because I mean, he pretty much knows everyone in the space industry. And my first meeting with him is I'll never forget it. We were actually living in his condo because he was traveling, but there's two into myself and another intern, Tom. And he had come back and he's like, okay, there's an event going on near Hollywood. And it was near the university. I think it was near the university. Anyway, it was, I think it was a meeting of like NSF, not NSF, National Space Society. Doesn't really matter. The exciting part was we were having a dinner at a deli with George and Loretta Whitesides or at the time Loretta Hidalgo. And that was really exciting. They introduced me to Yuri's Night and they're like, hey, we're running a space party in a few months. Do you think you're interested in volunteering? And I'm like, yeah, of course. So that's how I started getting involved with Yuri's Night. And then who walks in, but Buzz Aldrin. And so this is the, our first meeting theater is meeting George Loretta and Buzz all at the same table, having Mutzball Soup and yeah. So it's amazing. You never know what's gonna happen. Just gotta be kind of open to different opportunities. And I'm glad I said yes to Yuri's Night back in 2003. And it's been a wild trip. And I'm looking forward. I'm helping a team right now put together a Yuri's Night under Space Shuttle Atlantis for the first time on Friday the 13th out here at Kennedy Space Center. And take it, I think are officially on sale. The website's just in a soft launch right now, but yes, you can buy tickets and also for LA for under endeavor. So you could actually do two Space Shuttle Yuri's Night parties in one year this year. Gotta click. Yeah. One weekend to the next. I think it's like the sixth or seventh for one and then for the other one. Party across the nation underneath the Space Shuttles. Yeah. No big deal. No big deal. With astronauts, VIPs, you know, that's all cool. That's the way space rules these days. I think Nicole Stotz can be at both of the parties. And I think Bob Kibana, who's also the center director is also coming to the Florida party. So looking forward to, he actually did a year for us in Cape Canaveral when I was living there. So yeah, great, great connections. Just kind of, you know, everyone should always keep their doors open to talk to these cool people and never know what'll happen next. Yeah, interesting things, I'm sure. All right. We won't keep you up any later. I wanna talk about wine now though. Well, we look forward to someday having a 20 minute delayed conversation with you from Mars. Yeah, that would be good. But in the meantime. It seems to be no delay from here on the moon though. So yeah, no, this seems to be a great place to broadcast. Much closer, Justin, much closer. Yeah. You can send me up there as a correspondent if you need to as well, so. Okay, that's good. Because I know Justin doesn't wanna leave this planet, so. I'll do that. I'll wait until the singularity and then I'll just wait for the 10 minute delay to be beamed to Mars, that's what I want. That's right. I'm gonna wait, I'm holding up for that. Go be beamed into a virtual instance, living in a flash drive on Mars. Yeah. It'd be easy if you forget your keys, at least you can go back and get them. Yeah, great. Absolutely. 20 minute round trip. Yeah. Okay, Ryan, is there, where can people find out or keep track of your adventures in space? Sure. So my social media handle is rye in space, like pigs in space, so R-Y-I-N-S-P-A-C-E, and that's across all platforms. My lab is space suit up across all platforms, that's as it sounds, S-P-A-C-E-S-U-I-T-U-P. Then of course, Yuri's night is also Yuri's night, across all platforms, so that's why you are I-S-N-I-G-H-T, and you should be able to find the websites from those handles as well. And check out the photos that are there from my Martian adventure. There's a cool shot of gloves that I just added. I just finished photographing them for Final Frontier Design and shipped them back to work, so they can take a look at all the damage that I did to them. So yeah, so that's about it. And my website's the same, it's ryeinspace.com, social media is actually updated, where websites kind of lag a little bit sometimes. They sit there and are static for a lot longer. Exactly. And then there's lots of videos on YouTube. You might have to search for my full name, Ryan Kovrick, or ryecoby. YouTube doesn't really allow customization anymore, so there's a lot of cool time-lapse things that I put up there from the mission. Since the share screen didn't kind of pop up with, it didn't show those today, but definitely check those out. I hope people do. I hope people get excited about your adventures and go on to learn a lot from what you're doing. And I hope that you learn a lot from the research that you're doing. Always. Yes. Always a student. And stepping us ever forward into that brilliant future. So thank you so much for joining us tonight. We really appreciate your time. Thank you. Space. Woo-hoo! Ryan's back. Woo-hoo! We will talk with you all later. If you have questions, either send them to us or connect with Ryan online. We have a few more segments here to go. We still have a bunch of science news to talk about, but first we're going to have the wonderful segment of the show. This week in What Has Science Done For Me? All right, this one is from Kosti Ranki. Thanks to medical science and psychology, I am able to work as part of the community. I am diagnosed with minor schizophrenia and without medicine and therapy, I really do not know where I would be without them. Also as a bonus, I would like to thank computer science and engineering to be able to use these things called computers and have me able to gain a professional schooling in them. I have paper as a data gnome, which is a computer information, a technical computer information degree, professional school degree, but as I have schizophrenia, I am not able to work in my school profession, but I am able to take advantage of it and work in socially rehabilitative work projects as part of my therapy. Thank you, Kosti, for writing in. We appreciate that you have shared with us and shared with our audience and the fact that you're able to use these things called computers. Every day, I thank science and engineering for these things called computers. There would be no twist these days without them. So exactly, exactly. All medical science, psychology, all the things. We appreciate your openness. Everyone out there, open up to us. Let us know what science has done for you lately. We would love to hear from you. I wanna keep this part of the show going and I can't do it without you. So write in. You can write to me directly at Kirsten at thisweekinscience.com or you can send me a message at our Facebook page, This Week in Science on Facebook and let me know. Let me know, let us know. What has science done for you lately? I wanna know what science has done for you lately. I really do. I really, really do. But now it's time for us to take a break. We're gonna take a short break and then we will be back with all of the science, all of the wonderful science that you love. We've got wine and snap, crackled pop shrimp and all sorts of stuff coming up. Stay tuned for more This Week in Science. We're honored with more than intuition. The line of reason shows the way to go. The method to talk about the solicitations are the only thing time. We're on a pair of goggles and go look it for the things I couldn't see. Hello everybody. Thank you so much for joining us once again on This Week in Science. 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This last week a report came out from a couple of researchers. Gijbert Stutt of the UK and David Gehry of the United States put their minds together to try and analyze data about gender differences in the math and science fields for girls and boys. So there seem to be social factors that discourage women for pursuing careers in science and people have hypothesized it's things related to the culture of the scientific and math institutions. But we don't really know. Nobody's done a lot of these testing to find out all the factors. There are some tests, but we really don't know why there are fewer women in the maths and sciences than there are men. Now, Stutt and Gehry, they used information from the PISA test, which is the Program for International Student Assessment. It's a standardized test given to students in 71 countries around the world. And so this gives an international view of factors that are involved in the achievement of students and their analysis of data of students' skills in math, science and reading comprehension as well as assessment of the students' confidence in their abilities to do scientific analysis, found... But it's a really complicated situation. They found that in the more equal countries, countries in the world where there seem to be less... It seems to be less gender discrimination. The more egalitarian societies are, the fewer women go into the sciences. Yeah, so this survey that they looked at, they found that really, truly, the gender gap in science is very small. So girls and boys in this test, pretty much across the board, they were scoring about the same. 22 countries, boys outperformed girls in science. 19 countries, girls outperformed, boys in science. So this is really on a small number of countries' difference, and that could be the standard of error. And so there's... And why they were performing better or worse doesn't make any sense. There's no clear relationship between the results and the country's gender equality. They looked at students' relative strengths and they averaged scores for three subject areas and compared the score in each subject to the average to identify the student's strongest subject. So someone might be below average in reading comprehension, but be really high in math comprehension or science. And they found, among boys, it is more common that science is their strongest subject. Lebanon and Romania are the outliers in this situation. And in the 19 countries where girls perform... And this was true also in the 19 countries where girls outperformed boys on the science test. So in the countries where the girls outperformed boys, it was still the boys' better subject. In math, the analysis favored boys... The word said everything else, even worse. Right. In math, the analysis favored boys in every single country. And in reading, girls came out in every single country. And so even in situations where girls outperformed boys in science, they outperformed them in reading by even more. Yeah. And so, but then why? Just because of this kind of performance level, how does that explain women pursuing careers? And it doesn't. And so they think that there are social factors involved. In 76% of the countries they looked at, boys expressed a bigger interest in science. And this was more pronounced in countries with high gender equality. Additionally, boys expressed a higher confidence in their ability to figure out, to analyze scientific problems, even if it wasn't their top subject. Boys tended to have a higher confidence level or a self-confidence measure than girls did. Stuart and Giri think that in these countries where there's high gender equality, the countries also have very high levels of economic security or at least they have a very high a measure of social safety net. And so they think the researchers argue that females may not pursue degrees in the sciences in these countries because they don't, because even though those sciences, engineering, math careers may give them nice paychecks, they don't need to do that. They don't feel the need to. Whereas in other countries where the economic security is less, you want to get a good degree, you want to get a good job, you want to be able to support, you want to bring money in and have stability of some sort. They don't have data that actually drives us home, but this is what they are arguing. The researchers are arguing. But anyway. So a couple of things. I know, I just bring it up because this is fascinating. Yeah, so there's obviously, humans are complicated, societies are complicated. There's a lot of factors that goes into this. But one is this feedback loop of a lack of representation of women in the scientists leads to less women becoming scientists. So it's an uphill battle to be sure. And I'm sure that that has something to do with it. But the other thing that I think we try in an effort to push equality, we don't address the fact enough that men and women are biologically different for even just the sole reason of the fact that the woman is the oven for the baby. Right? Wait a second, what is that? Hold on, hold on. Let me explain. So. I like to think of it as the incubator for the parasite. There you go. You're the parasite incubator, but that means that this is a huge impact on a very specific timing in a woman's life that often if you're pursuing the academic track is at a very key moment in that academic track. And so if somebody is very focused on having a family or having a large family, I know lots of people who have thought, I wanna get a PhD, but I also wanna start my family. And that I think at the very basis is going to change the availability of the sciences and greater academic careers to women because academic structure is not built to accommodate maternity leave. Absolutely, yeah, it has not been. People are working to change that. Right, it's getting better, but it is a huge, it is a huge obstacle for any woman that wants to start a family in her mid to late 20s if she's working on a PhD. Yeah. I think that what this tells us though is that we definitely, people also have different skills. It's wonderful to know there really is not a lot of difference between boys and girls around the world in their performance on science, math, reading comprehension. It is interesting that girls have slightly better reading comprehension. We know girls usually start speaking and being social earlier and are usually just generally more social. There are gender differences. It's interesting that the boys are generally, their strengths are in the sciences. That is interesting, but that doesn't mean that we should force or enforce a division in our workforce. What it means is that we need to work harder to bring more women into the sciences so that we have a diversification of skills within the workforce, within the scientific industry because more minds looking at different problems from different perspectives is going to bring us answers more quickly. And so that's the goal here. We need more women. We need lots more people from different backgrounds doing more science. Yeah, but I totally agree with that. And I've got two little girls who I'm trying to mold into future scientists. I love that. So I totally agree with you there. But I think one of the things that this study is pointing to is that the interest in science isn't there. Not as much, yeah. Right, but is that because they don't see women in science as much? Okay. Possibly. But here's, can I answer that question? That's interesting. Can I answer that question? Here we are on a science news podcast, right? Hosted by two out of the three are women. And love you chat room, but if you look through our chat room of, I don't know, how many people are there? 50 people, 40 people, something like this. How many girls are out there? So I don't think it's necessarily role models. And I don't think it's necessarily the boys club to blame on this one completely. If this study is finding that there's a lack of interest and our, at least live chat room folks happen to be predominantly, if not all men. I don't know if there's a guy out there right now. What I think needs to be worked on is nurturing the interest, is building that interest early on. And I think you do it at home. And I think the schools are already starting to do this. At least the local area of schools, science in the fifth grade is a weekly class, not something you wait until you get to the eighth grade and then take finally a science class. It's now part of the regular curriculum. So everybody is being exposed to it. And I think that's where it needs to get built. It needs to get built really early as one of those sort of, what would you like to be when you grow up sort of a thing? And by the time they're old enough to choose their career path and if they pick the sciences, even if it was the old boys club of 30 years ago, they'd find a way, right? If that's your passion and that's what you get interested in, you'll find a way and you'll make it in. So, and I think we have the improvements in academic and in the workforce have been changing and dramatically over the last just 20 years even. But yeah, that's the frightening that the lack of interest is a little bit frightening. It reminds me of, oh gosh, what's her name? Dana McKella. Is that her name or am I messing it up? She was Winnie on Wonder Years. Yeah, I don't know, I'm blinking on her name too. So the whole book she wrote was about changing the word problems into things that girls might be a little bit more interested in. And the fact that maybe she's on even a better track because she was using word problems and word answer solutions and that sort of thing as lead-ins around the math. Well, but that's the whole idea of turning science into an interdisciplinary system, which is part of the deal with the next generation science standards too, is that teachers predominantly are saying they don't have time or the know-how to teach science in early elementary school. And so by instead of telling them now is science period by telling them for our reading assignment today, we're gonna read about an astronomer. For our math problem, we're gonna talk about adding volumes of a solution. So there's this idea that science class is not science class and everything is connected and having previously siloed all of the subjects and us asking kids all the time, what's your favorite subject in school? Kind of makes them pick a lane potentially too early. And if instead you incorporate science into everything that you do and you incorporate math into everything that you do and you incorporate reading into everything that you do, then you have an opportunity to expose lots of students to subjects that otherwise they may automatically say, that's not for me, I'm not good at that. Then I'm doing it wrong because I've definitely pinched and hold my kids. I asked them, what's your favorite subject in science that you studied in school? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, and even instead of asking what's your favorite subject, you can say, what's your favorite thing you learned recently? And just finding a way to, yeah, to allow them an open field of opportunity without telling them. I mean, when I was in high school, I was convinced I was terrible at science and I wasn't going to major in science in college. And once I went to college and I started studying science in this more open conversation and I was doing labs and I was doing hands-on work, I discovered that science was my jam. But if you had asked me that in high school, I would have said, oh yeah, I'm no good at science. I think it takes time. I mean, hopefully we can get girls into the creative thought process that allows them to have the self-confidence to look at a problem and go, I can tackle this. I can work on this and not feel like they are not capable or up to it. So self-confidence goes a long way toward getting women girls to the point where they're like, I wanna be a scientist. I wanna do this, I wanna go to the moon. You know? And part of it is what the National Center for Science Education is doing where they're actually trying to bring real scientists into classrooms throughout the nation. And it's because they had this whole thing where every time they do this, they have the kids draw a scientist and write a paragraph about a scientist and then they have them do it again after a scientist has visited their classroom. And pretty much always, you can guess exactly what the scientist looks like when they draw it at first. It's a white man with white hair in a lab coat holding a beaker. With a dacha accent. And after, it's women, it's men, it's every type of person, they're not necessarily in the lab coat. Sometimes they're out in the field with binoculars. Sometimes they're in space. Sometimes they're underwater. It's once you expose kids to the world of science and that everything is science, I think there's this real excitement that you can do almost anything in science. I think that's why I love it so much. And that's, I hope we can share that love and get past these discrepancies and move forward more egalitarianally across the board. Right? That's great. Yeah. And, you know, if you're depressed on this, maybe someday we'll be able to fix it. Get rid of that depression once and for all. You know, I've reported on this show previously about the effects of ketamine, which is an anesthesia drug. It's a drug that is used for anesthesia and it's a disassociative type of drug and people also use it recreationally at times, but research has shown that use of ketamine can alleviate symptoms of depression. And since they found that out, they said, well, you know, we don't just wanna be giving people ketamine and, you know, we spoke previously with Dr, was it Enrique who talked with us about his ketamine clinics and how he administers the drug therapeutically for people. But, you know, you don't necessarily want to always have the disassociative effects in order to get rid of the depression. Can we get rid of the anesthetic effects, the disassociative effects and just find a way, what is the molecular component of ketamine that triggers this anti-depressive effect? What is that influence? Well, researchers have been working on that and trying to figure it out. They identified a ketamine derivative that has fewer side effects. It's not perfect yet, but there's a team out of China, China's Zhejiang University that have actually figured out the target of ketamine's actions and gives us insights that are really interesting into not every depression that is diagnosed, but maybe the source of many depressions around the globe. These studies looked at an area of the brain. It's deep in the brain. It's called the lateral habanula. I love brain names, the lateral habanula. And it seems to be involved in the processing of unpleasant outcomes and punishment. Why do I have one of these? Yeah, get rid of it. What possible use of it? Can we get rid of it, right? Cut it out. And in previous work, looking at this area of the brain when researchers have stimulated the area with electrodes, it has in some instances, relieved depression. These researchers were like, maybe this is where ketamine works on the brain and does its magic trick to get rid of depression. And so they infused the drug right into the lateral habanula of rats that had depression-like symptoms and they were not depressed anymore. And then they used a different chemical that inhibits the receptors that ketamine acts on and those drugs blocked depression as well. And then they wanted to know, okay, is this really a causal relationship? And so they used optogenetics to engineer these cells in the lateral habanula to become active when they were stimulated by light. And when they were stimulated by light, the bursts of activity got kicked off in the lateral habanula. I just love saying this name. And it drove depressive symptoms in the animals. And so they were able to regulate symptoms of depression in the animals that had these cellular engineering. Turn on a light, you're depressed. Turn off a light, you're not depressed. So then there was another paper and they wanted to know what was going on a little bit more close up in a little bit closer resolution. And so they looked at these rats who had a depression induced by chemical means or by psychological means in which they induced learned helplessness. And so it's just these rats, they're like, I can't control anything, I'm helpless. I'm just gonna stop paddling around this bath of water. I can't find a place to sit, I'm helpless. I can't do anything, yes. What they found was that there's a protein that controls the flow of ions between the cell and its environment. These nerve gated ion channels allow for the stimulation of the nerves and the flow of the stimulation down the length of the axon via action potentials. And we know this happens through the cells membrane, the nerves membrane itself. But they found out, they found this protein and they were like, it's gotta be in the nerve. No, it's not in the nerve. It's in these cells that are packing around the nerves called astrocytes. And so these astrocytes are they are involved in resetting the nerve cells and re-managing and balancing the ion concentrations across the nerve cell membrane after the action potential goes past. So after a nerve cell goes and bursts, these astrocytes go boop, boop, boop, boop and send in the troops to fix everything and make the ion balance back to normal. And so the team were able to identify this protein, it alters how easily a nerve cell can fire again. And so by increasing the dose of a gene that's responsible for this protein, the researchers were able to again induce depression like symptoms in mice. If they batted down the gene activity, it reduced the protein and it reduced their ability to induce this depressive behavior. So it basically stopped the nerves firing in this area of the brain. And this isn't a cause of depression, but this could be a target for these ketamine derivatives. It could be a target in the brain for more specific stimulation to be able to get rid of depression. This is very exciting as it is maybe not for, like I said, for all people with depression, but for some depression, this may lead to a treatment very soon, this is very exciting. But currently, if you're a mouse, good news. That's right. If you're a mouse, if you're a rat. Just keep swimming apparently. That's right. But I think it's very fascinating that an anesthetic used in veterinary medicine more so than human medicine, but an anesthetic dissociative that's used as a recreational drug as well, that it has basically kick-started this investigation of these cellular receptors in areas of the brain that may eventually lead us to being able to control depression and treat it very effectively, much more effectively than the broad spectrum mallets that we use currently. This is this week in science. Justin, what do you got? I have the biggest story. There was a paper. No, make it two papers published today and the journal Nature, which is more than doubling the amount of ancient humans whose DNA is telling the tales of their history in publication. So this is from a lead author, David Reich, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at Harvard Medical School in Quoty Voice. When we look at the data, we see surprises again and again and again. So together with his lab's previous work and out of other pioneers of ancient DNA, the message making its way from the ancient past is that our prehistoric European ancestors were not couch potatoes or even neighborhood countryside or regional area potatoes. There was a, just back to Quoty Voice, there was a view that migration is a very rare process in human evolution, Reich explains, not so says the ancient DNA actually. The orthodoxy, the assumption that present day people are directly descended from the people who always lived in that same area is wrong almost everywhere. Builders of Stonehenge, Celtic descendants, right? Who turned into the Irish, right? That's how that happened. One of the new papers, Reich and a cast of dozens of collaborators chart the spread of an ancient culture known by its stylized bell shaped pots. So they were called the bell beaker people. This culture for spread between Iberia, which is a semi-ancient term for pretty much Spain and central Europe. They moved around about 4,700 years ago by analyzing DNA from several hundred samples of bones. Reich's team shows that not only the ideas, not the people who originated them made their move initially into Europe. So the pots started showing up. So people thought, oh, this is this culture. They go with those bones. These are the same people. No, they just were like, those are cool pots. We're going to make them over here. So then that story's a little bit different. The bell beaker culture expanded to Britain 4,500 years ago. And that population pretty much completely supplanted the population that was in Britain at the time. People who built Stonehenge were gone within a few hundred years. Sudden, rapid, almost complete, entire replacement of the peoples of Britain. Wow. Yeah. And so there's some theories about why. Archaeologists for these, let's see. Yeah. This is Barry Cunliffe, Professor Emeritus, University of Oxford. People are going to be, basically people are going to be upset and learning that their mystique of that area and its history might not be belonging to them in a sort of hereditary passing on of generations sort of a way. But he says that's part of the excitement of it. Well, I mean, remember, nature and nurture, it's always both. So this is just some non-genetic environmental influence. An unexpected movement of people who originally lived in the steppes of central Asia, north of the Black and Caspian seas. About 5,300 years ago, the local hunter-gatherer cultures were replaced and many places by nomadic herders, dubbed the Yamnaya, who were able to expand rapidly by exploiting horses and the new intervention of the cart. They had all these nice burial sites. They'd long known that some of the technologies used by Yamnaya later spread to Europe as startling revelation from ancient DNA was that the people also moved. They moved from those steppes all the way to the Atlantic coast of Europe and the West, all the way to Mongolia in the East and down into India to the South. They kind of went everywhere. Fast migration helps explain the spread of Indo-European languages because now you have these same people showing up everywhere. So of course the language spread because the people went everywhere, not just the language. Significantly replaced local hunter-gatherer genes across Europe with the indelible stamp of steppe people DNA. And it's happened with Britain, with migration to the Bell beaker people to that island. So did these local hunter-gatherer groups begin vanish. So this also might explain a strange result they got were of a genetic connection of modern-day Europeans and Native Americans. Now, logically people thought, oh, well, Native Europeans must have been somehow visiting or Native Americans were visiting going across the Atlantic Ocean. And that's why, but if these steppe people went all the way to the West and then went all the way to the East and then were a part of the, you know, their DNA was some of at some point in those people that went over 24,000 years ago, then yeah, now it kind of makes sense that there would be genetic connections. There's also, what is this? This is a new insights from Southern Europe, right, second paper. That was just the first bit. Second paper, a genomic history of southeastern Europe reveals an additional migration as farming spread across Europe based on 225 individuals that they sequence that were 14,000 all the way up to about 2,500 years ago. And it looks like the hunter-gatherers were there but then these farmers started moving in but they only moved as far north and then when the crops didn't grow as well, they stopped. And they sort of had this latitudinal line for thousands of years where there was a lot of interaction in this boundary between farmers and hunter-gatherers. So what was sort of interesting there is it looks like most of the, it was mostly males from the hunter-gatherer population. Their DNA was being passed on and they don't know exactly how that happened, right? Why would it be mostly the men's DNA that seems to have survived throughout the ages? One scenario is that that a farmer, women tended to be integrated into hunter-gatherer communities. Though I think it's just as easily that the hunters visited farming communities to trade and stayed for the hospitality they enjoyed. I don't know if that one works as well. So there's three things that have led to this treasure trove of these papers. One, cost reduction, speed of increase, and doing the gene sequencing. Two, there was a discovery spearheaded by Ron Panhasi, archeologist at University College Dublin. His group found that the, and you gotta help me out, Petrosbone, some little bone in the ear. You don't know it either? Okay, because I've never heard of the Petrosbone or Petrosbone. I don't know anatomy. I know physiology is different. So it's a little bone containing the inner ear. Apparently it harbors 100 times more recoverable DNA from that little ear bone than from the other ancient remains that they've been trying to pull DNA from. So they found, oh, if you're gonna pull DNA from a bone of an ancient thing, find this ear bone over here and pull it from that 100 times more. And then the third is a method, Reich himself created for reading genetic codes from a sort of carefully chosen variable parts of DNA so that you can find these differentiations and identifying markers without having to do a full, full, full genetic analysis. So this is what's crazy here. So this is just the latest of the paper, right? Because now everything's cheap, it's fast, they have a good target. His lab has generated about three quarters of the world's published data on this, including unpublished data, which has now reached 3,700 genomes, right? So we're talking about what, 1,300, something like that that they've got right here that they've been published on. There's 3,700 waiting for a little bit more study to be done on them. This is in 2014, there were 10, okay? 2014, we only had 10 of these ancient individuals where we had out there that we'd, he's got 1,300 out, 3,700 on the shelf and hundreds of thousands of samples that are still out there to be grabbed. So this information is gonna become better resolved. It's going to be, yeah, we're gonna fine tune this, the dates, the exact direction of this gene drive through the population, we'll get this. Right, and plus not just the moving around, but there's also going to be the studying of evolutionary traits within modern humans, susceptibilities to disease. One of the things that was sort of interesting, those step people were found to have a trace of plague left behind as you know. And if they were part of the Bell people who moved to Britain, it could have been what wiped out the Stonehenge people. Some questions, I don't know, but there's a ton. And for somebody who is doing a science-y news show who enjoys talking about this subject, I could not be more pleased. That's exciting. Yeah, this is a big discovery, a big elucidation of the history of Europe. Yes, more on this story as it develops. That's right. The history of Asia, of India, of the Americas there as well. Oh, it goes back. Yeah, it influences it all, yeah. All right, if you just tuned in, I guess you know what time it is. It's time for Blair's Animal Corner. Oh yeah, with Blair. It's your great-ass globe. Bired bed, filled with bed, no-bed at all. Wanna hear about this animal? She's your girl. Except for giant pandas. That's the girl. That I won't know. Yeah, Blair. I have some very interesting news about the microbiome in amphibians in the dreaded Ketridiomycosis, also known as Ketrid fungus. Ketrid fungus, we've talked a little bit about it on the show before, but it's this very weird disease that shows up in amphibians. It's caused by the fungus betrachocytrium dendrobotitis. And it, yeah, and what it does is they don't completely understand the mechanism, but it affects tadpoles by messing up their jaw and the keratin development in their jaw so that they can't eat or they have growth development issues. And in full-grown frogs and toads, it causes their skin to become kind of opaque and flaky and they have trouble getting nutrients and oxygen through their skin because amphibians breathe through their skin. So it causes them essentially to suffocate because they can't get oxygen through their porous skin. So knowing all of that, we've known about this for decades and entire amphibian populations have completely collapsed as a result of this fungus. What's more climate change and also people like not wiping their shoes off when they move from one place and then hike around another place, all this kind of stuff, human impacts have caused kitrid fungus to expand exponentially around the globe, but mostly we see it in the United States and really a lot along the west coast of the United States. So knowing all of that, there's all these ongoing studies with kitrid trying to figure out if it's genetic-based, if there are certain genetic strains of animals that are immune to kitrid fungus. If you can inoculate frogs and toads against kitrid fungus when they're younger, if you can give them like a teeny tiny little bit of kitrid fungus and then their immune system builds up something to fight it. There's all these different strains of research looking at how to fight kitridium mycosis, but this new study from Imperial College of London has found that bacterial communities on frogs and toads' skin might actually play a role in this system. Yes. So they found that the bacteria living on amphibian skin potentially can actually protect them from a kitrid infection. So they collected data from midwife toads in the French and Spanish Pyrenees and they looked at why certain populations had a resistance to the kitrid fungus while others had catastrophic declines in their populations. And they found that severe kitrid declines all possessed very similar microbial communities which were distinct from those in populations who were not as affected. They also found that skin microbial communities were not in any way related to genetic variants of the pathogen of the kitrid fungus or genetic variants in the frogs or toads. Let me guess, they live in water in a moist environment it has to do with the environment where they live. Yes. So it's kind of a short study. They don't know a lot yet. Their next step is to figure out exactly what these microbial populations look like, what is lacking from one population to another, what might be helping to fight the kitrid fungus. There's lots to look at, but this is a huge, huge development in the research of kitrid fungus. And I'm really excited to see what happens next in amphibian research and amphibian conservation in light of this new information. So you can see how if you can identify certain bacterial communities that can protect frogs and toads against kitrid, you could actually instead of inoculating them just using a small or weak version of kitrid, you could inoculate them with basically probiotics. You could give them some probiotics that help develop the right bacteria on their skin to protect themselves. Or you could discover what in the environment promotes these healthy bacteria in the frog and toad skin and how can we promote that in the environment? What's wrong in the ecosystem that you have this bacterial imbalance? Absolutely, yeah. So not only short-term, you could try to inoculate individuals or populations, but long-term, yes, making sure that the habitat health promotes the growth of the right bacteria. Absolutely. Yeah, probiotics for rivers and streams and lakes, yo. Yeah, there you go. It's all about the bacteria. But are the frogs and toads getting this that don't have the bacteria? So that's what they're saying, is that the frogs and toads that are being affected by kitrid have a very distinct skin bacterial population from the frogs and toads that are not getting infected. So next stop is to isolate what the difference is, do some experiments in a lab where they change the bacterial population on an animal's skin and then see if they still get kitrid. So there's lots of steps, but now there's a very clear path. When before conservation scientists were kind of just like leaves or feathers in the wind, just kind of like, oh, maybe it's a virus. Maybe it's genes. Maybe it's inbreeding. Oh, maybe it's water temperature. Like there was just, nobody had any idea. And this could break open the potential to save frog and toad species, which is phenomenal. It's great news. But at what cost? What? That financial cost. But no, I mean, there's bacteria. It's in this one environment where these one frogs, they were finding a benefit from it. No, but this is, okay, so this is in Spain and the French Pyrenees. So these were in, it wasn't in one pond. They found this one bacterial community. It was across all of these communities. There were little ponds that were getting it and there were little ponds that weren't. So yes, that's definitely a part of the research, too, is to figure out if introducing this bacteria into an area has other deleterious effects, but chances are if it's already naturally occurring, it's not likely to. And especially because amphibians weren't getting Kittred on the level that they are currently. So that might be, I don't know, because of antibiotics were releasing into the water table. Who knows? So it's, yeah, it could really blow open this whole story. Moving on to a little bit of a lighter story in Blair's Animal Corner. I remember a couple of years ago, I heard an episode, not to plug another podcast on our show, but I heard an episode of Radio Lab about snapping shrimp. Have you heard of snapping shrimp? Yes. I had not. And I'm gonna see if this works, but I have, yeah, snap crackle pop. It sounds like they've got castanets. Yes. Snapping shrimp. They are amazing little creatures that are super, super loud. When enough shrimp snap at one time, they can be louder than a passenger jet flying overhead. But previously, here, snapping shrimp. Quiet now. It's time to talk. Previously, we thought snapping shrimps were only found in shallow subtropical waters. But now, a recent study has found them off of the coast of Oregon. Yes. Yes. Wait, no, that's not good. Well, so we don't know. We actually don't know. This is a great question. So they were doing a research with a hydrophone, which is basically just a microphone that you throw underwater. And in 2016, they put this hydrophone underwater to try to figure out what sounds were happening off the Oregon coast. And they started hearing this snap crackle pop. And so Oregon State University's Cooperative Institute for Marine Resource Studies and NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Newport, Oregon, went to figure out what was happening with these snapping shrimp. This is the very first time that they've seen snapping shrimp in cold waters, in waters away from tropic or subtropical regions. And they actually don't know if this is new or not. So step one, we don't know if they're moving because of climate change, if currents are changing, whatever, they could have been there all long. People have not been sinking hydrophones underwater for that long. So we don't really have a good baseline of trying to figure out if snapping shrimp are found in Oregon. But where this gets more complicated is that they found eastern Pacific gray whales foraged almost always in their study period when snapping shrimp were sounding, where they were sounding. But gray whales don't eat them. They don't eat snapping shrimp. So the sound. But they probably eat the plankton that maybe the shrimp also eat. Right, so whales, gray whales are interesting because they forage all day long. So they forage in the dark. And whales are very acoustically attuned animals as we know. So it would lead, it would make sense, right? If the whales were hearing the snapping and hearing it like a dinner bell and coming out to where the snapping was to find their food. We don't have any proof of this yet. This is purely correlative. But if this is the case, so first of all, there's the question of whether the snapping shrimp have always been there. And if they have, have gray whales always been following snapping shrimp sounds and are snapping shrimp and gray whales somehow connected in the coastal sound escape? Then there's the question of if they're new. If snapping shrimp are new to the Oregon coast and they are affecting gray whale behavior, this is extremely important to know. So this could be a whole new type of sound pollution as a result of an animal moving due to changes in coastal habitats. It's like, it's this huge impact because it's an extremely loud animal and they clearly have an impact on all of the animals around them because of their sounds. Obviously, just in the past 20, 30 years, we're learning so much about how animals underwater are affected by sound and noise pollution from cities and boats because a lot of people think because we go underwater and it seems pretty quiet to us that it's hard for us to imagine how vibrant the soundscape is underwater. But this is such an interesting part of the story of the underwater soundscape. But also, yeah, I am dying to know if the snapping shrimp is new in Oregon or not. So wouldn't it be a simple matter of catching one, eating it, realizing we're gonna do an experiment, going and catching another one and then just running a quick DNA blast on it and then. That would be one way to do it. Compared to any of the other shrimp around the world. Is to catch a subtropical snapping shrimp and catch a snapping shrimp up by Oregon and see how similar they are. And then catch snapping shrimp from one subtropical region and catching a snapping shrimp from another subtropical region and seeing how similar they are. And if they are equally dissimilar, then they've been there a while. If the snapping shrimp in Oregon are very similar to one type but not another, then it would lead to make sense that maybe they've migrated there recently. So there's definitely work that can be done. Unfortunately, Oregon has no shrimp fishermen. Well, I think they'll find a researcher that's good at catching shrimp, I'm sure. Yeah, but I think beyond this, thinking about the correlation to the gray whales, these baleen species that are usually, they're not normally found in these subtropical waters for feeding as far as I would be, as far as I'm aware. They're usually kind of more the higher latitudes, more not Arctic necessarily, but not in the warmer waters. They're usually finding the plankton in the cooler waters, cooler, deeper waters. And so I would wonder if the correlation turns out to be true, then you would think that the shrimp have been here longer. Right, absolutely. Because otherwise why would they respond to this snapping sound? Yeah. Yeah, curiosity. And what do you say that? Do you have castanets? You're checking out what's in it, dear. There are party over there. I hear the snapping. Maybe there is poetry happening. Yeah, absolutely. There's some snap, crackle, pop. And now we will speak of science in a poetic manner. No, no, no, I'm just gonna talk about science, you guys. I'm gonna jump to a story about viruses and hormones. Ooh, yeah, this is fascinating research. And then after I get through this story, we'll talk about wine, okay? Ooh. It seems like a good way to end my stories for the day. Ah, a little wine. So researchers at the Jocelyn Diabetes Center have, through their work, published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on a discovery of four viruses that produce insulin-like hormones that are active on human cells. What this means is that there may, in some cases, be biological mechanisms for viruses to cause diabetes. What? Viruses, what they say. Emra Altindus, a research fellow at the Jocelyn Diabetes Center says our research may help open up a new field that we might call microbial endocrinology. We show that these viral insulin-like peptides can act on human and rodent cells with a very large number of microbial peptides to which we are exposed. There is a novel window for host-microbe interactions. We hope that studying these processes will help us better understand the role of microbes in human disease. And indeed, a senior researcher goes on to say the discovery of the viral insulin-like hormones raises the question of what their role might be in diabetes, as well as autoimmune disease, cancer, and other metabolic conditions. That viruses, with their genetic code, produce things, little peptide segments, little bits that interact with our bodies, that are very similar to what we produce. And we've talked about stuff similar to this on previous accounts, but this is a, I don't know, I think it's a very striking study into this concept of how through endocrine disruptors, whether endocrine influence that viruses, not by influencing your immune system, but by actually influencing the release of hormones or the up-regulation or down-regulation of hormones in your body can affect disease-state, right? I'll leave. But this is the, because they're able to communicate on the silver, there's the potential that they're causing disease? There's a potential, this is not proof, this is not cause. They found that. They have the right shape, they have the right ability to make it happen. Yes, so these viruses, they do know that the viruses infect fish and amphibians, they're not known to infect humans. It's possible that humans get exposed to these viruses by eating fish, but nobody has ever looked to see whether or not these viruses infect in this kind of situation, human cells, or get absorbed through the gut lining. And so there, but the big thing here is that this is showing that viruses produce human-like hormones and that they're, with all the viruses that we are exposed to, that infect us, if just a small number of them have hormone-like qualities, then this could influence a lot of things in our bodies. Right, and- And bad, I say disease, because that's the direction of this study, but it could also be beneficial. No, I mean, that's where I was going with that. It's like, because we know that these viruses are absorbed and moved about by the gut lining, intentionally pushing viruses into our body, probably doing so for a reason. It's probably useful somewhere. And it may be that as we're all down this far down the path of the microbiome, the microviral room, need some work on the wordage, might be the next level of this. We might be taking provirals or antibacterial phases in the future, as opposed to worrying about what bacteria we put under our bodies. It's like, no, you got to get on the right viruses. That's why you're unhealthy. Yeah, that's right. Not just bacteria, viruses. Good and bad. We may find that it's possible that diseases are caused. It's also possible that not having enough viruses is why the hormonal problems are taking place, because these viruses are supposed to be doing a job there synthesizing hormone to get the whole thing going in one way or another. That's really fascinating. That is fantastic. Yeah, but this is the beginnings. I mean, this is an early step in understanding disease and viral influence on health, I should say, generally. And let's talk about health generally that results from drinking wine. Well, yeah, so there was a study reported this last week, published this last week. Also reported at the AAAS, the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, researchers reported from their analysis of participants in the 90 plus study. It was initiated in 2003 to study the oldest old, and which is also the fastest growing age group in the United States. They used 14,000 subjects from the Leisure World Cohort Study, which was started in 1981. From that, there was a group for the initial participants of the 90 plus study who went on to give the sample size about 1,600 people who are enrolled in the study. Not much is known about people who age to 90 years of age and older. How do they get there? What do they do? Why do they live to be so old? Is it genes? What is it? And so they looked at all the factors that are associated with the longevity of these people was of food, activities, lifestyle. They looked at epidemiology of dementia in the oldest old. They looked at rates of cognitive decline and functional decline and clinical pathological correlations, what's going on in their brains. And they found major finding. People who drank moderate amounts of alcohol or coffee lived longer than those who didn't. Than those who abstained. So moderate amounts of alcohol or coffee. Oh, and. Or coffee, could be and, right? It's correlated. If you're overweight in your 70s, you're going to live longer than people who are underweight in your 70s. What? If you're 70 years old or older, having a little meat on your bones is a good thing. Mm hmm. Oh, my. That makes sense. 40% of people age 90 and older suffer from dementia while almost 80% are disabled. Both are more common in women than in men. And women do go on to usually live longer than men, which is known. But half the people with dementia over age 90 did not have sufficient neuropathology in their brain to explain the dementia, which makes me think that it's just you're 90 and you're able to mess with people. Yeah. No, there's other factors at play in the brain other than the usual neuropathological markers that then we look for, that we look for to explain about half of the dementia that's going on. And people age 90 and older with an ApoE2 gene are less likely to have clinical Alzheimer's dementia, but more likely to have Alzheimer's neuropathology. So you've got the neuropathology, the towels and the tangles and the plaques, but not the clinical Alzheimer's dementia if you have that particular gene. But anyway, the big factor here, you can drink some wine, moderate drinking, moderate coffee drinking leads to. Killing it. Yeah, or not killing yourself. Yeah. Leads to longevity or it's. I'm gonna live forever. I'm gonna live, that's right. Moderate though. So here's some other good news about drinking wine. Drinking wine, the factors, the lots of polyphenols and other factors that components of red wine lead to health, they think now because they inhibit the ability of oral bacterial pathogens to adhere to the fiber of blasts, to adhere to your teeth and to your gums. So basically drinking red wine keeps the bacteria that cause tooth decay and gum disease from sticking to your teeth and your gums. And so you're less likely to get tooth and gum disease. Gum disease we know is a major contributor to cardiovascular disease because it allows for the leaking in of bacterial components into your circulatory system to affect your cardiovascular. So maybe red wine is having its beneficial effects that way. Gosh, so if you end up with purple teeth because you've been drinking all that red wine, just say it's healthy. It's healthy for your teeth and your gums. Purple teeth than it is to have holy teeth. Yeah. All right, Dr. Gigi, I gotta say though, I don't, is that still gum disease to the cardiovascular? Is that still a thing? I know they talked about that a long time ago. I thought that that was bogus. I don't think it is bogus if we find it. If it is bogus, we'll have to revisit that one. And we'll talk about that maybe in another show or maybe we'll be able to look at that in another show. I thought that that was something that my dentists loved talking about for a long time, but then stopped completely. Yeah, no, I don't think so. But them stopping talking about it doesn't mean that it's bogus. It just means that they're not talking about it. Well, WebMD corroborates a kiki story. So, WebMD is a start. I can look further for some actual scholarly articles, but in the meantime, oh, Harvard, Harvard Health, Harvard Health also says that there's a correlation between, OK. Yeah, it's looking strong. Is that something about the platelets or the bacteria-seeming something, some sort of platelet that was caused that seemed similar in cardiovascular and gum disease, but that it turned out to be different? I don't know about that. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Harvard and WebMD, no better than me. Perhaps. Just possible. And then, you know, great, you know, I did say moderate drinking to help you get to the 90s. You know, a glass of wine, maybe two glasses of wine, you're going to be doing all right. It's the heavy drinking. A study in France looked at the contribution of alcohol use disorders to the burden of dementia between 2008 to 2013. And they basically just wanted to know what kind of an association is there between misuse of alcohol, overuse of alcohol and dementia risk with an emphasis on early onset dementia. And they pretty much found that alcohol use disorders were associated with dementia onset for both sexes. And they're significantly associated with all other risk factors for dementia onset. And so alcohol use disorders, specifically, especially early onset dementia, there is a correlation. So this heavy drinking, screening for heavy drinking should be a regular part of medical care, according to the conclusions of this study with intervention or treatment being offered when necessary. And maybe alcohol, this is the French saying this. Additionally, other alcohol policies should be considered to reduce heavy drinking in the general population. So. Everything in moderation. Everything in moderation. Everything in anything in moderation. Yeah, don't overdo it. That could lead to some early onset dementia. Maybe that's what explains the non-agenarians' dementia. They got there by drinking maybe a little too much. We'll see. Those are my stories for the evening. Anyone else got some stories? I'm all done. All done. Justin. I think I'm good. Yeah, I think we've brought enough. We've been here a couple of hours. I'm going to look up this thing. I'm already finding this gum disease thing. I'm finding it on both sides. We'll have to look at this in the aftershock. OK. All right. We will do that. I wanted to write last week, we commented on the speed at which people listen to the TWIST podcast. How quickly did people get through listening to the podcast this week? Got a couple of notes back from people. Steve, Biomedical Engineering Underground says, hey, TWIST gang, I wanted to respond that I usually listen to all of my podcasts at 1.8 to 3.5 times speed. 3.5? Yes, you all sound like Chip and Dale arguing. The reason is that I have some ADHD related issues that are accommodated by speeding up the audio. If it were up to me, I would have my professors speed up their lectures in the same way. The irony is that I also have a problem with processing speed when I'm taking notes. I don't even see the purpose of doing sentences in class as if we were all in detention. It's just wasted time to me. Give me the props notes and a 2.5 times recording of their lecture any day. I wonder if when he's done listening at 3.5 speed and then he's talking to normal people, does everyone sound like this? Yeah, exactly. Adam Ellis over on Twitter also said, you asked 3 times speed and no, I have no clue when Blair has had her copy. I can handle many conversational podcasts at this speed. Some, though, I do have to run slower than that. It's interesting to know how people listen. So thanks, you guys. Steve and Adam for writing in and letting us know how you listen to twists. I would love, not only have gotten to the end of the show, to thank everyone for listening. Thank you so much. Thank you to our chat rooms. Thank you to those of you in our web chat. Thank you to those of you over on Facebook, over on YouTube right now for watching us and for chatting along with the show. I appreciate you being here. And thank you especially to our Patreon sponsors. I'd love to thank Paul Disney, Gbert and Latimore, Richard Onimus, Charlene Henry, Joshua Fury, Andy Groh, Steve DeBell, Alex Wilson, Tony Steele, Ed Dyer, Jacqueline Boister, Craig Landon, John Ratnaswamy, Mark Masaros, Matthew Litwin, Jason Roberts, Bill Kersey, Bob Calder, Time Trumper 319, Kyle Washington, Eric Knapp, Richard Brian Condren, Artiam Rick Framus, Sean Bryant, Paul John McKee, Jason Olds, Brian Carrington, Christopher Drier, Lisa Slazowski, Jim Drapeau, Greg Riley, Sean Lamb, Ben Rothig, Steve Lessamann, Kurt Larson, Robert Aston, Lurdy Garcia, Marjorie Gary S, Robert Greg Briggs, Brendan Minnish, Christopher Rappen, Flying Out, Aaron Luthon, Ken Hayes, Matt Sutter, Mark Hatton, Tessin Flow, Kevin Parachan, Byron Lee, and EO. Thank you so much for your support. We do appreciate you helping us keep the show going on a week by week basis. Those of you who are interested in supporting us can find information at twist.org or directly at patreon.com slash this week in science. And remember that you can help us out by telling your friends about twists. That's a huge help to us. On next week's show, we will be back for the last week of February to bring more science news to you. Once again, as we do every Wednesday night at 8 p.m. Pacific time, live. If you can't make it though, you can find past episodes at twist.org slash YouTube, facebook.com slash this week in science or just at twist.org. Thank you for enjoying the show. Twist is also available as a podcast. Just Google this week in science in your iTunes directory or if you have a mobile type device. You can look for Twist, the number four, droid app in the Android Marketplace or simply this week in science in anything Apple Marketplace-y. For more information on anything you may have heard here today, show notes will be available on our website. That's at www.twist.org where you can also make comments and start conversations with the hosts or other listeners. Or you can contact us directly. Email kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com, Justin at twistminion at gmail.com or Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org. Just be sure to put twisty, WIS on the subject line or your email will be spam-filtered into oblivion. You can also hit us up on the Twitter where we are at twistscience at Dr. Kiki at Jacksonfly and at Blair's Montage Rate. We love your feedback. There's a topic you would like us to cover or address. A suggestion for an interview at Haiku that comes to you in the night. Please let us know. We'll be back here next week and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news. And if you've learned anything from the show, don't forget to subscribe to our channel and remember, it's all in your head. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science is the end of the world. So I'm setting up a shop. 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This Week in Science. this weekend science this weekend science this weekend end of the show the end of the show the end of the show away we go away we go they went away nope glair blairs back there she is she's muted but she's back why i'm here so my mic has been deciding to give me a 60 hertz hum off and on through the show today it was there and then it stopped i couldn't hear it that's good but it's annoying the heck out of me and then we had the echo earlier i turn echo i'm thinking about it and i think ryan must have had a window open yeah and it was playing back yep that would make sense why would it be going out over the speakers and not into his earplugs and the yeah because why would it start only after we started the show it would do that because doing this so long i should know this by now i thought it was maybe the fact that like i don't know i feel like some people's headphones they're really loud and their headphone sound gets picked up by their microphone that might have been it but i mean he had earbuds right in his ears yeah but that's why i was thinking that maybe it was it was present part of the time but then if we were talking for a long time it kind of went away because maybe the microphone wasn't listening for his voice at that moment and so it wasn't as sensitive i don't know i'm not a i'm not an audio visual person but it felt like it it somehow was correlated with him speaking in a weird way yes i agree so let's see uh yeah growly bear he said check my check my grounding cable well i did i just checked my cables and i messed with some cables and the hum went away yeah it's a cable issue i need to fix my cables right there okay tote bag who's asking about the tote bag hot rod the tote bag the grocery tote this bag is versatile trendy and durable it's cotton twill which is canvas and that would mean it's and it's machine washable yes there we go oh canvas and washable i would encourage hang dry though i would not tumble dry okay i'm ready for my rebuttal ish oh okay i found something to support me okay okay well like so what's funny is that you google gum disease heart disease and you get a whole bunch of let's see where did it go colgate.com yeah i saw it on terao.org yeah and there's web that's why i did not cite those on the ad you did good selection so i think my my my version of this as i think i probably heard this this is way back in 2012 uh studied by the american heart association or in their journal circulation the scientists reviewed 500 journal articles looking at links between gum and cardiovascular disease they concluded that wow people with gum disease may be at greater risk of heart or artery disease the association's probably correlative organizational uh because both conditions share common risk factors smoking age diabetes both produce similar inflammation markers lifestyle that sort of thing um and and some of that kind of makes sense too as you age you're more likely to have gum disease actually i think i've talked about this is probably a half dozen times on the show now this is like like why because i found out that i have gum disease from my dentist and i go do many 40 something year olds walk in here and you're like no you're fine like i there's a certain age where just like everybody has gum disease to some degree so and and as you age your odds of of you know having cardiovascular problems also increase so they're they're saying then at least that yeah oh oh the one of the theories let's see uh one of the most common believe that in fact gums can leave the systematic problems such as heart disease has been suggested by doctors for more than a century so it's not like that was a new thing that had come out um mouth bacteria are known to enter the bloodstream during dental procedures while brushing your teeth they've there's been theories that have been suggested to explain association is that from mouth bacteria attached to fatty deposits and arteries and trigger blood clots another that their source of inflammation which leads to thickening of artery walls but the experts writing circulation said statements like that imply cause and effect relationship between gum and heart and artery disease were unwarranted yeah interesting and AARP apparently came out with the uh thing saying they with their i guess in-house panel of american heart associated experts said not a thing so it's there's definitely a correlation but we don't yet know if there's any sort of causation whatsoever yeah it you have all these overlapping risk factors and age and yes oh and i you have to point out uh panoramic uh in the audience we do have a gal in the chat room and her daughter counts two uh so that would be two and over on facebook we have someone over on facebook moraine moraine thank you for representing so okay but i think i think the point is still i think that that point still stands and i think that that's you know that's sad i think that's i think that's uh that's uh really too bad well but also i would argue that people who watch youtube videos that are longer than 10 minutes might also be predominantly men there are lots of things because men have a longer attention span is that what you're trying to say no it's because um i'm just saying that it's the same reason that like tech often and video games and all this kind of like computer-y things still attract predominantly men as well so what are women doing where are you women you're not you're not on the digital devices are you are hunting and forcing in the wilderness so now that we're all glued to these electronics where are you who knows um would only assume no i'm not gonna say it never mind so anyway um i was gonna say you know they're in the kitchen where they belong i'm kidding i thought you were gonna say they were reading books oh no but um who knows who knows but i i do think that in the uh in the like long form video youtube video realm but particularly then if you add in science or technology it's mostly males also think about how many people that watch our show came to us via um a technology network right which is also predominantly males and then maybe if you went to the podcast listening audience it might not be quite as predominantly male i don't know the podcast listening audience is not as predominantly male no yeah yeah so um actually let me look uh right now i know youtube i can look right now i can tell you oh that's fun i can data that's right we have data i love data yes i can tell you exactly what the numbers are for the different networks um let's see so um going over to the youtube analytics there we go analytics loading them oh there's a long story but i applied to be on this um national committee for science communication for climate change and um i was accepted which i'm very excited um but in my thank you in my application one of the things i said is i love data of course you did oh my god yeah all right so um let's see we're talking to your mic geeky i am volume went down oh yeah super quiet oh well i unplugged something there you go i i unplugged something to get rid of the well that sounds way better sorry um yeah so uh females gender we have let's say yes should we put guess should we put guesses out there me and blaire for podcast listeners no for youtube oh for youtube two percent female i would have gone up to 12 justin is closer we have uh 13 percent female 87 percent male on youtube but the 13 to 17 age group is 0.7 percent female 1.3 percent male for watch time um wait actually 18 to 24 we have 13 is 13 percent female 7.7 percent male 25 to 34 age group 21st 20 percent female 22 percent male so we're um at at least equivalent equivalents in the 25 to 34 age bracket yeah um 31 percent in the 35 to 44 is female of the watch time is female 19 percent for male 45 to 54 is 20 percent female 16 percent male 55 to 64 is 15 percent female 16 percent male and uh 65 and over is 1.1 percent female and 17 percent uh male and so this is as proportions of watch time right that's um look at our data i show you our data wow so life data so overall yes male predominance but uh we do have different um different percentages from different age groups having different amounts of watching time and uh i think it's i think it's interesting but overall it's more more men to women and then i'd be interested to see the itunes data for listening yeah so itunes uh has just started doing analytics and i might be able to get something demographic from that i'm working on trying to uh figure that all out so that's great uh yeah that'll be something eventually um and then let's see face a booker face a booker you'll find of the data let's where the heck is my page there you are you don't get to see my personal facebook stuff on the screen sharing sorry folks um insights let's see what are the insights tell us about demographics um let's see where would i look for that not followers because that'll just be followers people yeah okay so our fans on facebook 31 percent are women 67 percent are men share the window with you guys right what percent women 31 percent are women on facebook 67 percent are men and the other two percent declined to state probably majority of our fans are in on facebook are from the united states but we have a big following in canada the uk australia hey australia india mexico many countries around the world yes that's neat data is cool i love data okay stop the screen sharing yeah you can find out it ed wonders i wonder if overall women's interest in science and technology has an age gap older women less interested younger women more interested and ed i would hazard a guess that yeah there probably is an age gap there um yeah i i would totally agree with that but i also think that i don't know i get the feeling that just in general science is much more has much more interest i think it's got higher levels of interest or at least much greater exposure but i'm also i'm also in a like you're in a bubble i'm in a bubble i i'm i get a research university town but it's like everybody's always been into science everywhere you go people love science yeah doesn't everybody everywhere like half the population work in some form of discipline of science isn't how it is everywhere yeah so um you know of all the there was a uh there was a new where is i don't know if i'll be able to find it but there was a there's a new survey from the american academy of arts and sciences and they're doing a three-year effort to understand public perceptions of science and the influences on those perceptions of science and so they just published their first years poll review which just looks into like the the attitudes about science and it takes from things like the pew surveys and other surveys that have been done and compiles all the stuff together so this is like a meta review of these surveys that have been done previously and um what they what they are saying from their survey is that while public attitudes about science are generally positive and continue to be positive overall media coverage if you talk about media the industry of media science coverage is going down in the media science departments as you know media outlets disappear in the outside world science departments as are are going the way of the dodo bird and there's less and less science writing that's happening however that wasn't taking into account this huge increase in online and stuff like i mean i'm finding so much amazing science writing at places like the atlantic ours technicug is moto buzzfeed even you know like these places slate you know there's vox stat news the verge i mean and there are new places opening up online all the time and these writers are putting out amazing material and there's and that's the bubble that we're in is this online conception of science news and finding science news all the time um but generally for the general american public the exposure to science is less than it had than it has been and less of course it has to do with a controversial topic that has public policy implications or ramifications i i wonder though so it's kind of two it's it's kind of a double edged sword because by having science writings in places that are not just science journals like buzzfeed like places that people go just to scroll through you are potentially reaching people that are not normally searching for science however i wonder if it makes it much harder to be a skeptic and figure out what is a reputable source because how do you know that that science writer or that writer who writes for an online magazine or a blog is interpreting the information from a press release properly i saw um i saw an article i think it was shared to our to the twist science facebook page um or maybe the the twitter account it was today or yesterday um and it was about a science writer taking um a scientist's words a researcher's words completely out of context for a weird headline oh yeah it wasn't that it was a comic strip thing was yeah yeah that was funny which which that's what happens is if if you get rid of the science desk you get rid of the reporter who understands how to interpret the science and what the scientists are saying then you have a general beat reporter who's suddenly going in and interviewing and using their normal skills of journalistic skills which are probably very good but not necessarily properly honed for interpreting the science for for people and so you end up with false equivalencies being being reported and leading to problems that we've seen you know where people are have been reporting you know doubt on climate change for years when really and it gives this appearance of doubt to the public because every article has to be fair and balanced right it's like right you know okay you found one person who doesn't agree but you know they're the minority and you should say that they really are the minority in the article if you you know you can give them you know give them article space give them give them words and page like page space but point out that they are in the in the minority of the interpreting the science in this particular way or don't you know don't do it at all yeah so yeah well it's it's kind of like that that thing that Stephen Colbert did where he said okay if i'm going to give a representative account for the debate of climate change i will bring in three climate denying or you know skeptical science climate scientists and then i will bring out 97 scientists but those three that they found were never climate scientists they were they were geologists right we'll also remember that all of the studies that didn't that disprove climate change were not replicable so also remembering that is an important thing so but so i yeah i think but i i think there there is an explosion in sciences um there are there's that curiosity stream right now which has got a lot of re-involved with it and in a decent amount of you know science topics in there but i'm i'm thinking more along the lines of access to education on these subjects online you can take online there's something corsia uh which i just discovered a little while back i've been i took a chemistry class i took some lab technique skills and do it like a whole bunch of courses in there but you can kind of just youtube search and google anything you want into the youtube's and you'll find it um as a few of you know i took a lab job recently so i spent an evening watching videos about pipetting techniques yes don't get carpal tunnel oh yeah but but like um you can learn like i and i've had to go back because i just like i was saying i'm terrible with the chemistry it's like i don't get an adam and then they're like and now we're gonna draw a diagram that makes no sense and that's chemistry i'm like i missed everything in between it's not in my head so i'm back in corsia and i'm taking uh the you know basic intro chemistry courses so i think access to science and knowledge is greater than it's ever been it's all at your fingertips it's all around and you know i've watched all those the there's walter lewens uh lectures from mi all this physics lecture he's like the most wonderful instructor uh that you could possibly hope to be sitting in his class and there it is you can take all of his classes on itunes right so i i think we have terrific access to it i think i think there's there's channels and shows and things that are out there unfortunately yeah when you're talking about a a mainstream media where somebody just clicks on a channel and they're gonna get presented with a short info thingy about science i would gladly get rid of all of that tomorrow for what we already have today wait that's sort of gonna be where things are and i much prefer i know i'm less interested than you know that you're gonna that the chances we're gonna lose somebody who's gonna come across the science article in their newspaper or that that that they're gonna the nova special came on which i know is inspired many many people those sorts of things and i i could care less if that all goes away for compared to what we have now where somebody goes gosh i'm really curious i heard about this thing and i want to learn about it and they can sit down on their computer and now they're watching a video or they're taking a class and a subject and now they can learn it right there i think that's much more valuable i think the ability that we have now for somebody to go out and pursue an interest and learn about something at home for free without having to pay for a university or like i didn't get to go to school because it just didn't work out because i got pregnant and i had a job and uh i a tornado took my house to oz or whatever the reason you you've decided you weren't going to pursue an education you can pursue it right now you can sit down in front of your computer and you can start learning and if it gets to the point where like you need a degree or want to do a degree or want to go back to school you can go in there knowing that you're understanding the material before you step foot into the classroom um so i i don't know i think i think i agree with you uh or maybe we're agreeing that uh despite the mainstream media's lack of dedication to science in some degrees we're still in a better place for it totally yeah people people who have access can access as long as people know again like what what is a reputable source i recently was looking for climate change videos um and climate change infographics and i stumbled across i don't remember what it's called but i don't even really want to name it even if i could remember it because i don't want to promote it but there's an entire quote unquote university that offers short courses in climate denial yep that's basically what it is yeah and i looked i looked i did some some digging they have no academic credentials whatsoever the scientists and professors are not any of those things in the videos and they are in fact funded by oil companies so this is something that you can say oh i want to take this 20 minute or two hour short course in climate science and you can find yourself being shoveled literal garbage like there's just unless you know better that unless you know better yeah and you're like i just want to learn which is the it is in my opinion the biggest fear and the biggest like um concern that i have for the huge amount of information at our fingertips and this is something that's why i talk i've talked about this on the show before how with my teen volunteers i always ask them what is a reputable source and it is really hard for them to be able to put it into words and i have to teach them how to find the about page on a website and find who runs the website and where they get from information how to look up sources and it's something that unfortunately takes a lot more work than clicking on something and and just ingesting the material you have to do all this extra background work because it is so easy to find pretty much anything on the internet right so there's there's there's a tremendous democratizing of information and there's a tremendous uh what is it decrease in reliability and decreasing possibly in our our ability to even have a democracy you know one of the interesting things i i thought fascinating thing um this is when they went back in that the FCC was was holding this sort of we want your feedback what is the general public think about net neutrality and they found that uh about two million responses who were opposed to net neutrality were not fake they were they were they were fake they were fraudulent but they were real people these were they did i they want the step to do identity theft to represent actual people from around the united states with their name and their location and yes they do live there and yes this is me but no i didn't write that and i was i would never i'm actually against them on the other side of the issue and here's a post in my name going to the FCC saying i'm for it and they've they've they've been running into a number of these problems there was some other um there was some other thing that had to do with a health care regulation they wanted to change and oh no no it was the yeah it was the fiduciary we're trading a fiduciary responsibility for people who offer financial advice to senior citizens right they wanted them covered the same way like your lawyer or your personal accountant has a fiduciary responsibility or your real estate agent has a fiduciary responsibility not to sell you a bag of goods just so they can get a commission but they actually have to professionally legally be working in your interest and i guess financial planners don't have to be that for these you know for for putting your money into a to an investment and they wanted to create this and you had all these people saying i don't want government involved in my investments and these people were also generated from from apparently apparently from uh identity theft like it's the real people and then they go and track them down and find out yeah no i never wrote that and some of it was was clues i guess like a lot of you know you get you get a hundred thousand response from one little town with a population of 800 because it ran through their server and bounced to the to the report agent things like this right um were some of the clues where they're like oh gosh there's an awful lot of people from one specific area and that it all are all up in arms about this and there's more responses than we have people so there is a really frightening age uh that we're going into where not only can we maybe not trust the sources of information uh for like what you're describing like who is this presenting me with this scientific view are they even a scientist because i'm not in a university setting where this has been vetted our own government institutions can't tell if the feedback that they're getting is from actual people because if they look and check their records it might match a name in a town if they did that level but they went to the point of identity theft so how do you know yeah yeah i just posted a link in the chat room for an article that a friend posted on social media speaking of sources it's a buzzfeed news article related about uh it's about a a researcher he's a his name's aviv aviv ovadia and his fears about the internet and and what what the world of information is becoming and his predictions of what may happen it's a it's a fascinating if not dystopian read but um i i recommend it but those of you who are interested you know it's the science fiction that's not really the science fiction it's the real real possibility yes so lately i've been reading harry potter to my uh my six-year-old son and as a result i've got all these different voices harry potter harry harry potter harry that's fantastic i can be love it harry why would you do that harry oh harry harry harry harry harry harry no you shouldn't be that way harry potter harry potter you've got a few things you need going down there you know you've got to get you warned oh did you lose your wand from your pocket how do you do that now you dean thomas right now yeah i'm working on it that's great i can master at all i i think i can do the cockney accent only because i watched my fair lady about a hundred times as a child right that is right i love accents it's fun elsa and anna work oh yeah but i always pronounce it anna so i go so elsa and anna work no no no it's anna anna i'm like okay oh it's leviosa not leviosa on their way so then i do overdo on the next thing that happened they're like no not all of that just that one like it's funny though because kai has gotten really he's gotten used to me reading in these different voices and when i mess up on a voice or don't do a particular voice he's like he stops me he goes no mom no you you have you didn't do it in the right voice that's not the right voice mom like don't agree to it right now yeah i have fun hermione hermione i do i have to talk like this i've got a big smile on my face when i do hermione oh i'm hermione i've got a big smile and then for um fred and george they've got a much forward more forward sound to the the voice i've got these boys who are speaking forward like that and um when i when i do ron ron's got a bit more of a choppy sound in his voice and harry harry's just got a normal kind of yeah i i live with the dursleys and they they kind of suck oh my goodness that's great what book are you still on askaban or are you on to the next one we are on to the next one goblet of fire goblet of fire huge book huge book unnecessarily long i feel like that one does not need to be as long as it is sorry jk love your work that one too long yeah we're having fun though kai loves it it's i'm excited he likes it we have our nightly reading i love it i love it get him into the reading young so good yes yes yes imaginations young and then next i'll get him starting on his accents yeah you guys it's almost 11 o'clock i had i don't think i i don't know if i have a fever still oh man yeah go to bed fever i need to go to bed um yeah i'm gonna be speaking in tongues pretty soon oh no go to sleep i might speak in accents now i'm gonna speak in tongues yikes well have a glass of wine go to bed right it's time did you know i haven't had a drink i had one drink last weekend and it's the first drink i had in over and over three months what yeah like yikes let's do this how do you cope with normal life yeah i drink a lot of tea now oh boy i'm like i would like a drink right now i will have tea okay there we go oh boy so next week i'll either be in the um guitar room because i won't have figured out the internet at my new apartment or i will be in my new apartment awesome yay well i hope the move goes well thank you everything's a nightmare always yeah and um i will see you in portland yes i'm so excited i got my welcome email today and i was like i got super excited yay awesome well i'll see Blair will be will be conferencing science communication conferencing together but unfortunately she's got to be in and out because of the move right well so i'm moving right up until i come for the conference but then the day after i come back so on the saturday i have a teen volunteer orientation that i cannot miss yeah so i'm gonna be onboarding a bunch of new teen volunteers and um talking to them and their parents in a group of like 300 so i unfortunately there's no one else that can do that so i have to i have to come back for that once a year we do these orientations i do two dates the timing is poor but one of them is this sunday the next one is the following saturday gotta do it gotta do gotta do you all right so there will not be meetups and other fun having but we will conference yeah and i'm i'm gonna barely see portland because i'll be there for the conference and maybe kiki will take me to a brewery on that one night that i'm there but other than that yeah i won't see portland at all which i've i've been wanting i wanted to visit portland for as long as i can remember so i'm just gonna have to come back soon so i can actually explore it's a wonderful city oh i can't wait yes and so eventually i gotta get both of you up here so we have podcasting and meetup and all that how are we bumping up at the same time is it no i've never been to oh that's right yeah it's pretty funny yeah listening comprehension justice no no i i have a hundred percent comprehension it's just that i was born like 15 minutes late and everything takes a while to catch oh i see i see you're on a slight lag got it yeah you got a slight cool i've gotten pretty good i'm i'm up to like being only a minute or two behind the conversation that i'm having that was good it's probably only like 30 seconds on that one okay thank you good night everybody thank you for coming we appreciate your time have a wonderful week say good night Blair good night Blair say good night Justin good night Justin good night kiki