 Starting the broadcast. Starting the broadcast. It's the start of the broadcast, it's the start of the night. We're gonna start the predictions of our science. It's the start of the broadcast, it's the start. And he starts. Start, start, start, start, start, start, Boom. Boom. That's right. We lost Justin. He's here. He's gone. He's here. He's gone. We get him. We don't get him. We get him. We don't get him. It's all the wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, and true webs and computers in the way that technology works together. Y'all right over there, we have a concern face on Justin. Now he can't hear me. Rupro. He was talking with us. We were having a very nice conversation. What happened? And then something happened and he tapped his mic, which was working. And... That was a scary sound. That was. He also said that his computer decided to update on its own. Never, ever, ever, ever have auto updates turned on on your computer. Your computer will just decide to update whenever it wants to. Never mind what you're doing. Don't turn on auto updates. You control that stuff. You control it. Don't let your computer control you. Yeah. Don't let your computer make a fool of you. Computers work for you. Only you can make a fool of you. That's right. It's true. Don't let your computer tell you what to do. You tell it when to update. Yeah, that's right. My computer has been yelling at me to update for about a month and so finally last night before bed I was like, I guess I better do this because maybe Google decide not to work or something terrible. And then I updated it and it took over an hour. It was right before bed so I had to wait for hours. That was so weird. Can you hear me? Seconds before going live it changed its internal audio input. I didn't drop out. I closed out to see if it would but for no apparent reason while we were going live it decided to change it. That's right. The predictions The predictions The predictions The predictions Are we ready to go now? Let's do it. I've got a glass of water. I've got lights. We've got Justin able to hear us. Kiki, did you do this just so I felt less guilty about starting at 8.15 last week? Nope. I do know you started at 8.15. I was lying in bed going are they going to be able to do the show? I was lying in bed going and then the show started and I was like everything's fine and I was there in the chat room and I was listening for a little while and then I'm like I'm going to go to sleep now. There we go. Thank you very much for going on with the show without me. I do appreciate that. Thank you guys last week. Yeah, I'm glad that we were able to let you be sick for a minute. I know it's hard sometimes. It was a strange vacation. I know. Not the kind of vacation I think I want to do again. No, it was a real cleanse, wasn't it? Oh yeah. I think of it as my purging of 2017. There you go. Out with the old. Get ready for the new. Ready, ready, ready. For a whole new year. So basically we're starting 2018 over again right now. Yeah. Because this is supposed to be our first show of 2018. So it's time to start the show, yeah? Ready? Okay. Do you want to go? Starting in three, two. This is TWIS. This Week in Science episode number 153. Recorded on Wednesday, January 10th, 2018. The 2018 prediction show. Hey everyone. I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on This Week in Science we are going to fill your heads with predictions from last year. Predictions for this year and actually some science news. But first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Those who cannot remember the past, it has been said, are condemned to repeat it. As if the past were only a thing to avoid. Many good things have come from the past. Every good thing in fact has its origins in the past. Much of it worth repeating. So it's just as well to point out. Those who don't remember the past will have a hard time replicating the positive results that they received at some point before. In any case, knowing the past will help you make good decisions about the future. And in some cases, that knowledge can even allow you to predict the events that will come before they even happen. Like a local weather forecast. More than just a premonition. A prognostication. With the right knowledge, you too can be a suit saying fortune telling crystal balling tea leaves scattering flight of bird watching the tautology buoyant oracle of the future. And on today's show we will show you just how easy it is. As we ring in the new year with our prognostications for science and gear on you guessed it. This Week in Science, coming up next. It's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to know what's happening. What's happening. What's happening. This Week in Science. What's happening. What's happening. What's happening. This Week in Science. Science to Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back again. I'm back again. It was a crazy week off there. But I'm back. Did you miss me? We missed you so much! A little, I guess. Thank you so much for taking care of the show last week. I'm glad to be back. Fit is a fiddle once again. I hope not to be taken down by any more of those crazy stomach viruses again. Oh, dear. That's my prognostication. I will not get a stomach flu again for the next 24 hours. There we go. You're really daring to dream there. I'm setting a low bar there. But today is our prediction show. So I'm really excited to be here. If we do this show once a year at the beginning of the year kind of recapping all of our predictions from the previous year and kind of check in to see if we got anything right. Sometimes we do actually get things right. We've got it this occasionally. I remember once Justin made a winning prediction about football. One time, huh? Hey! I was there. Just so it's clear. Even how exactly how the game ended. But it turns out I am 100% accurate with my Super Bowl predictions every single year that I've picked the New Orleans Saints to win the Super Bowl. Because I haven't won since, I'm again predicting this year of Super Bowl. Just to see if logic holds every time I predict the Saints win, they win. I should predict them this year and therefore I'll be back on my winning streak again. No, there you go. Yeah. If it worked before that's great human lack of logic therefore. Yeah. All right. So we're going to see how we're going to do how we did last year. We have predictions for this year as well. Lots of things that we can predict that will happen in 2018. We've got some science also. We've got some fun science stories for the second half of the show. CRISPR Alert. I've also got something to do with Anesthesia and some other stories. Do you guys have any fun stories in the docket? I've got another sort of human origin or people moving migration or anything. Human history story. And beneficial micro broccoli. Wow. Okay. I like broccoli. Let's talk about micro broccoli in the second half. Biochle. We could work on this one a little bit. Blair, what did you bring for the science? Oh, I brought some news from the deep blue sea. I brought some news from freezing ponds and I brought some news from an 8th grade science class. Digging into the depths there. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome, awesome, awesome. There is some great, great science discussion up ahead. But we've got our predictions coming first. I just want to respond to Wiz Mike who said, oh, so Kiki had no flu shot. The stomach flu is not really the flu. The flu virus is a virus and so will affect your respiratory system. And that is no joke. And please consider getting your flu shot. The flu shot will not keep you from getting the flu. But it will reduce your chances by, depending on the vaccine for the particular year, it reduces your chances of getting it proportionately. And I'd also hopefully, if you do get it can reduce the duration and how terrible it and ravaging the flu can make you feel. So the flu shot can be very helpful, is very helpful, also saves lives. Yeah, it could legitimately keep you out of the hospital. It's a good thing to do. It's a great thing, it can keep you out of the hospital for certain. What I had was something on the line of norovirus or something. This is something that gets into your gut, a virus that doesn't play nice with the gastric system. Very different. Very different. And we say stomach flu, but that's just a common phrase. It is not actually the flu. It's a very different family of viruses. Very different. And they're a pain in the gut. Good one. So moving forward, let's jump jump jump into the show and remind everyone that you can subscribe to the Twist podcast on iTunes in the Google Play podcast portal in Stitcher, Speaker and Tune In. You can find us on YouTube and Facebook. Just search for This Week in Science and you can always just visit twist.org where you can find link to take a look at our Twist 2018 Blair's Animal Corner Coloring calendar which there are just a couple left now I believe and so snatch them up while you can before they're completely gone for the rest of the year because once they're gone, they're gone. They're gone for more. And additionally, over on Facebook, there is information about the SF SketchFest event which is next Thursday, January 18th. We are going to be in San Francisco at the Cal Academy of Sciences at their nightlife event. It is an adults only event but we will be doing our podcast from there on Thursday and we do hope that if you're in the Bay Area we hope that you will join us online if we are able to get the event streaming. We're able to get the podcast streaming. We had issues last year but we did what we could. Okay, it's time. It's time now for the predictions from the previous year 2017. How did we do? All right. I predicted things related to about climate 2017. I said it was going to be drier and drier because of La Niña in the west and then I said when it was La Niña was going to go away then the west could expect heat waves and drought. Well, it was wet for months because of a really long El Niño but then the La Niña came and the heat and the dry returned and then fires. Then the west was on fire for months and months and months and months and months and the western and the west have a lower than normal snowpack which doesn't bode well leading into the spring and summer of 2018. So, maybe you should just already be rationing your water if you live in the western states. I also said that crisper and gene editing, I said the Chinese report positive results for their cancer tests, hemophilia clinical trials and another would receive FDA approval. I said Zika and malaria would see successful vaccine trials and the patent ruling for CRISPR would go to UC Berkeley. There's no results yet on those Chinese CRISPR cancer trials, but they have begun. The UK hemophilia gene therapy trial had positive results and is being expanded globally. So there might be more of that gene therapy on the way even in the United States. There is a gene therapy for retinitis pigmentosa called Luxterna that did receive FDA approval in December and therapy for a different gene related to retinitis pigmentosa also got underway as well as a stem cell therapy trial for the same disorder. Zika vaccine trials have been promising. There were a lot of vaccines kind of talked about being in development in 2017 but nothing has really come to the forefront. And now with Zika cases subsiding, they're worrying that they're reaching a saturation of immunity in the populations where Zika and the Anopheles mosquito are. And so they're questioning whether or not actually developing whether the market is going to be there for the development of these vaccines even though we might need them. So there's a lot of stuff happening there. Malaria vaccine trials were successful enough to expand to pilot programs across Africa. So there is a malaria vaccine that is really making strides. And the patent ruling did not go to Berkeley. It went to the Broad Institute. So, but they're still fighting it because, you know that's what you do when you have lawyers and buckets of money. I said, optogenetics, we will have trials of optogenetics in the eyes and promising results in early human studies for the treatment of Alzheimer's with optogenetics. Well, an optogenetics trial began in 2017 for retinitis pigmentosa with no patients having negative reactions to the treatment but there was no success with optogenetics to treating Alzheimer's. However, there is a company called Cognito Therapeutics who's working on a trial studying the effects of 40 Hertz entrainment on Alzheimer's disease. And basically they've got goggles and headphones that blast 40 Hertz light and sound at people in early stage Alzheimer's to see if it keeps the Alzheimer's at bay. And they've been working with a few subjects so far. We will see how that study continues, if it continues. From space 2017, I said Cassini will make an unexpected discovery as it passes through the rings of Saturn to its death. Well, that happened. Cassini unexpectedly discovered various chemicals, water, methane and others that haven't really been identified yet as it passed through the rings. And it suggests, the findings suggest that the rings are shedding material onto the planet. And there was a study today, I think, that came out talking about the rings of Saturn potentially being so young that if the dinosaurs had had a telescope to look at Saturn, there wouldn't have been any rings for them to look at. Isn't that cool? There's stuff to learn. We need another Cassini at Saturn. Juno, I said, would not find anything unexpected on Jupiter. Boy, was I wrong. There was, again, another story. I just read it today. I think it's on space.com. And there's a Bolden, one of the, I think his name's Bolden, one of the head, the leaders on the Juno mission. He went to a conference and he said, everything was wrong that we thought. Everything astronomers thought we knew about, and planetary scientists thought we knew about Jupiter. Totally wrong. They're like, we thought it had a little tiny core. Now we think it has a weird, fuzzy big core and we didn't know anything. So Juno, finding lots of unexpected stuff. Boy, was I wrong. I said that- The planet Jupiter is best known for its large, fuzzy core. That's right, large, fuzzy core. The Changi Five Lunar mission, I said, which is the Chinese lunar return mission. They wanna send a rover to the moon and then come back with moon rocks. Well, I said it would work, that it would return samples to Earth from the moon, reinvigorating the space race. Well, yeah, no, the Changi Five launch was postponed by a rocket failure in 2017. And it's probably not gonna get launched again until 2019, although the Changi Four might get launched in 2017. So we gotta stay tuned on that thing. The space race, it's still coming though. The space race is coming. And I have more, I'll talk about my predictions for that later. The Event Horizon Telescope will successfully photograph the event horizon of the black hole at the center of our galaxy, I said. And we did that. The Event Horizon Telescope collected data. We just haven't gotten any of the results back yet. They're still processing it. And so I have predictions about it now for 2018. Oh, good. I said self-driving. Why didn't they have it published yet? What's it on a thumb drive at NASA somewhere? And they're like, oh yeah, set it down. I'm not really, we're gonna look for it. It's probably in the couch. Oh, just with somebody's inbox. Yeah, just on a thumb drive and somebody's inbox waiting. Come on, we wanna see a black hole, everybody. Get on this. Get on it, yes. AI, I said self-driving trucks will begin to be used regularly with no accidents reported other than lots of lost jobs for truck drivers. Well, self-driving trucks aren't a regular thing, but there are self-driving trucks running refrigerators between Texas and California. Did you know that? Yeah, there's a regular autonomous truck route for refrigerators. Also, the Tesla semis were big news this last year and people are still only worried about the AI-inflicted job loss at this point. Not so many jobs lost. Microbes, I said, we will discover more specifically how microbes are tied to various human diseases like diabetes. And we discovered all sorts of things like that. Lots of connection to disease for microbes. So I'm gonna count that as a win, plus one for me. There we go. It was a very gentle one. Why even bother keeping track? You always clean up every year. I'm not all right, though. Physics will remain standard, I said. And that's right. No threats to the standard model came up in 2017. Everything is par for the standard model course. Supporting it more. If anything, a few of the ultimate ideas were shot down. That's right. Yes. I said results will corroborate dark matter particles existing in the galactic halo, but axions will not explain dark matter in 2017. And that seems to have happened. That seems to have happened this last year. We looked, we're able to classify dark matter as being in the galactic halo. I said there will not be a major graviton discovery either. Yep, and nope, no major graviton discovery. I said LIGO, along with Virgo in Italy, will detect at least a dozen gravitational wave events in 2017 and begin pinpointing location of origin. And while I was right about LIGO, Virgo, pinpointing origin of galactic waves, they did that. I did not expect the neutron star merger discovery. And I really overestimated the number of events that would be detected because at this point, it's still only at like six. Like half a dozen. So I was way low on that. Synthetic biology, there's a program called yeast 2.0 that was trying to create a synthetic yeast. And I said it would miss its 2017 goal of doing that. And it did not create a yeast in 2017. It's only achieved 30% synthetic genome replacement in a yeast cell. So there's still a long way to go. And then finally, astronomy, I thought, TWIS would travel to central Oregon to watch the solar eclipse. And we traveled, at least Blair and I did, but it was to Independence, Oregon. And I don't think that's central to anything. It was a very nice time. It was very fun. I mean, it was central Oregon, if you think of central as just a large, like, belt across. It was within the path of the eclipse, which the eclipse went through quote, unquote, central Oregon. So the fact that it was dark where we were means we were in the path of the eclipse. One could say. One could say. All right, so I did pretty well. I think I made a lot of good predictions. Missed a lot as well. I enjoyed the specificity. I think you pretty much nailed it. Yeah, the specificity of your predictions are really, what, if it worked for science, I would assume you were a witch. I put science, but that darn science is proving magic just time and time again. That's right. Yep, I can prognosticate and I do a darn good job because of science. That's right. All right, Justin, what did you predict? How did you do? The sun will go completely dark during the day in America. If it stays this way, God or perhaps gods, many gods will show up in person to explain everything to humanity. Science is usual, folks. It's just an eclipse. You predicted the eclipse. Good job there. It turns out, like, yeah. It was a, I said there would be no new proof of dark matter despite multiple new tests scheduled for 2017. Didn't really hear a lot of dark matter evidence this year. Yeah, no proof. No, I mean, it was a lot of like, well, I think dark matter's over there and we think we've got this mass over here and we're figuring that out, but it's still, I don't know where it is. Yeah, in fact, I said earlier signals that it might exist will fall down under further scrutiny. I'm exactly falling down. But they still have all their work ahead of them. Microbial influence on human health becomes so well understood that fast food joints begin asking which kind of bacteria you would like on your meal. Didn't quite get there yet, but we really are. Like, actually, it's one of the stories I've got for the second half. It has to do with bacteria and food. But that's a 2018 story, Justin. I know, I missed it. I was ahead. I'm always way ahead of my time. All of my predictions will come true. You're a man ahead of your own time. Yes, it's hard to remember back from the future. It's hard to remember back. Gene editing would go public. We're not really public yet, but it's showing up like everywhere with this CRISPR. It's definitely in the public consciousness now. I think it is, yeah. And I mean, there have been some human trials or guinea pigs. Yeah, I did predict only a few people would do anything useful with it. That was wrong. There were lots of great uses for gene editing this year, of course, but one such application of gene editing that would be applied by a mad citizen scientist would alter the cognitive ability of a colony of ants. And that by the end of 2017, mysterious hedge fund would spend billions to fund a global ad campaign encouraging people to picnic more often. I predicted Chinese ivory trade would come to a slow, incomplete stop. But that, meanwhile, elephants might begin trading in human teeth. Right. I think that's I think that's what Bitcoin is. Pretty sure that's just elephants. Yeah, I think that's how that goes. Unfortunately, the ivory trade has not come to a slow. But it is incomplete. I will give you that stop. This, I thought I got right, though. Home robotics will have a major breakthrough when engineers finally realize that people don't actually care about artificial intelligence, but really want artificial personality. Sales of both Flatterbot and Yes Man Echo Chamber 500 outsell all other appliances in 2017. I'm kind of like I'm going to this is sideways because this is a really tech show. But all those devices that you can talk to and tell it, like they're all like listening to you all the time and playing what you want to. Alexa, am I pretty? Wow, she was she didn't say anything. A.I. A.I. We make progress as pre-recorded robo calls are now placed by live robots who go door to door and knock on your door to ask you questions. NASA would be given the directed to focus only on space exploration. That happened. I said the Affordable Care Act would be repealed. Oh, pretty much. Right. Pretty close. Although I also predicted it would be replaced with something. I don't think it's been replaced with anything. But I predicted it would be replaced with a reality TV show resembling the Hunger Games. Only instead of energetic young people running violent gauntlets. It's tired old sick people running. But I got like one maybe. And that's that was like the eclipse, which I think pretty well known. But what about your football? Oh, that hasn't happened yet. No, that one. Oh, I know. Yeah. No, I got the football one. Well, I didn't say the saints. I think that's it. Every time I picked the saints, they've won. So this year, that's my prediction is that they're going to win the saints. OK, well, we haven't gotten to that yet. No, slow down. All right. So you didn't win the Super Bowl prediction for the last year. So maybe maybe this is the year. Maybe this is the year for you. All right, Blair. Oh, yes. Did you have? How'd you do? So first, I said that there would be more exciting news about slime molds 2016 was kind of the year of the slime mold. There was stuff cropping up all the time about them. There was only really one fascinating story about slime molds last year, but it was pretty cool. And that was that this was back in March. And that was that flashing lights that have been shown to confuse humans in trials actually focus slime molds and make them make decisions faster. So as if they're irritated and they're saying, let me just make this decision. So slime molds check. Next, I said successful replacement of bodily organs with 3D printed ones in a human. I've said that for like three years in a row. You're just waiting. You know, we're so close, especially after our time in Philadelphia when we met the people who had the 3D printer for stints in in hearts and things like that, I thought for sure, this one was in the bag. That was all the way back in June. But no, man, then I complicated, maybe it's a little bit more complicated. Tardigrades will continue to be the gift that keeps on giving. Yeah, absolutely. An amazing story this year from also from March that Tardigrades make their own proteins that are not structure specific and are unseen in other life. So and more on Tardigrades later in my predictions for 2018. But yeah, they really are the gift that keeps on giving. I love Tardigrades. Yeah, I predicted that in 2017, it would be a very wet year in California. And everyone would forget about the drought and water crisis. Yep, that definitely happened. Yeah, absolutely. Until the fires. Right. In fact, California was one of the it was one of the wettest years ever. Of course, rain years go from October to September. So the October 2016 to September 2017 was one of the wettest in the in the history of recorded records in California. So definitely was very, very wet and the reservoirs were full well beyond their normal capacity at the end of that rain year. But right at the end of that rain year in October, it all came screeching to a halt. And now we are officially on drought watch again. Back to it, everybody. Yeah. So if we can all just kind of think a little bit more long term. Anyway, my next prediction was that an A.I. written TV show will premiere on a streaming network and gain popularity. Did it happen? No, but it was close. There were more A.I. written films produced. There was one. So, of course, Sunspring was the famous one from 2016 with Thomas Middleditch in it, and that was written by a script writing A.I. machine or program. But then they they they had a new one made in 2017 with David Hasselhoff called It's No Game. And it's it's in an alternative reality where in the midst of a heated writer strike in Hollywood, A.I. script writers have gradually begun to replace human ones. So it's a it's an A.I. written script about A.I. writing some meta script writing. So I feel like that already happened. Yeah, yeah. And there was also a exact average quote unquote episode of Scrubs written by an A.I. in October of last year. So we're getting pretty close, but not exactly. Whether it's a human or or or a machine, it's artificial intelligence. If you somehow have to have a car chase in every genre of of movie that you make, that there's some point where there's just like, oh, this is the car chase scene. Whether it's running dinosaurs or it's actual cars, it doesn't really matter. There's always a car chase now. And in an artificially intelligent movie, that's how you can tell. Yeah, absolutely. I also predicted that Trump would withdraw from his plan to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement. Unfortunately, no. Wait, no, no, he actually that's very timely. They're now talking about today the possibility if they could get a bit of deal that they'd be, it doesn't matter. But it wasn't during 2017. Well, it was 2017. That was wishful thinking. I also predicted that self-driving cars would enter the roads in full force, start working for red sharing apps without a driver or wheel. And there would be some mishaps. Thank goodness that did not come to pass. A new political party will surface with their main platform, being the secession of blue states along the West Coast. I think that's that definitely can still happen. That's probably not yet, though, not 2017. There's already several of them that prediction for 2020. Yeah, I think 2020 will do it. Citizens said citizen led climate action will increase with marches and demonstrations of the rise. Yeah, absolutely. Yes, it was big. Yeah, it was everybody felt like a like a citizen all of a sudden. Very important. I also predicted that restorative vision tests will run and work in a primate species. So close, I got a mouse. They were able to reverse retinal degeneration in mice with tested functionality of the new retina. But just mice, unfortunately. The tools arise for two parents of the same sex to have a child together that is a genetic reflection of just them. So close, but not quite. So close, not quite. We have these sperm packets. We are able to manipulate DNA in many ways. I think we're right on the precipice of it, but not yet. And then very last, I predicted that twist would smash them dead at SF sketchfest. And I would say that's a big fat. Yes, we had standing room only in the terrace. I think it was great. Yes, it was a fabulous show. And we were going to we're going to do it again. We're going to do it again. That's my prediction. There you go. And you're not again. That's right. If you just tuned in, this is This Week in Science, and we are covering our predictions from 2017. We've just wrapped up our 2017 predictions and how we did. It is time now for us to discuss our predictions for 2018. What do we think is going to happen this year? Within the next 11 and a half months, 11 and two thirds months. Who's first? Who's first? Blair, Justin, I'll go first. I'll go first. OK, Justin, go first. I predict that Justin will go first. And your first prediction will be correct. As I am predicting a large unguided manmade object will re-enter the atmosphere and crash to earth while it is most likely to crash in the ocean. It could make landfall. Even so, it would be highly unlikely to crash in your country or your state or your county or your town. And if it did crash in your land, in your town, chances of you being under the spot where it lands at the moment it is landing is so unfathomably remote as to the phyologic of even attempting to calculate the chances of such a vent occurring. And yet, because that chance is not zero, it just might happen. In fact, the chance of an object from space landing on your head this year is just about the same as it landing anyplace else. So keep looking up this year, especially around late March. You never know. Japanese Space Agency will return to space with Hayabusa-2 mission to land on an asteroid this time when the ventral landing will go off without a hitch and it will be found that the asteroid is covered in tardigrades. And yes, every time I predict the saints who win the Super Bowl, they won the Super Bowl. So this year in an Ernst's desire to be correct again, I'm saying saints will win the Super Bowl. That's not really a sciencey one. It's a football one. A discovery in San Diego that appears to be evidence of early humans hunting mammoths 130,000 years ago will be found to be true and correct. Although it will actually get turned on its head when the researchers discover that it wasn't us hunting mammoths. It was the mammoths hunting us. They're hunting mammoths. Mammoths hunting humans to extinction 130,000 years ago in the United States. Microbiome will continue to reveal the way it works. The scientists eventually the cure to most illnesses will be addressed not with drugs, but with bugs. Vehicle transplants will become so commonplace and the benefits so well known that people will stop washing their hands. Turns out, turns out this will not be a very good idea as stomach viruses replace irritable bowel syndrome cases. And my final prediction 2017. Yeah, well, this one are 2018 and it might even happen in 2018. It might not be the very next year, but this is somewhere in the foreseeable future. The majority of Floridians will continue to vote for candidates who oppose climate science. Despite the fact that the state of Florida is now only slightly larger than Delaware. Shots fired. Yeah, go swimming, go swimming. Those are good. I like it. I like it. I like it a lot. I think you might be on to something there, Justin. Yeah, and which all of them. Well, that's right on all of them. We will see what will happen in 2018. Blair, what are your predictions? Oh, just a few. My first is that sperm, a.k.a. the new time release capsule for, you know, you're down under will begin clinical trials for cancer treatment. I'm really excited for that. We will discover a new kind of cephalopod this year. Oh, that'd be cool. Tardigrades, much like Justin's, but a little bit different will be discovered out in space. And this will prove them to be the original alien, as I've been saying all along. Why won't you listen, people? Coffee. Yeah, we got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're aliens. Coffee will be proven good and then bad and then good again. It's kind of the way that science works. It's what science has been showing for years. Coffee's great for you. No, it's not. Yes, it is. Oh, fantastic. Oh, yes, it is. But it'll end the year on top. That's important. Yes, good. Here's my my largest cop out of the year. Twenty eighteen will be the warmest year on record. Dun dun dun dun dun dun. White nose syndrome treatment will begin in the wild, saving some of the world's populations. Yay, that's what we want. I'm really excited for this UV situation from from last week that we talked about, actually. A scientist will run for Congress in twenty eighteen and win just one, just one. I'm I'm keeping my expectations low. More, more, more, more, greater than or equal to one. Scientists about that greater than or equal to one. I will spend another year on twists and will once again find myself astounded at what a coffee shop interview for an internship in late twenty eleven became. So, January, I'm not sure exactly when it is, but it's sometime in January. It might be the prediction show is my very first show I was ever present for. So this is my fifth anniversary, no, sixth anniversary. I don't even know how many years. Happy anniversary, happy twist, anniversary Blair. And last, twists will cross another state off of our live show map. Oh, we need to do that. We definitely need to do that. How about Arizona? Sure. I'm up for whatever. You know, I don't know. Just picking a state. We'll see. We will. That's the state you pick. You can pick any state. There's there's a whole bunch of states you can pick. You pick Arizona. Just so it's fine. All the people, all the states need the same. Just on the top of my mind right now about Texas. I don't go to Texas. Texas. A lot of places. Go someplace that line once in a while. Let's go places, people. Yeah, let's go places. Yes. And how about Washington? We could go to Washington state. And you know, even though I'm here in Oregon, we've never done a live show. So I like these ideas. Let's put these things together. OK, my predictions for two thousand eighteen. Climate, I'm going to start with the worst first. No rest for the wicked. More extreme storms and flooding of low lying regions. The Arctic will melt drought and fires in the Western United States. More bad news about coral reefs. We're going to see the conversations about states. Water rights heat up this year, I think. I am a total pessimist about climate in two thousand eighteen. But I am an optimist that people starting to learn more about these issues will begin to act to make a difference. Basically, there's going to be less debate, debate. I'm putting in quotation marks because there is no debate at this point. Just disagreement. Yes. And there will be more action. So that's what I predict for climate. CRISPR and gene editing therapy stuff. So the guy who trialed a gene therapy for Hunter syndrome, he will report a successful recovery. I just want to be optimistic about this. We will see more development of CRISPR based CAR T type therapies for cancer and for HIV. We're also going to see Chinese CRISPR trials for human papilloma virus treatment. And they are going to report success before the end of the year. That's great. That's what I'm predicting. Space, the Juno mission, which is supposed to crash into Jupiter after it's something like 20th orbit. I think the mission is going to be extended by NASA because it's bringing in such amazing, unexpected information about the planet and it's not being as compromised by the magnetosphere of Jupiter as they thought it would be. Yeah, it's a little, little. Wonderful, sturdy ship out there in space. There is a new a new telescope, space telescope that is going to launch the TESS mission is going to launch successfully. It's going to replace Kepler and begin to elucidate us about neighboring exoplanets before the end of the year. The insight mission to Mars, which is supposed to look beneath the surface of Mars, is not going to find little green men living in tunnels underneath the planet's surface. I predict that. What about targets, targets? Maybe tardigrades, right. But it will get to Mars in one piece before the year ends. That's going to happen. And then someone don't know exactly who it's going to be who's going to do it first. Someone's going to launch a successful mission to the moon before the end of the year. Well, actually, OK, I'm going to put it. I'm going to put my prediction, make it more specific. India. India is going to send a lander and a rover to the moon and drive a little remote controlled car around on the surface of the moon. That's what I think it's going to happen for the end of 2018. And I do think the event Horizon Telescope and the data that we're waiting for it to come back instead of showing just a fuzzy, weird image, which is kind of what we have now. It's going to show us a beautiful crystal picture of the event Horizon of a black hole. We are going to see a black hole this year. Guys, I'm excited. This is going to happen. I predict. AI in 2018, there is going to be a lot of talk continuing about the pros and cons of AI, but we're not going to see actually see out here in the real world much more than chatbots continuing to take over Twitter and robots inhabiting the Uncanny Valley. That's pretty much it. Although I think self-driving vehicle numbers are going to increase in 2018, not so much that people are going to lose their jobs yet, but they'll start increasing. Microbes, I think there's going to be a report this year of a new antibiotic class. I think that's going to happen this year. And microbes additionally are going to continue to be successfully paired with the immune system to treat disease, I think, and based on data from tribal people in Africa, a new fad diet will hit the public consciousness that involves root vegetables from Africa and seasonal meats. I might write I might write the book myself. I don't know. And a rogue scientist is going to develop a way to control politicians using microbes. Oh, my mind control. A good mad scientist or a bad man scientist. It depends on on your political views, really. What I'm asking is, will his lab coat be white or like red or like black or like green? Yeah, I don't know. That's because that's how we figure these things out. Maybe a technicolor dream coat. I don't know. A rainbow color lab coat. I wouldn't know how to respond to that. That's right, physics this year. Again, I predict there will be no challenge to the standard model. Standard models going to just stand up as a standard model and any new particles that are reported are only going to serve to add resolution to our understanding of the standard model. Not any weird alternative physics. There's not going to be anything groundbreaking on the dark matter front. There will not be a graviton and we still will not understand why our universe is made of matter by the end of the year. I also suit synthetic biology. I do not think that yeast 2.0 is going to make a synthetic bacteria, synthetic yeast before the end of 2018. No, no synthetic yeast and twists will continue to bring you amazing weekly shows and at least two live shows. The first starting with SF sketch fest next Thursday in San Francisco. Yeah, got some good ones in there, right? Get them in there. Yeah, AI, it's going to be a whole bunch of talk. And I've got a link that I will share on our show notes from UC Davis. UC Davis gave asked experts, which is my alma mater, they asked experts what they predicted for 2018. And one of our favorite microbiologists, Jonathan Eisen, is in there as giving predictions for microbes and there are other people talking about their scientific predictions. There's political predictions and other things as well. But it's great. It's a great list of predictions from the UC Davis scientists. And I will put that in our show notes. But right now, is it time for us to take a break? It's time for a break. Have we have we tired of this prognosticating? Yes, I got some real stuff. Yeah, OK, now it's time for us to know what's going on right now. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. What is happening right now? Dipper toe into the science news pool before the day is out. Yeah, so let's take a quick break so everyone can take a quick breather and change gears a little bit so we can get into that right here right now. Science news is about to begin. This is this week in science. We will be back in just a few moments. Stay tuned. Everyone, thank you so much for joining us for this week in science. Once again, we are here every week. Every once in a while, we do miss a week, but pretty much 52 weeks a year, we are we are pretty much here. And we thank you for being here with us for listening to the show, for bringing us in to be a part of your lives week after week. I do want to let you know if you are if the various ways that you can help this week in science to keep going, to maintain its schedule and to maybe even grow to be more than we are currently. So right now, if you head over to twist.org, T-W-I-S dot O-R-G, that is our website and you can find all sorts of things, twisty there. And let me walk you through it. First off, there are our 2018 Blair's Animal Corner coloring calendars. There are a few still available. I've got them in a little box right next to me. But like I said earlier in the show, when they are gone, they are gone. So head to twist.org and click on the black and white toad calendar image to order your coloring calendar for 2018 now and to help support twist. Additionally, we have other ways that you can help us out. One of them is if you're interested in buying twist related things, you can head to our Zazzle store. So you click on that Zazzle link and it takes you to Zazzle.com slash this week in science. 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And the neat thing about Patreon is you pick your level, what works for your budget, what works for how much you'd like to help us out. And there are little rewards that you will get in return. So once a month you will get charged, whatever amount you are donating and you will also receive a little thank you from twist that is concomitant with the level of your support. So Patreon or PayPal, these two different ways of helping us through donations. If you are not able to help us financially, if you don't wanna buy things, you're doing minimalism and you're not into commercial stuff or if your budget is tight and you can't afford to help out something like this, I totally get it. We are trying to keep twist free for everyone. So one way that you can help out is just tell people about twist, help us advertise, help us get the word out and send them to twist where we have this awesome big subscribe button now on the front page. So if you go to twist.org or any of the episode pages, we now have this wonderful subscribe button that takes you to all the, to U-Tunes or YouTube or iTunes or Google Play to let, to help people subscribe more easily. So if you're trying to tell people to check out twist, something you can do is just go to twist.org and say, hey, just click on the subscribe button and then you might find whatever way works for you really easily whether or not it's iTunes or the YouTube video program or Google Play. It'll help us out because we will get more subscribers. So tell people about that subscribe button, share the word about twist, tell people that there's this awesome podcast that makes funny predictions every year that you'd love your friends to listen to and we hope that you do. Everyone out there, thank you so much for listening to us. Thank you for listening to this whole spiel that I do in the middle of every show. And thank you for your support, honestly. We really could not do this without you. What is the moral that we all must learn especially those of us with money to burn before your eyes widened at the book on the shelf. I think is he helping you or is he helping himself? And we're back with more this week in science. Yes, we are, we are back, back, back and we've got all sorts of science news. You guys ready for the news? But first, let's write, oh my gosh, I'm getting ahead of myself. It's time for this week and what has science done for me lately? Our letter today comes from Tim Wagner. Tim writes in and says, I love the GPS in my phone and I have an outboard GPS for my car and I spent part of my career working on GPS navigation for the space shuttle. What an awesome job, oh my goodness. And anyway, okay, that was my side note. Tim goes on to say, of course, an enormous amount of science was needed to build the GPS system from the electronics of the GPS satellites to the rockets that launched the satellites. But what interests me is that GPS wouldn't work without relativity. The fact that's not obvious at first glance. The GPS satellites travel at 14,000 kilometers per hour which is a small fraction of the speed of light. So one might think adjusting for relativistic effects could be unnecessary. The calculation of your position is accomplished by triangulating the distances to at least four satellites computed by computing distances to the satellites derived from the difference between the broadcast times of the precision clocks in the satellites with the time of the clock in your receiver. The receiver then solves four equations with four unknowns, the X, Y and Z of your position plus how much your receiver's clock is fast or slow. The distances to the satellites are so great that it turns out ignoring relativistic adjustments renders the calculation useless because extraordinary precision is required. The clock ticks of the GPS satellite clocks must be known to 20 to 30 nanosecond accuracy. There are two opposite relativistic effects that cannot be ignored. The apparent slowdown of the GPS clocks due to the satellite speed relative to us and the apparent speed up of the satellite clocks due to our relative closeness to the Earth's gravitational field. These errors combined are 38 microseconds or 38,000 nanoseconds, which is way more than the 20 to 30 nanoseconds accuracy required of the receiver's knowledge of the GPS clocks. Your GPS's calculation of your position would be seriously off in just a couple of minutes and the error would grow to 10 kilometers each day. Wow. But with relativistic adjustments, if you have a good view of the sky, your GPS can calculate your position within five or 10 meters. So what has relativity theory done for me lately? It helps my phone tell me where I am to within a few meters. And he has a link to notes that we will put in the show notes, so you can actually link the source of his information there. And oh my goodness, if you Google top four reasons why GPS doesn't need Einstein's relativity, according to Tim, you will see that there is such a thing as relativity denial. I guess there's denial for everything. Well, yeah, I can't say I'm surprised. Yeah, but oh my goodness, relativity denial. Einstein would be turning in his grave. Tim, thank you so much for this. I really enjoyed reading this and thinking a bit about this technology that we maybe take for granted now as we use our apps to navigate around our environments and we don't have to use a compass or old fashioned paper maps to figure out where we are. Yeah, GPS is a wonder of modern technology and relativity. Thank you, that was great. It's relative, yeah. I can't exactly say I understood all of it, but I understood some of it. I mean, the basic idea, I mean, it's a fast thing that I read it quickly and it's a thing you have to pay attention to to follow. We'll put it on the show notes, so you can read it again if you want. But the big message is, this is happening and we have to use, we have to use relativity. Yeah, well, we're not in a vacuum. There's all these kind of factors affecting all of us all the time, which means those factors are also affecting satellites, which means they're affecting our technology and it makes nothing but sense. And relativity, oh my goodness, where I am relative to you, am I sitting still in a moving car or am I moving? Right, right. Are you sitting, are you standing still? Are you moving, what's happening? All these things. How is time passing? Oh, the mind-bendingness of relativity, and it's important for science. Everyone, we need you to write in to let us know what science has done for you lately. What does it do for you every day? I want to know. Blair wants to know. She wants it in sonnet form. I actually got a sonnet this week, so I'll have to send that to you and we'll throw it in the show notes for a future episode. Yay. Oh, that's wonderful. Yes. Awesome, somebody's listening, so we got a sonnet. Haiku's are great too, or a letter of your own experiences, an observation. I don't know what Justin wants to know. He wants to know. He wants to know what you love. Pictographs are good. Comic strips. Yeah, it's hard to share pictographs and comic strips. Infographics, show notes, but it's hard to share them visually over the podcast. Interpretive reading. We'll describe what we see. Anyway, everyone, leave me a message on our Facebook page, facebook.com slash this week in science. You can email me at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com for reels. We want to keep filling this segment of the show with things for you. We started this segment on Earth Day last year and I want to keep it going at least until Earth Day of this year. If we can keep it going longer, I want to keep these things coming because come on, you guys, science is inspiring. What does it do for you every day? Let me know, please. Is it time for the science now? Yes, science, science, science. Okay, CRISPR. You know I love the CRISPR, right? Did you guys talk about the troubles with CRISPR last week? No. No, well, yeah, they've run into a potential problem with using CRISPR in human therapies. Now the paper that has brought up this issue has not yet been peer reviewed. It was only published on a pre-print server, kind of like the archive.org for physics, but this is for biology. So it has not yet been peer reviewed. So there's still a lot of commentary and the scientific publishing process that still needs to happen to make it a really good paper and to make sure that there are not any errors in what they are putting out to the public and to the rest of the scientific community. So the idea though, Stanford researchers published of this pre-print that highlights the problem that if we're using CRISPR in the human body and trying to get it into chop up genes and put new genes in and do this editing process, it has to be able to get there. It has to be able to get into the cells. And now anything you inject into the human body, put in the human body, we have this thing called the immune system. It fights it off. And well, CRISPR comes from bacteria. And the CRISPR Cas9 system specifically, there are a couple of them. One comes from a Staphylococcus bacteria and one comes from a Strep bacteria. These are bacteria that live on and in people and have for ages. And so these are bacteria that we very likely have antibodies for. And so if we have antibodies for the bacteria, we very likely have antibodies for the CRISPR Cas9 system on which it is based. So they did a test in this study. They took these CRISPR Cas9 systems and they tested people for antibodies among, this is a small study, among 34 people they tested, 79% had antibodies against the staff Cas9 and 65% had antibodies against the Strep Cas9. And if you've got antibodies, that means your body is going to do what, you guys? That's right, it's going to fight off the invader. This antibodies are a quick alert system. It makes it easy to identify something that has been seen by the body before. And so it's like, I know what you are, I'm gonna attack you, we're gonna get rid of you. Yeah, yes. And so then they looked to see if T cells from the immune system can recognize Cas9 proteins and they studied T cells from 13 healthy adults. 46% reacted to the staff Cas9, but none of them did against the Strep Cas9. We don't know exactly why that difference is, but it's still a very small sample number that we're looking at in the study. They only tested for preexisting immunity against Cas9, but if there's any kind of large bacterial protein that's put into the human body, it's very likely because it's bacteria and our body's like, we've got to fight off the bacteria, it probably is going to elicit an immune response. So let's circle this conversation back to sperm packets. What about that? Use the sperm or... Oh, right, right, right. Yes, so I get what you're talking about. Yeah, so what do the sperm do that they don't get attacked by the immune system? Use the sperm somehow, I don't know. Maybe we can use, that's right, maybe we can use sperm packets to deliver. Yeah, sperm delivery service. Hello, knock, knock. But here's my other question. Why are we using human bacteria instead of using bacteria from other species that our body wouldn't care about? Well, it's not so much that they wouldn't care about them though. It's just that they're common and that they're probably that they're accessible and that that's where they were able to easily get this protein system. I just wonder because there's a lot of diseases and bacteria that other species carry that are not zoonotics, that do not make us sick. So it's why I would have to wear a mask when I was near a sick primate, but I wouldn't have to wear a mask when I was near a sick rhinoceros. How interesting. Yeah. So what if we used non-human related strains? I don't know, I don't know that that necessarily would be a good idea or a bad idea. I just don't know why it has to, I mean, is there a way to do this with a virus instead of a bacteria? Well, I mean, yes. So there are viral gene editors that are being used. The issue with viruses is that we don't want viruses which can potentially go in and survive and infect and maybe retroact, maybe put themselves, their DNA into the cells and have a negative response. We have a lot of research with viral vectors that are used to infect cells on a regular basis. But the problem is we just, we have to be careful with them because you don't want that infection of cells to go on to be a systematic, a systemic infection, right? You don't want the treatment to become the problem. So researchers, we don't know if it's going to be a huge problem. The crazy thing is this news came out on this preprint and people are just kind of talking about this now, but it led to a huge crash in the biotech stock market. Oh no. So all the companies that have been building stuff up related to CRISPR, a bunch of people are like, ah, and pulled their money out. Oh man. Well, what did they think was gonna happen using strep and staff? Well, but it'll, you know, we don't know though. I mean, that's the thing we haven't done the tests yet and there are ongoing human trials that are going to be starting. So we will see what will happen. We will see. The other thing is, is that there are other CRISPR-Cas systems. Like last year I talked about a CRISPR-Cas 13 system that does much more efficient point mutation cuts. So instead of cutting whole genes, it just cuts out little base pairs. And so it's like, it can be a much more efficient machine. And it might be, it is potentially from a different bacteria that would not be as reactive. There's also CRISPR that acts on RNA that again is the result of looking at different systems from different bacteria, different CRISPR-Cas systems from different bacteria that may not be as reactive to the immune system. So there are a bunch of things that are on the list and maybe we will find that CRISPR is gonna be good for some therapies like the Chinese human papillomavirus trial that's ongoing. That's actually going to be like a gel that is put on the surface. It's not going to be something that's injected into your body. It's going to be like a topical cream or CRISPR ointment. That's pretty cool. Yeah, so maybe that. A cell gel. I like that, that's neat. Yeah, so there are ways that researchers will probably look at getting around this issue. This does not mean the end of CRISPR, one preprint does not mean the end of CRISPR. This is still a very promising tool. So jumping on those bandwagons. A lot of the uses of this tool don't have to be direct on human DNA. I mean, this is a large amount of what is done is to engineer the thing that goes in there and creates the cure, not so much direct editing. So. Yeah, like the CAR-T stuff where you can take the immune cells out, use CRISPR outside of the body to do the editing and then put the cells back in the body. Yeah. And cure cancer. And which they do in a hollowed out HIV virus. Yeah. That's how they reintroduce some of the stuff. Yeah, there's interesting stuff going on. And I think there's still a lot of promise. And just as a genetic research tool beyond the biotech, it's gonna affect people aspect. Just as a research tool, it is amazing and still has massive application. So. Even though it's legal fate is still unknown. Yes. Still up in the air. Yeah. So again, another, moving on from this study, another really cool study having to do with the immune system. Researchers talking at a conference this last week, they were talking about a study that has been done where they're looking at pregnancy. How does pregnancy happen? And what are the genes that are involved? Oh, wait, I know. Are they really trying to figure this one out? Cause. It's a mystery. I got that one. I got that one. No one knows. Well, it's more of, not the fertilization, but the implantation part of pregnancy. How does, what happened from the egg laying history of mammals into the evolution of marsupials and to placental mammals where we hold our young in our body? How did all of that happen? What genes became activated? What evolutionary processes allowed pregnancy where the young is held within the body to succeed? How did that actually happen? Well, the researchers have discovered looking at armadillo genes and rabbit genes. They've found out a whole bunch of information about all the genes that are in play. And they've found that it all has to do with the timing of inflammation. The researcher and evolutionary biologist at Yale University, Arun Chavan, presented his findings at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, SICKB, in San Francisco. And he said, implantation looks like inflammation because it came from inflammation. And we did this study to learn how it became an implantation process instead. So Chavan and his team last July reported that a suite of inflammatory genes turn on in the opossum. So the opossum fetus leaves the egg and clings to the uterine lining, but there's a bunch of inflammatory genes that get turned on as that leaving of the egg, as the leaving of the egg happens. And then there is an immune response as well in placental mammals when the embryo latches on to the uterus. But there's not like in marsupials where the young climbs out and then kind of clings to in the pocket outside of the body. That's not what placental embryos do. Placental embryos have to actually implant burrow their way into the placental lining to get in there and to be surrounded by that healthy tissue. And so in order to do that, it has to actually destroy the uterine lining to bury itself and in that it triggers inflammation. And so normally inflammation would try to repair the wound, but that's not exactly what the embryo wants to happen. But some studies are suggesting that this inflammation is actually necessary at this very early stage for the embryo. In fact, there are studies that show that women who take anti-inflammatory drugs during the earliest days of their pregnancy suffer a higher rate of miscarriages. Really? And so, and it's because the uterus doesn't successfully, the embryo doesn't implant itself in the uterus. This is really important information. Yeah, and so there's this implantation process that takes place where inflammation has to actually, has to happen. It's very important. And so the researchers have tried to figure out how mammals, placental mammals can actually deal with all the inflammatory proteins that come in and try and heal the wound in the uterus. And they looked at the inflammatory response in the rabbit, in the armadillo, and in the tenrec, which, according to this article in Nature by Amy Maxman, is a hedgehog-like animal. Econops telferi. Anyway, they looked at interleukin 17. It had been present in high levels in the opossum, and it was inactive in the placental mammals. And so, Siobhan says it's probably important to shut those down, these things that destroy invaders before they can damage the embryo. So the placental mammals are acting different than the marsupial ones when it comes to turning on this inflammatory protein. He also found that cells that line the uterus of placental mammals suppress production of interleukin 17. But then there's other parts. So there's this inflammatory response that takes place in the very beginning, but then he's found that inflammatory response changes over the course of pregnancy so that the inflammation goes down to kind of keep the pregnancy in place. Another researcher at Yale and a senior investigator on the studies, Gunter Wagner says, mammals have figured out a way to keep some aspects of the inflammatory process that are favorable to the fetus, but stop the destructive parts of the response. So the end result of all of this is that if they can figure out what genes for inflammation get turned on and off at different points in pregnancy, maybe they can help to reduce miscarriage rates and maybe help to also reduce the rates of inflammation-related disease and late-term miscarriages that occur. Wow. Yeah. All thanks to looking at opossums, armadillos and rabbits and 10-rex. It's kind of neat to look across the spectrum. You look at the evolutionary aspect of it to kind of answer the question of how did this come into play and why is it here? And placental mammals, we're weird. Well, the armadillo that they chose, the nine-bedded armadillo is the species they used and they always have identical quadruplets. Every time. That's a good one fact, wow. So I am very curious as to why they chose them. Maybe they were like, this is a very remarkable pregnancy. This is something to look at. Remarkable. Yes. And then my final little final study here has to do with anesthesia. We talk a little bit about anesthesia every once in a while and the idea that we use anesthesia, we know, oh, it makes people go to sleep, right? And then, you know, you wake up and you feel kind of not just drowsy as if you'd taken a sleeping pill, but your brain doesn't work quite right. You wake up and there's a mental fog for a little while and researchers really have had no idea. They don't know how anesthetics work, right? It's like they know that they work. They have a general idea of what they do, but they really don't know the specifics. But there's a new, a new really interesting study that just was published in Cell Reports by a team at the University of Queensland in Australia. And they look at an anesthetic that's commonly used called Propofol. And this is used during surgery all the time. It puts people to sleep very nicely and easily. And, but again, how does it work? So they teamed up with some people, researchers who do like nanoscale imaging and they actually looked at synapses, the connections between nerve cells in the brain within the GABA-ergic system of the brain to see what was happening. They actually looked, they took a microscope and got really deep in there and said, what's breaking? We wanna know what is stopping here. Is there actually a stoppage of communication between nerve cells when we give Propofol? And there is. It breaks the system that physically moves neurotransmitters out of the presynaptic terminal. So there's one, the presynapse and the post-synapse and neurotransmitters get released in these little bubbles, bloop, they get blooped out into the synaptic space. And there are motor proteins that are involved. These that are involved in actually moving the neurotransmitters out. They found that one of these proteins was specifically involved. Protein Syntaxin 1A, it's required at the synapses of all neurons and it just went, yep, you're not gonna work anymore. Propofol took that Syntaxin A and just, it stopped it working. And so no neurotransmitters were getting released from the presynaptic neurons so nothing was getting picked up by the post-synaptic neurons. So it's not that Propofol quote unquote puts you to sleep. It stops your neurons from talking to each other. It disconnects the neurons in your brain. And so that mental fuzziness that's going on there, that's because your brain has, your neurons have to start talking to each other again and there's a lot of neurons in there to start talking. You're less unconscious and you're more like temporarily a vegetable. Is that, I'm trying to understand really what that would mean if these synapses aren't talking to each other. You feel like you're asleep, like you lose consciousness. You do lose consciousness. So you are unconscious, yes. But it's more like your, but it's not an unconsciousness of sleep where your brain is still working in rhythmic fashion and where everything is still connected. It's actually disconnecting the wires. You're still conscious. You're just no longer aware that you're conscious. Mind blown, literally. Literally, yeah. Like a circuit, like it's blown, like a blown circuit. Yes, yeah. And so understanding stuff like this is really important, especially we know that there are certain populations of people who are like older individuals who are vulnerable to going under anesthesia. And so if we can figure out how to protect people like that and still be able to put them under, but in a safer way, you know, it would be, surgery would become a breeze. You wouldn't be, you know, would give you less to be worried about in those situations. This is really great research, very important. That's all I got. My brain is broke broken. Broken, broken. No, it's not. Justin, how many you have? Tell me some stories. I've got a story of pro-bio-rockily. You've been working on this for the whole show. That's still not good. You just don't look like you're going pro-rockily. Nope. Pro-bio-rockily. Nope. Micro-bio-rockily. Nope. It's actually, it's a colorectal cancer story. It's research team, National University of Singapore, Medicine Lab of Associate Professor Matthew Chang has found a way to turn a cocktail of bacteria and vegetables into a targeted system that seeks out and kills cancer cells. The study, which was led by Dr. Chun Ho will be published actually in the current issue of nature biomedical engineering. So the basis of this is they've got this cancer targeting system and engineered form of E. coli. This little, that's a type of bacteria that's normally found in the gut. The team engineered the bacteria into a probiotic that attached to the surface of the colorectal cancer cells and then secretes an enzyme to convert a substance that's already found in vegetables like broccoli into a potent anti-cancer agent. The idea was for the cancer cells in the vicinity to take up this anti-cancer agent and die. So normal cells aren't affected by this toxin. So if they can get it in there, get it in a general vicinity, it should just attack the cancer cells and that's what happened. A mixture of engineered probiotics with the broccoli extract containing the dietary substance killed more than 95% of colorectal cancer cells in a dish. This is in the lab setting still. The mixture had no effect on cells from other types of cancer such as breast or stomach cancer. This is, so it's pretty targeted there as well. Strikingly a probiotic veggie combination reduced tumor numbers by 75% in mice out of the lab. Also the tumors that were detected in these mice were three times smaller than those in control mice which were not fed the mixture. Dr. Ho and associate professor Cheng along with cancer specialist Dr. Yong Wipeng National University Hospital envisioned that these probiotics could be used as a prevention method. Kind of like, you know, take your shot of probiotic anti-cancer broccoli juice, put it into your Jamba or to clean up cancer cells remaining after surgery. So surgery goes in, they remove the big chunks and then this is used as a follow-up cleaning method. So, associate professor Cheng puts it, one exciting aspect of our strategy is that it just capitalizes on how our lifestyle potentially on our lifestyle potentially transforming our normal diet into a sustainable low-cost therapeutic regimen. We hope that our strategy can be useful, complement to current cancer therapies. And then Dr. Ho, mothers are right after all. Eating vegetables is important. So, yes, listen to your mothers. Listen to your mother. Eat your vegetables, eat your broccoli. And last week, we brought you the news that the first people in the new world arrived all at once and over 20,000 years ago in one migration that populated the native nations from Alaska to the southern tip of South America. Now, new news out of Scandinavia finds that not one but two separate routes and migrations were taken to populate the land of ice and snow. New genomic data suggests that the first human settlers of the Scandinavian Peninsula followed two distinct migration routes. This is published in the open access journal, Loose Biology and it's led by researchers from Uppsala University with an international team of collaborators. It also indicates that the resulting mixed population genetically adapted itself to the extreme environmental conditions of being somewhere so far north and so far cold. There's consistent evidence of a human presence in Scandinavian Peninsula from around 11,700 years ago. They found tools, artifacts in Scandinavia that were also seen in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, suggesting that several groups may have migrated into the area when the ice retreated. Migration routes and genetic makeup of the first Scandinavians have been, though, kind of unknown. By sequencing the genomes of seven hunter-gatherers excavated across Scandinavia in the range of about 6,000 to 9,500 years old, they found that the migrations into the Scandinavian Peninsula most likely followed two routes, one from Central Europe and one from the Northeast along the Norwegian Atlantic coast, known best for its award-winning fjords. The two groups met up in Scandinavia and in an almost futile attempt to stay warm, created a genetically diverse population. And superior, no. No, that's further south. That's further south, too. You're talking about my people. Much further south. Sorry. It's obviously the Italians. That's right. All right, is that what you meant? No. Many of the genetic variants have, and the Jews and the Portuguese and the Native American, and I'm a mod, I've got everything, I can keep going. It's the Irish, you know it's the Irish. Many of those genetic variants that they found, though, were not passed down to modern-day Europeans. So this is some of what they found that was sort of diverse is maybe not everywhere yet. The research team also discovered that several genetic variants in the hunter-gatherers were linked to genes associated with physical performance, which they hypothesized could be partly because it's cold and you have to keep moving or you die. The hunter-gatherers also... I like this. I read about that. That's why I was kind of alluding to with my comment earlier. It was just the idea that these genes, that these two groups coming together, that these are the hardiest individuals basically coming through into the coldest area. Two directions. Yeah. Two directions. These people have to be, these are gonna be the genes for being strong, for being cold tolerant, for being hardy in, I don't know, high stress situations, for being resilient. You know, there are gonna be aspects of these people that's surviving in the cold north. And also stubborn, because they're not people who question the fact... What are we doing? No, it's the time to start around that. No, we keep going. All right, why am I always the only one that's suggesting that like, it's getting colder. It's not... No, it's not getting warmer. It's getting colder the further we go. Hunter-gatherers also had high frequency of genetic variants linked to reduced skin pigmentation, which is a known adaptation to being in low UV radiation and high altitude. They share, we use cutting edge genomic approaches to investigate hypotheses about early colonization of Northern Europe after the ice sheet of the last glaciation retracted. It is really great to see how evidence from different disciplines can be combined to understand these complex past demographic processes. Says population geneticist, Torsten Gunther. I wanna lead off as he adds, our findings are important for human genetics, archeology, anthropology, and it will be interesting to see what similar approaches can tell us about the post-glacial population dynamics in other parts of Europe and the rest of the world. But again, this is all pretty recent history. This is, you know, 6,000 to 9,500 years ago, total time estimated right now, 11,700, nothing like the 20,000 years of... Baranginians, right? Baranginians, yeah. But also like, also foolish people. I mean, they basically lived just north of a glacier, they were north of two giant glaciers for like thousands of years. Like at some point, people need to listen to the me who must have been there going, let's turn around. No, there's still people living next to glaciers in the cold. I mean, now we have, you know, high tech fabrics and all that kind of stuff, but, you know. Yeah, like, how did these people live? How did they die? We've just gotten soft with our urban culture and our indoor heating and plumbing. We're just mentally soft now, Justin. I'm still convinced that the driving force in human exploration has always been to get away from other people. It's just people who are irritated by the larger population of people, the mass intellect that they're just like, I don't care how cold it is. I don't care if I'm going to live next to a glacier for a thousand years. As long as those people aren't around, a little peace and quiet, not get bugged by my neighbors, that's where I want to be. Because think about it, outside of, you know, the early days of being attacked by lions, people have got to be the biggest threat. Yeah. People have always been the biggest threat, for sure. Oh, conspecific competition and violence. I think, you know what that brings us to? What? There's Animal Corner. By dead little pet, no pet at all. Wanna hear about the animal? She's your girl. Except for giant pandas that squirt, that are no closer. What's that, Blair? Well, speaking of the icy cold and how kind of sensitive us humans and warm-blooded animals can get, I wanna start with a brief, brief public service announcement in relation to these alligators that were all over the internet this week. I don't know if you guys saw this. Oh, I saw that in the frozen ones? Yeah, the frozen alligators. Everyone was very concerned because these alligators, they were left outside in this wildlife preserve and they were frozen and how dare they and why don't they bring in those alligators? Well, let me tell you something. Speaking of hardiness, crocodilians have been on this planet for hundreds of millions of years. The last Ice Age was a mere two-ish million years ago. These guys have dealt with this before and remembering we're squishy warm-blooded mammals and they're not and they have a lot of abilities to deal with different temperatures. Reptiles, some reptiles go through something called brumation, which is kind of similar to hibernation, but it's in cold-blooded animals and they don't sleep the entire time. They actually move occasionally, they'll drink, their oxygen use goes way down and their temperature, their body temperature goes way down, but otherwise it's not a true hibernation, but this is what these alligators are doing. So read the whole articles, look at the videos, recognize that if you play the video, you can actually see the water around their snouts kind of moving, that's because they're actually moving water in and out of their mouths and they're totally fine, they're gonna wake up when it thaws, this is how they have survived for hundreds of millions of years in a varying temperature. So they're okay. But what about the sharks, the frozen sharks? That's not good. That's not good. No. The sharks are just being frozen because the water where the sharks are is getting cold. Well, and that's more about I, yeah, I didn't bring a full story on that, but yes, sharks are washing up frozen and this is partially because this is, so they're seasonal changes, which is what this alligator thing is about, and then there's drastic sudden changes to ocean currents and drastic sudden changes to ocean currents can create all of a sudden, you're in a warm water current, it's cold. So when that happens, as a result of climate change, then it's a sudden change that animals, then how do they find the warm water? They can't, they're done so. So that is a very different situation. Also, a lot of sharks have adapted over hundreds of millions of years to be in very specific areas because there's so many kinds of sharks on the planet that they have become highly specialized after these hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Alligators and crocodiles pretty much unchanged. They have not changed a whole lot since they came to town as it were. So that was my quick PSA about the alligators and the snow. So yes, you go inside, you can't handle the ice and snow, but the alligators turns out they can. Moving on to the Deep Blue Sea. I have a very exciting story about deep sea crustaceans and a team of scientists at the Keck School of Medicine at USC. They have found a way to use deep sea crustaceans to help fight cancer. They've actually been able to harness the power of enzymes that give these marine animals bioluminescence in order to create a test that makes it easy for them to see where a therapy is having its intended effect. So they can track killed cancer cells, harnessing the bioluminescence of crustaceans. Yeah, so let's see. Prit Shadari, MD, PhD, is a professor of medicine at the Keck School and one of the lead researchers. And they say, one of the most promising areas in cancer research is immunotherapy, including chimeric antigen receptor T cells. We talked about CAR T cells. It's also one of the most difficult because the methods for testing immunotherapies are not ideal. Radioactive chromium release assay is the gold standard for testing whether an immunotherapy kills cancer cells. This method is expensive, complicated, and requires special disposal practices. Other available methods also suffer from limitations and don't allow scientists to rapidly screen immunotherapeutic agents to find the best candidates. But these crustaceans with their bioluminescence, they are part of something now called the matador assay and they get trapped inside cells and then they leak out of cells when they die, which causes a glow. So the level of luminescence can be measured with a luminaumeter to see the percentage of dead cells. Yeah, and so the assay was so sensitive they could actually detect the death of a single cell. A level of sensitivity are exceeding existing assays. Yeah. Yeah it is. Yes, so the lab has since developed more than 75 cancer cell lines expressing the marine luciferases, so the bioluminescent enzymes and use them successfully in the matador assay to develop the next generation of CAR T cells. They continue to say in our hands, the matador assay can detect cell death in as little as 30 minutes, which can ultimately translate to more expedient treatments for patients getting cellular immunotherapies such as CAR T cells. So these little marine crustaceans could actually hold the key to much more effective and targeted cancer treatment. That is cool, thanks shrimps, thanks shrimps. Another reason for me to push my agenda of deep sea exploration. There's cancer treatments down there, we don't even know. We don't even know. And last I will end on a very nice kind of feel good story to start out 2018. Yay, and that is about an eighth grade science class and this science class actually has helped a eight month old Indian runner duck named Peg Walk again. They used their class 3D printer to create a prosthetic leg after this little duck Peg was hatched. Peg as in Peg leg. He has, yeah. So the teacher, Patsy Smith, told a nearby television station that when she found the bird, a turtle had chewed off his foot, poor Peg. And the leg became irritated as Peg grew. Obviously Peg was hoppin' up down, up down. And so they took about 30 tries in the school laboratory with the 3D printer, these three students. And eventually came up with an appropriate leg. Peg is now walking and running like a normal duck. Like a runner duck. Yeah, so I bring this up not just because it's kind of a very silly local news puff piece story, but really what this gets to is that 3D printers are more and more accessible and they're showing up in our schools and they're going to be a normal piece of lab equipment soon, which means there's going to be a huge host of opportunities to use 3D printing for everything. And as the next generation of scientists grow up and they are all well-versed in these new technologies, I cannot wait to see what comes of it all. Yeah, oh, I think I need this kind of a part. Nobody makes anything. I'll just make it myself. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, I see a solution. And I can fix that. I can make that. Yes, there we go. Let's just do that. Yes. The makers and the scientists, hmm. And I think about so many things, even with little things like this, like animal injuries that we say that are, you can't fix bird bones or something that are really, you can't put a cast on a bird bone. But imagine if you could heal a broken wing with a 3D printed bone. Yeah. There's a lot because you can 3D print a hollow. You can definitely 3D print a hollow structure, so. Yeah, there's a world of treatment options. There's a world of science to be discovered with the new tools and technologies that we have. And I think it's so exciting that they're accessible to eighth grade students. And yeah, I can't wait to see what happens. Me neither. Thank you for that. Yeah. That is a feel good story. And I think we will leave it at that for our show for the week. Predictions galore. Some wonderful science and some feel good making science news for ducks. Science makes me feel good. 3D printed legs. It makes me feel good. That's right. Now I'll stop singing now. Okay. Everyone out there, thank you so much for joining us tonight for This Week in Science. We really appreciate you being here with us today. And once again, our This Week in Science Blair's Animal Corner calendars are available and you can find information, a link at our website twist.org. If you are interested in joining us in San Francisco for the SF Sketch Fest event at Cal Academy of Sciences next Thursday night, January 18th. Go to our Facebook page. There is an event page specifically for this on our Facebook, This Week in Science Facebook page where you can find information about tickets. Again, it is an adults only nighttime event at the Science Museum in San Francisco. And bring your twist shrag and we'll all sign it. That's right. We can sign your stuff. We can sign your calendar if you bring it. We're looking forward to seeing you all there. I'd love to give shout outs to our wonderful people in the chat room. Hey chat rooms, how are you? Shout outs to all of you for being here and chatting during the entire show, YouTube, Facebook and the web chat, client chat room. Thank you for being there. Thank you for recording the show for me. Brendan, thank you so much, Brandon. Thank you, I don't know why I said Brendan. I'm getting names confused. Brandon, thank you for simulcasting us over to Facebook and Fada, thank you for your help with the show notes and links and things for YouTube. Really appreciate that. And I'd like to shout out to our Patreon supporters. Thank you to all of our supporters on Patreon. Now I am going to roll the new credits. New credits for 2018. That's right. Got new credits for 2018. We made some changes, so maybe good. See if I can get this, get it to go. Sometimes these things work. Sometimes they don't. The internet and Google Drive does not always work with me. Come on, Google. You can do it. It doesn't want to. Google's not making me feel good. I don't know. No. There we go. Thank you to Aaron Luthan, Alex Wilson, Andy Gro, Ben Rothig, Bert Latimore, Bill Cursey, Bob Calder, Brendan Minnish, here's that name. Brian Condren, Brian Carrington, Byron Lee, Charlene Henry, Christopher Dreyer, Christopher Rappin, Craig Landon, Deepak Chopra, The Woo Master, EO, Edward Dyer, Eric Knapp, Flying Out, Gary Swinsberg, Greg Briggs, Greg Goothman, Greg Riley, Jacqueline Boyster, Jason Olds, Jason Roberts, Jim Drapeau, John Crocker, John McKee, John Ratnaswamy, Joshua Fury, Ken Hayes, Kevin Parachan, Kurt Larson, Lisa Slezowski, Matt Sutter, Marjorie Cohen, Mark Hessenflow, Matthew Litwin, Patrick Cohn, Paul Disney, Paul Samson, Richard Hendricks, Richard Onimus, Robert Aston, Robert Coborn, Rudy Garcia, Sean Lamb, Steve Lessiman, Steve DeBell, Tony Steele, and that's it in my list. Thank you to all of our Patreon sponsors. 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We will try to be live on twist.org slash live where you can watch and join our chat room as well as YouTube and Facebook. But if you can't make it, if it doesn't work out, you will be able to find the episode along with other past episodes at twist.org. Thank you for enjoying the show. Twist is also available as a podcast. Just Google this week in science in your iTunes directory or if you have a mobile type device, we are twist the number four, Droid app in the Android marketplace or simply this week in science and anything at Apple Marketplace. For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes will be available on our website. That's at www.twist.org where you can also make comments and start conversations with the hosts and other listeners. Or you can contact us directly, email kirsten at kirsten at thisweekincients.com, Justin at twistmedian at gmail.com or Blair at BlairBass at twist.org. 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This week science is coming your way. So everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientific method for all that it's worth. And I'll broadcast my opinion all of it. It's this week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science, science. This week in science. This week in science. 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 views, but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science, you may just better understand. But we're not trying to threaten your philosophy. We're just trying to save the world from jeopardy. This week in science is coming your way. So everybody listen to everything we say. And if you use our methods to roll it and die, we may rid the world of toxoplasma. Got the I, I, I, I. It's this week in science. This week in science. This week in science, science, science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science, science, science. I've got a laundry list of items I want to address. From stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness. I'm trying to promote more rational thought. And I'll try to answer any question you've got. So how can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one hour a week? This week in science is coming your way. You better just listen to what we say. And if you learn anything from the words that we've said, then please just remember it's all in this week in science. This week in science. This week in science, science, science. This week in science. This week in science, science, science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. D'la show? Oui. Oui. C'est tout. Oui c'est tout. Ce n'est pas plus. Ça c'est du… Ce n'est pas plus. De túce ce soir. Ce n'est pas plus de tuce ce soir. you have a calendar. It is now the after show, the after show, and this is how it goes. We have a show next Thursday and where is Justin? We need to talk about the things. I need to get information from the people who make the showing happen. Yeah, that'd be nice to know what we're done. Yeah, because I still don't know what time within the four hour block we're going on. I don't know if we're going to be out in that outside area again. Dressing warmer this time. Yeah, just in case, right? Yeah, I was not wearing enough. There was no warning last time. Hey, you're going to be outside, like really outside. Yeah, I'm going to wear a big scarf. We still had a full house into the cold night, so it was a good turnout for the event. So look forward to that again for sure. Yeah, I look forward to it. So I arrive in the Bay Area, hopefully around 1.30 in the afternoon on Thursday, the 18th, at San Francisco airport. And I'll have my things and I can, I don't know, we can do it like we did last time. I'd love to have a couple of hours ahead of time to go over everything. What did we do? We met at my house and then we went to dinner. Okay, that sounds like a plan. Because I think we should eat ahead of time again, because they had pizza there, but they never know how much weather will be in the right place at the right time to be able to eat when the food is available. And then it was also nice to be able to go over the rundown of the show ahead of time. Mm-hmm. So do you have time? What time can you get to town, Justin? Yeah, I can whenever. Like whenever you guys think it's like a good time to be there. Just text me when it's like that day. So probably around 2.33? 2.33? Yeah. Okay, that should be doable. Yeah, and then we can, then we have flex time, hopefully. Yep. Hopefully. Fingers crossed. Air travel. I hope I get there before six. Yeah, I'll plan on picking you up if you want to send me your info, your flight info. Okay. And I just have to double check my work schedule tomorrow, but I'm pretty sure I've known about this date long enough that I wouldn't have dared schedule anything after noon. Good, yes. It's good. Do we want to dress? How do we want to dress? What do you want to do? Dress warmly. Yeah. Dress in layers. Is this an event you want us in twist t-shirts for or no? Oh, you can. We don't need to. Okay. Yeah. That's all I wear with the house. Okay. That to nothing else. Well, because if, yeah, if it's, if warmness is a thing, then it might not end up on my outermost layer. Yeah. Last year, we didn't do twist t-shirts. Yeah. I mean, it's fine. That's fine. We could put, yeah, we'll see. I might have. I think I did. I think you did, yeah. Yeah. But we can do, we can do twist t-shirts and I'll look, I'll, you know, team, look like a team. There have been these posts on Twitter from LIGO, like showing off their, their researchers who have the teams that have been involved with the Nobel Prize winners who won the Nobel Prize for finding gravitational waves. And it's like all these pictures of older white guys. And so I tweeted back to LIGO and I said, I'd like to see some ladies of LIGO. And I got a tweet from somebody who works at LIGO and she's, and she tweeted and she said, here's a few of us ladies of LIGO getting ice cream. Cute. Very nice. That's great. That's fantastic. Ladies of LIGO and, and gentlemen, we'll go out and get ice cream on occasion. You must do it when you're searching for gravitational waves. I love that. I love that they sent me a picture. And she thinks that a lot of younger ladies of LIGO could not join in the Nobel's and us tweets because they haven't met the Nobel Prize winners. Yeah. Basically, we're working on that timeframe, getting the women in. It'll happen. It'll happen. It'll happen. I'm very excited this march just to participate in an event called exploring your, no, expanding your horizons, EYH. It's at Skyline College every year and they, they bring over a thousand young women, six through 12th grade, to learn about science careers. And I've gone now like four or five years in a row in my different jobs. And it's so exciting to go. I'm really excited to support it. And every year there's some kids that don't realize that working in a zoo is a science job, which in so many ways it can be. I mean, we have actual researchers at our facility, but also there's a lot of education jobs that are science careers. So it's pretty cool to expand the horizons on the different channels that you can go into that's science based. And the other big thing about it is that it's a lot of disadvantaged kids. And so a lot of kids that grow up without a lot think that college is completely out of their realm of possibility. And so a lot of girls who might think that they might want to do science, if they think that they can't go to college, it's kind of moot. And so that's a really big part of what I try to talk about at it, too, is that there's a way, there is a way to get to college for anybody. I'm not going to stand here and pretend that it's not easier for some people and that it doesn't help to have some money in the bank, which it certainly does, but college is accessible. And you can find, you can find people who will help you find a way to make it work. There are ways where there's a will. There is a way. Of course, yeah, you might end up paying for your undergraduate for the next 10 years. But if you end up in your career in science, it might be worth it, let's say. Yeah. So, let's see. So next week, I think we had a 40 minute show, 40 minutes for our show last year. Okay. For SSH Fest. It is quick. Yeah. And I will, I'm basically going to copy the rundown from last year. Okay. And put it in there for this year, and we'll put our stories in. I pulled my stories out so you can, you can overwrite. Yeah. You can overwrite it. Okay. And I'll pop them back in. That's fine. All right. And then you plop them back in. And then there we go. There we go. And then what do we need to do here? I'm just going to copy this right now. And then we need to pick out our stories. What do we think? Two each? Well, it's in the rundown. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, it was like two stories each, maybe three. Yeah, two. I can't remember what happened last year. I want to say I had an extra story that I didn't get to. I want to say like we all kind of had auxiliary stories that didn't make it all the way in, but I don't remember. Yeah, we had a lot of extras and decided what, I remember there was a list we whittled down and picked the best stories to put in and then. Yeah. And then I had, I did make a split second decision based on kind of what people were responding to from what I had. Yeah. And then there's the consideration of, okay, it's a comedy night. We're not necessarily a comedy show, but it's nice to find things that where there's humor. And then there's another consideration. Live audience. So if there's anything we can do for interaction, that's good also. And we had planned on being able to project stuff, but that did not work out last year. Yeah, I've asked them, but I haven't gotten an answer back yet. I wonder if we'll be in the same space again or not. We'll see. I've asked that as well. All the people that, all my friends and stuff that are going involved in this. Oh, what time, what time do we need to be there for you? Yeah, exactly. TPD. Yeah. Blake is suggesting I talk about poop transplants. Yeah. That's always good. Yeah. But there has to be science to go with it. There is science to go with it. And I don't know. I feel like this is one of the few types of shows where I may take off the docking clamps of this weakness if I so choose. Yeah, I would say it should be recent. Yeah. Not like long ago, because if it's like super long ago, that's higher chance that people have really heard about it. Yeah. This pigeon that Tesla's trying to get married to. Have you heard about this? Yeah, that might be. There's this thing called CRISPR. Have you guys heard about it? Anybody? It's this new thing. No? Okay, great. Let's talk about it. Yeah. There's this guy. His name is Elon Musk. He's trying to make electric cars. People have been trying to do this for him. Why is he wasting his time? Oh, Bleak, this general timeframe in science. That's funny. This weekend, it's new to you. Yes. We're going to call it news. Because if you haven't heard it yet, it's news to you. It's news to you. This weekend, gosh darn it, I want to talk about it and you're going to listen. Listen to my coffee. Watch your sushi. Oh, oh, oh, oh. We will figure it out. Oh, Janesco Viking's going to win Saints. That will be a good game, sir. Now you're having this Super Bowl argument debate. So Justin, your Super Bowl predictions are a little bit fixed because a lot of the season is gone. This is just occurring to me today is that there's only a couple games left before the Super Bowl and you're making predictions. Okay, okay. So to be fair, there were more teams left when we should have done the show. That's true. So it's become less predictive, but the predictions are the same. So yeah, thanks, Ed. So it turns out in the Additols and Humans, they did it. What do you think about that? Oh, get the heck out of town. See, we're making geeky laugh. We're ready. Turns out the pandas, despite having a short intestine, actually have a digestion that's good at breaking down bamboo. No, remember we learned it's not good at breaking down bamboo. They have a constant tummy ache. No, we learned the opposite. We learned that they have microbes and gut microbes in common with other. So this is what's interesting. We learned that they have gut microbes that are in common with other bamboo eaters. However, if their enzymes and their genes are for carnivores. And what you're talking about, the length of their gut and all these other things, it's more about the hardware. The hardware is for meat eating. The software is slightly more attuned to the bamboo. But there are still issues with eating bamboo in a carnivore stomach. And so there's this expectation based on what they know about the bile and things like that in their stomach is that they do have a constant stomach ache. Oh, they probably do, as do we all. But Kiki, they shouldn't exist. It's not that they might have the right enzymes. They might have all the right bacteria. That was the takeaway. They have the right bacteria, but the bacteria don't create all the enzymes. Well, and we don't know if it's the right bacteria or if it's just bacteria in common. In the study, they didn't say this is bamboo processing bacteria. In the study, they said they said lemurs. They said lemurs, red pandas and giant pandas have bacteria in common. Lemurs that ate bamboo. Yes, which was not common with other lemurs. Right. But that doesn't mean that's bamboo processing. It's a pretty good sign that that's on the right track. Actually, one of those that they had common. It could be bacteria that lives on bamboo, you don't know, or that lives in a bamboo forest in the soil. It's not necessarily. It could be a chicken egg scenario. You don't know. It could be. One that they had in common, though, is also a bacteria that's found in the guts of termites. So I mean, you kind of like put these pieces together. It's like this is what you would expect for something that has altered its digestive system to digest these things efficiently. They haven't altered their digestive system. Their gut bacteria has been changed. That is the digest. No, it's the system itself. The length of the short and long intestines, the enzymes, the bile. That stuff is still ill-equipped for bamboo. How come they didn't develop that? But they got the thumb shearing device. Oh, I got to go. Also, it was proved they can't get enough calories from it, so they're also all tired because they can't process it right. It's they're pooping it right out. Well, that's just a survival instinct thing. No, they're not good at eating bamboo. No, the red panda does it too. That's what they've adapted to with their diet. The red panda does not have the same issue processing the bamboo that the giant panda does. I don't know. Maybe not. But they also do those. They have severe down times. They're big-time nappers. It's not the napping. It doesn't have anything to do with stomach. Yeah, there's nothing to do with it. Are you really trying to go toe-to-toe me on this for real? Yeah. Why are you punching the air? I'm glad I'm far away. But when I eat a big meal, I need to take a nap afterwards. So. Exactly. Yeah, you're just like if I was frozen in ice, I'd be cold and miserable. And ate but descended. And you're not a red panda. And you're not an alligator. You're not an alligator. It's not analogous to you guys. No. Okay. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take the panda challenge. Analogous alligator. I'm going to swap my microbiome. Is that a shirt? Analogous alligator. And I'm going to live on nothing but bamboo. No, you're not. And I'll prove to you. You're going to die. You're going to die. You're going to die. You're going to tear apart your insides. Eating bamboo for a human is like eating shards of glass. Like it tears apart your intestines. You know, it's yeah, it's not that bad. Okay. Goodbye. But I do have to go. I got to go. Goodbye. We should all go. A little more than a week from now. Okay. Yes. We'll be texting. We'll be texting to make sure everyone we're all meeting up at the right time. Everybody out there. I hope that you will join us on Thursday night. For the show. We'll give you more information. As soon as we have it, we just don't have it ourselves yet. So, sometime between 6 and 10 p.m. Pacific time. Somewhere generally in the area of the Cal Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Thanks for joining us. Be near there. Yeah. Or checking your social media. Around 8 time. Yeah. We're going to try. We're going to try this internet thing again. See if we can do it. Yeah. Periscope. At least. Well, and we have the Mevo this time. We didn't have that last year. Right. Who knows. Still needs an internet connection. That old chestnut. That old thing. Yeah. Alrighty. We're all good. Yeah, I think so. We're good. Our prediction show is done. We are well into the year. Now I feel like this year has started. Really started. Official. It's official. Yeah. Okay, everybody. Say good night, Justin. See you next week. Good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Good night, Kiki. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. Thank you once again.