 Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode, the broadcast of the podcast of This Week in Science. We are recording live, which happens every Wednesday at 8 p.m. Pacific time. And so you're watching the live unfold filtered version of this program. If you want all the editing and the cleaned up version, then make sure you subscribe to the podcast and that will be neatly edited for you by our wonderful Rachel. Yeah, go away and come back later. I'm just kidding. Hang out. It's fun. This is the real thing. This is the real deal, everybody. Warts and all. We're here to talk about science for the next 90 minutes. No, no, no. And I'm hoping, fingers crossed, that my internet is all fixed and ready for tonight. So everything, there's been a lot of work in this new place. Making things go. Is everyone ready for the show? Perhaps. Okay, there's at least that's in the positive realm of possibility. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. Okay, so we are beginning the show in three, two, this is Twist. This week in Science, episode number 894, recorded on Wednesday, September 28th, 2022. This week in Science of the Future. Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on the show, we will fill your heads with coffee, chromosomes, and Dr. Steven Novella, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Nature is a beast. One that we often assume has long been tamed. Man versus nature, a mere trope of ancient storytelling. We know that nature has not actually been tamed, but it is better understood. While nature is still a beast, the brunt of the beast is avoidable. We know when and where severe weather will strike. The disasters of nature are therefore now man-made. Building in the path of hurricanes or tornadoes or earthquake-prone places is our doing, not nature's. Scientists have warned us. The methods we have relied on to fuel our economies, our cars, our homes, and our agriculture have consequences. Science has even given us the tools to predict storms to track them, to give us time to act, to engineer, and to evacuate. And as a fierce hurricane hits Florida again, millions are fleeing ahead of the danger and millions are still there seeking higher ground out of the storm's path. We hope that they are able to stay safe. Avoid the immediate danger and when conditions change for the better, when the storm has passed, reflect on a future where such events become more common, not less, more destructive, not less. And heed the warnings of science to mitigate the outcomes of future extreme weather and the best way to keep updates, keep yourself updated on the future. This week in Science, coming up next. ["Science"] 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. See you to Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome, welcome, welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back again to talk all about the world of science. And this week we do have a special guest with us, Dr. Steven Novella. Welcome. Hey everyone, thanks for having me. We're so glad to have you on the show. And as usual, you know, we're gonna talk about science and Dr. Novella has been kind enough to talk with us about some science for a little bit, but we're also gonna talk about a new book that he has coming out that he's written with his brothers. The Skeptics. Those of the Skeptics guide to the universe, you may have heard of it once or twice upon the internet. Anyhow. Oh, it's the one that says on the cover in bold letters that says panic. The other, it's the compliment to the hitchhikers. Right. On the show, I've got a bunch of stories to start out with. We've got stories. I have stories about chromosomal fluidity, epigenetics, and a reason to get outside. We'll talk about that at the end of the show. What do you have for us, Justin? What do I have? I have one of those studies that says coffee is good for you. But this time they did the study on, wait for it, humans, which makes a big difference when you're looking for something that can actually help humans. Also, we got, yeah, not a mice study this time, which is the usual. We've got a Just Good News segment, Bird Population Edition. Mercury is in the news, the planet, but also Mercury is in the news in my ancient mind civilization this week. This all sounds very exciting. As well as, waitest. As what? Oh, we have a terrible delay. I can tell we have a delay because my usual ability to talk over people is going the other direction. It is. And then if we have time, if we have time, there's a study that shows that being social improves your longevity at the molecular level. That's why I love doing twists. Blair, what is in the animal corner? I have female fruit flies fighting it out and whale brains. And before that, we're gonna talk a little bit about your dog or cats, medications. What medications? Okay, yes, let's have that conversation in just a moment because first I wanna tell you that as we jump into the show, you can always find us anywhere good podcasts are found. We're on all the majors. Look for this week in science. You can also find us when we broadcast live weekly on Facebook, Twitch and YouTube. Look for us as Twist Science on Twitch, Twitter and Instagram. If all this is just a lot, go to twist.org where you can find all this information, show notes and more. That's our website, it holds all the stuff. But now, it is time for the science. All right, we can't let this show get started without diving into the very number one thing on people's tweets this week, NASA's bullseye with the dart mission, hitting dimorphus, the moonlet of Didymus. They did it. They ran a little craft into an asteroid moonlet and we knew they'd do it because they've put stuff on asteroid moonlets before. They've done this, we've done this, it's okay. We hit it pretty hard and there's a little CubeSat from Italy that's been following along behind going, I'm gonna take pictures and so they got some really great pictures of a bunch of dust being blown off the surface. There are also more high resolution images that have come out as a result of this impact, but the big question still remains. Aside from impacting and causing a lot of smoke, not smoke, dust to be ejected off of the surface of this little moonlet, did it move it at all? Because that's the point. For planetary defense, you're not just sticking a dart in something, you actually potentially want to move an asteroid or other object that is hurtling toward Earth off course. Yeah. So did it make the corner pocket? Exactly. Did we bounce it? And that information is yet to come. Did you all watch it? They made it live. They had a great, great. I will say it is the first asteroid that I have ever seen or meteor, whatever, meteor, it's asteroid because this was first one I've ever seen that looks like an asteroid. All the rest of them, you get the photos and you're like, that's not what an asteroid is supposed to look like. That's not the, not even close to the picture I had in my head. This one actually looks like they got it out of central casting and yeah, it's pretty. And I do, I'm putting up on screen right now. If anybody wants to search for NASA Dart on Google, let's see if I can actually make it work. It is a pretty fun little animation that they've created, a little Easter egg from Google related to the Dart mission. It's kind of fun. And then in other news, beyond NASA, as you're still looking at my screen here, we also have fluid chromosomes. Who knew, fluid chromosomes? What does that even mean? Well, researchers have always wondered about the solidity of the chromosomes within the nucleus of our cells. Chromosomes are the little bundles of DNA that go about making the proteins that allow us to function, that make all the things that we are. Well, there's been an idea from previous experimentation that the chromosomes and the interior of the nucleus are kind of like a gel, like they're a jelly substance. Well, some researchers from MIT and CNRS, the Curie Institute and the Sorbonne have found a pretty interesting result by putting little nano magnets into chromosomes and then by using very small cellular level forces to see how the chromosomes reacted. And so they were able to use these very, very small, the kind of forces that would happen if an enzyme were coming upon the start codon in a piece of DNA, in a gene to start it activating. Or if an enzyme were coming around to unwind a histone and to allow access to the cell, the chromosomes move. And so the movements, this is published in the journal Science This Week, the movements have been described as almost liquid, liquid-like or fluid-like in nature. And so the result of these forces that are naturally exerted by the nucleus allow us to now imagine chromosomes as a more liquid-like structure as opposed to more solid. More liquid-like, but not fully liquid-like, not like, not water, right? So more oob-like light is like, is what it sounds like. A little bit more. So what I did when I did my interpretive dance as my thesis for studying chromosomes, and it got rejected. I need to now dust off the moves and bring it back because it was all fluid movements. It was in water. You were like a merman. It's not like Jell-O. No, it's not like Jell-O. It's no longer going to be considered gel-like. It's more like a liquid. Like the, yeah, because I don't know. Anyway, the researchers say ultimately these measurements allow a deeper understanding of how genomic elements can move under active biological forces and provide a basis for developing new physical models of chromosomes. And so the take-home message in all of this is that once we can understand how chromosomes move and how they interact with other parts of the cells, we can potentially understand how to manipulate those things better. There are lots of things that we can learn. How does it work? What can we do with it? Can we, if we can understand the forces that work and how the chromosomes react, can we use it for medical treatments? What do you think, Steven? Well, we're talking about when the, not when the chromosomes are all bound up tight. You know, you do a karyotype and you see like the little Xs that touch your, the chromosome all wound up as tight as it can be. But most of the time, the chromosomes have to be active, right? I mean, they need to be reproducing themselves and sending out the messenger RNA to outside the nucleus. So yeah, I mean, they have to, they have to unwind. And then, and if they're unwound, it's just like a really tiny thin string. Yes. So yeah, you would expect, and they're just floating in jelly. And it flows around. So it's like putting string in hair gel. I'm gonna poke at it. Yeah, just like it. But like a really more liquid hair gel. Okay. Got it. Yeah. Got it. Just, you know, imagine different ways of imagining the chromosomes. All right. I know Steven's up late tonight. So he may have had coffee. I don't know if he drinks coffee. I don't think so, but Justin tell us how coffee can be good for us. And not for us. Yeah, I can do the coffee story to start off with. So we normally don't do a whole lot of these. This new thing says it can be good for you because 12 people ate chocolate and none of them got into car accidents or whatever, right? I feel like it's always coffee, it's chocolate and it's red wine. Are the ones that are like, it's good for you, it's bad for you. It's good for you, it's bad for you. It's what you're consuming watching daytime television is what's good for you. Right. But this was a decaffeinated ground and instant coffee. We're tested two to three cups a day were associated with significant reductions and incidences of cardiovascular disease, so like strokes and that kind of thing and mortality that was linked to it as well as some heart arrhythmias too, which I thought was interesting for the ground. More heart arrhythmias? Less. Less. Less. Only for the caffeinated coffee. For the decaffeinated coffee. You would think it would be the other direction. Right. So, because part of the thing is you have coffee and we think, oh, that's how I get my caffeine delivered. But there's all sorts of other stuff in there that's compounds that are working. But the decaffeinated coffee, which was associated with the reduction of cardiovascular disease, was not associated with a reduction in heart arrhythmias. So, keep in mind though that again, these studies were based on humans, so if your mouse results may not correlate. The study by the Baker Heart and Diabetes Research Institute in Australia, published in the European General Preventative Cardiology, included 449,563 participants who were free of arrhythmia or cardiovascular disease at the beginning of the study, which was some 12, starting where they collected these folks data, starting in the mid 2000s. In the 2009, something like this, 2008, somewhere in that area. So, awesome sample size though. Participants were also pretty equal, male versus female. Average age was in the 50s. Participants completed a questionnaire asking how much coffee they drank, what kind of coffee they drank, or if they drank, you know, they could maybe drink none. And then they also got separated into how much coffee they would drink on a daily basis. The majority of the intake was instant coffee. What? Yeah. Definitely a European thing. This is a whole, right? A lot more instant coffee. Yes. This is a whole interesting thing that we did enough to talk about. Like, why are the Australians drinking so much instant? That's 44% were drinking the instant. Ground was only 18.4%, which that's... Yeah, when I lived in Israel, it was only, only, only instant coffee and Turkish coffee. You had to find like a special store that would sell Americano coffee if you wanted a drip coffee. That's wild. Yeah. That's wild. So anyway, and then 15% were decaffeinated, 22% were non-coffee drinkers and they served as sort of the control group for the just looking at the coffee thing. So they followed up about 12 years later. Cardiovascular disease was diagnosed in that timeframe and 9.6% of the participants during the follow-up, again, these are people who are median age is, I think 58, something like that. So they're getting into that range where heart disease starts to show up. All coffee subtypes were associated with the reduction in incidents of cardiovascular disease. The lowest risk was observed with two to three cups a day. When compared to the non-coffee drinkers, it was a 20% reduced likelihood of cardiovascular disease from the ground coffee drinkers. Only 6% lower risk for decaf, 9% lower risk for incident coffee drinkers. So there's something wrong with the decaf. I wouldn't even, something that's not right about it. Heart arrhythmia, diagnosed in 6.7% of the participants during that follow-up period, ground and instant coffee, but not decaffeinated were associated with the reduction as we were talking about. Again, ground coffee, two to three cups a day was like the best reduction, 17% lower risk of heart arrhythmias, 12% for instant. So while the study shows that coffee can extend longevity by lowering other health risks related to the heart, it should be noted that if they continue to attract participants in these 12-year increments, every study is based on sort of the timeframe that you look at that and things can change outside of that narrow window, is expected if they continue these 12-year increments in a couple of studies down the road, all of the participants are expected to die of something. That's usually the case, eventually. So for the couple. Life results in death. So, but this is, I mean, this is an observational study which is how you get the hundreds of thousands of people. That's the advantage of this kind of study. You do tons and tons of people so you get a lot of statistical significance. However, you can't make causal claims from this kind of data. No. Let's say people who have heart disease think they're not supposed to drink coffee so they don't drink coffee and they're especially not supposed to drink the coffee with caffeine. So that could be that people are avoiding those things because they have the disease. They don't avoid the disease because they're drinking the coffee. I suspect there's so many coffee studies, like I said, in chocolate and wine. It's always these observational studies or so many confounding factors. I personally don't think you can make any kind of like causal claim from this kind of data. Saying like, if you drink coffee, you'll be healthier and you can't say that from this data. Right, true. But however, and I would, I totally agree with you and I would get rid of the control group of the non-coffee drinkers then. Because that, you're absolutely right. If you have like, oh gosh, I feel like I have heart and rhythm here, but I haven't had it diagnosed yet and caffeine makes it worse for me. It makes me, so those people forget about them. The decaf drinkers, I don't know what planet they originate from. Their biology is probably very different. But if you just look at the instant coffee drinkers versus the ground coffee drinkers, you still see a very significant jump. And then what you could do to seek out the next step, to get away from the correlative and to start seeking out the causative, is compare ingredients. Compare what compounds make it into our present in a ground coffee that somehow are not part of that instant coffee formulation. And then you can maybe create a new experiment where you just focus on the lack of overlap. But yeah, of course, more study would need to be done. Yeah, I mean, this is a good kind of study to generate a hypothesis that you then test with actual experimental data, like identifying compounds or whatever. But I'll give you an anecdote, like I don't drink coffee in general. I'm a tea drinker, but I drink decaffeinated. I don't take any caffeine because I have palpitations. But the cause and effect is definitely I stopped drinking caffeine because I have palpitations for a completely unrelated reason. But I would be in that category of somebody who has a rythmias and doesn't drink caffeine. And David Nevin in the chat brings up another really good point I was thinking about too, which is with self-reporting, there's so many problems. Like for example, I drink one cup of coffee a day, but that's a thermos. It's definitely closer to three actual literal cups. So how successful were they in getting real scientific numbers from these whole cups? Self-reporting data is always gonna be iffy. But that's also what you ask. Like if you're gonna get a half a million as your sample size, you're gonna have, you're hoping that the brute force of numbers overcomes the noise of that. But it cuts both ways though, because because you have so many numbers, any kind of confounding factor can be statistically significant. It actually creates noise. It makes the noise statistically significant. So you have to be especially careful when you're dealing with such huge numbers. But it's funny what you say about like the cup, because I treat migraines, I always take a caffeine history on all my migraine patients. And you can't just ask how much coffee you drink or how much caffeine you drink. Cause people will say, oh, I drink one cup a day, but it's a 32 ounce Starbucks, whatever. You have to get to ounces. You have to know how many ounces they consume. And if the study didn't drill down to that level, that's another potential confounding factor. I have some patients who say that they laugh and they go, I measure it in pots of coffee, not cups of coffee. I think I might have identified your problem. Yeah. Absolutely, and speaking of the statistical stuff, there was a study out this week that I couldn't talk about, but just to bring it up very briefly as to how much noise gets generated, there's a researcher who has a paper out suggesting that the popular statistical methods of doing genetic analyses to infer evolutionary relationships are problematic and that it may affect some over 250,000 research papers. And so it's a study that's out and if you find it, take a look at it because it hits at that point of if you have these big data sets, you have to be careful about the way you're looking at them because you can find all sorts of relationships that aren't necessarily real. Especially since a lot of genetic code is single-sourced in a sense, so everything is pretty much a mutation of a mutation of a mutation of a thing that was there for maybe even a different reason, to a logic sense. So you're gonna find genes of great similarity in very disparate organisms. The genes that are involved in budding yeast are also very similar to the ones that do neuron generation. And they may actually share history, but it doesn't mean that there's a closer relationship between man and yeast than we know of. Than other animals, right? Yeah, than other animals, right. Speaking of animals, Blair, you wanted to talk about pet medications? Yes, pet medication. This is a study from University of Minnesota Medical School and they compared the prices of 120 medications commonly used by both humans and pets. For example, my dog and I are on the exact same antacid medication. What? The authors found, can you guess, the price of these medications. What was more? The human or the pet? I would say the human. At least in the United States. Yes, so this was in the United States and the human medications were insanely higher in price than the pet medications when they had the same ingredients at common human equivalent doses. So they're looking at very similar doses, very similar ingredients. The human medications are approximately 5.5 times higher priced than pet medications. On average, if they were discounted, prices were still 1.5 times higher for human medications than for those same pet medications at full price. For example, a 10 day supply of one medication costs $2 for a dog, $10 for a person with a discount or some sort of copay, and $100 for a person paying full price. Human prices were also higher than pet prices for antibiotics. They warn that this may actually promote human sourcing animal drugs, which in some cases would be fine. Like for example, the antacid that my dog is on and I am on are exactly the same and that would be totally fine. But for antibiotics, the course might be different, the dose might be different, the treatment of that drug might be different. And so also human drugs are closer regulated. So the way that they're created, right? Yeah, why can't I go to a vet? Yes, there's a few reasons for that. This is one of them. So next they wanna figure out the reasons behind these price differences. I have an idea. They think that one possibility is drug manufacturers engaging in price discrimination by charging consumers different prices and different markets for the same product. I would say duh. I would say also this is definitely taking advantage of the insurance system and feeding that whole monster because pet insurance, for example, the pet insurance that I have for my dog doesn't cover simple medications. Wait, that's a thing? That's a thing? I didn't know that was a thing. So yeah, so that's what I was gonna say, is pet insurance by and large is like, my dog had to go into $10,000 surgery and I only wanna pay $600. It's not covering your normal vet visits with a copay. It's not covering normal medications. It is covering these kind of like catastrophic costs that pets can cause a family to go through. And that's why you kind of, you'll say, I'll pay you $50 a month and if my dog has to get its stomach pumped one day cause it eats a Lego, you'll take care of it for me, right? So it's a different insurance system as opposed to ours where we kind of are constantly feeding this machine to then charge more for things than they actually cost so that they feed themselves. It's a whole thing. But anyway, that's my guess as to why human medications are more expensive. So anyway, this is not a surprise, this study but I just kind of wanted to throw it out there because it's a good example of kind of one of these predatory tactics. Yeah, but can I ask, I mean, like I know this is, I worked in a medical diagnostic lab for a while. I know that whatever your vet is charging you for a test is a multiple, multiple, multiple of what the lab is actually charging. But I also know that, yes, yes, it definitely, yes. It is, but I will tell you. If you paid $500 for that test, I almost guarantee you the lab didn't charge more than 80. The idea here is I would argue that if you drilled closer down on this, that would be true, but it would be true 5.5 times for humans. Like the time I had to pay full price when I was in the ER and I paid $250 for a microwaveable dish of pasta. So that's my point too. So that same test for a human to get at a lab might be thousands of dollars but it's all invisibly paid by insurance which is how they hide the cost of medical treatments in this country. But the thing that I, a question to have those is for the cost difference between humans and pets, is the dosage, because like a lab test is the same lab test, whether you're a human, a dog, a cat, or a fish. They controlled for dosage, Justin. Oh, they did, okay. So for example, the antacid that my dog is on is 10 milligrams, Mayan acid is 20 milligrams. So they controlled for that, right? Even, you're more than just saying. Milligrams per kilogram, right? I'm not just saying that you're trying to size your dog. Yes, but we actually have a prescribing doctor on the show with us who can probably speak from experience. Yeah, I mean, I'm not on the pharmaceutical industry side, but I do know this is true across many aspects of medicine just because it's an artifact of our insurance system and Medicare and Medicaid that like they're contracted to receive a certain percentage of the true cost. So they just sort of, you know, they don't expect anyone to pay full price. The full price is a bargaining starting point for insurance companies. You know, if you're paying full price, that's like crazy. Nobody expects that that's what's actually happening. That's just so they can get the 20% from Medicaid or whatever, but they have to do that. It's like against the law for them not to then charge you the full price because then that basically shows that they're lying when they say that's the full price. So they kind of have to position themselves that way. And from the pharmaceutical industry point of view, they basically make all their money on the American human market and they don't, the rest of the world, including the animal world doesn't pay those prices. That's kind of built into the system because again, just an artifact of the fact that like Medicaid and Medicare can't negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over prices. Although, you know, they're trying to change that, but so that's basically where it's coming from. And they just, you know, that's where they get all their profit from it. They know they're not going to get it off of pets. Although I have to say, I've noticed over the last 10, 20 years, the amount of money people are willing to spend on their pets is crazy. Like you say like $10,000, $20,000 on an animal that's towards the end of its life expectancy, you know, just get a new pet at that point. I mean, people are going to do what they want to do. So I'm not saying we don't take care of our pets, but it's, I mean, you can really spend $20,000 on a 15 year old dog, but I see people doing that. It's just amazing that they'll do that. Yeah, and I think that's part of this too is there's a different pain threshold for cost with pets versus with your own personal health. And so that's the other thing is, I think pharmaceutical companies know that and they know that if they charged way more for your pet medications, you'd go, my dog will have a stomach ache. It's okay, I can't afford to buy this every week. Or even just like diagnostic tests. It's like the stuff they've offered me for my pets when they are at the end of their life, it's like, no, just making comfortable, I'm not going to do a $2,000 MRI scan to find out that there's a $10,000 surgery I'm not going to do anyway. So I just think it's really, when did that happen? Like I didn't realize at some point that people just were starting to. As the millennial on the show, I'll tell you that I think it's when millennials could no longer afford to have their own children. And so they decided to have the pets instead. And so those pets are their children. Yeah, urban millennials. My day, old Yeller took the helmet. You had a solution. It didn't cost you very much. It was emotionally charged. It's true, but you have a built character. Built character. We don't need that. What's the back of this shed good for anyway these days? Young kids ever go back there? Okay, okay, Justin, you're gonna just stop right now. We don't need to follow this train of thought any further. How interesting for a man who's on a show with an animal corner. The animal corner is gonna be coming up in just a bit on this show, but I do want to stop right here and say thank you so much for joining us for This Week in Science. You are here to learn about science and to have fun while we have fun talking about it with you. If you're enjoying the show, please share it with a friend today. All right, we're gonna come back right now and it is time for us to specifically ask a lot of questions of Dr. Steven Novella. Our guest tonight on the show, as I said, is Dr. Novella who is an academic neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine, in addition to being the host of the Skeptics Guide podcast. He's the president and co-founder of the New England Skeptical Society, a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a founding fellow of the Institute for Science in Medicine. He is a prolific writer, blogging at Neurological Blog and Science-Based Medicine. He's the co-author of the best-selling Skeptics Guide to the Universe named after his podcast that he's been doing for almost about as long as twist has been going on. And now he's co-authored a new book with his fellow Novellas, The Skeptics Guide to the Future. Thank you so much for joining us on the show tonight. Well, thanks again for having me on the show. It's always fun to talk about this topic. Oh, the future? Yeah. I mean, it's unwritten, right? We can just talk about that all night long, make things up, it's all good. Yeah, I mean, so people asked me how long it took me to write this book and I always say about 20 years or longer. My brothers and I have been amateur futurists, technophiles, science fiction fans, basically our whole lives. So we really dug deep into this book. It was so much fun to research and to put it together. Just thinking about the possibilities of what could happen in the future. But of course we didn't wanna just riff, right? We wanted to take like a hard skeptical look that's the Skeptics Guide to the Future, not just riffing about the future. So we did a deep dive on futurism itself, like the science of thinking about how things change over time and how to think about the future. Don't like to say predict the future because we're not psychics, you know? And then predicting the future kind of implies that it's inevitable. And one of the points that we make in the book strongly is that the future is not inevitable. The present is not inevitable. Things could look, have looked very different today if just things had zigged instead of zags, you know? So the future is something that we make by the choices that we make, right? We craft the future. But we can think about what's plausible, what's likely and what types of things tend to happen and how our choices will shape the future. So what did it mean to you to take a skeptical look at the future and at kind of all of the various futurists and people who craft their living off of telling the future, or so it is? Yeah, so at the beginning of the book, we list what we call futurism fallacies, right? So these are just common mistakes that past futurists have made. And there are lots of patterns. People, the futurists tend to make the same mistakes over and over again. And so we identify and explain as many of them as we can and then we try not to make any of them when we talk about the future. So for example, one of my favorites is that we tend, when we think about the future, we tend to imagine ourselves in the future, right? And in fact, science fiction often does that and futurists of the past have done that. Isaac Asimov imagined a world 10,000 years from now with people from the 1930s living there, right? I mean, like exactly zero cultural change over 10,000 years. But that's clearly not gonna be the case. And culture is changing the way we interact with technology, like even one generation to the next, let alone over hundreds of years or longer. The people who are gonna be using whatever technology develops in the future are gonna be different than us. They're gonna have a different morality, different relationship with technology. And you can't really understand the choices that they're gonna make if you're, again, if you're just imagining yourself in that future because that's not the way it's gonna play out. Yeah, I mean, we don't have, I don't think, a spoken language or a written language that was around 10,000 years ago that is being used today, you know? I mean, we're gonna have such, if we look back 10,000 years to try to assume the difference, the gap between where we would be 10,000 years ago. And that's assuming not 1930s people all the way through, but that the rate of change over the next 10,000 years would even be anywhere near the last 10,000 years, which we can probably guess that it's going to be accelerated because of technology and everything else. Yeah, that's one of the aspects of futures in that we spend, you have to focus a lot on. And people like Kurzweil would ever have written about that a lot. Like what is the pattern of the rate of change in technological and scientific progress over time? There's luck, right? Just more luck. It's well, I mean, it's- Doubling. Like Kurzweil argues that it's, you know, geometric and that it's gonna continue to do that. We're at the inflection point, but actually it's more complicated than that because not all technologies follow that pattern. I liked one of the examples I give in the book, for example, like when I was 10 years old and our family took a trip to California, you know, from the East Coast, we got on this jet and we got there in six hours, you know? And then a couple of years ago was at the AAAS in Seattle, I got on the plane and I got there in six hours. Like there was zero progress in at least the time it took for me to fly across the coast in 50 years. I mean, think about that. If you asked anybody 50 years ago, I think it's gonna get quicker to get to fly across the country in 50 years. They probably would have said yes, but we've hit a technological equilibrium point there where jets fly pretty much at the optimal speed. Did it take a certain number below the speed of sound where fuel efficiency is maximal? And they're staying there. They have no intention of going faster. And the Concorde, which was the fast one, it was too loud. Well, you gotta go supersonic. Yeah, so that worked for a while, but there were probably limited routes because of the sonic boom and it was very expensive. The economics, right? And there are companies trying to reboot supersonic travel but it's hard to predict that that will take off because again, it's like how much are people willing to pay for that? And I've done a deep dive on why the Concorde failed. It's always more complicated than you think. It had to do with limited routes and things like that. There was an accident, which was definitely what was a huge problem, but also they positioned themselves, and this is just decisions that companies make and it just turns out to be the wrong one. It turns out that the commercial jets just out-competed them in terms of first class luxury. So you could be more comfortable for cheaper on a regular commercial flight than paying for the supersonic flight. Those seats were not as comfortable and so they just got out-competed and then the business model fell apart. So you can't predict what's going to happen just based on superior technology. The superior technology doesn't always win out because people have lots of reasons for the choices they make. It could be comfort, it could be convenience, it could be cost, it could be safety, it could be the environment, it could be fashion, it could be aesthetics. Some people would argue that the segway failed partly because people thought they looked dorky writing it. There were just things you can't predict until you put technology in the hands of millions or billions of people. That's another reason why you can't make these assumptions and futures tend to make, oh, we'll be doing it this way because this is clearly the superior technologies. But people might not like it. I still cook with knives, with steel. In fact, I bought hand-forged kitchen knives, hand-forged because I like them. And they're because they're- You like the Santoku, like the folding steel. Yeah, the steel is really high quality. I'm not using some kind of space-age metal. Elon Musk is building the starship out of steel because it's cheap and it's good and it works. There isn't this predictable pace of technological change in every area and that's where it really becomes challenging. However, it is absolutely true that scientific research in some arenas is accelerating. There was a couple of studies which came out ironically after our editor cut us off for the making edits to the book because you're never done with a book like this. At some point, the editor just cut you off and said, stop sending me updates. You can't go anymore. But there were a couple of studies where they used AI, just narrow AI algorithms in order to essentially accelerate the rate of research, to essentially predict of the billion things we can look at here, what's the ones that are most likely to be true? And they essentially did 20 or 30 years worth of research in a couple of weeks. So that's a massive acceleration in the rate of scientific research that's happening now. That's one of those futurism promises that is coming true before our eyes. So, there's the whole spectrum from things of stalled or hit roadblocks and we don't know if they're ever gonna get over it to, wow, this is like much faster than anybody predicted it was gonna be. And if you could predict which ones are gonna do that, you could become a billionaire, right? But it's hard to predict that. That's why not everybody is rich, right? Yeah, everybody wants to go back in time and put money into Apple. Because if you knew that smartphones were gonna be the thing or whatever, then, yeah, sure, you'd at least know what the company's to invest in. As a science fiction enthusiast, and this book is full of that mix of science and science fiction, science fiction as it inspires science and science as it inspires science fiction authors, who do you think in terms of science fiction authors or creators, imaginers, has gotten the most right? Do you think from what you've looked at, you have an idea? I don't know that there's one clear winner, but I mean, a lot of people point to Arthur C. Clark. I mean, he definitely was not only one of the great science fiction writers, but wrote in hard science fiction and was very prescient about many things. A lot of science fiction, science fiction's interesting is a lot of futurism that happens in science fiction. So that's why we did plumb that resource for futurism, and it's a lot of fantastic speculation there, but at the end of the day, they're writing a story and the narrative has to come first. So there are certain things that they don't even try to get accurate because it doesn't really work with the story. The big thing is space travel. You pretty much have to forget everything you've ever seen in any science fiction about what future space travel is going to be like. It's because it would be completely boring or just be so problematic, like you can't tell your story. And now we're gonna be on a ship for six months, but there has to be a gimmie there somewhere. And then even the really good hard science fiction like The Expanse, which I thought was excellent, they still had to make up a fake rocket technology that will never exist in order to keep their story moving along. They still had to do that and they kind of knew that that was their gimmie. So science fiction is interesting because it's like, yes, there's some really good futurism in science fiction that anticipated a lot of actual scientific and cultural changes, but there's also the narrative, the demands of the storytelling that limit the futurism are constrained in certain ways. So we talk a lot about that as well because we all think the future is what the science fiction is telling us it's going to be. It's like, yeah, but it's gonna be nothing like anything you've seen in the movies for very good reasons. Yeah, so even starting this week in science back about 20 odd years ago, flying cars, we were at UC Davis and we had a flying car creator in the local area and it was all in the news. We were gonna have flying cars sometime soon. Where's my flying car? Yeah, I mean, that's like probably the number one trope of the future, right? There are always flying cars in the future. People also think of the future as this one amorphous time period, but how long in the future? And again, it's one of those things that one of those technologies, it's not impossible. It just is a lot harder than people thought it was gonna be. Pesky laws of physics that you have to deal with. It just takes a lot of energy to get something off the ground and rolling on wheels is really efficient. And so there's gotta be some reason why you're gonna do this massively inefficient way of getting from point A to point B. And there's safety issues and all these other issues as well. I think where we are right now, we've kind of cracked the safety issue with AI assisted drones, basically. I mean, the flying car would basically be a big drone. So yeah, I think we're pretty much there. We're pretty much there in terms of the safety, at least in good weather. Probably not in adverse weather. And good weather will be picked up by our drone lift, right? In terms of energy efficiency, we're kind of getting close to the line. Electric engines are actually very efficient. But I read an analysis, there was about a year ago where they said, yeah, actually electric cars, even with current technology, could be energy and cost efficient if you are commuting across a really challenging area, right? So if you are trying to get from one end of a busy city to another end of a busy city where you're basically gonna be in traffic for two hours, flying is cost effective. Or if you have to go around a great lake or something where you have to go way out of your way, flying the direct route could actually be cost effective. And actually most of the energy is just getting off the ground. Once you're cruising, it's about the same as a car. It's actually not that much different. So it's actually totally plausible. Flying cars are totally plausible. It was just a lot harder than everybody thought. And I don't wanna say we're getting close because it's like one of those technologies that's always 20 years away. And like we're still thinking that, but it is extremely plausible. It just again, then it'll be like, how much is it gonna cost? Are people gonna be willing to pay that much? Are you gonna need a special license for it? How hard is that gonna be? What's the cost of operating it going to be? Is it gonna be too much of a pain in the ass where you can't take it every time that's too windy outside or whatever? All these things have to play out in real time. It'll probably find a niche somewhere. You know what I mean? Is it really the question of how much is it gonna be used? Or is it just gonna be a rich toy for rich people? Or is it really gonna be the Jetsons where there's gonna be the flying car lanes where everyone's using to get to work? Yeah, and I think that gets at the question is like, what are the specific situations in which certain technologies become adopted on mass by individuals and useful for individuals versus potentially useful in an industrial capacity versus just not useful at all? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, part of it is the killer app, right? Somebody is really clever and figures out a really clever way to use it and to make people's lives better or just an aesthetic. You know, like Microsoft came out with the tablet before Apple did, but Apple made it cooler. And so they're the iPad that predominates. You know, again, wasn't really technologically necessarily any better, it just made it cooler. So it's the same kind of thing. And also here's another futurism fallacy, you know, is that new technology replaces old technology. It does sometimes, but most of the time they can, the old technology persists, they just sort of take on different roles. Like TV didn't replace radio. Radio just became a different thing when TV was filling some of its purpose. And, you know, so now we have, you know, radio and TV and movies and streaming and it's all continuing to exist side by side in, you know, filling different niches. And so that's typically what happens. Another, again, one of those future fallacies is that, you know, old technology is remarkably persistent. And when people imagine the future, it's like everything changes. Like there's no recognizable technology because it's the future. So everything has got to be different. It's like, no, you know, we still live in buildings made of wood and stone and glass and ceramic. And, you know, it's... And we had record keeping and notes being made in the ancient world on tablets. And a lot of them were in the hand held. The thing about the size of an iPhone. It was just like, we didn't invent the iPhone, the tablet out of it. We invented it based on our hand. Our hand chose the design. Like these are the ergonomic aspects of you. We didn't invent selfies. People have been taking various versions of artistic selfies for as long as we've been alive, you know. Yeah, technology has deep roots always far way farther back. The steam engine, you know, was existed in ancient Rome. They just never figured out the killer app, right? They didn't realize we could industrialize this. So they just used it for toys. But what if one person figured out that you could use steam power to automate and industrialize work? We could have had the industrial revolution 2,000 years ago, but nobody thought of it. And so they... And when we say we, because one of the things that when people talk about the future, we tend to think of, again, not necessarily 1930s versions of ourselves into the future kind of a thing, but our own culture is being projected. Like we have like something like 40% of planet earth is living under authoritarian governments that are probably gonna use any technology to maintain power of a state body, not so much a human... Or not use it, turn it off, as in the case of Iran right now. Yeah, correct. That's why pretty much for many of the chapters that we wrote where we say like, how will this technology play out into the future? Like what would the mature version of this technology look like? We often, like we have to present, here's the utopian version and here's the dystopian version because you're right. What if an authoritarian government gets their hands on this technology? That will play out very differently than if a liberal democracy gets their hands on this technology. And so that's the other thing that, like how will technology be used? It kind of depends on things like the government and society and things that we're not really in a position to predict. We're not sociologists, you know, we're psychologists. We're just, we're science nerds. Yeah, whatever, there's like a dozen ways the earth can, we could destroy the earth that we... Yeah, the dart mission, the dart mission, which is great because hey, there's an asteroid coming and we can put a thing on it and then we divert it maybe. But at the same time, you're like, oh, hey, there's an asteroid coming. We could put a thing on it and adjust it just so when it makes its entry, it hits our enemies on the other side of the world. Like all of this is double edge. But again, it's like so hard to get beyond just the immediate socio-political economic thing that again, 10,000, if we were talking in a 10,000 year frame might be difficult to even imagine that the humans are the dominant species. There's the doogie howzer mouse mice that escaped, you're familiar with these? Most intelligent, genetically engineered mice that were ever created in a lab escaped and are now out in the wild somewhere because they were smart enough to escape. Maybe they come in in 10,000 years and replace us. Or it could be the crows, you know. Or it could be the crows or maybe they work together. Maybe finally we have a new species through operation. On the different time scales, it's something I found that was really interesting with the book actually is that you did kind of address these various time scales. At one point you make the very basic statement, the future is anything from like a split second from right now to anytime, 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, a million years in the future until the heat death of the universe, right? But then you do go through and kind of address what might be possible in different time frames. Why was that? I mean, it kind of gets both harder and easier to predict the future when you get farther in the future because what's, I think there's almost like this bimodal curve of difficulty. So if you're talking about 20, 30 years, you're just extrapolating from existing trends and emerging technologies. Again, you could still be wrong if you don't do it well, but I think we could make some pretty confident statements about like, oh yeah, batteries are getting better, solar power is getting better, computers are getting more powerful, AI algorithms are getting more powerful. We're probably gonna have self-driving cars within 10 or 20 years that are real self-driving cars, not the almost ones that we have now. So there are some high probability predictions you can make over 20, 30 years. Then it becomes really hard to precisely predict what things are gonna be like in a hundred years because there's so many, so many different possibilities. Like are we gonna have fusion power in 50 years or is that gonna be more like 150 years? That's a hard prediction to make. But if you go far enough in the future, it's like, well, definitely by 500 years from now we'll have fusion power. And once we get fusion power, that's pretty much it. For a long time, like probably tens of thousands of years, that's probably the best that we could do. Now, there's always the wild cards. There's a runout of deuterium and tritium and things like that, right? Yeah, right. Well, you could make it from hydrogen that you get from water. So it's a pretty abundant resource. But the difficulty is really in predicting the timing of things. So again, if you go, and we don't even try, we just say, and when this technology reaches full maturity, whenever that happens, and we could argue about how long that's gonna take, this is the potential of this technology. And so unfortunately, we only have sort of one history to look at humanity. We don't have like the encyclopedia galactica. We could say, oh, these civilizations tend to do this. We have no idea. We have one data point. But it's really fascinating to think about like what technology is plateau and for how long? And what happens when we run up against the limits of physics? You know, there are physical constraints to things. We should be able to, because we have, I mean, you say it's, we have one data point, but it's our data point. Yeah. It's, you know, tens of thousands of years of about 10,000 years ish of civilization and they're like going back, we have a history. We know the eighth brain of humans and how they engage in the new things over and over and over. We know our political systems seem to repeat over and over and over. Ideologies seem to repeat over all these things repeat. So what your job then is to take, okay, what if we give this eighth brain somewhat predictable creature new technology? Yeah. How do they then, how do they then do the same thing that they always do, but on this other scale or in this other arena? And I think one of the things like we've been modifying our environment and modifying our own abilities so much. I think that there's going to come, we know I don't have to, I don't think wait to too many generations. It might be the generations born today that's going to be totally okay with genetically altering themselves. I mean, for that cosmetic surgery, but then you could even see like a special, a branching of intentional evolution of, and then when you get into it. And then all bets are off because you're talking about different species. You do talk about genetic modification and synthetic biology in the book a bit. Oh yeah, I mean, that's going to be huge. Absolutely, we're getting more and more control over genetics in general, not only ours, but just of all life. And that's progressing at the same time that we're getting more and more ability to control our environment digitally to basically convert information more and more directly into physical stuff. And we're also getting more and more ability to merge with our own technology because the brain-machine interface exists and it works. It's just a matter of making it incrementally better at this point, all the proof of concept is there. So all these things are happening kind of at the same time. And so what's going to dominate in 50 years, 100 years, 200 years? Are we going to be more genetically modified? Are we going to all be cyborgs? Are we going to all be living in a virtual computer world and just be laying on a couch? Or all of those, I think everything's going to be happening. It's just a matter of proportion, but that's going to get where it gets really tricky. But I agree, one of the patterns that we tend to see over and over again is that some new disruptive technology gets introduced, everyone's aghast, and there's a lot of protest and pushback. And then within a generation, everyone is just okay with it and it's normal now. But before we get the cyborgs, the world has got to agree on the standard input. You're right, we have one input, yeah. Shut up, you can't keep changing the connectivity of the table. It has to be reversible, I can't go like, is it this way, is it this way? Exactly. Which way do I have to put it in there? Absolutely. So that's my question though. Are you a Mac person or are you a PC person? Oh man. It takes on new meaning. Right, so as technology improves and our interface with technology improves and efficiency improves and all these things, I'm not so concerned about where's my flying car. I'm more concerned about when all this happens that makes our lives easier, are we still gonna be working 40 hour work weeks? Yeah, we actually talk about the 40 hour work week because that's very artifactual too. I mean, when technology was improving, people actually were working longer hours because their hours of work were more valuable to corporations, right? You're more productive. So let's work them even harder. So improving technology led to greater hours of greater work weeks. We like in the West, we only- You can do more. Yeah, we only got the 40 hour work week by legislation. It was by fiat. It wasn't because of any trend in technology or economics. And now that's being reversed by gig work basically and not just with gig work, even before that, basically people are working like contract work they're getting around to the 40 hour work week limitation in all sorts of ways. So the amount of hours we're working is actually going up again. So there isn't this direct correlation between technology and convenience. Although that was the big assumption a hundred years ago, technology is all about luxury and convenience. It actually isn't, and things like that, these are decisions that we make and they're political decisions. They're not really driven by technology. And again, that's why you can't say, we're going to be working five hour work weeks like the Jetsons in the future. How do you don't know that? There's no trend in history to predict that. If anything, we'll be working more. Capitalism? That's the thing. That's the thing. It's like, I think at some point it does become more Star Trek. And I get that we're following around a military group all the time. So they're not talking about transactional stuff. No, they don't have money in Star Trek. Well, yeah, they don't own a Starship. They don't own a Starship. But they're also all in military conscripts for all we know. We don't really know how they got there. But the thing is, we're already to see. To explore your world. Maybe. Maybe. It's the future. Do they have a choice? They grew up in the Starfleet system. Okay? You need to see the most recent Lower Decks episode. Okay, I haven't watched that one yet. So, but the thing I was going to say, we already live in the United States at least in a society where 90% of the population only has a 16% stake in the stock market in the country. So there's already like such a disconnect between what is where the money economy and how people are surviving. It's not actually that big of a leap to get away from it. When that many people aren't that involved with the economy. Yeah, again, that's a trend that's really hard to predict because there's the wild card in all of this because it's got it's really fun to speculate and to try to extrapolate current trends and technology into the future. But when you look at the actual history of the advance of technology, what we see are there's just this every now and then there's this disruptive technology that nobody anticipated, which completely obliterates all previous predictions immediately. And so it's almost guaranteed that that's going to happen. And like none of us have mentioned the real things that are going to completely disrupt the future. Like for, again, I think the most dramatic example that we're past is that no futurist predicted the analog to digital revolution before it happened. And so all predictions about the future from the analog world was more analog, there was going to be a more sophisticated, what I call, it's a steampunk fallacy, right? Steampunk is what if technology was the same as it was in the Victorian era, just more and more and more complicated and elaborate. But it's still steam technology. Now this cassette punk, there's all kinds of things where you, let's keep the technology in one era and then just say, what if that just persisted indefinitely? But that's what a lot of futurists do because almost by definition, you can't anticipate the disruptive technologies because they kind of come out of the blue. And once they occur, they could change everything. Again, all predictions prior to digital revolution are obsolete pretty much about, and even Asimov got it like dramatically wrong. Like he painted an analog world 10,000 years in the future, but then 10 years later, he had to completely retcon his own fiction to make it fit this clearly the digital revolution that was happening. And then even then, we didn't anticipate the full implications of it. Nobody saw like, yeah, the smartphone coming when it did. Again, only when the technology is already sort of existing, that's when it starts to appear in science fiction, but nobody really anticipated it. So like we try to think about, what's the disruptive technology that no one's really thought about? Like what could it be? And it's just so hard to say. That's kind of a point. Some genius will figure out something crazy to do that gets around what we think of are the limitations of technology. Here's another example. I don't wanna keep ranting, but for a long time, there was the diffractive limit, right? The laws of physics say that you can only image something, the size of the wavelength of the light that you're using, whatever. You can't get beyond this diffractive limit. This is the limitation of optics baked into the laws of physics. And that's it. We're never gonna get past it until we did, right? Until we developed metamaterials. Again, what are metamaterials? Nobody predicted metamaterials until they existed. It's a completely disruptive technology, but this is an emerging one because we're like right at the beginning of it. It's basically when you take materials and you manipulate them at the nano scale or something like that, where they have properties that can't be explained by just their physical structure, by their material that they're made of. They take on new properties because of the features at the nano scale. This is like whenever you read about like the invisibility thing, it's all metamaterials. Visibility cloak, metamaterials. The lens, a microscopic lens, it's all metamaterials. And so, yeah, we can do things like get around the laws of physics of optics by metamaterials. What's the next metamaterials? I don't know. I mean, predict that and you're a freaking genius, right? But we know, I don't think it's, we've stopped coming up with disruptive technologies all of a sudden. And that's like one thing, it's almost guaranteed that our vision of the world a hundred years from now has to be wrong because someone's gonna come up with something we didn't anticipate. And I really hope it's something that is sustainable energy related. I mean, let's, that fusion, I'm not waiting 500 years, like can we have it now? I mean, fusion, I mean, it's one of those technologies that's like always 30 years away. I get always, yeah. But it is, but there is progress being made there. We have achieved burning plasma, right? So they have actually achieved- The Tokamax are doing great. The Tokamax are doing great. They, even the laser conformance are doing, actually the laser confinement's ahead of the Tokamax in terms of like burning plasma. But then after, again, this is like killing myself because after we wrote, because there's a fusion chapter in the book and after the editor cut us off, there's a study came out that, hey, here's a design for a fusion reactor where you don't have to have sustained fusion, which of course is like the hardest part about having plasma energy. It's like, you can just have little fusion explosions and they're not sustainable. And that will generate a lot of heat and that will heat the steam and turn your turbine. And there you go. It's like, shit, my chapter's already obsolete because we didn't include this whole new idea that I didn't think of, but somebody's like, hey, forget burning plasma. Let's just have tiny explosions. And they did it with a really clever way. They use sonic cavitation, like shrimp snapping its claw, yeah. And to collapse it down, but it's just for a moment, just long enough for it to explode and make a lot of heat and then you just keep doing it again and again and again. Like crap, that could work. And now the next edition of my book is gonna have to completely add a new angle to it. But at least, this is the kind of book that it can be updated as we go into the future. I mean, one of the other topics is room temperature superconductivity. And this week a paper got retracted that was like a major room temperature superconductivity paper. Yeah, that's another good example of how you can't predict the pace of scientific and technological advance. So if you lived through the 1980s, you lived through all the hype about superconduct, high temperature superconductors because they discovered the ceramic, like a new class of materials that was high temperature, meaning, you don't need liquid hydrogen. You can be at liquid nitrogen temperatures and that's a lot cheaper than helium or liquid hydrogen. And so it did really matter. It was a very important technological advance, but all of the hype was, well, if we made this much advance over this period of time in 10, 20 years, we're gonna have room temperature superconductors. Everyone was saying that. And I was too young and naive not to doubt it. I'm like, oh, great, that's gonna be awesome. And now here we are 40 years later and we are no closer. Not that they haven't advanced the science, but really, and there's been some incremental advances in the temperature and blah, blah, blah, but really we're still dealing with the same ceramics and we're still pretty much at the same point. And every time I read a paper about it, there's always a gotcha. It's like, oh, that's a high temperature. Oh, you gotta be at a billion Pascals. I mean, you gotta have the pressure of a diamond anvil or something and that's when you could do it. And that's probably not even a pathway to room temperature superconductors that we could build computers out of or whatever. Right, you're gonna have that in your kitchen. Yeah, we've just hit a wall and we don't know if it's even possible. We just may never have room temperature superconductors that are pliable and work in one atmosphere and whatever, all the things we would need them to be. Who knows? But if they do, we could say, hey, but if they do, this is what that will be like, but we don't know when or if that's gonna happen now, but that was such a fake, a fake out. That was a tease in the 1980s, man, but that's like one of the things that really made me skeptical of technology hype. I'm like, oh, they totally lied to us about the room temperature superconductors, you know? And that's a huge point. Like right now, and maybe a good point for us to end our conversation on is, right now we are in this sensationalist media environment and there's hype all over the place in all sorts of directions by the newest gadget, Gizmo, the world's gonna end, everybody's gonna be fine. Everything's a breakthrough, everything's a cure for cancer. Oh no, your punch is fine. Yeah, all this stuff. So how, with this book and a skeptical eye, like what can you offer to people as a way to look into the future? Yeah, I mean, we'll definitely don't believe the hype, and that's a good rule of thumb. And the mainstream media reporting of science, they look for the hype. That's the formula that they have. They're not putting it at the context. You know, they're really just, oh, what would be some fantastical application of that? And that becomes the story. Not that there was just some incremental progress in understanding the phenomenon. So it's always good to find topic experts and see what they're saying about it and not just believe the mainstream reporting. But what we do balance that, we're not, yes, we're skeptical and you have to be very careful about overhyping things. But at the same time, the progress that's actually happening is amazing. It's absolutely astounding. And it is gonna get faster in the aggregate. Again, you can't predict that for every individual type of technology. It is getting faster in the aggregate. And the potential stuff that is gonna come out in the next 10, 20, 30 years is amazing. You know, again, if you've been paying attention, you know, in the last 10 years, the AI applications have exploded, have absolutely exploded. Actually, I had the opportunity to talk to an AI expert last week when we were doing a streaming event. And I said, yeah, it's just, you know, computers are more powerful. The internet has a lot of training data there and people have gotten really clever at leveraging these algorithms to do really cool stuff. And it just exploded, just absolutely exploded. Again, not something, yet we kind of hit a wall with AI for like decades and now suddenly it's exploded. Again, you can't really predict that, except that at some point, it'll probably get better. It's hard to map out exactly how long it's gonna take. And then it'll happens faster than you think it's going to happen. So it's a wild ride, you know, so just enjoy it. I hope people can take that optimistic angle because there is so much to enjoy. Like your book. Absolutely, thank you. Yeah, thank you so much for joining us on the show. The ton of fun. Your book, The Skeptics Guide to the Future, what yesterday's science and science fiction tell us about the world of tomorrow. Where can people find it and where can people find out, find you? Yes, I would launch yesterday, so it's now available to order right now. You can get it at Amazon pretty much anywhere if people sell books. If you just go to our website, TheSkepticsGuide.org, we have a book page that links to the official book page, which has all of the places that you can get it. So it's available in the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand at this point in time. And you know, you always get contracts for other languages so that those are filtering in but nothing's gonna be available in other languages for a while. So yeah, so you can just order it online. And of course, it's print, Kindle, and audio. I recorded the audio version of the book. Is that one of those that I'm looking at? Is that Barnes & Noble? Yeah. They still exist? Hey, books are coming back. Books are an old technology that people are not giving up on. They're actually book sales, hardcover paperback books. Paper physical books are increasing at this point. I go to bookstores all the time. And yes, Justin, there is a Barnes & Noble actually close to my house that I go to frequently. Well, I think that's fantastic. I thought they all went away. The one in the old hometown disappeared. And so then you just assume it was everywhere. Like the blockbuster in town disappeared. You go to another town, you don't see a blockbuster. Those are all gone. You can't feel a movie with your fingers. You can't smell it. You can't smell the paper. Streaming did kill blockbusters, but e-books did not kill physical books. But again, it's just people like it. It's changed how finance movies. Everyone out there, support authors, support bookstores, and also support your local libraries. Very important resources. Thank you once again. So great to have you on the show. Such a great time. Yeah, really good to see you again. Have a good day. Yep, good seeing you too. Goodnight, guys. Right. All righty, everyone, that was fun. What a great conversation with Dr. Novella. I want to remind you, you are currently in the throes of this week in science. It's a wonderful, science-y place to be in the midst of discussion and curiosity related to science. If you enjoy the show, please head over to our website, twist.org, and click on the Patreon link. Patreon is how we support our show through listener support, and at $10 or more per month, we will thank you by name at the end of the show. It is now that hour that we come to. We know and love on this week in science. Is it a whole hour? Ah, no, no, at this time, no, what, what? Blair's Animal Corner. She's really expanded her slide. She loves to spy on creatures great and small. Biped, milliped, no pet at all. If you wanna hear about animals, she's your girl. Except for giant pandas and squirrels. Well. Ooh, I have fruit flies. Fruit flies. We talk about fruit flies all the time. They're really great to study. And one of the things that lots of researchers study with fruit flies is male mating roles and their behavior and how they compete with one another. But this week, scientists at the Champalimo Center for the Unknown in Portugal. It's probably not the right way to say that, but you get it. Has an idea that female fruit flies have a lot more to do with this process than previously believed. That's because it's well known that female fruit flies normally display aggression over food and territory. So what about mating? Why has this not been looked at before? It's because the males have aggression when they compete for mates. And so it's kind of like, wash our hands of that. They're the ones competing over mates. And it's usually kind of a one or the other thing when you're talking about animals. Are the males competing or the females competing? Who's got the advantage, right? And so that was always the understanding before, but considering that females do display aggression over food and territory, might they also show aggression related to mating that just has not previously been noticed? And because I'm talking about it, you probably have an idea what the answer is. So they have discovered a new type of female behavior in fruit flies, something they call aggressive sexual competition, specifically related in this case to a species where males already are competing. The new behavior wasn't covered when they placed two virgin females and one male in the same chamber. Why do I say virgin females? We're getting there. In the beginning, the male alternated courting both females who's like, hey, how's it going? Hey, how's it going? Hey, would you like a drink? Hey, would you like a drink? Hey, you look really pretty tonight. Hey, you really look really pretty tonight. Just kind of work in both ends of the table there. And at that stage, there were no problems. They didn't mind. They were both getting courted. They were happy. However, as soon as he began actually copulating, actually mating with one of them, the other female attacked. She had butted. She pushed. Mainly she did this on the females' rear end, of course, where the actual copulation was taking place. Just cut that out. Yeah, hey, what are you, you were talking to me. This is curious because when they reverse the situation, when there are two males in the same chamber and one female, both vigorously court the female simultaneously. So the males are both kind of vying for the female's attention. But once the mating starts with one of the males, the losing male doesn't attack. He just continues to court the female, going, hey, are you sure I'm over here? Maybe when you're done, so it's kind of doesn't give up hope. So this was the first initial finding. They were like, oh, yes, there is some aggression. So then they wanted to know what signals were impacting this behavior, especially considering it's similar aggression to again, what they see related to food and territory. So they tested these kind of different experimental conditions. One was that to become aggressive, the females had to be courted first. If a female virgin entered the chamber while another pair was already mating, she didn't care. She had no like investment basically in the process because the male hadn't courted her previously. So they understood enough that like, oh, he's not interested, supposed to like that lying son of a... Anyway, they also found the reason I brought up, a virgin before, is that if females had recently mated, they wouldn't become aggressive even if they were initially courted. So they already got the sperm they needed to breed. So they were like, I'm not fussed, that's fine, you go do what you're gonna do. The other thing is that smell was a determinant factor. Aggression only happened in the presence of food odor. Mated females become aggressive towards each other in the presence of food. So after they've already mated with a male, they just fight over food. But when the females were virgins, so they had not mated yet, they still aggressed in the presence of food odor. So the idea they're thinking here is that the food odor overall is a kind of push towards aggression because food is part of a successful pregnancy, whether you have mated already or whether you have not mated yet. Food is part of the equation. So it's possible that if there's no food around, they're less fussed because they might not carry a pregnancy to term anyway. I don't know, it's pretty weird. And by term, I just think, you know, lay a bunch of things. But they also found this was in fact the odor that was doing it. It wasn't anything else related because they looked at odor receptors in the flies. And when they blocked those receptors, their aggression was significantly reduced. So olfactory factors were a significant role. And in fact, more than visual signals, they also tested this on blind flies and they were still aggressive towards other females in the presence of food odor, even if they could not see. So this means this is new context for female fruit flies competing for sexual mate, not something that's been studied very much at all, if at all. This also adds to the growing body of evidence that fruit fly females have complex behaviors that relate to social, emotional, internal states. Of course, this is another insect with their kind of clump of nerve cells for a brain that is displaying this kind of complex behavior that is more than just a very simple on-off switch response to stimuli, there's a lot of things going on. So they wanna use next extensive genetic and molecular tools to investigate the neural underpinnings of this behavior because fruit flies now. This is a great example of a study animal that we know how to manipulate in a bunch of ways already displaying something interesting. So it's gonna be really easy to come up with a wealth of research based on these guys. The other thing that I wanna mention here is that at a larger degree, it could be time to re-examine sexual selection in the animal kingdom when it is attributed solely to one side of the coin. There can be sexual selection and sexual competition happening on both sides. And this is a really good example of that. So just because you've seen the two bucks fighting with their giant antlers, that doesn't mean the females aren't also competing for resources and mates. So just kind of a good reminder when we're looking at behavioral ecology, right? Yeah, and this is a huge example of that. It's not just resources, not just mates. This is the both of them together, food order. Ooh, there's food nearby. That's a resource. That means it's a time of plenty. Mating is important now. Really good time to have babies. Yeah. Maybe the doe in your antler scenario, maybe the doe, when she catches on that there's a male that's sort of following her around. Maybe she wanders over to the other male. She's had her eye on territory. And then they see each other and compete. Like, oh, okay, here's one. So manipulation, I see. Uh-huh, her how. Justin, are you speaking to previous experiences in courtship? Anyway, moving on to whale brains. I wanna tell you about this crazy study that I read that I had to read like four times. So, in all mammals, the average blood pressure is higher in arteries or the blood exiting the heart than in veins. This is understood, widely understood. This difference in pressure drives blood flow in the body, which helps move oxygenated and deoxygenated blood, including through the brain. However, locomotion can forcefully move blood, think about like a horse trot, causing spikes in pressure or pulses to the brain. The difference in pressure between the blood entering and exiting the brain can cause brain damage. And in fact, long-term brain damage of this kind can lead to dementia in human beings. So, where are the whales? Well, first I have to tell you about the horses. Land mammals. Yes, land mammals such as horses experience these pulses in their blood when they gallop. Their blood pressure inside their body goes up and down on every stride. They deal with these pulses by breathing in and out. This study posits that marine mammals that swim dorsoventral movements, that's most of them, but especially whales, they suggest that this same pulse is happening inside their body. But, cetaceans hold their breath while they dive and they swim. So they can't do what the horses do to regulate these blood pulses because they're holding in their breath. They can't use respiratory changes to moderate the pressure pulses. So they must have found another way to deal with this problem. This all comes down to whale brains because there are these weird blood vessels in whale brains that have been seen for a long time, but nobody really knew exactly what it was for. So this is actually the first time that there is a really good theory of what these radiumirabilia or wonderful net, these blood vessels cradling the whale's brain and spine might be used for. Researchers used computer modeling to try to figure out what's happening in their body. They collected biomechanic parameters for 11 cetacean species. They input this data into the computer model. And the theory was that the radia used a pulse transfer mechanism to make sure there's no difference in blood pressure in the cetacean's brain during movement rather than dampening the pulses that occur in the blood, the way that the horses do with the breeding. The radia transfer the pulse in the arterial blood entering the brain to the venous blood exiting. So they kind of just like open up the floodgates to allow the pressure to exit quickly, keeping the same amplitude or strength of pulse. So they are avoiding those pressure pulses in the brain that can create brain damage. The computer model supported that prediction that locomotion generated pressure pulses can be synchronized by pulse transfer mechanisms and that reduced the pulsatility of flow by up to 97%. So it really does seem like this is what this blood vessel net is doing. This model could potentially be used to ask questions about other animals and what happens with their blood pressure pulses when they move, including us, of course. And- It's one of the theories that have been put out there as for why we have the big brains. Being bipedal with fleshy feet, creating blood pressure injections to the brain over and over and over again through millions of years. Yeah. So this hypothesis still needs to be directly tested because this was just a computer model. I don't wanna say just a computer model, but still it needs to be actually directly tested so they need to measure blood pressures and flow in the brain as some incitations. However, that's not currently possible. You can't put a probe in a live whale for many reasons, many just being current rules that exist in scientific testing, but perhaps there will be new technologies to our previous conversation that will make this possible in the future. A nice jaunty hat for a whale that could check this instead. I don't know, but it would definitely need a chin strap so it wouldn't fall out. Anyway, I'm just picturing this now. But yeah, so this is something that ties cetaceans, ties whales back to the land mammals that they originated from. It's a common problem, but in this case, they had to develop a whole new solution because they hold their breath while they're moving. So pretty neat. They've got a blood capacitor. Random whale fact that I learned this week by accident. What do you think the oldest whale lifespan that it would detect it is? Yes, yes. 15? I would say like 60 to 100, somewhere. Okay, there's a bowhead whales have longest longevity amongst whales. 211 year old whale. If we don't kill them first. And if you want to know whale facts, you should be watching the extraordinary attorney woo because there's whale facts galore from the extraordinary attorney. Apparently the bowheads have a gene duplication somewhere that slows cell division that they think is tied into, they're still looking into why, how it is. They managed to find one there. That they live longer than other whales to begin with, but 211 years. So long. All right, Justin, what do you have to talk about? I've got just good news. Let's get through this show with some good news. Great. Wait, why is it? Hey, can I ask you, why is it always, when it comes to the part where I'm gonna do things, nobody else gets this. All right, let's get through the animal corner. That's cause I go faster, Justin. Let's go. All right, well, that could be true. I'm planning on going quickly through my stories at the end. Just good news. You get a new segment that finds the silver lining in the mercury laden drinking water and otherwise perfectly good story well and offers you the first sip. Just good news, bird population addition. According to the once every four year state of the world's birds report, half of all bird species are not in decline globally. Seven out of eight are not being threatened with extinctions. So that's good news. Using data from the International Union of Conservation of Nature report found that 51% of bird species worldwide do not have declining populations. Roughly 87% are not considered threatened with extinction. Things that, things the birds making it a man's world need to do to stay off these threatened lists. Few tips for our feathered friends out there. Avoid high growth, unsustainable agriculture areas and logging, places like the rainforest. Also avoid invasive species and climate change and other human activities. And you'll be fine when compared to the past. Avoid climate change. Yeah, and so this all sounds good. Like a bunch of these birds are fine. So they compared it to years past bird life international which has decades of survey data. Said there are now 2.9 billion fewer individual birds in North America than there were in 1970. An estimated drop of 29%. I don't think that's good. Oh, okay, European Union, European Union. Has seen a net loss of around 600 million birds of roughly 18% of the bird population since 1980. Both cases, the losses are most acute among long distance migrants and farmland birds. So city birds apparently doing fine. The ones that stick around like, wait, we got pigeons and crows and seagulls. This is why you're not supposed to let your dog off leash in shore bird habitat is because the migrating birds will get scared away, not store enough food and not make their migration. And why you should keep your cats indoors? So just more than half aren't declining though. So that's still good news. That's bad, Justin. That's bad. Just more than half. Cities of ancient Maya, this is cities of ancient Maya. The Maya. New story, okay. My new story, my Mesoamericans, long the subject of speculation, Google Mayan collapse and you will likely come across a convincing argument for why the Mayan society collapsed in the ninth century. And in fact, you may even find 80 convincing arguments because there've been a lot. And despite being convincing, they are at least all mostly wrong on a sliding scale between mostly wrong and completely wrong. First of all, foremost, because despite the fact that the Mayan society collapsed, it also didn't so much collapse as it was a reorganization of increasingly decentralized power structures that then went their own way. And it wasn't so much a societal collapse as just evolution of society over time. But also because many of the theories predate the bulk of our archeological understanding of Mayan culture, revealing theory was agricultural failure of a population that expanded and they couldn't make enough food for everybody. And so there was just starvation and climate change and a drought hit them and just wiped them out. But we now know that this was a society of farmers who were the most advanced agriculture lists in the world at the time and had a knowledge of climate trends and engaged in massive scale land management that prevented mass starvation, even in severe drought conditions because they've been at this for a very long time. They knew actually how to live in harmony with the environment and anticipate things better than apparently modern humans are able to grasp. But beneath the soil surface has been discovered an unexpected danger, mercury pollution. And a review on frontiers of environmental science researchers conclude that this pollution is due to frequent use of mercury and mercury containing products by the Maya in the classic period, which is between 200 and a year, 250 year, 1100. Population is in places so heavy that even today it can pose an environmental health hazard for the unwary archeologist. So apparently the mercury was very concentrated in Cinnabar, which is I guess this thing that you can make red pigment out of. And red pigment was very popular amongst the Mayans and they put it on everything. It was all over the place. And they actually found, they've discovered vessels that contained liquid mercury. Well, it's room temperature mercury, just liquid mercury and like they were collecting it. And what's also interesting is that they were finding that this material also didn't, the Cinnabar didn't grow in the main territories of the Mayans. So this was also more examples of ancient long-distance trade routes. But yeah, the toxic effect threshold for mercury in sediments is defined as one part per million where they found at the site, what is it, Tikal, 17.16 parts per million. So 17 times what is considered the toxic threshold in one location. They found mercury pollution in the soil almost every major Mayan site. Authors conclude that the Maya, ancient Maya frequently Cinnabar and mercury containing paints and powders for decoration and that the mercury could have leached from everything from belongings to how they painted floors and patios and walls and the ceramics and everything. And that's how it got into there. And they also point out there's an interesting, the last, one of the, considered one of the last Mayan rulers of Tikal where that concentration was so high, ruled around year 810, which is also when a lot of people think Mayan society collapsed, even though they're exactly collapsed. He is depicted in frescoes as being pathologically obese, which obesity is a known effect of a metabolic syndrome, which can be caused by chronic mercury poisoning, along with all sorts of other effects that can come with being affected. So yeah, you can have impaired vision, tremors, liver problems, paralysis, mental health issues. All of this can be associated. So add one more wrinkle to the, why the Mayan's collapsed story, which isn't also correct. Is it exactly? There's a story. It's not an exact story. Something happened. It could be responsible for why though, like why reorganization was important. If you're living in a society where the king is mercury poisoned, which has happened a few times, it happened in China too. And may have happened in the United States. Actually, Lincoln was taking a lot of mercury for depression, right? You know, and kids love mercury. It's the liquid mercury, it's so fun to do it. It's just fun. It's just so much fun, yeah. Oh, what is that? I got one last story real quick. There was a study on the molecular age, I guess, of people compared to the physical age. The aging clock with biometric data that they can sort of put on you and say, you're five years older than your age, you're five years younger or whatever it is. They found that quality of life, which is largely overlooked from the scientific study, was a major contributor to this biological aging, biometric aging. And loneliness was one of the key factors. In fact, in fact, because, okay, so aging and acceleration, this is people who are having strokes early, liver and lung disease early, all these sorts of physical problems where they seem to be aging at an accelerated pace was highest amongst people who lived alone, who were unmarried, who didn't have a lot of friends. So if you wanna live longer, make some friends and get married and have a family or whatever if you wanna do that, but at least go hang out with your buddies at the very least. It was actually worse. I had no way to have a social life, yeah. It was, and if you think, ah, it's not worth it, but I still can all just live healthy, it was worse than smoking. Wow. Chronic cigarette smoking was bad, but it wasn't as bad as not smoking and living an unsatisfactory life or an unsatisfied life or an unsocial life. I would also argue then that bullying and excluding is akin to physical pain, just to give somebody, right? So like, it's doing physical harm, yeah. Yeah, sorry, not pain, but yeah, harm. So that's kind of the flip side of this that I think is an important piece is like keeping people from making friends and not being friendly can do real harm. So be a friend, be an ally. I'd love to know whether or not in this study, I mean, do virtual relationships. So there are so many people who are at home and the pandemic was part of that, but we found connection over the internet. We found streaming communities where you have a chat room or you know, you find people that you don't see face-to-face, but you're still having social interaction. So I wonder what the difference. So this was a study of 11,000 Chinese adults and the reason I point that out is because there may be cultural significance to that feeling of unaccomplishment life or that the depressive feeling that may not any more, maybe in a more individualistic society might not be as present. I don't know. It seems like loneliness is loneliness, all around the world. Loneliness is loneliness, but you can be lonely in a crowd, Kiki. Yeah, you can't be lonely in a crowd and that's not good. That's what, if you're not good, you can be lonely and satisfied, but you can also be lonely. But you can also be highly irritated in a crowd and have a great sense of well-being, home alone with a book you got at Barnes & Noble because now you're gonna go find one because now you know they exist again. Great. Yeah, but to Kiki's point, is somebody texting you and asking you how you liked that book? Does that create a social connection that then helps make you feel not alone? I would argue it does. We don't have the science behind that yet of how it impacts the same thing. But the other thing I also wanted to throw in there is that the social media that's allowed in China is also different. So it's a different experience being on social media in China. It might be stressful. It's stressful the self-monitoring of what you're putting out there through an authority and government. It is different, yeah. Yeah, just a different point. But the key there is being social. Finding life satisfaction in whatever way that means for you, that's important. I've got a couple of stories to finish out the show. Number one, epigenetic transmission across generations. Researchers at UC Santa Cruz, they looked at C. elegans, nice worms, not people, not mice, worms. They published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, their modification of a histone protein that changes the way DNA is packed in chromosomes. So we talked about those liquid chromosomes earlier. Well, sometimes they're wrapped around these proteins called histones. And when they're wrapped around the histones, it makes it hard for the translation, transcription to take place. And so certain genes appear less in the protein, in the proteome. And certain genes appear more based on how they're wrapped up in these epigenetic markers. The methylation is the key. So they looked at a particular mark called H3K27Me3, which is particular to a particular histone and a particular amino acid in a particular chromosome in the nematode worm, C. elegans. They erased it from some sperm. They got rid of that histone mark, this epigenetic mark in some sperm. And then they had egg and sperm come together. So you have egg that has the histone marker, you have sperm that's lacking the histone marker. And then they wanted to see what happened. Well, in the downstream first generation of offspring, it was, everything was based on tissues. So different tissues had different expressions of the markers. And this probably has to do with imprinting, where if you have two chromosomes, one of them gets turned on or turned off to be the chromosome that makes all of the proteins in particular cells in a tissue. So there was a kind of chimeric kind of effect through different tissues. But in that offspring generation, you had some genes that had this lack of a histone marker and some that did not, they had the egg's histone marker that was still in there. Anyway, they went down another generation to the grand babies of the original worms. And they found that some of the sperm cells continued to carry that lack of a histone marker. And so genes were appearing as proteins where they originally didn't. And what they're suggesting is that this is a particular mechanism by which we might see that transgenerational transmission of epigenetic changes. And so like we've talked about on the show before, this is potentially epigenetic changes that happen during an organism's life. So for example, you're under a lot of food stress, and that changes the way that your stress hormones are being released in your body. And so that changes the cellular levels of various metabolic pieces. And then eventually it leads to an epigenetic change. If that makes it into your sperm or your eggs, that mutation, that change can go on down the line. So once again, we're sorry, Lamarck, you were kind of right. Exactly, yeah. And so what they're looking at in this is that these are, it's not mammals, but these worm cells are animals. And so this isn't necessarily a worm-specific phenomenon, but they think it is a conserved feature of gene expression and development in animals. And that this work in the worms has great implications for other organisms. And we've of course seen the correlative in the, I think in Norwegian farm studies. The towns that kept like these insanely good records back in the 1600s or whatever. And yeah, if you're in it, show that the grandfather before puberty had experienced a time of famine or bounty that it had a predictable effect on the grandchildren through an epigenetic change of what they had experienced in there. Yeah, it didn't show, it didn't have a how. It just was all correlative, but fantastic data that showed that there was something in how you experienced the pre-pubescent years of life that affected your offspring's offspring. And this is, you know, this mechanism is potentially, if it's conserved across different animals in the animal kingdom, then this is a mechanism by which. A mechanism for, I love it when we find a mechanism. Mechanism, and my very last story for the night is even though it's nighttime where we are and we're going to bed, maybe not now, but Justin, hey, you're awake right now. You know, it doesn't matter. Try to get outside, everyone. We should really be trying to get outside. Science says, go outside. Research has just published a study using fMRI scans of volunteers to figure out what happens to the brain after people go for walks in different environments. They had 63 healthy adult volunteers. This is at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. They had them fill out questionnaires related to how stressed out they were and other things. They had to perform a working memory task. Some of the stuff that they had to do was designed to induce social stress and make some of the participants kind of stressed out. But then they were like, oh, then go for a one hour walk. And some of the people got to go for a walk in a busy Berlin shopping district, and others got to go for a walk in Berlin's 3,000 hectare Grünwald forest in a natural environment. Yes. So, what do you think happened, everyone? The outside people had a better day. Yes. So, both places, they had to walk a particular route. And apparently from the fMRI scans, they showed the activity of the amygdala. And after a walk in the woods, the amygdala, which is like that stress center of your brain, was calmer. Go for a walk in the woods. Calm yourself down. We know this now because we've taken pictures fMRI scans of people who have gone for walks in the woods. And an hour walk is enough to calm the amygdala down. An hour? So there's this study. An hour walk for an hour? Yeah, they did, yeah. There's this thing called the Parks Prescription Program, which this is exactly about. Maybe they didn't have the, again, the mechanism or any of the specific changes in the brain when that started, but there was an understanding that being in nature helped the, not just the psychological, but the physiological state of a person. And so, yeah, so there are doctors out there that participate in the Parks Prescription Program where you can get written a prescription to go to a park. That is a real thing that you can get. And so, forest bays. Yeah, yeah, so this is definitely related to that. But we're talking about a park. We're not, these people weren't wandering around in an untamed forest of the Yukon where there's bears and stuff lurking around. It's a big park, but it's a cultivated park, yeah. You have to have the right kind of nature. There are lots of kinds of parks. Yeah, these people who took this forest walk, they had better attention afterwards and they had actually greater enjoyment of their walks than the people who had to walk in the busy shopping district. They, the people who took the urban walks, however, they didn't have an increase in their amygdala activity. So even though you might think that people would be like, how about in the city that their amygdala would be. Watch out for cars and things. Yeah, no. These people probably are used to being in cities and while they didn't maybe enjoy it as much as the people who were walking in the forest, it at least didn't increase their stress levels. It didn't increase the amygdala activity. So there's something else there, but it does definitely highlight the fact, highlight, it highlights this hypothesis that nature is better at reducing stress than urban environments. Okay, I would buy that. I think though in both cases though, my amygdala would be lower because after an hour of walking around pointlessly, I wouldn't even have it. It just, I've been walking and now I'm bored. The point is to be in nature. It's not pointless. Do you still have cell service in the nature? Oh boy. They weren't allowed to be on their cell phones either. They had to just be walking for an hour. That's a whole different study then. Then that's a, right. Because people get that phone separation anxiety thing. But it was fine for people in the forests. It really was. All right, well that does it for my stories for the show. Are we all good? Did we make it? I think so. I think so. Yeah, we did it. We did it. We did it everybody. Thank you for joining us for another episode of This Week in Science. I want to give shout outs to all of our wonderful assistants. Fada, thank you for your help in social media and show notes. 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This Week in Science. Science. Science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. That what I say may not represent your view. Whatcha got there Blair? We're in the after show. Whatcha got there? Whatcha doing? Whatcha got there? They're doing Lego things? Are they toys? Whatcha got there? Yes, I'm muted. Yes, these are, this is a raccoon. Ooh, oh, I love it. Trash panda. Also, a brittle sea star. Ooh, that one's cool. Also, a Euromastix. Ooh, what's a Euromastix? It's a lizard. Special lizard. Here's a sand frog. That was previously shown. I like the sand frog. Yeah, yeah. And then we got, we got my macaw, the first one. We're doing really well. We're, yeah, how are you doing over there? We're getting there. What do you have? I have seven. I've got fishies. It's a Saddleback fish. Saddleback polar bear. Ooh, I love that. So, that's great. We're making progress. We're almost there. It's a lot of work. I bought 10 pounds of Legos off of Facebook Marketplace. That's awesome. Give me your Legos. And I just dig through them to make things. That's fun. That's gotta be a lot of fun. Yeah. Be creative and make the Lego animals. And everyone in the chat, you know why she's making these Lego animals. Do you not? You know what it's about. We're running out of time, but... Do you know? Have you heard? Have you listened? Oh, we've got a fada and a noodles typing furiously. Yes, Arn-Laure, out of boredom. Not out of boredom. Yeah, we should probably open a pre-order pretty soon. I have to double-check to see if inflation has changed our price point. Yeah. We'll see what the calendar manufacturers will be charging this year. Everything, prices are up. We'll see what things are. We've got to do some calculations and stuff. But you still need to make five more animals. No sweat. No sweat. I'll do the cover really soon. And then we'll at least have something for the pre-order situation. Yeah. David, huh? Yes, calendar. We do an annual Blair's Animal Corner twist calendar, in which Blair shows off her amazing artistic skills and creates original art for every month of the year. And this year it's a Lego calendar. Lego animals, it's going to be great. I swear. Next year I'm just going to draw with a pencil. But then you're like, oh, and suddenly I'm shading and I'm getting in, you really get into it with the pencil. Yeah. Yeah. But you haven't done that yet. Uh-uh. Yes. But Blair chooses the animals and she makes the calendar and we put fun science holidays on the calendar. We have twist broadcast days on the calendar. And then we let you order the calendars and then you can have a twist calendar in your home and also for certain Patreon sponsors. I believe we usually send original artwork. Maybe there will be, I don't know, Blair, can you give up your Lego animals this year? We'll have to see. We'll have to see. I still have almost all of last year's art that I can send out. So those are still an option as well. Those are pretty cool. And then, yeah, what I might do, so here's what I think I'm going to do. I haven't actually done it yet. So we'll see how it all goes. Because like almost every year when I finally try to finish a couple pieces, I'm like, hmm, actually. So I think I'm going to take pictures of these out in nature in a habitat that looks appropriate for where they're supposed to be. So then my question is, so I think what I might do is I might put the picture in a shadow box and put the Lego in front of it. I like it, yes. But it would have to fit in the shadow box, which some of these will and some of these won't. Like the R Actoon and the Polar Bear would fit and the McCall would fit. The Brittle Star. The Frog and the Euromastix won't fit, which is fine because those are my favorite. I see how it is. Have a good night, Bada. Thank you. Flying out is saying in the Discord chat, I'm going to wait a bit. Got to have more confidence next year is going to happen. Oh, geez. I think this is something we can predict. If it doesn't, you might as well buy a lot of calendars. Well, you know, if you prescribed to the Jewish calendar, next year already happened. Oh, that's right. Happy, what, Rosh Hashanah? Shana Tovah. Shana Tovah. James Salisman in the chat is asking, what's the minimum number of Lego bricks necessary to make account? Okay, first picture is spherical Lego. No, I would say four and you would turn them upside down. You'd have, you'd have one of those, one of those, the typical rectangle. And then two little two peg ones underneath her feet and then one of the fours up top offset a little bit as a head, but upside down. So the remaining under pegs can look like an udder. That's what I would say four. It'd be the minimum number of Lego bricks necessary for account. Happy, what is it, 5783, I think is the year. How many episodes we've done? No. No, that's the year in the Hebrew calendar. Yes. James Salisman was just asking, how much to commission a Lego Basilisk Thuringiensis Israeli, Israeli, Israeli lenses. Looking for pictures that would be, you'd have to find a good picture to, let me see, base it off them. Let me see what this looks like. There we go. Oh, the ads at the top of this are ridiculous. For some reason, there's like mosquito dunks, six count natural mosquito killer. They're doughnuts. They're like mosquito killing doughnuts. They're showing up in the ads for this. Oh yeah, I see them, mosquito dunks. So here's the thing. I have not previously done bacteria on the calendar. I've only done Animalia on the calendar. Yes. That would be a different, a bacterial. You know, you love the invertebrates. That would be a different calendar though. Well, so, so I do, I always have invertebrates on the calendar. Did you do a slug one year? Yes, I did a banana slug. I did the brittle star. That's my invertebrate this year. I did velvet ants last year. I did, I did a few invertebrates the year of the stained glass. I did a dung beetle and a rhinoceros beetle. Yep. I did a peacock spider the first year. Beetle, beetle, beetle. So I always have invertebrate. I have a list. So I like, I have categories. So I have to make sure that I have, I have a fish. I have an amphibian, a reptile, a bird and a mammal. I have to make sure I have at least one invertebrate and I have an extinct animal. Yes. And then the rest is just for fun. And then, and then here's the only one that I have is original. There it is. But you still haven't framed it. Excuse me. It's just hanging out loose. No, no, no, I just had to go pull it. It's on the, it's magnetized onto the refrigerator door. On the refrigerator, there's so much water around there. Are you serious? You should frame that. Wait, but this is where everybody, this is in the room where everybody sees it. Put it on a refrigerator frame with magnets then. Oh, fine. It just, it will get ruined. I'm serious. If that gets wet that first year, that's all water soluble. But is it? Uh-oh. Yeah. Oh, I just set it down into coffee. Oh man. Oh, look, you want to know how to, how to forge Blair's signature. I'm not going to say it, but you buy a piece of art and you can do it all day long. Um, I have a secret for you, Justin. That's not my legal signature anymore. Oh yeah. This is my art signature. That is my art signature. That is not my signature. Look at the date on that. 15. 2015. Also, I sent you another piece of art. So, uh-huh. Me? Yeah, it was in a shadow box. It was the second year I sent you something. Where is that? Wait, this was in a shadow box at some point, I think. Uh-uh. Nope. Nope. What is it? The year where I had the painting in the background and I had the paper cutouts on the front. I don't remember which one I sent you. What is it? Because I don't have it. I can, I can look at the ones that exist. And you can tell me if any of them sound familiar. I think I sent Kiki the blue-bellied roller, I want to say, is what I sent you, right? Was it the roller? I don't know. I think I'll find it in the box. I wanted the mammoth, but I think I just bought it. In the box. Well, at least you just moved. So, I'll forgive you for that one, G. I have like 30 something back in the old country. I've got like 30 plus paintings and a whole bunch of other art. Yeah, so it's gotta be there. But, but I wanted the mammoth, but I don't think I got it. Somebody else got it. So, the 2015 year I got the zebra finch. Right. Yeah. So, it's, uh, so that was for the 2016 calendar. So, I need the- The dragonfly. Is it a dragonfly? Did I get the dragon- Yes. Yes, you did. That's the one in the shadow box. I sent you the dragonfly. I still have it. It's just, it didn't come with me because it was in this frame and really hard to bring with me. Oh, how dare you. Oh, nasty. Yeah, that's right. We need the Sotheby's. Shame. Shame. I don't know where all my art is. Actually. Your art is- It's all over the world. It's all over the world. I think, uh, Paul Disney. It's made one of- American Pika Shadow Box. Paul Disney has at least one. Yeah. I think he has several. He has a collection. And a penilla- A penilo. A pillow with a banana slug on it. Yes. Those pillows, the lumbar pillows are really good. Oh, the pika, pika pika. Pika pika. Here is it. Pika. 2018 calendar. It's cute. Oh yeah, the 2018 was the coloring book. That was a fun one. 2019. Oh yeah, it was the pointillism. Here's 2017. I've liked all of the different styles. They're all so fun. When did- I don't remember making the pika. It's in so many years now. Oh yeah. So my parents have the red-eyed tree frog and the mammoth. Oh, that's nice. The mammoth is a good one. I gave away the chameleon to someone who used to own a chameleon. I gave the bear to my friend who's a bear keeper. That makes sense. Yeah, where's so many good old arts? When did I make a pika? I don't remember that. I think- Do you remember all of your animals? No, it's- there's not one. I think maybe it's a rabbit. Not a rabbit. And Paul Disney's confused? I don't know. It's very specific to be confused. I know. I think it's a rabbit. I think it's this one. Here. Share. Share z's. Share. Share screen, please. Here we go. Yeah. It won't let me. You have to do it. Add to stream. There we go. That's where you logged out. Funny. Oh, November 2020. Okay, I can figure that out, Paul Disney. Okay. That's the information I need. Where's 2020? Oh, 2020 is when I move to- See, this is bad. I need to put all this in the same place. We should make a Google folder for each year that has the art uploaded. Oh, there it is. Oh, of course. I did make a pika. It sure did. Yeah. Here we go. Open a new window. That's really funny. Did I? This is in the see-through situation. Don't show these tips again, please. Not a shadow box, right? There we go. Not a shadow box. It was supposed to be stained glass. Yes. That one. Those were cute. Yeah. I like the stained glass ones. That is a nice one. So many fun calendars. Those were the hardest ones, I think. The stained glass. I got such a like- I got a huge callus on my finger because I exacto-knifed all those by hand. It came out really well, though, so it was worth it. Yeah, I like it. I think it did come out. It's a beautiful, colorful calendar. We have a shower curtain made of that stuff on Zazzle. Yeah, so if you missed the calendars, a lot of this art is also on the Zazzle. We do have a Zazzle store. If you go to twist.org, you can click on the Zazzle store. Yeah, I have to put this year's stuff in there, actually. I don't have any of the 2022 art in there yet. More fun. Yeah, you need to sit down and do a Zazzle session. I do. Calendar first. Always fun. Yeah, exactly. But I do really like- here. I really like this one. I think this one would be really good for some art. Or some Zazzle stuff. Super tooth tiger. Yeah. I love doing the layering of the paint. It was really fun. I think this one also would be really good on some stuff. Oh, I liked that one. Yeah. What is that? The lionfish. It's a leafy sea dragon. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's a leafy sea dragon. Okay. Now I see it. This one. Tommy Frogmouth. That was a good one. My favorite. That is my favorite bird. They were little mammals that survived the dinosaur killing asteroid. Were they pikas? What? They were little mammals. I thought they were like hyrax relatives. Hyraxes. Yeah. Look at this silly emi. Hi. I'm an emi. Fun art. Yeah. So much fun art. Weak, weak, weak. Weak, weak, weak. All right. That's enough of that. Oh, everyone. The after show. I think it's going to go because 1030 we went long on the show show. For the show show. Oh, we did, didn't we? Yeah. So long show. It's the after show. Blair's got art coming. It's so cool. Love to see that. Can't wait to see how they all come out. I'm very excited about that. So I hope everyone is excited about that. Out there. More wonderful Blair art. Yep. But to do good creative art, you need a restful night sleep. So say good night Blair. Good night Blair. Say good morning Justin. Good morning Justin. Good night. Good night. Good night everyone. Thank you for watching the show. Thank you for being here with us yet again. And we do look forward to seeing you again next week. In the meantime, make sure you go forest bathing. Get help with that stress reduction and improve your attention. And talk to your friends. Yeah, friends are good. And stay safe. Stay healthy. Stay curious. And just mercury. And don't ingest mercury. We'll see you again next week. Thank you.