 It says it's starting, it says it's starting. Hey, Kai, before we actually get the show started, before we get the show on the road, do you wanna come up here and say hi as Justin is going and getting something very quickly? Hey everybody out there. Hi. Kai, I wanted to say hi. Hello! I mean, you don't, no, don't do that. Oh God, okay. Climbing the child, climbing on me. Okay. Hi. What is your name? Kai. Okay, how old are you? Eight. What did you wanna talk about tonight? Global warming. Why? I just really think we should start focusing on global warming a bit more than we actually are currently. How can we focus on it? What can people do? Well, maybe use their lights less, like when it's daytime, turn off, unless it's like a really dark area and you can barely see in there. Mm-hmm. Maybe use LEDs and, yeah, lower power, lower electric requirement devices. Try and buy electric cars maybe. Mm-hmm. And why is this important to you? Just because. Talking to the mic. Everybody's going to die. No! And everything living on the planet. I don't know if everything living there, there are excrement files. Mostly. Yeah. Mostly everything. Well, we will talk about climate change and all of the science around that next week. And next week we're gonna be talking about solutions to climate change. That would be great. We're gonna have an interview with Jonathan Foley, Executive Director of Project Drawdown next Wednesday. Oh, I love Drawdown! Yay! So, it's very exciting. Can I come into the show on that day? Maybe. Can I join in, please? We'll talk about it. Okay. Say goodbye. I wanna join. Bye. Good night, everybody. Bye, Kai. Bye. Nice to see you. And that is the intro to the show today. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you next week. Nope. Thanks for joining us, Kai, to talk about the important issues that are concerning eight-year-olds these days. I was worried about, like, I don't know what candy bar I was gonna get at the store when I was his age. So, things are a little different these days. I was pretty worried about the rainforest when I was his age, but I didn't feel like I had any answers at all. It felt very so far away and done and over with and end of story and sad that I didn't really feel like there was anything I could do as an eight-year-old American. Right? There are things we can all do. We'll talk about it. We'll talk about it next week. Should we do a show? It's time to do a show, isn't it? Let's do it. Oh, is it that time? It's time to do a show. I think we should have this thing that we've all come here for together today. I've got all these things open that I forgot to close the last time I was here. Oh my goodness, oh my goodness. Hold on, did I do what I needed to do? Goodness, oh my goodness. If I check and make sure I have files before I delete things. Yes, I do, that's good. Quit. Save? No, just quit. Too many things open because I wasn't paying attention. I'm gonna quit you too. I quit you, Firefox, huh? There we go, I got my iTunes because you gotta have your iTunes. Do you? Bonk. My name is Bonk. You lose. Bom, bom. Okay, starting the show in three, two, this is twist. This Week in Science episode 717 recorded on April 17th, 2019. Keeping science alive. Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on This Week in Science we are going to fill your head with pig brains, fire ants, and irritable bowels. But first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The following science news program is brought to you by People Like You. More specifically by People Like Andy Grow. People who not only enjoy learning about science but understand the importance of it to our everyday lives. People like Andy Grow. People who support science-based shows and science-based policy making. People like Andy Grow. People who listen to the show and then tell other people about the show to spread the science knowledge to the world. People like Andy Grow. And while we have lots of choices to make when it comes to how, when, and where we spend our time in this life, we here at TWIS are always happy to spend that time here with you. And Andy Grow here on This Week in Science, Andy Grow edition coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I wanna learn everything. I wanna fill it all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I wanna know what's happening. What's happening. What's happening this week in science. What's happening. What's happening. What's happening this week in science. Good science to you Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back again to talk about science that happened this week. Yes, it's all in the name. It's what we do. So let's talk about it. What a great show we have planned for you. Tonight I have stories about printing hearts, pig head perfusion and promising exoplanets. What you got Justin? Oh my goodness. I have ancient PR archeology, CBD for your head. Let's see, I've got your, I've got irritable bowel syndrome. I've got some amazing environmental DNA tests that's being done. And the universe's first baby molecule has been discovered. Oh, baby molecule, baby molecule. It's so cute, I just want to eat it up. Wait, I don't know if I want to do that. Yeah, it'll be fine. All right, everyone. Or Blutzen Blair's animal winner. That's all right. I'll just go. I have fire ants, I have sea spiders, and I have primordial ooze. Oh, that's the good kind. Blurp, all right. As we jump into the show and await the primordial ooze to perfuse our brains, I would like to remind you that if you have not yet subscribed to This Week in Science, it's pretty easy to do. If you're interested, you can find information at twist.org. We are also available all places that good podcasts are found as well as YouTube and Facebook. So on to the news. Okay, what is in the big, big news rundown this week? 3D printing of organs. This is the gold standard of, oh my goodness, someday we are going to print the organs that we need. We are going to not have an organ donor shortage anymore. Everyone will have organs when they need them. And so challenges have been set to bioprint aspects of organs. Some organs are easier than others, but one of the main problems is the perfusion of blood through the tissues to enable the, or all of the tissues to come together to function as a whole and to have the nutrients they need so that the organ, all the cells in it can survive. Another aspect of this progress forward is not just printing organs, but potentially using people's own cells. So taking biopsies, samples of people's own cells and then growing them into these organs, right? Very exciting idea. And this past week, researchers published for the first time in advanced science, a team out of Tel Aviv University, the very first 3D printed heart, which you would think this is a huge deal. So they took a biopsy of a patient's fat cells. There's a fold of fat cells called the omentum in the abdomen that wraps your organs and it's fatty and there's wonderful, their extracellular matrix and also cells in that area that can be used for experiments such as this. They took the cells themselves and got them to regenerate and they started creating populations of this patient's cells and they told these fat cells to turn into heart cells. And initially, on top of doing the heart cells, they decided that, oh, hey, we will move on from just heart cells, we will use this extracellular matrix and combine it with some other compounds that we have and create a biofilm, basically a biological matrix to grow the cells in. So with experiments that have led up to this point, this kind of growth medium has very often come from animal cells. You find a medium that can support the growth of cellular structures and it very often is not from the patients themselves and so they have developed this patient-specific biological matrix so they can print the cells, they can also grow the cells and they can support the cells all from the patient's original tissue, which is a huge step forward. Initially, they were creating, printing heart patches. So using 3D bio printers to just print little patches that had the shapes of which had come from scans of the patient's heart and they were like, oh, we can fit this over this little vessel here, we can fit this patch over this place here and they showed that they could print these patches with vascularization and with all the stuff and they could support the growth of these small patches that could fit on a patient's heart. And then they were like, well, let's just see what we can do and they scan to the patient's heart and then they're like, let's print it and they did keep problems here though is that it's the size of a rabbit heart so it could like fit in the palm of your hand, it's not quite big enough to actually replace your heart. This wasn't- Just a tad smaller than I would like. Yeah, not a full size printing. So we're still dealing with the limitations of being able to make sure that we can really grow tissue the size that's required for the human body. We're still dealing with that but they have this little tiny rabbit heart-sized printed human heart that seems to have cellular contractile activity. However, it doesn't play well together so the cells aren't really contracting as a team. And so that is the next step to get these cells starting to work together so that this kind of printed heart can actually function, maybe not in a person but could be shown to really have atrial ventricular contraction and function to pump blood and then potentially someday down the road we're getting there. We are honestly starting to get to the point of printing organs. This is a big step forward. And I just kept laughing at all of these headlines as first 3D engineered vascular-rised human heart has been printed. And I was like, yeah, that's amazing. I didn't know we were that far along in the technology and then I looked and I'm like, oh, but kind of didn't. Yeah, it's very close. I feel like we're getting so close though. My question is gonna be, I mean, obviously the huge benefit to this is that you don't have to wait on a transplant list. You don't have to wait for something that is compatible. You don't have to bleach out other people's cells first. There's all these barriers that are removed. The question is, once we figure out how to do this, how expensive is it gonna be? Because is this something that only a very select number of people are gonna be able to do? Or is this the exact opposite? Is this something that once we break through that wall of technology, is it actually gonna be more accessible than a transplant? I'm just very curious. Yeah. Well, I remember we saw a 3D printer when we were in Philadelphia and these 3D printers are based on off-the-shelf technology. Some of them are much more advanced but many of them are based on off-the-shelf technology and they are not incredibly expensive devices to create. It is the processes and the procedures that really are the stumbling block. And it's interesting though that the way that they're doing it is a fairly efficient process where they have the cells growing as they're doing another step and then they kind of, so everything is over, all the steps are overlaid so it makes it a faster process. But initially this kind of technology will always be a very expensive thing to do. This is a very expensive endeavor. What I'm really wondering, which this is the cart way before the horse, but I'm kind of wondering who is gonna hold this technology and who's gonna be in charge of dispensing 3D printed hearts? Is it something that will live inside a hospital and we will be part of a copay? Or is it something that will become some sort of prescription? You'll have to get a prescription 3D printed heart from a pharmaceutical company. These are kind of what I'm wondering, this is what I'm wondering is once this becomes a production item, who holds it? It's kind of this undiscovered territory in the medical field but I'm very curious to see where it goes. Or it could end up in the hands of a democratized scientific, I think where everybody has their own printed heart that they've already pre-printed. They've got to put in their organ closet at home, just in case. Just in case. Yeah, and how far ahead you go. And there is a lot in the technology, especially out of universities, these tech technology fields where people are creating things fairly open source, which is provocative in that sense. And the researcher who is behind this study says, we need to develop the printed heart further. The cells need to form a pumping ability. They can currently contract but we need them to work together. Our hope is that we will succeed and prove our methods efficacy and usefulness. Maybe in 10 years, there will be organ printers in the finest hospitals around the world and these procedures will be conducted routinely. Okay, my ticker's just got to hold out 10 years. I don't know about 10 years, but maybe we'll see. I don't know, I love the way it's moving forward. And speaking of technology moving forward and ability to do things, it's just mind blowing this next story that I brought. You may have seen it in the news. Researchers have published in Nature about their BrainX system. It's a perfusion system that has enabled them to... The sensational spin on this is bring pig heads back from the dead. Is this a head in a jar? Is that what this is about? It's not a head in a jar, but it potentially could be a head in a jar if taken the wrong way. So let me tell you about this. What they have done, this was reported on about a year ago by MIT Technology. And the researchers behind this process have been working on it for quite some time. They, in this particular paper, took pig heads from an animal facility that these pigs had been sacrificed for food and they took the heads. And four hours later, they split the group up and they had their tests and their controls. The controls got not their BrainX perfusion system, but or they got perfused with stuff but not the BrainX solution. However, the test group, they used their BrainX system, which allowed the restoration and maintenance of microcirculation and molecular and cellular functions of this intact pig brain up to four hours post-mortem. So they took these pig heads and they plugged in the artery in the jugular vein, right? The credit early jugger, they perfused the pig heads with the solution of nutrients. And also it also contains ion channel blockers, which is important for a point that I'll bring up in just a moment. This, what they call extracorporeal pulsatile perfusion system, which is out of the body and it pulses like a heartbeat. So it pushes the perfusion fluid through the brain so that even after this animal has been dead and had no blood, no nutrients, no oxygen going to the cells of the brain, we know that within minutes after death, the or after the heart stops, the brain starts to shut down because it has no oxygen. After an hour, maybe up to two hours, you start to have cellular apoptosis because the cells themselves, the pH increases and the cells start going into metabolic shutdown and killing themselves and they start bursting and a liquefaction process ends up happening. But there's this whole process of death that we know that takes place. Now, not all the cells die all at once, right? So there's something that's happening with this perfusion system, with the nutrients that they have included. It's a hemoglobin-based, non-cellular, non-coagulative, cytoprotective solution that they've put in there and it allows recovery from the lack of oxygen. It also, when other experiments have done in the past that have tried to do this kind of reperfusion and bringing back oxygen into the system, there's usually injury to the system during that process and what they've built doesn't injure the quote, unquote, dead head any further. It prevents swelling and edema and it metabolically supports the energy requirements of the brain. And so when they looked at EEGs, there was no brain activity per se, but there was cell metabolism. There was a decrease in cell death. There was preservation of the whole structure, the cytoarchitecture of the brain as opposed to it collapsing on itself through that decomposition process. Restoration of vascular and glial inflammatory responses, there was also, there was spontaneous synaptic activity, but not enough to create a collective, what you would call a brain activity. And there was this metabolism that took place. So the brain was brought back to life. It was resuscitated, in a sense. Until it responds to stimuli, I'm not there. I am, I don't need an outside world. That's why I have the do not unplug order standing even if I'm in a comatose state. That what you're calling sporadic activity may be all I need. So part of this, there is a huge bioethical aspect to this. If we can potentially resuscitate a brain, what does that mean for brain death? At what point is a brain truly dead? If hours after supposed death, a brain can be resuscitated. Now in this perfusion system, I mentioned that there are ion channel blockers and that is important because it decreases the ability of the neurons to fire. And that is part of the system. They don't want necessarily the neurons to fire in their normal activity. They did not want to bring a severed pig head back to life and have it conscious. Right. And aware and feeling pain. Yeah. Yeah. And you don't know what they would feel. Yeah. And so the ion blockers would reduce neuronal activity and they did not see any EEG as a result, but people are still kind of going, well, what? What does that mean? And what would happen if you removed the channel blockers, the ion blockers and perfused the system with this resuscitative juice, right? Just at least once, wait. What would happen? Yeah, I'm all for it. There's going to be some anger guaranteed when that happens. For sure. But if this leads to head-in-a-jar technology, a la Futurama, I'm for it. Can I sign up for the if-I-should-die test where they would try this out on a human cadaver? Like I would donate my brain to this stuff. Right. I donate my brain to science if it goes to this study, exactly. Yes. Yeah. I know it doesn't work that way, but we know the brain guy, maybe I could talk to him. You're like, hey, I know you know where to take my head. If anything bad happens, let's get this on paper. So the question though, so where is this going to lead? The researchers are developing this technology in part, there's multiple reasons, but in part because of the lack of ability to study intact brains after death. Like you can't study a human brain easily in someone's head while they're alive. You can't study a human brain even after death without perfusing it with stuff that sticks it in a static state, right? When you put formaldehyde, put a brain in formaldehyde, it stops everything and freezes it in a particular state. And this potential system could allow researchers to do brain research after death or in brains that have taken from animals that were involved in a research study and they want to look at how things connect within the brain, they'll be able to do this in a brain that is not decomposing and is still cellularly, metabolically active without the potential ethical issues of it's a living animal. Even though people are raising the question of, well, is it a living brain at that point? The second aspect is this could someday be used as maybe recovery for stroke. If somebody is caught with a stroke or some kind of terrible brain injury, could this technique, this brain X solution be used instead of the current medical techniques and treatments that are used to help people get through that kind of stuff? And then finally, yeah, brain in a jar. I mean, I'm wondering, I mean, if this works for the brain, I mean, are people gonna want to put their whole bodies in this solution and say, okay, preserve me forever? Here I am, there we go. Forget cryo protection, right? Forget cryo preserving, we don't need to freeze it anymore. You just get to be in this. Go for a nice swim. Used. At one power outage, and then you're, you know, not a non-sufficient battery backup into cryo fails. You gotta have a battery backup. Yeah, but nobody ever puts enough of a battery backup there. I mean, hospitals are pretty good at that. That's kind of their job. Yeah. Battery backups, I would hope so. Yeah. There you go. We figured it out. That's how I'm gonna live to be forever years old. This is how you will be forever young, that's right. This is this week in science. Justin, what did you bring? I brought cannabidiol, aka CBD, which is the non-psychoactive or one of the non-psychoactive out of the many compounds that can be found in cannabis. And we have talked a bit about this in the past. The many potential and found benefits ranging things from like, there's potential. Cancer, maybe even, not to the point of the cares, but what do you call it? Aversion. Versions. Concussion protocol treatments. There are usages for helping people get off worse, and worse drugs like opioids. They actually have some pain relief, epilepsy, all these things are known to be in here. Scientists have now shown CBD could be used in a completely different way. Anyone that they hadn't envisioned before, they can use it as the Trojan horse to slip medications past the blood-brain barrier. This is an ACS journal molecular pharmaceutics. The blood-brain barrier is a sock that's around your brain. What is the blood-brain barrier, Kiki? The blood-brain barrier is just the very tight junctions between cells in the tissues that protect the brain. So instead of having open channels where lots of stuff can flow back and forth like we potentially have in our guts, you have a very tight barrier where it's highly controlled so that things that shouldn't be there don't get in. So some of the things that get in, there's some amino acids that are let in. It's a very exclusive club. The glucose is allowed in. Neurotransmitters, how would they be transmitting if they couldn't get past the blood-brain barrier? So there's an entire class of neurotransmitter called endocannabinoids. These bind proteins called cannabinoid receptors, and this is also something which resembles very much what CBD looks like, which is why it's cannabidiol. This is how these connections would be at the molecule, and then we found it in the brain, your vice versa, very similar. So what they did was they created a little pocket, a lipid pocket under the CBD, and as proof of concept, they put a fluorescent molecule in that pocket, and they showed that the CBD managed to get past the blood-brain barrier. Now they had similarly sized pockets that didn't make it in as often. So when injected into healthy mice in this research, CBD with the glow sticks in their pockets transported about two and a half times more fluorescent molecules to the animal's brain, which means like it's a very high potential that this is going to be a good method for getting drugs, that sort of thing, past the blood-brain barrier if needed. So maybe a nice delivery mechanism. Yeah, and there have been other delivery mechanisms. We've used like viruses and things that are, they're small and so they fit through those tight junctions and while viruses are potentially dangerous, so that's one of the big issues. And so stuff like cannabinoidol, which we know is, it's something that people use constantly and interacts with our endocannabinoid system. It is not, I mean, and it could be modified to not be active in certain sense, but to carry drugs that would be active in another sense, and that would be amazing. Yeah, and CBD in your brain isn't doing anything terrible. No, it's not. Let's see, oh, this is interesting too. This is a correlation of sorts, but one that you would kind of expect to find. So I'm not sure how, but so far, this is just a small sample size of 23 pre-adolescent children with irritable bowel syndrome and 22 healthy controls. Participants were asked to maintain daily pain and stool diaries for two weeks and to provide some samples. And what they did was they did a bacterial composition of their microbiome. And after some use of metagenomics, creating some metabolic markers, they were able to distinguish just from samples those who had irritable bowel syndrome and those who did not with 80% or greater accuracy, which is still a little lower than I might have expected. But I'm actually surprised that this isn't a thing that we've already really delved into. But they had this classifier system, classifier assesses specific metabolites, types of bacteria, functional pathways, other factors, and they've sort of, they can sort of now see, like looking at the microbiome, pretty good chance that you do or do not have irritable bowel syndrome, which the fact that they had 80% or greater accuracy in distinguishing is actually not too bad seeing as only about 20% of the population have it, 50% of their population in the study had it. But yeah, so there is, they're finding, they're concluding that there is definitely at least a very strong correlation between your gut microbiome and whether or not you have irritable bowel syndrome. Yeah, that seems like a slam dunk. It seems like it's, I'll tell you, as somebody who in my workplace they call it, I have TPS, tissue paper stomach. I'm somebody who can get stomach aches like that. I've often thought about, God, I wish I could just take a poo pill, reestablish, have a little bit more of a lead gut. I'm so sensitive. Right, so what's really great about studies like this is once you identify what those microbes are, once you identify it, perhaps what the, because they have some of them that were shown to be having, that were increased when there was the unhealthy effects and some that were a little bit increased with the healthier patients. When you kind of have that, you no longer just have, you can actually just raise those microbes up and take a pill that was never poo at any time. So it's, I mean, just a novel approach, but there is another way. I'll take it, just probiotic, but very specific probiotic. It's only a matter of time until when you give blood, you are also giving a stool sample so that you can have a baseline microbiome in your medical file. I feel like we're very close to this. I would prefer a cheek swab if possible. That could work too, but then you can't really tell what's in the lower intestine. No, it's probably if 33% didn't make it, or 66% didn't make it through. So the other part of it though, then I was, it's like, you could actually create a bacterial phase. You could, like if you identify the bad players, you could potentially engineer something that would go in and devour only them. That was specifically designed to go after bacteria that cause or increase the symptoms, the inflammations of irritable bowel syndrome. And so the pill you take might not be a probiotic, but might be a viral phage that does the same job. There's gonna be a lot of ways to address and attack this. It's gonna be very- Yeah, what I think is interesting here though, like you mentioned the 80% number of being able to identify whether it's a healthy control or someone with IBS, I mean, that still leaves a very wide swath of potential false positives. And in that case, you know, when you're trying to put someone toward the appropriate treatment, that's still a, I mean, you're closer than you're not, but it's still kind of a- Oh yeah, this is, yeah, this is correlation level in investigation at this point. Yeah. I still feel like this is just the start to going, okay, this is the bacteria we find in people with IBS very often. Let's remove that bacteria. Oh, your IBS went away? Great. This is what we need to target for IBS cases. So like, I still feel like we're two or three steps away from the solution here, but I think it's an important establishing step, right? Is to isolate the bacteria that IBS cases have in common. Yep. And also, and like, this is a sort of, we talk about correlatives as though they're not sufficient. Correlatives are great places to start. Correlatives are the thing that says, hey, I found this correlation, now fund the next round of research and let's go with a 500 person survey and let's go with deeper sequencing and see if we can find more depth to the microphone. And then let's see if I can give someone IBS. Yeah, yeah. You're all part of it. That would have to be a thing. Yeah. Oh, dear. Now, I don't wanna do that to anyone right now. We're working on your brains this week in science. Is it time for Blair's Animal Corner? Probably, yes. All right, it is time. Yeah, let's do it. Blair? A creature, great and small. By this millipede, no pet at all. You are here about as an animal, to change your world. Except for giant animals that's grown. They've been uprooted forever. What you got, Blair? Oh, I have a story as old as time about fire ant colonies. You know, you have your single queen. She's in charge of all that she surveys. But then over there across the road, there's a colony with many queens. What do they have going on over there? Well, this is a study from University of Georgia, looking at tropical fire ants, native to Florida and coastal Georgia. Looking specifically at colonies that thrive with multiple queens in close proximity to single queen colonies of the same species. So this is why the lead researcher, Kip Lacy, was so interested in this, was because they were right next to each other. But they had these completely different social structures. This was looking at these tropical fire ants. They isolated communities of native fire ants that cover the shoulder and medians of Florida highways. So that's another reason that Florida, maybe not the place where I would like to reside, just fire ants on the highway, that seems really intense. That's the name of my next album. Fire ants on the highway? Yeah. Yeah, is that a metal record? I feel like it's metal, right? So they found that in these areas, the multi queen, and I always say this word wrong, polygyny colonies would be nestled right next to the single queen monogany colonies of the same species. Nests with single queens were as close as five feet away from nests with as many as 13 queens. Many fire ant colonies were founded by a single queen made it to a male from a different colony, so that way they have the unrelated genes, right? Who produce all of the eggs that start a colony of their own. In polygynous colonies of the species, all the ants shared a social chromosome. So they found that the reason these guys did have this very different social structure, it was down to a specific chromosome that was absent from individuals in single queen colonies. This is what they dubbed the polygyny syndrome. They also found that this chromosome led to lower levels of aggressiveness towards non-nest mates and smaller body sizes of individual ants. Where this gets interesting is that there are other types of ants that have these two different social strategies, but there is something that is totally different here. So in imported fire ants, monogany colonies produce all their daughters sexually, but in contrast, this tropical fire ant colony in Florida with multiple queens found that the queens reproduce asexually. So reproductive queens and daughter queens inside a colony were genetically identical, but the worker ants in these colonies displayed greater genetic diversity unlike the queens they were not clones. When they did some controlled experiments with these ants they found that the queens were produced asexually and workers were produced sexually in polygynous colonies. They also found that the male ants in these colonies seem to be sterile. Okay, so let's unpack this. So we have a bunch of queens, they are reproducing asexually to make daughters. They are reproducing sexually to make sons and those sons are sterile. So where's the, where's the... Queens from multi-queen colonies were mated to males from the single queen colonies next door. So they were symbiotic even though they had completely different strategies. Here is the weird thing, I would not call it symbiotic because this helped the multi-queen colonies by introducing new genetic material, but because those males were sterile, those sons, there is no benefit to the male ants from the other colonies. So they are deeming this sperm parasitism. Yes, sperm parasitism. So taking advantage of the diversity but then not taking advantage of that for future generations for... Correct, yeah. Because she's got to take care of herself, make her genetically identical daughters to make sure it all stays. So this is just insane. This is something we haven't really seen before. Why this is important ecologically to learn this kind of stuff is that first of all, you have these invasive fire ants in Florida that are different from these fire ants that were in the study. So we need to know how the social structure and the genetic kind of descendants works in the local species so we can protect it. But additionally, there are invasive fire ants in coastal Georgia and Florida as well. So if we can extrapolate information on invasives from this study and find similar systems, it may be easier to control those species. But mostly I just think it's very interesting that there are these two different chromosomes that create two different social strategies. But these two different social strategies are somehow still intertwined, but against one half's will. Right, the females that are producing fertile offspring, the female that is going and having her diverse non-clone army for fertile offspring, that female is, she's like, this is my thing, it's great, and the other female is like, no, I'm gonna take advantage of that right there. There we go, one of those. But you're just talking about this from the perspective of the females. The male ants that go and visit the queens on the other side are like, eh, it's actually a pretty good deal. Actually, remember Justin, outside of our species, sex is supposed to be for reproduction. So the hormone drive to mate comes from a desire to perpetuate DNA. Sure, sure. So if you're mating sterile sons, there's no evolutionary driver to mate with those females. But can I point something out? The visiting male ants, they don't know that. That's why it's there, they're tricking them. Yeah, you know what? They don't care. Yeah, well, anyway. They're fine with it. It's tough to be a fire ant. I'm an ant, but tough enough to be a fire ant. What am I gonna worry about all that? Yeah, well, there you go. From one creepy crawly to another, what do you know about sea spiders? That they are in the sea and that there's spiders. Yeah, the same as Kiki. They're bizarre looking. Everyone listening who is not watching this show right now, please do a quick Google search for sea spiders. You can also check out my Twitter and my Facebook for a gif of them walking. They are fascinating. They look kind of like crabs missing bodies. They're just kind of a lump of legs, but they are in fact related to spiders. And sea spiders are famous for getting enormous because they live in very, very cold waters. And this has been a long-believed theory that there are animals that get huge in deep ocean waters because this is called the oxygen temperature hypothesis. Animals living in extreme cold can grow to giant sizes because their metabolisms are slow and therefore they don't require as much oxygen. It takes a lot of energy to move oxygen through a larger body. And so by being in a colder temperature where their metabolism is slower, they need less oxygen, they can grow bigger. This has been the theory for a very long time. But what's big for a spider? We'll see if Kiki can pull up some pictures, but they get huge. They get as big as me. What? Yeah, they get really big. What? No. What? Yeah, they get, I've seen some in the- I'm not going to be who I haven't met Blair in person. She is only three and a half feet tall. So it's not as big as it might be. Wait, what? They can get, not quite as big as me. They can get to be about three feet. Okay, yeah, so six and two is shorter than you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I thought they could get a lot bigger. I thought they could get to be five to six feet and maybe they can't. Maybe I found a bunk source, but they can get to be really, really big. Which for a spider, if you think about spiders, remember they're spiders. Oh no, that's massive for a spider. Yeah. So that was the theory previously. This is from University of Hawaii. They did some research looking at how metabolism is related to body size and oxygen distribution. So before I get any further, let me also tell you that sea spiders are quote unquote skin breathers. They do not have gills. They do not have lungs. They rely on diffusion across surfaces on their legs. Oh, their legs and their lungs. They have lung legs. Lung legs. Wow. This looks like the, what is it? Daddy, lung legs? Forcing moles play where the end of the world the aliens are attacking. Right, I don't remember there being sea spiders in that. Yeah. Anyway, in this study, they, I love this. They quote unquote exercised the spiders to exhaustion. How do they do that? Flipping them upside down and counting the number of times they were able to write themselves. They did this at a range of temperatures from their normal- I would be tiring. Yeah, yeah. Their normal temperature of negative 1.8 degrees Celsius all the way up to nine degrees Celsius. Counter to predictions, these sea spiders kept up with smaller ones at every temperature. Despite their body size, they were able to write themselves consistently. So, I mean, I just love the idea, first of all, of like an animal getting up and then you pushing it back over and getting up, pushing it back over. And this is science. And you work at a zoo? You work at a zoo. Is this what happens with a zoo after hours? No. People are out there. However, I think it's very funny that some researchers got together and thought, okay, how do we exhaust a sea spider? Oh, I know, just push it over. Anyway, it gets up, push it over. Anyway, so counter prediction to predictions, they kept up with the smaller spiders. They dealt with warmer temperatures just like smaller spiders, which means that the, this is not the reason for them to be able to grow so big. It has nothing to do with the water temperature, at least in this very small preliminary study. They used microscopes to look closely at their legs. How the heck are they getting this oxygen from their legs throughout their body in higher temperatures? They found that sea spiders are covered in pores. Quote, the exoskeletons of these really big ones look almost like Swiss cheese. As the spiders grow, their exoskeletons become more and more porous. So they allow for better diffusion of oxygen across their legs as they get larger because they're more and more holes. Again, the researcher's caution, this is short-term experiment, a long-term effect of warming on giant animals are not yet understood. But at this time, it looks like these particular giant animals may not be as vulnerable to ocean warming as we thought. And the previous high-poly spiders. The oxygen temperature hypothesis of large deep sea animals may be bunk. I think it's really fun when research finds evidence against high-poly species. Yeah, just means you have to go back looking for more. What then, what is the explanation? I mean, maybe it's that they live in water and they don't have the... And because they don't have to deal with gravity so much because they're surrounded by the liquid water to loft them. They just have to deal with pressure. It wouldn't... If they're deep sea, wouldn't gravity be worse? Well, it's gravity, but there's the water that's around them and kind of shielding them because they float in the water. Right. But density and pressure is a huge issue in the deep sea. So they're still dealing with massive amounts of pressure so that could be an issue. Which you wouldn't expect things to get giant under high pressure, and they do. I guess once you're built to withstand it and it looks like a pretty, you know, strongly put together thin limb has gotta be an asset. You don't get to bulk up too easily, structurally under that kind of pressure. Right, right, right, right, right, right, right. Okay, so also I found out that the reason I thought sea spiders got as big as me, this is very funny, is because there's an animal called the Japanese spider crab. Oh, that's huge. Does get as big as me. But sea spiders still get to be about the size of a trash canlet, which is very large. Big enough for a spider. Big enough. Oh my goodness, and on that note, the spiders of the sea. We are going to head to a break. We are going to take a short break and come back in a few moments with more This Week in Science. We have some space news. We've also got some baby molecules, baby molecules coming up with more This Week in Science. Stay tuned. Can you explain the things you've heard from all that intuition? The libraries have chosen the way to go. New conclusion. The methods of hypothesis in patients are the only things I need. Put on a pair of goggles and go look and pull the things I couldn't see. The answers lie somewhere within this scatterplot top. First, some should work correct. Please prove the rest. It's hot. The methods of hypothesis in patients are the only things I need. Put on a pair of goggles and go look and pull the things I couldn't see. Thank you for listening to this episode of This Week in Science. We are so glad that you are here today with us. If you enjoy this show, please consider supporting us and helping us maintain our listener-supported status. There are many ways that you can support This Week in Science, so let me tell you about them. One way is to head to twist.org where you can find all of the links for various ways that you can support us. That's where you can find everything, is it twist.org. So head over to twist.org. 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He said that I needed to get an angiogram to find out if I had any heart blockages. I was in and out within eight hours and went to work the next day. The results of the angio said that we probably need to go in and do a triple bypass. That's a big deal. So we're setting up everything with my insurance company to take care of the triple bypass. I work part-time at minimum wage and I absolutely do not have a company health plan. And while medical science is doing all the heavy lifting, there's another kind of science that's paying for it. Thanks to the Affordable Health Care Plan, I have medical insurance for one of the few times in my life. Thanks to the state of California, I have MediCal because my income isn't sufficient to warrant me paying for insurance. And say what you like about it, I find the coverage is vastly superior to every other medical plan I've ever had. So what has political science done for me lately? In the stroke of a pen, I'll be able to get my heart repaired and recover and even work casually because of medical science and have it all paid for through the taxes I've been putting in all my life. Tedward. So fantastic point. You know, all of the efforts that are made are nothing without a little bit of political policy to back them up. Yeah. Yeah. Very fantastic what has science done for me lately. I love it. Yeah. I think it's a wonderful spin on our weekly segment and I was very happy to read it. And I hope that the surgery goes well and that you do recover well and are able to continue to work casually after and that everything, I just really hope everything goes great. It's a combination of the medical science, the science that backs it all up, economics, which is also a science, political science, all these things working in tandem. Nice. Don't we all deserve a little bit of health? And everyone remember, remember that we need you to keep writing in and sharing in this segment of the show. This is the show, this part of the show is all from you and we really love having it on the show. Message me on Facebook or page facebook.com slash this week in science where you can email me at Kirsten at thisweekinscience.com. Keep it up, everyone. Help us entertain you with your stories. Justin, what'd you bring? So I actually brought a story from Hawaii at Minoa Department of Biology, which I think is also where the Spiders story. Yeah, yeah, they're busy. Yeah, this week. So they've developed the technique for measuring the amount of living coral on a reef by analyzing DNA in small samples of water, of the sea water. This is research by Patrick Nichols, graduate student marine biology graduate program and Peter Marko, associate professor in the Department of Biology. And they have published in Environmental DNA. So a while back, it was in March, early March, we talked to Raquel Pesuto. I probably mispronounced it. I'm sorry, Raquel. Episode 711. We talked about some of the difficulties involved. And some of the successes in studying microbiomes in these environments of getting in there and getting the DNA of that which is swishing around. So this analysis, of course, didn't have to go as in depth. But what they were doing is environmental DNA. So they take water samples. They sequence everything in there. They're looking for genetic residue that's in there. They sequence it and they take those sequences and they match them to references of known corals. And by doing this, it turns out, voila, they got a snapshot of the health and diversity of the coral down below. Without scuba diving in, without submarines, without a really prolonged study. So ladle into the water? Yeah, that's kind of how it's presented here. So the technique takes advantage of the fact that the coral shed, like any living organism, they're constantly dropping bits of their DNA out into the environment. Wow, that would be like going into the dust bin or the little dust scoop at a museum. After somebody's done sweeping up after a day at the museum, what does it hold? Who is there? So there have been, and there actually have been this technique in form has been used to look for ancient hominins by sampling DNA fragments found in dirt layers. So there has been other, the environmental DNA has got a huge potential and it's just getting tapped into and this is one way. But so what it was, it's sort of, they did also do some testing on dying reefs and they could see that there was a significant drop in both the diversity and amount of DNA. There's some level of sort of figuring out if there's corals that put out more, that shed more than others. But they were actually really able to get a decent snapshot that they could compare at later time points. Also sort of interesting is opposed to going down with divers or even a little submarine and taking pictures and visually inspecting, they were able to pick up rare coral that might get missed in visual inspection because, you know, because they're hidden or there's just less of them. They're like, I have an ear between the big coral. But they were visible. They were visible through this technique. Yeah. Yeah, so I remember, gosh, it was probably years ago, I did a story about environmental DNA and following fish migration with it. And I remember that just feeling so weird that a moving animal just through the water column and something as big as the ocean. Right, yeah. You could just pollution everything's everywhere. There it is. But yeah, especially in a coral reef in some of the most biodiverse spaces on the planet with so many plants and animals occupying that exact space. And then also, let me just remind everybody, we share about 60% of our DNA with a banana. So that also means there's a lot of DNA that's kind of overlapping. So you have to really be good about knowing what coral sequences are and then be able to find that. It's just, it's something that, you know, even 20 years ago would have been totally out of the realm of possibility for us. But because DNA sequencing has become a lot easier, it's something that's much more within reach. And I absolutely love this idea. There's so much of the ocean we know so little about, but just scooping some water, we can figure out who's living in the neighborhood. Yeah. And even, yeah, just scooping some water, there have been some huge projects mapping the microbiome of the ocean, mapping what is out there and getting what reference signatures we didn't used to have. So now we have more signatures of life that is out there and that involves more coral, more fish, the microbiome. There's, our information is growing and that is only going to enable us to do more. Yeah. Speaking of places that life could be, what about exoplanets? One of, yeah. Place to look. Yeah. If it's going to be somewhere. Look at exoplanets. But one of the big questions, a lot of these exoplanets that we're finding are either very close to their host stars or they are around stars, red dwarfs, that tend to have lots of frequent solar flares and solar flares means radiation. And if there's a lot of radiation ramming through your atmosphere, do you have an atmosphere? What are you? Are you, is the planet protective in any way or is it just the radiation running amok as it will? The, some researchers from Cornell University astronomers have written a paper and published it in the April 9th, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Lisa Kaltenegger and Jack O'Malley James have written lessons from early Earth. UV surface radiation should not limit the habitability of active M star systems. Consequences. Hmm? Hmm. So they looked at planets near Earth so that are also around these type M, active M stars, which are red, like I said, red dwarfs that have these frequent solar flares. Proximab, Proxima B is one of those stars, only 4.4 light years away. It receives 250 times more X-ray radiation than our planet. Oh, that can't be healthy. Right, can't be healthy, right? Unless you revolve there. Exactly. And the other side of it is that at one point in time, Earth was bombarded by a lot more radiation and didn't have as thick of an atmosphere, although it did have a magnetosphere, and life evolved here. So maybe the other side of it is that radiation is important for evolution. And so they simulated, they modeled the surface UV environments of Trappist 1e, we know the Trappist system, Proximab, another planet, Ross 128B, and LHS 1140B. And according to their approximations that even though we don't know what the surfaces of those planets are like, it's really highly likely that even with a significant amount of radiation, life would still be able to exist on those planets. Nice. Yeah, that is nice. And so then they also looked at an extremophile here on Earth, Dinococcus radiodurans, and it's one of the most radiation resistant organisms that is known to man. And so they were trying to figure out... Could it survive on one of these planets? Yeah, they were looking at the mortality rates at different UV wavelengths of this extremophile, and they wrote a dosage of UV radiation at 360 nanometers would need to be three orders of magnitude higher than a dosage of radiation at 260 nanometers to produce similar mortality rates in a population of this organism. So basically these different frequencies need different dosages to create death. However, it would be at 360 nanometers if that kind of UV light is hitting the surface of the planet, there would have to be a lot more of it to kill off this radiation resistant bacteria. So they're really what they were looking at. They're really showing that UV radiation should not be a limiting factor for the habitability of planets orbiting M stars. Our closest neighboring worlds remain intriguing targets for the search for life beyond our solar system. And we now know we have an emissary that we can send ahead. That's right. Send the Dinococcus. Send the radiation resistant bacteria. Speaking of exoplanets, NASA's TESS mission, which is the follower to the Kepler mission is looking for exoplanets. And it has found its first Earth-sized alien world, HD 21749 B and C. So there's one that's an Earth-sized planet. And the problem with it, however, it's... Oh yeah, HD 21749 C. It probably doesn't have a potential for life existing on it, seeing as it's very close to a very hot star. The star 21749 is almost as big as our sun. And this planet goes around it once every 7.8 days, which means that it's very close. So it's probably burnier. It's probably hotter than Mercury. It's probably within the orbit of Mercury and just zipping around in there. They also found a subneptune-sized planet, which is HD 21749 B. That one's a little bit further out and is a bit bigger than our planet. They definitely think it's a gas giant and it has an orbital period of 36 days. I'm wondering at what point we're going to start finding planets. We keep finding these exoplanets that are super close to their stars. We're using this transit method where the planets dip, they transit between the star and our telescopes and we see the dip in light and so we're like, ah, something's there. The reason we're finding them is because it's this really easy to catch pattern when you're looking at something zipping around a star once a week, right? Or even once a month. You look at the data and you go, it's easy. But when we start thinking about something like Earth going around a star once every 365 days, I mean that's going to be, it's a much longer period of data collection to actually see the transit and to know that you are getting a replicatable signal, right? Right, great. Yeah. Just calling me out on your filler word. That's all, no big deal. Thank you. Right. And then finally, last story. There is in the Tatooine system. It's not really the Tatooine system. It's known as Kepler 47, the star, it's called Kepler 47. And they have found a number of planets in this binary system and that's why it's called the Tatooine system because it has two stars, two suns, planets orbit around. If you could imagine being on Tatooine and seeing two suns come up for sunrise. They just found a third one. There's another star in there. I mean, not another star. There's another planet in there. There's more planets in the Tatooine system. But do they have blue milk is my question. I don't know if they have milk at all. Well, if they do, it better be blue. It should be. I'm going to be pissed. Yeah. Anyway, new planets, exoplanets. Is there life out there? Possibly. That's the final story for that. Probably. Yeah. What's up with you, Justin? What you got there? Oh, let's see. Where am I at in the rundown of my. Oh, sometime around 13 billion years ago, the universe was a simple soup made up of three simple single atom ingredients. That was it. That's all there was. They existed in a rather dim universe as stars. We're still not going to be invented for another hundred million years. But within that first 100,000 years after the Big Bang, the very first molecule was born. A soupy love child of helium and hydrogen known as helium hydride ion or HEH plus. Quoty voice of David Neufeld, professor at John Hopkins University in the co-authors study, which scientists have finally detected this elusive molecule in space. It was the beginning of chemistry. That's how big a deal this is. Theoretical models have convinced chemists and astrophysicists that HEH plus was the first molecule followed in a pretty precise order after that of a parade of increasingly more complex molecules. We have actually been able to study this in a laboratory. It's over the last 100 years in laboratory settings, but have not yet detected it in its natural habitat, which then you have this pretty convincing idea of how everything works and how everything would have been put together. But you can't see it. Why can't we see it? So part of the problem it turned out was they knew where to look. They thought, okay, we should see this in glowing gases being ejected from dying sun-like stars. Create some sort of conditions similar to those found in the early universe. The problem though was the electromagnetic waves given off by the molecule were in a far infrared range, which became completely canceled out by Earth's atmosphere. So it's undetectable from the ground, which sounds like a good alibi for why your hypothesis or why the theory itself isn't working out. We just can't see it. It must be within this wavelength. So NASA and the German Aerospace Center joined together to create an airborne observatory. They had a 2.7-meter telescope, an infrared spectrometer, and a Boeing 747. They cut a big window in the top of the fuselage and they flew their observatory to about 4,500 feet. That is awesome. Yeah. Just take the lab, put it on the back of a plane, cut a window in the top. Off we go. Yeah, so this is the Stratospheric Observatory of the Red Astronomy, or SOFIA, managed to get up at that height. They were actually able to be avoiding 85% of atmospheric noise that ground-based telescopes would have to deal with. And data from a series of just three flights back in May of 2016 contained the molecular evidence that they saw. So now that they've got it sorted, sort of an interesting thing is the universe in the early stages around this time rapidly after the Big Bang was still about 4,000 degrees Celsius. That's a hot ball of just atoms floating around. So you can kind of see, like, with that heat you would expect those atoms to be moving quite a bit. But even then, this bond is very fragile. So the fact that this molecule even got started and then progressively was replaced by larger, more complex molecular bonds, maybe this whole universe is just a freak of probability. It probably is. Probable. Probable. Yeah, it's probable. Absolutely, definitely probable. Moving on to the next story. What did I have coming up? Oh, AI. This is a quick love story to artificial intelligence and what it is going to do for us in the future. So there have been a bunch of warning stories about artificial intelligence and, oh my gosh, the world's going to be taken over by artificial intelligence. What are we going to do? Don't trust Facebook. Don't trust this and Siri. And what are we going to do? The robots are coming. But in some cases it's very helpful and actually really good. Justin, you remember years ago when Folding at Home got started. Fold it. Fold it. There's Folding at Home. Exclamation point. Yes, it is a crowdsourced citizen science effort to match up protein folding sequences with reference sequences that have already been identified to determine whether proteins actually fold the way that we predict them to. And for the most part, we still don't do a very good job at predicting how a protein is going to fold, especially when it comes from a sequence of DNA or RNA or originally that is several thousand base pairs long. So shorter sequences, we're getting it down. We're able to understand based on basic physics principles, angles at which chemical bonds take place. Hydrophilic, hydrophobic. Exactly. How things are attracted to each other or not. There are many... There are very set rules. We just don't necessarily know how all of them play out in this more complex environment, especially when you take a thousand amino acid base pair long strip of DNA and then it folds to its primary structure. And then it combines with maybe another chunk of protein from somewhere else. And suddenly you've got this massive tertiary structure and things are bonding to each other and refolding all over the place. It's bonding and then there's these activation sites, these docking ports. This is how all enzymes work. That's just... And when things interact with those, then it changes the structure of... And then suddenly the enzyme doesn't do the thing it was doing before because docking ports... These are just a fascinating universe. It's fascinating. Things we would love to know. We would love to know how proteins fold. And so this effort is now... Oh, wait, what? It's now being undertaken through artificial intelligence. And previous efforts with artificial intelligence have used codes, programs that are thousands and thousands of lines of code and the code itself to run the program is almost as complex as the proteins that we're trying to unfold and figure out how they work. And so these AI programs historically and the current methods that we use are time-intensive and they don't always give a very accurate representation. Well, a researcher from... Let's see where... Where is he from? From Harvard Medical School, Mohamed Alkarashi. He is reported in Cell Systems this week about his artificial intelligence system which is taking deep learning in which you take known sequences and you train your algorithm based on the known sequences and you do it over and over and over again and get results. And this deep learning is giving similar results to what is out there currently. The difference is that it takes minutes instead of days to weeks for the processing time. You know, and this is like one of those things that I'll be disproven on again one day into the future. But the thing with the deep learning is every deep learning thing has come up with available answers. Like the deep learning coming up with an available answer because the filters that were able to be put in were by known answers. And this is like part of the problem I have with the deep learning. It's like, okay, you put in the encyclopedia Britannica and you asked it for a... An animal with stripes and you name it with tiger. But you put in the information to begin with. So I'm very skeptical of deep learning still. I don't feel like it can give a new conclusion yet. I haven't seen a deep... So where it is, instead of that basic layer of the human processing, like with folded, what you're doing there is you're using human processing power for recognition, pattern recognition to be able to make the same kind of matches that this algorithm, this AI program would be able to make. And what the AI program is able to do is increase the complexity of what is observed at any one moment in time. And so the depth of what this deep learning can potentially do is potentially that it can go past the human capability for pattern recognition and these big data sets for these big structures that it will see things that people can't and it's going to go beyond us. And that's what's happening. I think it can find the needle and the haystack quicker. But it's still going to find the same needle that humans would have found. I don't see it yet as a thing that can do new learning. I guess that's what I'm... Yeah, it's not new learning. It's what people could do. But now where it was slower previously, now the computer programs have gotten faster and they're faster than us. And that's what's happening. It's going to make us more efficient. So we will make the discoveries more quickly. And then on the other line of another artificial intelligence deep learning application, not just to protein folding, but to fusion power. We all would love limitless fusion power, wouldn't we? For cheaper electricity, limitless electricity, it would be a wonderful thing to eventually get to that technological stage. And the technology that is on the forefront of that right now are Tokamax and ETER, the French and European Union collaboration which should be kind of coming online. I don't know what year. It keeps getting pushed off for many reasons. The issues they come up with are disruptions in the plasma field, the plasma generated within the Tokamax. And those disruptions can not just damage the fusion process that's taking place, but also damage the Tokamax themselves. And so people who are running these Tokamax, they're constantly having to monitor what the plasma field is doing to keep these disruptions from taking place. And humans do an okay job of it, but artificial intelligence can do it better. And how much better? Well, they're getting into predicting disruptions and they're using deep learning to learn from model Tokamax. They're currently using the joint European Taurus and also the DIID National Fusion Facility at the Department of Energy in California at General Atomics. They're using these to model fusion reactions, take that data and then predict what will happen in Tokamax that are being constructed and in energy runs moving into the future. So the idea is that we will have better control over these energy fields. Know when these disruptions are going to be coming up before they happen so that they can be taken. The disruptions can be disrupted before they disrupt things. Very meta. Sounds very snakely too. I'm again, I'm going to be, this is my new other things that I have predicted against in the past I failed. Some of them I'm still hanging in there. This deep learning thing. By the time they the next generation of this is like again, this is like correlative data to me. It's not new data that they're going to come up with. It's not really going to be that powerful thing. The next thing that comes after that they're going to name it something else and that'll be the thing that might be cool and might be built off of this. But the deep learning as it is now I have not been impressed with yet. It's a lot of people being like, look what this might do. Eventually I'm not seeing like, give me results show me that this thing's like That's how technology works. Yes it is. I do understand this. Really? I'm not impressed with it yet. You're impatient. You want the deeper learning. You want your learning to be super deep. I want now discovery AI not help you figure out a large data set and give you the answer you got through a harder way. I don't even know if it's doing that yet. Like you said, the code to write it's more complicated than the thing it's trying to look at. And it's not seeing it yet. That's a problem. In that AI program I just talked about for the protein folding they've improved the code so it's simpler it's faster and it is it is an improvement and they are doing this all over the place. The improvements are happening more and more rapidly and we are going to see the influences of deep learning on the pace of development of the technologies. Now by the time you see those improvements I'll be on a different town telling them all about the wonderful benefits of We'll see. We'll see. I don't know why this one is a bug in your head but I see the potential I'm optimistic that way. I'm also optimistic that we are at the quick stories section of the show I've got some biological machines for you researchers from Cornell University are using what they call DASH DNA based assembly and synthesis synthesis of hierarchical materials these dash materials are being used to create life-like behaviors in materials kind of like a slime mold in a sense I'm listening they are using DNA to self-organize and also create locomotion and there is a system that manages metabolism so these cells have they are not cells but this material that they are creating DASH material they are creating has metabolic function in that there is energetic need and waste is swept away and there is form and function it's not alive it just acts like it this is how we get the brave little toaster in real life maybe it wasn't a cartoon it was a horror story from the future about I don't know you're not familiar with the brave little toaster I don't need stories about toasters this was a toaster that was alive and he had a friend that was an electric blanket and a friend that was a lamp and a friend that was a vacuum it's sorry it's a subject from my very particular niche of childhood I don't think any other parents bought that book it's a film and I guarantee you or Hansel and Gretel or this living toaster people born mid-80s to like 1990 probably are very familiar with the brave little toaster we'll have to do a scientific study of that one I've had three kids since then never came up so whatever it was it's not good enough to reach back I mean sorry about that who's up next since Justin was talking earlier about the primordial ooze I have another story about that very same ooze from MIT this showed that shallow bodies of water were probably more suitable for Earth's first life researchers report that shallow bodies of water on the order of 10 centimeters deep could have held high concentrations of what scientists believe to be a key ingredient for jump-starting life on Earth that is nitrogen in deeper oceans, nitrogen has a harder time establishing a significant life-catalyzing presence if you think about the origin of life requiring fixed nitrogen then it's tough to have the origin of life happen in the ocean it's much easier to have it happen in a pond life came from ponds so there's all sorts of things happening here with RNA and lightning strikes and rust it's very interesting I suggest you check out the show notes but ultimately if nitrogen's involved with the origin of life the water it appears would need to be shallow good to know Justin tell me about you say you want to be an archeologist but you got no bones no tools no artifacts of any kind no problem an examination of soil errors in early Neolithic site in Turkey reveals that they are highly enriched in sodium, chlorine and nitrate salts that are most commonly found in human, goat and sheep urine offering then a kind of signal for us to start following the management of those animals throughout history, the findings along with they also had some enriched nitrogen signal in the soil as well as higher soluble nitrogen levels in trash heaps which we actually even see in modern feedlots they were able to this is Jordan Abel and colleagues used several techniques to identify the urine salts and to distinguish them from natural geological salt deposits and they found that 5 to 10 time increase in these salts between about 10,400 and 10,000 years ago and they tend to a thousand time increase in the time between 10,400 and 9,700 years ago so they could actually track a switch to hurting and possibly a domestication event in animals over a thousand year period without the typical archeological tools necessary to do such things just finding the traces of urine that were left behind by the animals at the time and they say they only required a population of somewhere under 2,000 people and in my last quick story tonight this is one that seems like has come up before there was an interesting thing off around Monterey Bay a while ago that was looking at a there was an event where there was a orca that killed a shark and what was interesting is the sharks in the area that weren't attacked disappeared from the area across this whole western they all took off all at once went to that deep ravine out there in the middle of the pacific ocean didn't come back for a year and the idea was there was this scent of this killed shark that had scared them off because the orca had killed it for an apex predator like the great white shark makes incredible amount of sense here's an apex predator something out there just killed one of you let's all just leave it's a nice sense mechanism that you wouldn't expect from something that we consider to be an aggressive predator so this is a study in nature scientific reports that showed that when confronted with orcas white sharks immediately vacate preferred hunting grounds and do not return for up to years this isn't even showing a kill there may have been a kill in a place somewhere that they didn't see because this is all happening under the ocean but they noticed just a passing group of orcas is enough for sharks to leave a feeding ground and to stay away for an entire season and the sort of interesting thing is the orcas they might just keep going they're going to some other hunting ground further away Monterey Bay Aquarium have noticed this and they found that the beneficiaries of this the ones who are really you would think you know the sharks of course because they're not having to confront orcas but it's the elephant seal colonies because the orcas go by they weren't there to feed on them the sharks that would have been there all left because they were scared and now it's just open safe waters for the elephant seals for an entire season so orcas helping seals where they can sharks afraid of orcas who would think it that's wonderful oh my goodness you wouldn't think great whites would be afraid of much oh it makes sense if it's going to be anything it's going to be an orca for sure the orcas are going to be way smarter than those sharks anyway they are smarter and they have hunting techniques the thing where you flip the shark upside down that was the attack that was witnessed that led to the sharks all taken off from the whole west coast when the orca killed the great white off of Monterey Bay there was footage of it somebody had caught it people who were out whale watching or whatever caught this on video and the shark orca hit it and flipped it and held it upside down as it pushed it through the water which incapacitated the great white that is like that's an intelligent attack maneuver and what's funny is they also do it on the stingrays which are related to sharks which also if you flip upside down go into that catatonic state pods of orcas have been seen utilizing that technique on them too but they don't utilize it on anything else they've figured out what it works on they don't go flipping everything upside down I'm going to flip it up it's just the things that go into the catatonic state they've learned this and it's a past on knowledge it's a really fascinating element of orcas and before we put everybody into a catatonic state no that's not what's going to happen while you're here it is the end of our show though but maybe not it is time for us to give those shout outs and thanks to everyone thank you to Fada for helping with show notes YouTube descriptions and social media thank you to Identity 4 for recording the program thank you to Gordon McLeod Ben Rothig for moderating in our chat room and thank you to our Patreon sponsors thank you to Paul Disney Richard Richard Onimus Ed Dyer Andy Groh Jayce Harrison Brather Charlie Henry Joshua Fury Alex Wilson Tony Steele Craig Landon Mark Mazaros Jack Matthew Litwin Jason Roberts Bill K. 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On next week's episode Jonathan Foley from Project Drawdown will be with us post Earth Day to talk about Project Drawdown what it is, what are the solutions that are out there for us when it comes to climate change and we will be broadcasting once again live online at 8 p.m. Pacific time on twis.org where you can watch and join our chat room but don't worry if you can't make it you can find our past episodes at our YouTube channel look for this weekend in Science on YouTube or twis.org Yes thank you for enjoying the show TWIS is also available as a podcast just google this weekend science in your iTunes directory or if you have one of the mobile type devices you can look for TWIS the number 4 and the action is that one still there we should look that up somebody told me the twis.org app isn't in the android marketplace anymore or this weekend science in anything Apple marketplace that you should still be able to find for more information on anything you've heard here today show notes will be available on our website that is definitely still working that is www.twis.org that's TWIS.org where you can also make comments and start conversations with the host while you're there. Yeah you could or if you don't feel like being quite that social you can just contact us directly email kirsten at kirsten at thisweekandscience.com Justin at twisminion at gmail.com or Blair at BlairBaz at twis.org just be sure to put TWIS TWIS somewhere in your subject line otherwise your email will be you can also hit us up on the Twitter where we are at www.twis.org at Dr. Keke at Jackson Fly and at Blair's Menagerie we love your feedback if there is a topic you would like us to cover or address a suggestion for an interview a haiku that comes to you in the night please let us know we'll be back here next week right here and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news and Andy grow if you've learned anything from the show remember it's all in your head thisweekandscience thisweekandscience thisweekandscience thisweekandscience it's the end of the world so I'm setting up the shop got my banner unfurled it says the scientist is in I'm gonna sell my advice show them how to stop the robot with a simple device I'm still warming with a wave of my hand and all it'll cost you is a couple of grand 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 over the air cause it's thisweekandscience thisweekandscience thisweekandscience science thisweekandscience thisweekandscience science I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news that what I say may not represent your views but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan if you listen to the science you may just get understanding but we're not trying to threaten your philosophy we're just trying to save the world from jeopardy jeopardy and thisweekandscience is coming your way so everybody listen do everything we say and if you use our methods to roll and die we may rid the world of toxoplasma got the eye cause it's thisweekandscience thisweekandscience thisweekandscience science thisweekandscience thisweekandscience 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 your rational thought and I'll try to answer any question you've got the help can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one hour a week thisweekandscience 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 on your head cause it's thisweekandscience thisweekandscience thisweekandscience science thisweekandscience thisweekandscience science science thisweekandscience thisweekandscience thisweekandscience thisweekandscience thisweekandscience All the buttons to push and all of the settings to set and sometimes I miss things, but I got it Thank you for watching the show everyone. Thank you for joining us for another episode of this week in science Anyone out there live near Santa Fe, New Mexico Anyone move near Santa Fe, New Mexico? I cannot stay much longer tonight I have a child who did not go to sleep would I asked him to he's still awake and he's Clearing his throat. He tells me he loves me. Oh I love you so much. I just think I think it's the wonderful. It's the wonderful strategy of the child. You're mad at me I love you. It's a wonderful strategy. Sorry. I just started a Twitter poll about the brave little toaster Did oh good. You must share the results when they are in I've been shouting on the internet today I hope everyone appreciates it at shouty Blair. So much shouty Blair today, huh? I did some shouting My goodness here. I should retweet to my other Twitter Identity four has framed the Kiwi bird Look at that. I'm gonna open that up. Hold on. Oh Looking good there. Oh, hey, um identity four, please Social media that so that I can share it. Please. Please Look at that the Kiwi bird Over to Mixers. What's that got destinations you got UFOs. No, LFOs one LFO to destinations Look at that little framed Kiwi It's cute You can have a Kiwi tote bag their own zazzle People out there. Wow. Awesome. I'm glad that was the hand delivered for the first time By Blair who brought the Kiwi to Portland and identity Down to our live show. He's up in Seattle. It's so great And it's sitting above his synthesizer His music how fun very nice very nice Yes, we're just and go he's gone for a long time again, huh? Sort of a single cigarette he's smoking an entire cigar Something like that Swirling some whiskey. Oh good Ellsworth Dan B in the YouTube chat room says that our podcast is on The Android Player FM app. Great. So glad to know that We're out there. We are on all the apps. I know we're there We are we're out there. We're kind of like, you know, the x-files What the x-files we're looking for I'm tired my child is awake I'm tired too. I hit the snooze button six times this morning. Yeah, I had a hard time waking Did not go to bed late last night, and I don't know what happened. I woke up so poorly this morning I've been waking up at all week mate I think the the spring allergies are starting to hit my sign. I woke up and I was like My head my sinuses. Oh my goodness my goodness Yeah, I Did not think that I had allergies. I still am like I've never had allergies but I'm starting to have to give it and I think about one of my co-workers today said, you know, I Didn't have allergies a day in my life until my 30s and it hit me my mid 30s. Yep And I yes an alarm clock to wake wake me up and a kai alarm to put me to bed That's like a car alarm. Yeah, it is a kai alarm. Oh Hot rod you have itchy eyes. That's the worst. I don't like itchy eyes Is that the kai alarm sounding over there? Yeah, did you hear the kai alarm? So knowing that He's ringing I don't know He's just ringing any dingy. Well, he was loud tonight wasn't he? Cringle crinkle crinkle. I heard some I thought it sounded like somebody typing, but neither of you had your hands moving I was like, ooh a ghost is typing Like cleaning audio It wasn't bad. It was just a couple times All right Eric had a friend who developed an allergy to walnuts in his 60s No, you're not supposed to get allergies that late Especially food allergies. That seems weird Right, I know yeah an identity for all them grasses and trees getting busy all over my face. That's right All the pollen. Oh the love for the love of plants I Have Alex's yeah Yeah, thanks Chris Harden Chris Harden is sleepless in Lansing, Michigan. Yes, you are you're up late in Lansing my goodness Kai are you gonna get a PhD? He'll try he says he'll try We'll see what's your what's your new what's your career you want to do right now? What oh His new career. He's going to be a global warming protester That's a career a I didn't know that was a career He you start saving now A scientist astronomer I Mean there's a way to be a global climate change protester that makes money and that is to be an educator He's gonna be a marine biologist See spiders study some sea spiders Oh my goodness. Yeah, he could study sea spiders He could be the intern that pushes the spiders over Yeah, that would be so fun. Can I Adam wait or Adam weaver? I'm not a jerk. I just think it'd be very fun Came off as very junkie Encouraging spider No, it's just funny that you're like this is how I'm gonna Test Exhaustion hey, I mean you can't put them on a treadmill. I get it. I Really did we ever explain the anti-growth thing to the no No, that's like that. It's left unsaid. Yeah, we can leave it unsaid Really, that's a secret patron level that people don't know about Secret it's a secret Charles Charles abroad Yes, did we grow up in the same town outside? I did not grow up in Lodi I grew up in your Linden and I would lend Linden high school So close it's not the same thing Central California you had this same experience. Yeah, we were like 20 minutes apart 30 minutes hot dry and Well boring Well, what do you do with yourself, I don't know How sad there was even a Walmart to hang out in there wasn't Yeah, we grew up Charles abroad maybe you remember cruising on Pacific was it Pacific? Was it Pacific in so far from the ocean by the way? No, not the ocean breeze makes it to no Linden. No, I remember doing that a couple times. Oh my goodness. Oh High school. Oh town with four stoplights Yarks Was it four by the at that point or did that come later? Linden, I think the stop signs came later. Stop signs even came later I don't even think they still have stop lights. It's just they have a few stop signs I'm not making fun of your time. I actually would love that Maybe not the hot dry desert desert of the central California Valley Yeah, come on you grew up near there me. No, not even close. Oh, no, you didn't did you? No, it was just later that you ended up there. What do you mean in Davis? Oh, and David? Yeah Yeah, well, I was here. Yeah, David, but that's not this you cannot compare the arid desert to the Delta That's true. You're close to the Delta But no, we were I was kind of close to the Delta. I mean outside Stockton has the Delta go right through it But you were outside of Stockton I went outside of Stockton Where the walnut trees and cherry trees grew in groves offering plenty of shade And that's what we did for fun we cooled off in the shade I you know, uh growing up. I mean Honestly, I swam in ditches. I didn't have a pool. I swam in a ditch. Oh my god That's awesome And my dad had the at one point somehow like that He ended up with my cousin's surfboard or something. So we'd go up and down the ditch on the surfboard. That was like Summer entertainment. Well, how much tetanus did you have? Oh plenty That's very weird pipes in Kai. Yes, Kai. You have very weird exactly. Yes. It was Pacific Avenue. Thank you, Charles I didn't live in the ditch I didn't build a house on a bridge over a ditch Oh my gosh Your imagination is something else Okay So I I'm gonna can I segue into a little childhood story? I don't know if I told this one before segue So my summers were spent up in the high foothills locieras And there's one summer I was seven I was there with my four cousins the oldest of oldest of which was 11 And I I mean my cousin we're talking about this this one summer that was just amazing. It was totally like Tom Sawyer freedom We had we're out on this 800. We were kind of home Caretaking an 800 acre ranch And I remember we went out and we hunted bullfrogs And And I remember we we we even like, you know had killer rooster. We were milking goats We were doing all this this country bumpkin. Just fantasy life. It was just fantastic. We had horses Life horses from the Bureau of land management because they were giving away mustangs because they're relocating them from Nevada That's cool and and these things my My uncle had to break them my uncle would and by the point they would take a saddle That was the okay for us kids to ride them and these were not these are not trained horses These were just these were like half wild horses still that would sometimes take off on us But i'm recounting like all the fun and the adventures we had and we made our own raft to go out to catch the bullfrogs And we had we built our own thing to get them with and had this whole technique Where two of my cousins would rattle the cattails and the bullfrogs that came out across the top of the water And me and my my other cousin were out there on this raft and we'd catch him. He's like, you know why we were doing that, don't you? What do you mean? Yeah, it was fun. It was awesome. We were a huck fence. I'm sorry. I didn't like no no no no Our uncle who was a minor Uh, he was he would put the explosives in the holes of the mines. Yeah, m i n e r Yeah It's like a three-day job That got uh the road got washed out Oh Maybe i'm joined be kind for some reason he was there 10 days The pantry that he thought was sufficient plus, you know, the chickens laying the eggs and the goats with the milk and everything They ran out of food. I'll be fine. We ran out of food What I saw is an idyllic childhood romping around My older cousin who's the oldest amongst us who at 11 was like, no, we were surviving When that was subsistence survival Lord of the flies style that we had to do for like four days of that And then and then as we're talking about it. It's like Too bad we can't send our kids off to uncle You know, there's some lessons learned that you don't normally get You can send your child off to that kind of idyllic experience without the potential starvation. That's the thing though That was that's the part of it that you know, that's the part that really forged us as cousins early on is that Yeah, we really figured out what we were made of early thanks to uncle phil going. Yeah, they figured out I'll figure the goats. Yeah, they'll figure out the rest of it That's funny. Wow, that's a good story you haven't told that story before that was that was good Oh childhood childhood memories All right, um business Blair and Justin I need your traveler information Send it to me so I can uh send it to people I need the days I have to take off of work I will tell you everyone out there The twist team is going to here. Let me put it up. I'm going to put it up on the on the enter I'm going to put it up on the screen. Hold on There's a new thing that we just confirmed today Uh little side thing that we're also doing when we're there meow wolf What's that? meow wolf is the uh ginormous art installation That you wander through and it tells a story of sorts But you're literally interacting with and want it's like part puzzle rooms part art installation Uh, that's what we're also going to do. Uh, but this is how about a hot air balloon also though We can do that here. Why wait if I go to a phase where that's a thing It's a thing here too. No. No. No. It's much of a thing there It's a thing Okay, but there's this thing That the twist team is now confirmed to do we are going to be the podcast and the podcast stage At the interplanetary festival in santa fe new mexico Is this going to be three days of podcasting because I love no, we're going to be just like one day We can do more if we want but um as far as I know, it's just gonna be like one show One for the show one for the show, but the the other thing is this is one of those opportunities To grab a ton of really awesome guests to bring on for 15 20 minute interviews Uh, so so aside from the regular podcast, I think we should have our ears up for grabbing lots of people unsuspectingly before or after they've done their presentations And Them to talk to us about how awesome their research is Yeah, absolutely. You can run around and do that friend of the show frequent guest friend of the show Sean carol will be there. That's right Um question is this that going to be we're going to do like a normal show there, right? I think it's gonna be a normal thing So um, is it is it going to be a bonus show or are we going to do it in place of a show on one side of it? I Like well, we can figure this out. I like I like the idea of doing a Because it's not going to be covering our regular time slot, right? Yeah, no, it's gonna be probably we we can choose our time slot and they've given us the opportunity to pick when we want to want to do our show um on saturday sometime between I think What did they say? um On saturday any sometime between like noon and seven or noon and six or something like that On june 15th, so we'll we'll figure it. Yeah between noon and six We're going to be in this innovation and ideas expo and so we can kind of pick where we want to be What I think might be nice and maybe this isn't the best idea So i'm going to say it like it's a question um Is if we did a A show where we're bringing stories that are maybe beyond this week But are themed I think that would be fun. Yeah All the amazing things maybe just the last six months or a year Uh in in you know space exploration Uh, yeah, I mean seriously we're gonna get we are gonna get an interview with somebody from the santa fea institute So i'm talking with them about there would either be uh, what's her name? Uh, gosh, jennifer dunne who she researches Uh complexity of ecosystems and so it would be the idea of ecosystems for Space travel and how could we put people into outer space and what are the ecosystems need to be like or the The head of the institute david crack hour Who does other Spacey complexity kind of stuff and so we are going to have at least one interview, which will be great Yes, that will be awesome. Yeah, but I like the idea of kind of theming it up along with this Interplanetary, you know, what's what's happening. Yeah, how long are we doing? Are we doing a 90 minute thing? We haven't decided yet. We haven't decided Do we have a time limit? If there are other people if there are other people in the schedule Yeah, we have to It will be a It sounds like it's not the dance card isn't quite filled out yet. My point that is that we could um We could do a you know a 60 minute show a 30 minute show of show where we're talking stories of recounting a lot of the Awesome stuff that's been going on in the last maybe six months. Even doesn't mean we have to be here but um, but also we could fill Another hour with 15 minute interviews like like I like the idea that we're whenever we're one of these events we have a sort of Shooting fish in the barrel opportunity to talk to a lot of these people and I not want to waste that opportunity Yeah Yeah, exactly. I think it'd be great or we could yeah run around with a with a camera and do interviews or something As a put yeah, if we have a stage and mics Yeah, so anyway, the whole thing looks really fun and it's Santa Fe and I've never been to Santa Fe and I'm very excited and it looks like it's just going to be a blast and Yeah, so uh, we'll be going there on the 14th. They would like us there by the early evening on the 14th And Then uh, we can go home Sunday monday whatever works for us Yeah, but that's where we're gonna we're gonna be in june June festivaling in Santa Fe extra show And you know, if it seems too crazy we can be like maybe that'll be a show Planet of the apes is a keynote Oh, yeah, no, they're gonna so the keynote they're doing. Um, what did they tell me? Yeah, it's going to be This guy jw rinsler is going to introduce the screening So I guess he's a a writer Oh, he wrote a book the making of the planet of the apes and so he's going to give the keynote about the movie That's Yeah, so this festival brings together science and space and art and music And it looks like it's going to be a lot of fun if anybody wants to go to Santa Fe Yeah, and Sean Carroll is going to be there. Oh and also, um The authors Daniel Abraham and ty frank who've written the experience series They will be there also I'm excited to meet some of these people Yeah, I'm gonna bring tardigrade stories. So there You're like, I already figured it out. That's it Um Wait, what did you say direct flight? Uh, so what they suggested we do is here. I'm gonna stop presenting stop presenting, um They recommended we fly into albuquerque and then they said there are shuttles that will take us to Santa Fe and they said Don't you don't try to go to the little little Santa Fe? Oh, okay. Yeah, I don't know. I just got that. That's not a good idea. I got that exact same advice Uh and talking about this show, uh from my sensei at work Uh crystal. She was like, uh, whatever you do Do the the way she described it to like the entire airport has one vending machine That's that's the food Okay, so albuquerque is a vending machine. All right. Yeah, I wonder if it would be cheaper to run a car Then grab a shuttle. No, I think there might be free shuttles. Oh, you think there's free ones Yeah, I think they said something about there being shuttles and that she was like, yeah, just get a shuttle It'll take you right to your hotel and I would I would rather But if you got hot air balloon Go test the wind first That's right Yeah, so if I don't know if we can all try to get to albuquerque at the same time we could Maybe rent a big vehicle or something or getting a shuttle together depending. Yeah, minivan or something like that. Um Right, and then we'd be and then we'll wait. No, that's right. There's gonna be more than just the three of us Yeah, and then we would be mobile around Santa Fe Yeah, that'd be pretty cool. Which would be kind of cool. Uh and meow wolf. I think that's what it is And the balloons you have to check out this meow wolf thing if you have All of the turquoise you could ever want that is the new mexico Types i've heard hot air balloons and turquoise jewelry I heard spicy food and I went i'm sold I was talking with uh jenna and um her co-worker today and who were the women the Santa Fe Institute who are running this festival and they're like Do you like spicy food? No, I was like, yeah, they're like you should live here like, okay Move here immediately. That's not portland Hold on That's not what hold on that's good. I just yeah, I want to eat all the food It'll be great. They told me i'm not allowed to bring rain. Okay Huh Does it ever rain in Santa Fe? So it so so here's the thing. I don't know. I I don't quite know how far away it is Albuquerque I've visited in a february before There was snow It's a high plateau. I mean it's it's it's desert, but it's a high plateau So yeah, they get they get like roofs covered in snow Huh, I can't wait I know i'm like looking at the i'm looking at touristy things. I'm gonna Touristy yeah noodles. I gotta put my head and my child's head to bed also Tomorrow's gonna be hard to get this child up for school um, but yes um We will make it so we're going to this fun festival and it's gonna be Let's all go. Yeah. Yay. Let's all go. Yes Yeah, so if anyone wants to meet us in Santa Fe, we'll see you there Yeah, um Blue crystals Oh, I won't break any blue crystals Can we can we pull up the meow wolf thing? I don't know meow just google it and look it up This is this is a thing. There it is meow wolf Santa Fe. There it is. Okay Immersive experiences immersive art experiences. Wait, what there's is this like is there one? Giant installation. I watched a documentary about this thing Uh and was Huh, you said documentary Like some well, I was like it's like a mini documentary. It was like this thing about the making of I just really liked how excited you were and I was so impressed by this. I was just like in awe of what they had built and Santa Fe and like you have to like walk through a dishwasher and it's all Alice in wonderland But it's not quite but it's just and it's interactive and it's insane. It's off the hook And it's just an immersive museum storytelling experience. Yeah, you should check out um One dome in uh, san francisco One dome I think no What Yeah, no, it's called uh one dome in san francisco and they've got it's this kind of immersive art experience and A friend of mine runs it and And Yeah, that's they've got this thing. It's called the unreal garden So they used augmented reality and virtual reality and some of their stuff. I will have to check that out. That sounds awesome Yeah, it is supposed to be very awesome. Um, yeah, but this Some yaw wolf sounds cool to you I'll have to look into it. I don't know what's going on there That doesn't make any sense It's immersive. I don't know what that means Isn't that life? I am immersed in life anyway I've been immersed. Yeah, sure Take the left turn at albuquerque. All right, eric. Thank you Lots of art galleries that'll be fun. It'll be such a fun trip 7 000 feet above sea level. Thank you ed You drove there and it was a semi terrifying mountain drive. Oh great Oh, it's funny 7 000. It's not that high. It's high enough. That's pretty good. I was in denver. It wasn't that high. Yeah That's higher than I thought that's yeah What do our near mountainous? Uh, it's still flat from what I remember this Just because it's high. Yeah, but but if you go, yeah, but to get I guess to get up the down the plateau Yeah, that's how a plateau works. I suppose But yeah, and I actually have family in albuquerque, so I might have to I might have to figure that out. Maybe maybe I need to get there a little sooner Yeah Yeah, we can work that out if they said just let us know dates and I'll make some You figure it out. Make some phone calls. Let me know Yeah Awesome, I'm excited. Um, also earth day this weekend. It's monday coming up I thought it was saturday Saturday is when everyone's celebrating but the actual earth day is like a birthday. You don't do it in a wedding Saturday is for 20. Yes Earth day is it is April 22nd Oh, I've always thought that it was 4 20 Oh, no, that's always thought today It is but I've just decided that that is earth day and that's always been earth day in my head Doesn't matter what the calendar says That's herb day. That's a different that's Yeah, I could I could care less about that Uh, let's see the sea level folks are gonna love it. Yeah, it's gonna be great I love it I know high altitude if you're like walking around hiking stairs Oh Drinking beer getting really drunk here. That's right. Yeah, that's gonna be awesome. Don't drink too much. Yeah, but it's not too high It'll be fun. That's a map. That's like a that's a pretty decent elevation even it for the sierras That means you're up there a ways. Yeah, it's over a mile It's over a mile. It's over a mile high Oh, we're almost in space That's another 49 miles That's why we're have that conference is there because you're really in space because you're closer to space You're like, oh, look, there's mars Duck everybody duck the moon's coming by Oh Oh, no, I ended up on the moon. How did that happen? How did that happen? I didn't duck in time Hot in the day cold You know what that means everybody say good night Blair. Good night Blair. Say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin Good night Good night everyone. Thank you for sticking with us for another episode another fun after show Thank you Blair and Justin for another great show And uh, let's see. Thank you, Andy grow and on Friday. I will do my usual twitch stream around 1 p.m twitch.tv slash dr Kiki if you want to hang out and talk about science with me for a little while and Then we'll have our episode next week. It'll be awesome. Happy Easter everyone. I hope all is well. Merry science to you all We will see you again soon