 This is Twist. This Week in Science, episode number 583, recorded on Wednesday, September 7th, 2016. The Big Red Spot. Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on This Week in Science we are going to fill your heads with EM drive rumors with Milky Way madness and a Big Red Spot. But first, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer, space, the final frontier, or so it may have once seemed. But we now find ourselves on many frontiers in science, with rovers and probes and telescopes investigating the solar system and beyond. We have many other pursuits closer at home, like understanding the inner workings of matter, which when considering distances of scale is a much more distant journey than anywhere in our galaxy. And how our ancestrally allocated assortments of DNA and RNA help us become who we are. And understanding the fundamental role bacteria play in our health and understanding how the changing climate will make living on our own planet seem as foreign as a new frontier. And of course, space! We are at the forefront of our knowledge in every category of science. Boldly going where no scientists have gone before, with a few exceptions of really brilliant scientists who got there before. We really were sure there was a there to be boldly going towards. But like a scientist ahead of their time, you will be in the knowledge before it is common because you are boldly going to listen to yet another episode of This Week in Science coming up next. Discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to know what's happening. What's happening. What's happening. What's happening this week in science. What's happening. What's happening. What's happening. What's happening this week in science. Good science, dear Kiki. And James, we have a guest. Hello there. Thank you. Yeah, welcome James. Hello Justin. And welcome to everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. Tonight yet again, we are here to drop science knowledge. Or at least, you know, talk about some things we thought were interesting. Some stuff that happened this last week. It's kind of interesting stuff. But anyway, on tonight's show, what did I bring? I brought magnets for your brain, or at least little nanomagnetic particles. Good news or bad news? I also have a story, another brainy story, Brainiacs Abound about social neurons that have been found. We also have a little bit of animal news. Because Blair's not here, I thought I would bring some animal conservation stories. And yeah, and we also have a guest tonight, James O'Donohue, who I will introduce in a moment. But Justin, what did you bring for the show? I have a far flung fossil, and it came from space. And a handful of other stories if time permits. Like sand through the hourglass, so are the stories in our podcast. Sorry, I don't know where that came from. Okay, let's get into this show. I'd like to introduce our guest. His name is Dr. James O'Donohue, and he's a planetary scientist at Boston University. Dr. O'Donohue specializes in astronomy of gas giant planets. He uses ground-based observatories to view the upper atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, and is mostly interested in Aurora, or Rore, Saturn's ring rain, and the atmosphere above Jupiter's great red spot, which appears to be rather hot. And he recently published an article in Nature on the heating of the atmosphere above the great red spot. We talked about it a bit on the show in a past episode, but we thought it deserved a little bit more discussion. So James, thank you so much for joining us tonight on the show. Thank you very much, yeah. Pleasure to be here. We're glad to have you here because I don't think many people really know a lot about gas giants. So you're one of those few people on this rocky planet of ours that knows a lot about these things. Can you tell us a little bit about what, like with Jupiter, what do we know about the great red spot just to begin with? Well, it's a big storm. Yeah, right. So the upper atmosphere is about 500 miles above the planetary surface. So most of the great red spot images you've seen are usually at the, what do you call it, the zero kilometer surface, the surface of Jupiter. Now, Jupiter doesn't have a solid surface. So just to set the scaffolding up for this discussion, the surface is defined as the one bar pressure surface. So one bar pressure is Earth's sea level pressure. So what we do is we say the gas giant surfaces are at that same sea level pressure on Earth. So it's kind of cheating a little bit, I guess. But yeah, so most of what you see is at the surface of Jupiter. And so this storm is about, at least, about 400 years old almost. It's unclear exactly how old. But as far as observations go, it was Cassini. We discovered it in 1665, probably. We don't really have any reason to doubt him. He said there was a big blotch on Jupiter, and that seems about right. And since then, we've been tracking it, and it doesn't seem to be going anywhere, although it is shrinking lately. So this storm has winds of something like a few hundred miles per hour in either directions, and it's the biggest storm in the solar system. So I worked out the other day that if you were to put the storm on Earth, it would be something of the order of from Hawaii to Cairo as a storm around the planet. So that's the kind of scale on the feeling is. I'm really glad that we don't have an atmosphere that would bring us that kind of giant storm. Right, yeah. And if we did, it would dissipate quicker because part of the reason the great spot is lasting so long is because there isn't any landforms, there isn't any real friction to slow it down. Although the current theory is that it should last about 80 years, it's sort of blowing that out of the water right now. Which is why you see the storm that was just passing the US recently, as it was coming across the land, it was dissipating. Although I think it went back out to sea a little bit, so carried on going. Storms above the sea pretty much go on until they hit some kind of land usually. Yeah, so when we talk about typhoons or hurricanes that start over water here on our planet, usually they build up energy, they gather the heat from the atmosphere and from the water below them and that gives them more energy and then they hit land and how long and then it's just kind of the weather people wait for it to just calm down. That's right. Yeah, the generation mechanism of the great red spot is really that it's sort of like it's in between a conveyor belt of zonal bands on the planet. So if you see some time-lapse things of Jupiter, you can see the bands are moving east and west by hundreds of miles per hour and that's it's basically like two conveyor belts spinning up the storm like that. Yeah, and there's belts above those which are flowing the opposite direction and so it's a very violent planet. It's very interesting that these bands of high velocity are moving anti-parallel to each other so opposite directions and still maintaining everything. So it's very interesting. So what is though? What is at the core of Jupiter? That's a good question. I'm hoping the Juno spacecraft will be able to find that out using its gravity instruments. It's something that's very difficult to do at Earth which is why personally I'm doing ground-based observations looking at the very outer layers of the planet. But yeah, to really probe deeper, you need to use microwaves and gravity probe instruments, things like that. So is the answer really that right now we don't know? Yeah, the best theory is saying that there is a core but it's up in the air still. I'm pretty sure there is but I'm pretty sure most people in the field go, okay, it's a core. It's a core different from what we would think of. So our planet has a core of iron and other metals and we're not expecting that that solid core is going to be at the center of Jupiter in the same way because we're dealing with gases. Yeah, it's tricky. As far as I remember, one of the things that Juno, so I'm really a ground-based person, but I think Juno is going to be looking at sort of the variation in the flow around the core as well because the giant magnetic field of Jupiter is, I mean it really is a giant. If you could see it from Earth, it would be about three moons, three earth moons across in the sky. If you could see Jupiter's big magnetic field. Yeah, so the generation of that is due to this metallic hydrogen around the core and it's sort of like hydrogen with its electrons stripped off and pretty much an electric current is in there and hopefully the gravity probe will be able to estimate things like the different densities in different regions. Maybe it's the stronger gravity here and maybe it's weaker over here suggesting there's an imbalance. Judging by the images of the aurora we see certainly seems like it's not very symmetrical in the core at the planet. So to get back to the atmosphere in the Great Red Spot, so if we're thinking about where the spot is located in the atmosphere and what kind of pressures the gas is in that storm or under, is it all gas? Are there any liquid components? It's essentially all a gas. Yeah, I mean the way I picture Jupiter's atmosphere, if you're going in like you were a probe, a probe has actually done this, the Galileo probe a while ago and you would sort of see that it's averted space and then it's kind of a very diffused gas which is the bit that I would look at. You go deeper to the surface and then it's getting a bit thicker and eventually it turns into sort of a liquid in a superfluid state. So it's kind of a smooth transition as far as we know. The bit I look at is way beyond this which is why the temperatures that we talk about are so high and so if you were to sort of Google what the temperature of Jupiter was you would probably find that it was on the aurora a couple of hundred Kelvin but typically in the upper atmosphere it's around 16, sorry, 1000 Kelvin. That's hot. That's really hot. And so the big question I know coming from your paper is it's really far away from the Sun which is one of the ways that our planet gets its heat. The main way our planet gets its heat and we all talk about the greenhouse effect but Jupiter's really far away from the Sun so it's not getting as much solar energy. Right so yeah if you look at Earth's upper atmosphere pretty much where the great red spot on Earth, the international space station is we're looking at temperatures around 2000 Kelvin even on Earth's upper atmosphere. The reason people can live up there in a capsule pretty much without any hindrance of getting burns is that there's so few molecules per unit space so that temperature is not transmitted to the person because if you burn yourself yeah you really need a lot of contact with whatever the material is. Yeah Jupiter's upper atmosphere is on average about 1000 Kelvin across the entire planet and it's about 1200 Kelvin at the poles where the aurora fall in so you've probably seen some spectacular images from the Juno space graph recently and Hubble actually in an infrared view of the southern pole and you can see all the activity going on there. That's charged particles coming in from space and they lead to currents which heat the atmosphere like a sort of a kettle element if you have an electric kettle I'm not sure how many Americans have. Electric kettle? A few. A water heater. Yeah so what ended up so you've got this air movement that's involved in this convection that's involved in the heating of the atmosphere with a storm can you tell us like what exactly you ended up figuring out with your right yeah so I was trying to map the entire planet to find okay what is the temperature of Jupiter everywhere because people can only really do it for the poles where it's a very bright signal so you get a good signal to noise but yeah so I like to look at the lower latitudes where nobody likes to look I guess it's it's harder to deal with because there's a lower signal to noise so your errors go up and everything but yeah so what we found is that a really highly localized place where it's 600 degrees warmer than anywhere else on the planet and so we were struggling to think of a reason why that was the case and it turns out that the only real plausible explanation is that it's coming from below because you can't really throw anything so localized directly above the Great Red Spot with the magnetic field it doesn't really make any sense that it would only go in there and nowhere else it isn't coming from the sides of the Great Red Spot because we measure the temperature around it and it's it's about a thousand so the conclusion was that it has to be from below and the only ways you can do that are by wave heating so we think that it's a combination of acoustic waves and gravity waves well personally I think it is acoustic waves which is a form of sound wave heating if you like oh there's a nice spot there yeah and yeah so yeah we think that it's heated by sound waves which on earth this happens quite a lot we see things like earthquakes, tsunamis, storms, lightning, things like that cause acoustic waves all the time having a mountain in the middle of nowhere when when there's a weather system moving over that mountain you'll have acoustic waves coming from that too and so how do you think the I mean I it's very molecules moving that's going to increase that increases heat as molecules move more so is it that these acoustic waves are really they're moving through and increasing the energy and that's how the heating is taking place yeah we think so this is where our sort of knowledge breaks down and exactly how it's working and we use clues from earth mostly but in this case it pretty much has to be from below and gravity waves so the reason we we don't say it's gravity waves really is because there have been many modeling papers showing that gravity wave heating can only heat the upper atmosphere by a few degrees and sometimes even cooler planet whereas this modeling paper saying that if you throw acoustic waves into the upper atmosphere they heat it by several hundred degrees quite easily so what it is is there's a lot of turbulence in the great red spot and this kind of turbulence ends up sending waves up essentially into space and at some point they have to break and so these waves are produced in quite a dense area of the planet on the surface compared to the upper atmosphere and as they they go up they they break like waves on a beach pretty much and and that's how we think that works I have an analogy which is to do with a storm in a teacup if you can imagine stirring your tears I'm sure you all do all the time then there's sort of you get it spinning in one direction but then you suddenly do it the other direction that's essentially what the great red spot is when you suddenly turn your spoon the other way making the sloshing sound it's those sound waves that you can hear in your ear so a vibration has come from your teacup into your ear and that vibration is a sound wave so that's my analogy. So is it the sound waves themselves that are generating the heat that it's not like it's just bringing heat from further down and lifting it up sort of like a vortex like I when I first was like heard about this story before we talk I sort of pictured it like a tornado and picking up heat from below and sort of just lifting it up like or cows or cows if they're happy to be which we I don't think we've seen cows yet up and we're still looking just in case yeah we know it's the waves themselves are actually creating the heat that's what we think yeah because gravity waves are kind of ruled out by well I mean it remains to be seen it's almost impossible to observe these things even when you have a probe going into the planet it's even quite hard to do then so I'm hoping a lot of modeling papers come out and say hey yeah this looks like it's legit and maybe they'll maybe they'll say actually no acoustic waves can't do this much but we already have papers in the past that show from different authors not us that acoustic wave heating is quite efficient process we thought originally it was we are increased brightness was due to some kind of lightning and we thought that would be a really cool paper lightning eating of the you know the upper atmosphere but I spoke to some earth lightning experts and they say no that's not gonna work you defect the chemistry so much that it would be obvious so that was an idea we tried right because if it were lightning then it would be in increasing the energy but also breaking down molecules right yeah we would expect a very sharp density difference that's difficult to check because we have density measurements but they're really low they really sort of high error so we just stuck with temperature which has a low error and not with that but yeah essentially we explored the idea of lightning and that failed to explain what we were seeing and also there's no actual evidence of lightning in the great red spot which is interesting as I learned I assume there would be lots so now it's not to say that there isn't we think that it could be lightning but it's so deep that we can't see it when we've got spacecraft going above it and there certainly radio signals we receive because when a lightning bolt occurs there's a lot of radio output from that but when you're in a spacecraft away from the planet and you feel a radio wave coming from something it's really difficult to tell where it's actually from on the planet so yeah and I imagine there's just so much energy coming from Jupiter anyway that being able to differentiate different signals is probably pretty difficult but I mean we're differentiating signals from galaxies far far away at this point like so that's right yeah we can do it but you're you're point about the let's see the the transport of material from below we don't think that could happen we feel like these regions are not coupled in that way that you can just make material flow up and down but that's definitely something we're exploring next but the thing is if you move it turns out that if you move material from below it's got something that's very deadly down there it's got methane which can come up and destroy our molecule and if that came up then we would see no signal at all that's another interesting thing but yeah it's also 500 miles away which are I make for people listening home on earth our atmosphere at least where you get to the point where NASA will give you a little clip on wings for having been to space is like 50 miles right it's really thin this people look up and go gosh it's a really long ways to space but yeah I only need to get up about 50 miles and and you'll be falling in free fall just fine yeah and so from your research is there anything I mean you said you talked to scientists who study lightning and atmosphere and acoustic waves here on earth is there anything that your study can help with their research so that we can even understand our own atmosphere better right yeah that's true so it surprised me that somebody from the earth climate science community contacted me with a team of people in the email as well and I was very flattered he was really interested in this work normally we think about our planetary work is some slightly related to earth science but apparently in earth climate models they actually dampen acoustic waves out so they they sort of soundproof their models and there's a there's a community of earth climate scientists that want the argue that it should be included so this is I mean it's difficult to detect this kind of thing on earth because the storms we have are quite small and they don't last very long and all of that but with Jupiter you have this perfect laboratory to study this you have the biggest storm in the solar system reliably coming round every X amount and we can measure the temperature of it even when the sun shining on it we can measure the temperature all the way across and yeah so hopefully our work can inform earth climate science as to whether or not acoustic waves should be taken seriously or not and so you mentioned also that the spot is starting to shrink slightly and I remember I think I remember a while back when this announcement came out that researchers had just detected this shrinkage it was thought that it would only last about 80 years but it's been around for 400 so what are what are people thinking like are you are you just excited that you've gotten this work done in now and you're looking at it now while you can absolutely yeah it appears that by the time it's about shrinking by 500 miles a year or so it seems like everything is 500 miles in this yeah every year it's been shrinking and at least since somewhere in the year 2000 and possibly before but yeah it looks like by the time it's 2040 it will shrink so much that it won't be an oval anymore and that it would be a circle but there is a another oval opening up just below another one not an oval now it's a circular storm it's only about the size of earth but it's very close I think it's called oval BA and it's growing and maybe it's even sapping the energy of the great red spot but yeah that's that's gonna be very interesting to watch in the next 400 years or so or maybe maybe it could get absorbed absorbed right and then add to it instead of draining you know maybe this is we'll get to keep it going maybe this is part of the yeah how it's gotten to go for you know 400 years it's it's collecting other smaller storms as they form around it it's like the black hole of storms yeah I'm still holding out I kind of I like the idea of there being a molten core in the center of Jupiter but a smaller one than anywhere else in our solar system so we can say it's the biggest planet but it's also the smallest planet in a way in terms of storms this being the largest storm in the solar system there are obviously other storms like you mentioned this one that is just opening up and there are other storms on Jupiter going on at any time but what about Saturn what about Neptune Uranus I mean these are other gas gas planets we never hear about storms on on them and you always and the pictures that we see of pictures we see especially of like the ones that are way out there Neptune and Uranus it's just like these hazy balls no detail you said something to that just I'd never heard before and I want to know more about Saturn ring rain right yeah and to get to your point about the other storms first the at least on Saturn there was a giant storm that appeared and went in 2011 I think yeah 2010 2011 it's sort of it appeared out of nowhere in the North Pole there's loads of cool images online of that and it basically went around the planet until it ate its own tail and then it dissipated yeah so that's a very transient storm I'd love to be able to observe that as well now but unfortunately it's not as regular as spot but Saturn's ring rain yeah that was something in 2013 that was also published in nature by a team and we found out that essentially there's a water influx from the rings to the planet and if you picture let's see a magnetic field around Saturn would be kind of these C-shaped lines going from pole from the North Pole to the South Pole like a bar magnet kind of iron filing experiment and then it looks like there's water coming from the rings and following those field lines and going into the planet and so we could observe that yeah there we go and yeah so the is a comedy one in the middle there which was done for us which I like very much and yeah we think that there's water coming from the rings and following that half the reason we think that is because when we looked at Saturn in a similar way that we looked at Jupiter just now it turned out that there was a decrease in the emission of the molecule we're looking at and it was very specific it was a very specific latitude and longitude sorry very specific latitude it was at all longitudes and yeah it turns out that when you map that that latitude to the rings it comes out in a very theoretical location of water outflow from the rings if that makes sense wow so so it's Saturn is literally sucking the water out of the rings pretty much yeah so there's a bit in there was a section in the rings where the centrifugal force outwards matches the gravitational force inwards meaning there's no net movement of the water it's a stuck so any any flick by anything like a micrometer right we'll just cause it to follow the field line and go into the planet it's so fascinating that that you can have that kind of a dwell point where the centrifugal force or centripetal force matches the magnetic force perfectly balancing it that's right yeah that you would you would have things moving at such a at such a rate that the things we're moving at such a rate that you would have that kind of a of a balance yeah it's quite amazing there was hints of it with the voyages spacecraft as it went through so there's a paper on it in the 80s to they looked at haze actually there was a sudden drop in the haze in a very specific place and so that discovered it in the lower the low altitudes near the surface of the planet and we discovered it really high again about about 600 miles away this time here from the surface so most of my work as you can tell is is really fine on the planet it's not very deep it's kind of deep right so getting to your other area of interest there's also news out this week from NASA talking about Juno and the pictures that just came back from its most recent past and looking at the Aurora on Jupiter and one of the things that I thought was really interesting about this and I don't know I'd love to hear your take on it is the fact that the they did not find hexagonal hexagonal rotational forces as they do at the poles of Saturn yeah that's right it's a really interesting point I was also looking out for that I remember a preliminary image coming out and I thought hmm no hexagon yet but yeah it turns out that hexagons aren't so I mean circles are everywhere in nature you see them everywhere spheres are sort of everywhere in nature do you get used to that hexagons also are in nature here and there you see it in honeycombs that bees make you see it in the Giants causeway sort of rock formations in Northern Ireland and you also see it manifest as cool patterns on in Saturn's North Pole in fact the South Pole of Saturn doesn't have that kind of hexagon pattern and turns out this has been simulated in a lab as well if you have a giant sphere of fluid and spin it up you can have it you can make your own hexagon pattern on the top you can also have octagons and things like that and so it's really just a critical sort of velocity here is critical velocities that cause that and it looks like sadly Jupiter doesn't have that same one I mean I'd love it if all planets have these hexagons but because it's neat looking it's different you don't expect a rotational object to have a hexagon I mean all my experience suggests whirlpools are more similar to circles or ellipses than a hexagon right that's true yeah yeah it's very fascinating field hopefully we get some probes out to look a little bit in more detail at Uranus and Neptune too that's I mean when there's none in there isn't any in a planning stage we're looking at a long time to say 20 30 20 40 something like that yeah but hey we're going to Proxima Centauri so yeah that's right yeah I look forward to that right so what were you recently looking using the Juno probes measurements for with the measuring the aurora right yeah so we've been working with the infrared team so the southern aurora that they showed a picture of before that's taken with the Jupiter infrared aurora or gyran for short and that's yeah so that was we worked with those people for a while there it is yeah and yeah so we've been doing preliminary work for them to try and figure out exactly what the temperatures are around there although you know gets a far better look at it because we can't really see underneath the planet but it's so well from here so what we're hoping to do in future in the next year or so is is make global maps of the entire aurora and show what temperatures there are from it this is something that is slightly difficult for this instrument to do because when the spacecraft passes over the pole it's only measuring of quite a thin swath of data each time so every few weeks it will go over the north pole and it will take sort of a very thin band of data and so it's difficult for them to sort of come up with a average picture so we're gonna have a full map from earth you know have much better resolution though something like 100 kilometers per pixel whereas we've got about 600 kilometers per pixel and yeah so we're hoping to see unprecedented detail with Juno. Absolutely and how are you putting together so you're using earth-based instruments and then there's Juno that is right there basically right there next to Jupiter how do you put how are you putting the data together to be able to kind of put put together a picture that's a extraordinarily pertinent question to the next couple of weeks we're submitting a proposal I was actually looking over the exact orbits and narrowing it down to about seven nights that we can observe at the same time that the spacecraft is observing so the spacecraft is going to pass over these magnetic field lines and at the same time we're going to measure the planet and so we'll tell you what temperature is while they tell you what was actually what what particles what energies were going down into the planet so we're hoping to together figure out what is going on in the North Pole there's a lot of mysteries in that area we know roughly why there's this sort of oval shaped aurora but the stuff that's inside is really mysterious and the only real way to get to the bottom of that is to fly a spacecraft over it which is just great because Juno is doing that exact same thing the first polar orbits of that planet ever so hopefully that solves all the problems so yeah so you'll have you'll have both measurements to to compare with as though they you were getting both in real time and see what comes of it awesome this is so this is so interesting I mean it's amazing to me I mean people have said it in the chat room as well but I mean we're you know we're looking outside our solar system and planning you know there are people who have the 100-year spaceship idea there are other people who are trying to plan little tiny spacecraft to go to Proxima Centauri or you know one of the close stars all these let's go outside of our solar system but like you said we don't have a mission going to Uranus or Neptune anytime soon we don't have anything planned until for you know like the next decade really there's nothing there's nothing coming and there's so much that we don't know and Juno is gonna get crushed to death by the magnetic field and all of the radiation that's coming from Jupiter you know Cassini Cassini is amazing it's been doing amazing work at Saturn for years but I mean we know nothing and we had these little glimpses of these outer planets and it's so neat it's surprising yeah how I sort of disparate the data is and and really the things that I've learned in my career are just how big space is it really it's kind of awe-inspiring and depressing at the same time you know especially when you look at how long it takes to get to planets and then there's the planning and everything like that but when it gets there it's amazing like the Juno spacecraft stuff coming out it's mind-blowing actually yeah all right so yeah Juno Juno launched I had to Google it August 5th of 2011 right yeah so so this is and this is the thing too and I always I always think about this every time we're getting data from any probe that's out there how much how much our technology changes in that amount of time how many more precise instruments we might have been able to to load this thing with if we could just build it and put it there in the same day you know if we have to use all of technology all of our today technology to load up the probe with how much more information we might be able to get and so that sort of dictates that we should be sending something right on the hill heels of we get this thing there I mean this would be the perfect time really to start the planning for the next launch is okay we got all this data we see what we would have liked to have been able to see better we can we now have technology of things we didn't even know to look for that we that this is you know that we've gained the information from this probe that we want to look further into and we should be able to put something right on the heels of anything that's up there and I think this is this is the time some with the you know the scientific community needs to lobby for that project right on the heels of getting this data saying aha here's what we've learned here's what we need to do to take the next step and see more and not that hopefully somebody is working I assume that there's a somebody somewhere yeah yeah there's a lot of some buddies right yeah so interesting point about the latest technology going up there is that they actually use quite old technology a lot of the time so they use they probably use tried and tested radiation hard materials radiation hard computer systems so they're usually pretty old I haven't got anything to quote on that but I know that some of the stuff on some of the new spacecraft is it's got to be decades old at this point so they yeah they already send old stuff up there but if it works it works but yeah I'm certainly looking forward to new spacecraft going up but one of the good reasons that to be a ground-based astronomer is that you do have this technology immediately and you can look at the planets well as long as it's nighttime anytime you want and so you didn't have to wait too long for a spacecraft but as we said before it's difficult to sort of figure out everything about the planet without going there really yeah so what are thinking about being a ground-based observer of these outer planets I mean we're not talking about little telescopes that you look at a little you're not looking at a little spot of light in the distance what kind of what are what are your observatories what are you using and what are you looking forward to being built is there anything being built that you'll be you're looking forward to using yeah so for our work we use mostly the sort of bread and butter of our work is the NASA infrared telescope facility and that's in Hawaii on monarchy about a few miles high to avoid a lot of the absorption by the atmosphere of earth so we don't like it atmosphere always gets in the way it's nice to breathe it but it destroys our data really and so we build them on mountains and we also use the 10 meter tech telescope so it's about 30 or feet in size I forgot to mention the previous telescope was about three meters so about 10 feet I'm converting to feet a lot but yeah there's a couple of new telescopes being built one is the extremely rather European extremely large telescope the ELT very original name right the whole call it what it is it's just extremely large put themselves in the box like the 10 meter telescope fantastic that's a 10 meter telescope but when you're getting into the extremely the very big array the extremely large you're gonna have to keep adding to that to explain that it's larger they're really extremely huge bigger than before when we had a really big extremely large telescope tells but yeah that's right yeah we always so this is the next one the extremely large yeah well there's so there's two at the same time really coming up there's one that's in Hawaii that's gonna be in Hawaii that's the TMT which is the 30 meter telescope and the ELT ELT is gonna be in Chile and that's a 40 meter telescope and I understand it from the people that work on those teams that the the amount of light collecting power they have will actually be roughly similar because of some technical reasons that are technical and I don't understand them but yeah there's there was a funny one which I wish was built but it wasn't it's called the overwhelmingly large telescope and it became true to its name true to its name again call the thing what it is it became too overwhelmingly large to build yeah the overwhelmingly large budget required was not that's exciting so that this is really just fascinating stuff I'm excited to learn more as you get more information about about Jupiter's aurora and from Juno and also your observations and also about this great the great red spot before it disappears thank you so much for joining us tonight yeah and if people want to follow any of your your work is what's the best place the best places that they can find you probably Twitter where I spam stuff that no one likes yeah I have a website but it's on my Twitter too yeah I post the latest things on there when I go out to observe for example I'll post some pictures what's going on your Twitter is physics J that's right at physics J yeah Twitter right and then your website is James Donahue James oh Donahue.com yes yeah absolutely fantastic well we won't keep you awake any longer so you can get you left although as an as someone interested in astronomy I'm sure you're used to staying up late that's right for those observations but get your rest in between I will thank you thank you so much and on that everyone we are going to move to a short break but we will be back in a few moments with more this week in science we've got science to come all sorts of stories don't you hey everyone don't forget to head out to the Portland mini maker fair which is this weekend September 10th and 11th from about 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at UMSI the Science and Technology Museum here in Portland Oregon I'm gonna be there talking about podcasting doing a little bit of maybe live hang outing hanging out podcasting all sorts of stuff so drop by this Saturday to see me Paul Colligan will also be heading the booth that we have our table on Sunday so if you are in Portland Oregon drop by OMSI this weekend for the Portland mini maker fair lots of cool maker things and one part of this weekend science one part come on by twist also has merchandise that you might enjoy head over to twist org to buy some of our stuff we now have a link on our website goes directly to our Zazzle store so if you go to twist org you will be able to click on our Zazzle store link and start buying stuff that has the twist logo and blazing doll over it and some of Blair's original art twist is also supported by listeners just like you your donations pay for our hosting bandwidth contractors we need 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you know who you are you are listening to twist and we thank you for your support for being part of our audience we really could not do this without you and we are back with more this week in science yeah I got some science stories do a first up I have a story you remember the EM drive or the M drive so it's supposed to be this super sci-fi propulsion system back in the fourth of the small shooting yeah we're supposed to be microwave radiation inside of a canister that shoots back and forth and moves the hole and just got to move it one bit further that way then this way and then it should keep doing that yeah so people who have been working on this this is not a new idea it was originally proposed by someone named Shire and he's he came up with the idea a long time ago but more recently NASA's Eagle works team has been working on the idea there's also a Chinese team at Northwestern Polytechnic there's also a company called a can a ink so anyway they're all working on this propulsion system which there are Shire has published a few papers and shown in his papers that it this is theoretically plausible idea however people have still been like what it doesn't work and Shire just says well if you don't get it then you don't know physics but anyway the idea is that this could be a propulsion system over long distances that you know we're little bits of force add up to create a lot of thrust over time so it could be something also that's fantastic because it doesn't have to use a lot of fuel you have a very small amount of fuel to get the system going and then it's the bouncing of the particles back and forth the radiation back and forth that keeps it driving forward so you don't have to worry about massive amount of weight or space in a craft to be taken up by fuel and so it's a really exciting idea to many who are interested in long distance space travel and there are some who even say that if the forces prove and this proves to be possible that this could even be something that could work in cars and airplanes and drones here on the planet so that is I think a little bit more questionable yeah anyway it seems like this is this is this is a you don't want the influence of a gravitational body it would seem to make this function yes so there was a paper out of the NASA group that they've been trying to get out and there are rumors Jose Rodol has claimed but it was deleted from the website where he claimed it he claimed that their paper has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication but nobody's been able to confirm it yet so we're waiting for the paper to come out meanwhile can a ink there's a guy the CEO named Guido Feta Guido Feta has invented the can a drive which is based on a very similar idea and he has announced that he is going to put his can a drive on a 6 u cube sat and that it's going to be sent up into orbit it'll it's going to be it's going to stay on station for six months it'll be it'll go it'll stay there for six months and that it would be tested so all right so here's I mean there's a test coming whether or not it works and I'm building things and this is the rumor this is the stuff this is what I'm just reporting on what's happening we have papers being peer reviewed and published and we have something that this guy says he's gonna put in a cube set right and and as I have proved many many times on this show I am not a physicist but but the only thing that that occurs to me in this is if it's in orbit it's it's the misnomer of the zero gravity right you're free falling with gravity you have Earth's gravity affecting even though you know astronauts can float around there's there they're not in zero gravity there and a whole lot of gravity they're just falling at that rate and there's and there's atmospheric drag so all these things so this is the idea is that the idea is that this technology would help this satellite stay in its station it would it would be part of the propellant to keep this CubeSat satellite in its station it would it would be working to counteract atmospheric drag and gravity right I just wonder if it's that start because it what it what it seems like to me this idea is it's a commutative commutative commutative cumulative I still can't say the word thank you Kiki for articulating it adds up the effect it's like a compound interest you know you think you got a good deal and then all of a sudden your one penny interest turned into owing hundreds of thousands of dollars and just a matter of two years like like that would build up and build up the little bit this direction but a little bit more that way just a little bit more as it propels would sort of in a away from gravity or outside of well outside of heavy influence of gravity at least allow this thing to pick up steam as it goes and then how you slow it down nobody knows but allow it to to do that over a long period of time and it can get up into increasing increasing increasingly greater rates of speed I I'm skeptical that this experiment work and I would therefore I would therefore I would and I'm sure people know there's people who know much more about this than I do but if it should fail I don't think anybody should point to it and say aha that doesn't work because I think this is the wrong laboratory possibly right if that's very possible but it's what I think is is interesting is that there are scientists physicists engineers who are working to build these engines and Guido can a is not the only one the Chinese and shoyer himself are building their own drives and there are also there's all sorts of commentary on it if you go to NASA's plate space flight calm there's an online discussion where you can find technical commentary on it if you're into that kind of thing and additionally there's a guy out of Germany who's built a an M drive that'll fit in a pocket cube Q sat and he's looking for crowdfunding to raise the money to do it but then while people are building these the theoreticians are still saying this propellant less thruster paradigm doesn't match with physics yet it doesn't work with conservation of energy thermodynamics and there are some who've come up with ideas right the University of Plymouth researcher my like Michael McCullough in the UK says that it can maybe be solved using what's called quantized inertia based on an unproven phenomenon called unre radiation and then a wades yeah and popular mechanics popular mechanics has also reported that a Finnish team recently published a peer-reviewed paper pres proposing that it could work the theoretics of how it could work based on an unseen exhaust of paired photons that cancel out each other's visible effects but still have momentum so into the weeds we go so I think I think I'm gonna give you a note for the aftershow Kiki we should find one of these people who's working in this direction to talk to actually that I never mind the note to the aftershow I think I just said it you just said it that you put it out there sounds great some point not right away I might want to wait but yeah so anyway enthusiastic and fascinated by the idea I'm dry let's see theoretical propulsion propellant list propulsion system that might just be getting a test very soon cool other news I just had I know people have probably been talking about this all week long but it happened after the show last week and this is a topic that we have discussed on twist for years the FDA has banned 19 substances specific compounds that have been used by manufacturers of hand soap banned them triclosan triclocarbon these are antibacterial carb compounds that we have been saying for years we've been bringing evidence after evidence after evidence we've been talking about it and finally the FDA said we don't really have enough evidence for usefulness of these things and maybe even harm causing the opposite so right so and it's this is actually this this revelation is this pivot if you will by the FDA it's all thanks to you the minions the listening audience for for sending links to this week in science to people who happen to be in the FDA you did this we're getting them to finally listen to the show now they went oh really that's going on let's look at it so thank you minions this was this was all your grassroots that's right that's right and manufacturers have a year to phase out the use of all these compounds so beyond having to just not buy these products within a year these products just won't be on shelves so awesome it's a bad time yay and my final intro story magnets in the brain well not really magnets but magnetic nanoparticles of magnet magnetite magnetite nanoparticles our brain our neurons produce them and they've been associated with the tangles linked to Alzheimer's disease and in the brain when they found these magnetite nanoparticles in past research they're kind of angular little chunks nanoparticle sized chunks so it's not really visible with the naked eye but these are little chunks of magnetite in the neurons that somehow increase the effects of the tangles to in in Alzheimer's disease so the tangles on their own cause Alzheimer's but when the magnetite particles are there it's like an extra added oomph to the development of the disease so a new study has just found that there are similar particles in the brain neurons of the brain that come from the environment they don't know exactly how they get there but their shape which is spherical in nature kind of looks like magnetite particles nanoparticles that are found in polluted air and so the idea is that they come from say carbon processing processing of of mineralic or other products in industry and so the spherical shape is from the high heat that they are the compounds in these products are often put through in industry so anyway the problem now the answers that have not been addressed by this study are exactly how the particles get into the neurons of the brain because we have the blood-brain barrier and you're not supposed to inhale stuff and have it get into your brain that's just that's not supposed to happen so how is it happening the researchers believe that the nanoparticles are entering through neurons in the olfactory bulb so literally going in your nose running into neurons and go going directly through the olfactory bulb into the brain they haven't proven it yet but that would be a plausible method or route of entry the second question is do the spherical particles have the same toxic effects Alzheimer affecting result that the angular nanoparticles do that is not answered either so we don't that we found these particles they look like they come from the environment but we don't know how they get in the brain and we don't know exactly what they're doing once they're there but if pollution is putting stuff in your brains boo yeah probably not making year braining power greater by doing so I don't know and I mean if I can navigate through the earth's magnetic fields as a result of this dude I'm in it's gonna be my new superpower come on right so like 50 years from now 100 years from now nobody uses GPS anymore mm-hmm we can thank you industrial pollution navigation I just plotted a course in my brain I'm gonna follow that magnetic field that way to that large emanation of magnetic waves over there I'll be fine yeah yeah yeah yeah so the brains that they used came from people who lived in urban environments mainly but they also didn't look at comparing they didn't look at comparing brains of people from more rural environments which would also help to give an idea of you know is it really coming from pollution in urban pollution as opposed to general environmental yeah yeah exactly so there are many studies to come in this direction we say call that job security that's right as long as the grants are there that's for sure this is this week in science just in what you got Terzan five is a fossil you talk a lot about fossils on the show and when we do we are typically referring to bits of calcified bones and impression made in a stone or even some sort of intricate structure left by microbes but fossil I'm talking about is about as far from the familiar type of fossils it gets like really far like 19,000 light years away far for this fossil remnant is of our own Milky Way galaxy no the galaxy isn't a dead thing on a bit of rock but is what in its old age and its whispers this is not the last within our galaxy star systems there is a globular cluster of stars actually there's a whole lot of these things but there's one that's unlike any other that we have seen so far the stars in the cluster didn't form all together some seem similar to the most ancient stars within our galaxy and some are just kind of like newer ish stars so why this is weird like normally there's like star the okay stars start to form and then that's it right stars in this okay so this team what did they do they scour data with the scientific brillo pad from the advanced camera for surveys and the wide field camera 3 on board Hubble as well as a whole bunch of ground-based telescopes they found compelling evidence that there are two distinct kinds of stars and ters on five which not only differ in elements that they contain but have an age gap of roughly seven billion years wait what seven billion year right so this is right like okay so typically when conditions are right for star formation they are right for star formation so stars are formed and then the conditions pretty much suck after that right they stopped forming stars they used up whatever gases and mass was available in the area to make these stars and they don't just suddenly find more lying around later right how are you gonna where are you gonna find that yeah I've got it in my galactic back pocket and that's kind of what this is this is a galactic back pocket right the age they say is the age of the two populations indicate star formation process in ters on five was not continuous was dominated by do distinct bursts of star formation and this is in the quotes from David Masari who's the co-author of the store study from INAF Italy and the University of Gogan gun Netherlands says this requires the ters on five ancestor to have large amounts of gas for a second generation of stars and to be quite massive at least a hundred million times the mass of the Sun it's usual properties it's unusual properties make ters on five the ideal candidate for a living fossil from the early days of the Milky Way current theories on galaxy formation assume that vast clumps of gas and stars interacted to form the primordial bulge of the Milky Way merging and dissolving in the process while the properties of ters on five are in common they're very similar to that stellar population that can be found in the galactic bulge which is tightly packed into the central region of the Milky Way it's just sort of the center it's the most dense portion of the Milky Way similarities could make this a fossilized relic of galactic formation representing one of the early earliest building blocks of the Milky Way how how what sort of a representation of what took place in that dense bulge in the very beginning we think some remnants of these gaseous clumps could remain relatively undisrupted and keep existing embedded within the galaxy the galactic back pocket explains friend just go ferraro University of Bologna Italy who's the lead author of the study such galactic fossils allow astronomers to reconstruct an important piece of the history of our Milky Way for ters on five to accomplish this isolated second wave of star formation it must have had the kind of mass scientists suspect existed in the bulge during the early galaxy formation some 12 billion years ago somehow ters on five managed to survive being disrupted all this time maintaining that mass and getting to have the second go at star formation or the rest of the galaxy around it had sort of moved on characteristics of ters on five resemble those detected in the giant clubs that we see at the star forming galaxies and see in star forming galaxies a high red ship that's not our Milky Way that's other galaxies suggesting that similar assembling processes occurred in the local and at the distant universe of the epoch of the galaxy formation says ferraro so this discovery not only gives us some insights into our own Milky Way star formation but could help us better understand what we're seeing in galaxies far far away that's awesome yeah really neat it's sort of like just a little bit of a little bit of under cooked you know you click your low for Brad and there's that one little doughy part right somehow managed to sort of and that's kind of what this is representing right and then if it were you know you just add it to heat a little bit longer and that doughy part will cook up a little and that's what happened and then next story is researched by rice university earth scientists suggest that virtually all of earth's life giving carbon isn't native to the earth it came from space not aliens no but and maybe not that really far away of a space new idea is that 4.4 billion years ago earth crashed or was crashed into by another baby planet something similar to mercury perhaps this is a long debated geological question how did carbon based life develop on earth given that most of the plants carbon should have either boiled away in the planet super hot surfaced early days or it should have become locked into the earth's core answer might be they came later not a lot later but just a bit later that carbon might have shown up or in this case give a reason for the absorption rate of our earth's core this is according to das gupta who co-authored the study does get this lab specializes in recreating high pressure and high temperature conditions that exist deep inside earth and other rocky planets we've talked about this before his team squeezes rock and hydraulic pressures that can simulate conditions about 250 miles below the earth's surface or at the core mantle boundary of smaller planets like mercury cody voice even before this paper we had published several studies that showed that even if carbon did not vaporize into space when the planet was largely molten it would end up at the metallic core of our planet because iron-rich alloys there have a strong affinity for carbon so our iron-rich core would have just sort of sucked the carbon down and the rest of it would have turned away so there's not enough carbon then in our mantle let alone our crust for all the carbon that we see running around and being life so that our iron-rich core wouldn't be like I'll take it up and then maybe I'll spit it back out again because there is you know a convection current there's lots of there is no there is in the mantle at least in the mantle to the crust in the atmosphere yes to the core not so much and that was the problem is that is that that iron core should have taken away everything that we have to play with so because yeah earth's core is mostly iron makes about a third of planets mass earth's silicate mantle accounts for the other two-thirds 1500 miles below the earth's surface and up earth's crust atmosphere it's 1% hardly worth mentioning even though that's where we exist for our entire lives and late 2013 that scooped this team began thinking about unconventional ways to address this issue they decided to conduct experiments to gauge how sulfur or silicon might alter the affinity of iron for carbon at the core and their idea for this they didn't just pull these out of the hat this was from some of our neighbors so Mercury has a which is silicon I think Eric Mercury is the silicone rich sulfur and then Mars is sulfur rich right so they used sort of these two different cores to sort of get an idea of what might have happened here we thought we definitely need to break away from the conventional core composition of just iron and nickel and carbon that's what they recall so it began exploring very sulfur rich and silicon rich alloys in part because core Mars is thought to be sulfur rich and the core mercury is thought to be relatively silicon rich it was a compositional spectrum that seemed relevant if not for our own planet then definitely the scheme of all the terrestrial planetary bodies that we have in our solar system so they did a whole bunch of experiments in their awesome high temp pressure chamber thingy and experiments revealed that carbon could be excluded from the core and regulated to the silicate mantle as it is if the iron alloys in the core were rich in either silicon or sulfur so if we are right so it makes sense what we see in the mantle makes sense if our core has a lot more sulfur or a lot more silicon if we're a lot more mercury like or if we're a lot more Mars like at our core and not and not so solely we think in the iron nickel thing at the core then it would make sense okay so the key data revealed how the partitioning of carbon between the metallic and silicate portions of the terrestrial planets varies is function of the variables like temperature pressure and sulfur or silicon content anyway what they did was they did a bunch of these experiments and and the conclusion was when they look at ratios uh when they ran their their experiments and sort of looked at what they would expect to see for the ratios of sulfur and carbon in mantle the the dynamic that made sense was a silicone rich core and so one scenario that would sort of make all of this work is that an embryonic planet like mercury which had already formed a silicon rich core collided with and was absorbed by earth says that's uh that's because it's massive body the dynamics would work in a way that the core of that planet would go directly down to the core of our planet carbon rich mantle would mix with earth's mantle so when are they when are they saying that something like this would have happened would this have been more point billion years ago so this is even before the formation of the moon yeah this is this oh so what are we yeah are we looking at the is this like the the the planetary the planet like small planetoid that ran into earth and created the moon or is this the planetoid that is something different so that's a fantastic question and if it's different could we possibly find evidence in the moon in samples of right i i bet you i bet you absolutely so so this is the sort of thing like the the moon is about that old or about as old as we are but the material that forms the moon doesn't all have to get there once either so a big impact like this you get lots of the planetary detritus a little bit of construction cleanup on isle orbit and there you go so they need to do some more work on this there's some other the volatile elements that aren't fixed by this however there is no amount of asteroid hits meteor hits that could account for they think they've got a pretty good working dynamic for a silicon rich core allowing the amount of carbon in the mantle currently interesting interesting makes sense it does make sense they could probably argue it so Blair's not here obviously so we won't be talking about animals finally a week without animal stories and i got i've got a couple of animals oh you did have you brought some okay just a couple not a lot are you gonna play the theme song no okay because then there's no it's not photo no jazz hands or pointed you squirrels or anything like that but i'm really sorry that Blair is not here this week because great news about the panda have you heard no i have my the giant panda is no longer endangered oh i think i did hear this they're like actually they've become a pest they're like raccoons well maybe they're just living in people's attics coming down at night going through the garbage maybe not everywhere no not not that not that running through them on country roads yeah so they had a 17 percent rise in the population in the decade up to 2014 and a nationwide census in china found that there were 1864 giant pandas in the wild they have been downgraded to vulnerable as opposed to endangered as a result the number of panda reserves in china have increased to 67 these reserves now protect nearly two-thirds of all wild pandas and so it's really the conservation efforts that have been taking place that are allowing pandas to thrive ish so there there is concern though that over uh you know coming decades the next 20 or so 20 or 30 years that there will be more people encroaching on the bamboo habitats and so this kind of conservation is going to be very important but even though the panda we talk about the panda not doing so great not being good at things but we joke the pandas getting better yeah but this is going to be hugely expensive and cause a great deal before a station because the the world wildlife uh what the world wildlife they've got the panda is on all of the letterhead and all of it you know and if it's just you know not endangered anymore but like just it's marginal they got to get they got to pick something out no they can now potentially be uh since it is vulnerable they can potentially continue using the panda because it is an example of how conservation efforts are enabling the recovery of an endangered population success story it's a success story so it is now going to be not just a you know what what was once an icon of what humans are doing wrong in the world it'll be an icon of what we can do right and another icon in that way is or are humpback whales in other great recovery news uh the humpback species the humpback whale is also off of the endangered species list in a very exciting turn of events not all of the populations those here in the pacific northwest are not doing great but nine of the 14 populations those that winter in hawaii the west indies and australia are no longer endangered or need endangered species act protection those that breed off of mexico feed off of california the pacific northwest are going to be listened listed continue to be listed as threatened so it's very exciting that humpback whales that this is two examples of pretty iconic species the panda humpback whale in which conservation efforts what people are have been trying to do shows a really great moment of progress i mean these are just two species of the thousands hundreds of thousands on the planet um but it is very exciting and then you know because i gotta keep it even two steps forward and two steps back elephants are still having issues this i did hear about this is it's getting much worse it is getting much much worse and uh in both of the stories related to elephants this week poaching is what is driving the massive decline in species population numbers and so there was a great african or great elephant census in which uh it was a very coordinated attempt to it was funded by microsoft billionaire paul alan it used a small fleet of planes to find and count savannah elephants and so they're very very specifically we're looking for african savannah elephants um in their estimates they found that there is a decline of 30 percent in the population based on poaching between 2007 and 2014 wow that's just just i mean uh that's seven years if you if that trajectory were uh you know of poaching we're just to say the same that means 14 years from now pretty much no elephants all gone that kind of trajectory i mean right now we're looking at uh the number of elephants that they estimate at across the african countries that they looked at 352 271 elephants so many many more elephants than there are giant pandas in the world but 144 000 animals were lost in just seven years because of the poaching way too much it's way too much and that's just that's ivory trade where is that ivory trade going to we need to shut this down completely who's not on board with banning ivory yet yeah i i uh that's a difficult one to solve i'll not be a market for this yeah um and the additional story the african forest elephants are suffering even greater losses their population has shrunk by 60 percent since 2002 and uh these elephants part of the problem is that it takes 20 years for females to become of reproductive status 20 years so if at any point a female elephant is um is killed before that 20 years before reaching reproductive age it takes an individual completely out of the possibility and then um it's several years for uh of parenting for each each offspring they only give birth once every five to six years after that they're very long-lived animals um and so their their population growth rate is a lot smaller a lot slower which means that any poaching effects are much more heavy heavily felt in this forest elephant population so unfortunately it's the tusks they want the tusks yeah yeah cocky in the chatroom says we need poacher poaching well you know um it it's tricky but there that is sort of what uh the leakies were doing in kenya is they were they were putting out observers who could respond to poaching efforts and look for poachers but it's you know regardless regardless of where you look in this world you know there's there's currently a thing with algae right now algae or not algae but seaweed seaweed harvesting is going has gone global it's this this thing that we was pointed to because it's like hey you know instead of over fishing on your island areas you could just harvest the the seaweed that's out there and you could make the same kind of income so preserve the fish but now there could be a potential of algae over harvesting going on in areas and it also seems to be then you know you have this production thing and then you've got it's an economic thing it goes to where ivory is going it goes to where those fish are going it goes to where the out uh the seaweed is going it goes to where the ivory trade ends and you have to shut that down if you completely shut down the ivory and buyer uh there won't be any interest in poaching ivory because this it's a financial thing so you're getting rid of this poacher that poacher as long and in what you might be doing is making it more lucrative for the next and the next so yeah definitely we need to protect the elephants but we also have to get an international type effort behind preventing yeah and another area in which uh you know poaching is the big uh the the big force decreasing these populations but also human encroachment is as well so areas of conservation are where these animals are thriving so uh so places where we have preserved land specifically for these animals to live with no concern about people coming in and cutting down trees or growing plants or you know that if the elephants don't have to worry about it then they do a lot better and they're also very dynamic species that are great for tourism for the you know just people come and look at them and so maintaining the elephants would be great for these african countries who can do it um so those are my animal stories do you have any more stories uh wait i do uh did you talk about filet though this is a i have not talked about filet it's a story i saw but i didn't uh i didn't read the the i kind i was just like oh they found it they did i mean that's really the big news filet the little lander associated with the rosetta craft that was orbiting the comet 67 p garat cherimov garasamenco filet was the lander that went down and was supposed to land on the comet and take measurements and communicate with the rosetta craft that was an orbit around that is an orbit around the comet um however it landed funny and in its funny landing it bounced a bit kind of flew for a couple of minutes longer and then ended up landing in a crevice somewhere kind of turned at a funny angle in the shade that it couldn't really collect solar energy that it needed and it couldn't really talk to rosetta and so people weren't really sure exactly what it where it was they guessed in this kind of tenor hundred meter area and 100 meter square area they figured where it was but uh they hadn't found it until this week there are reports that um rosetta got into a spot over the comet and they've been looking and they found it and it looks like the Loch Ness monster it really does it's so nice how similar it is to that old photo yeah but you can see there's a a bright spot that kind of sticks up and that's one of the legs of the lander there's another leg that's kind of stuck down in the crack and i'm falling and i can't get up yeah so that's that's what happened but this is like our first piece of space junk on a comet yeah and we found it so we have uh the researchers the big deal with this is that they have confirmed what they thought and now everything that happened makes sense they actually can calculate back and say okay this is exactly why it couldn't communicate with rosetta and this is exactly why we did see it communicate with rosetta for a couple of days in June and July when there was a little bit more solar solar energy coming in um and then why it went dark again so there are explanations and everybody likes a good explanation right yeah it's all making sense you need to next time talk to the people who put on the robo games right if your robot gets flipped you need like a lever or some sort of mechanism to flip the stuff back over again because how do you not plan for that eventuality i landed on my back now you're a dead bug not a robot not a robot right yeah um and my final story is about social neurons got some they have some neurons in our brain and so we've talked about mirror neurons before but there have really not been a lot of studies it's the evidence for mirror neurons in human brains is scarce most of the recording has been done in monkeys and so and a lot of what the evidence we have talked about in people it comes from fmri recording and going oh that kind of looks like that area is active when a person in an fmri machine is watching a video of somebody else doing something because you can't be having your head fmri while you're actually interacting with somebody because we don't have that technology so it's all kind of fake so the only like hard evidence not only but the real hard evidence we have for these mirror neurons comes from recordings of neurons in awake behaving monkeys there are a handful of studies in humans one a few years ago i think it was like 2012 or 2014 um some researchers uh recorded from the brains of epilepsy patients in a particular area of the brain and they found that yes when um when people were shown things happening with and other people doing the same thing um that these neurons turned on but the the neurons that they could access in the human brain were not in the same area as what had been seen in monkeys and so there's still this question of like well do we have mirror neurons in the same places do we have as many mirror neurons do we have more mirror neurons than monkeys do we don't really have we don't really understand it so new study kind of exciting um finding that this is in nature communications again this is now studying um the brains of epileptic patients who have come in for epilepsy epilepsy surgery and who said yeah sure record from my brain while you're doing the surgery that's great um so they recorded from three areas of the brain they looked at the amygdala they also looked at the prefrontal cortex and they looked at an area called the rostral anterior cingulate cortex and this is um the anterior cingulate cortex has been identified from fmri studies and from lesion studies as an area of the brain that's kind of thought to like give us our sense of self our sense of self-esteem compared to others and is some as some researchers francis crick for one has even hypothesized that it may be the seat of consciousness um and so idea is okay maybe this area of the brain is going to respond differently from say the amygdala or the prefrontal cortex another thing that this area of the brain is thought to do is error recording so kind of prediction expectation mismatch so if you think something's going to happen and what you think doesn't happen the anterior cingulate cortex responds right so they got in there and they gave these people a card game okay and they had two decks of cards and they had to basically come up with rules to determine which was the better set of cards and so the people played this little card game and they came up with their individual rules and they had their hands of cards um and so the cards either gave ten dollars or a hundred dollars in virtual winnings or subtracted the same amount and in one deck 70 percent of the cards were winning cards and the other only 30 percent were and so they did trial and error and they figured out which one was the good good deck which one was the bad deck but then they had the opportunity to observe videos of other players using you know you'd think the same decks of cards where they were allowed to think they were the same decks of cards and so the virtual players chose from these decks and then so it was basically the the people the epilepsy patients were able to kind of predict okay I think that's the good deck or I think that's the bad deck and then watch what happened with the virtual players and so they made predictions and their predictions were getting better and they looked at the neurons were firing and when they were firing the researcher says the actual signal that record is the action potential this is arguably a ground truth in the brain it's really where biology becomes information it's just the informational signal and so they found that the firing in the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex stayed the same whether or not the player the the patient was playing themselves or watching the virtual player but it was the rostral interior cingulate cortex which upped its activity when the other player was having when the other player didn't match which we're doing it and so they're saying that this area of the brain is highly involved in this computation maybe more so than other structures and so that they the this area of the brain may be very important in encoding prediction errors and also in social learning and it might be a very important area of the brain for learning from other people yeah and this is the first time really that we have this that we have this kind of example of an area of the brain responding to errors or that that kind of prediction mismatch in the brain this area of the brain is very specific to that and this is kind of cool because we haven't recorded this before in the brain i know that's awesome the brain is looking to see if other brains do what we think the other brains are gonna do exactly are you gonna do what i think you're gonna do oh gosh you didn't my brain has to figure out how to calculate that didn't work why didn't that work yeah yeah my uh i guess i can make this the last story of uh my thing uh the grolier codex if you haven't heard of it it's an ancient document that is among the rarest books in the world has been regarded with skepticism since it was reportedly unearthed by looters Chiapas Mexico back in the 60s uh this is this is sort of basically this book this uh this codex which is a book codex's word for book it's pages of you know paper-ish things written stuff stuff it's supposed to explain things i mean if it's a codex it's supposed to mean something right yeah so this is the fourth and most recently i think found of sort of paper stuff from the uh from the minds right this is so weird so they didn't think this one was real right uh partly because it was sort of primitive and compared to the rest and also it was maybe the fact that was found by looters not by archaeologists and didn't just get turned over to scientists when the looters got a hold of it that looters sold it to somebody who made a very elaborate story about how he got it which probably didn't hold much water because he probably was had an outstanding you know if you find anything uh ancient text bring it to me and i will buy it it's probably what he put out i don't care where you get it right this is probably what happened we made up this story about having to go through all these channels to find this guy who said he had this thing and then he bought it from his story apparently was fishy uh and the book was shows up in the spring of 1971 at a new york city groillers club which is a private club and society of bibliophiles so this is uh uh it's named after the sort of book collectors club that it was first sort of made public at in 1971 it's for the manuscript itself it differed from authenticated codices in several market ways including relative lack of hieroglyphic text and the prominence of its illustrations so it drew the illustrations real big but there weren't that many of them and it wasn't very intricate uh so and this particular uh uh codex is it consists of there's 10 painted pages decorated with ritual Maya iconography and a calendar that charts the movements of the planet Venus so planet Venus was very important right so you know for for all that time until just uh recently this thing has been considered a fake it's been sitting in the basement i think somewhere in mexico uh some some university there like ah it'd be great if that was real but this you know it's probably just a forgery everybody says so so everybody assumes so so many really looked at it so they looked at it again and the gorillas composition it is from 13th century animal paper they looked at the thin red sketch lines underlying the paintings and the Maya blue pigments used in them and the authors assert that this is uh pretty tough for a 20th century forger he would have to know or guess so many different things uh to create this forgery to be this good he or she would have had to intuit the existence of and then perfectly render deities that had not yet been discovered in 1964 by classic western knowledge uh when any modern forgy that would have been completed they also would have had to correctly guess how to create Maya blue which was not synthesized in the laboratory until uh mexican conservation scientists did so in 1980s they would also have to have a wealth of range of resources at their fingertips and some cases require knowledge unavailable until just recently so uh it pretty much is they're authenticating this thing but not only authenticating it they're saying it is older than the other three codixes they have by a really long time uh and is sort of the reason it's sort of simpler is because it was very sort of all right this is you got you got the sun over here you got the you got venus over there it comes up in the morning you can see it we're gonna track it and also lightning's pretty cool it's like a very simple version of the religion and of course it built from there and became more elaborate so all the other codixes they found are sort of more detailed and more elaborate that they seem to be building on uh building on this more basic version interesting so this is like the the starter version we've got some ideas and then later versions things were added to and it got more and more complicated but it had to start somewhere it's like that it's like the early the early draft yeah yeah and it's also um it's also you know this is found in the cave this the calendars that were in this one would have outlived their usefulness by the time the other codixes were written so they needed to write more but one of the one of the things though is a lot of the what do you call conquistadors when they were when they were doing exploration didn't capture and preserve these uh but rather uh were under sort of religious edict to destroy them right so so there could have been much older uh and many more than we've gotten our hands on uh but they were purposely destroyed uh by the conquering Spanish right well if yeah the Spanish get rid of these ideas it's easier to uh copy conquistadors oh yeah i think they had a uh a religious uh edict in some respect to go and get rid of all false gods that they discovered and were destroying and uh the last story i guess i can sort of uh this is global warming global warming bad for agriculture uh this is sort of just talking about in general how we may have to be dealing with this very warm springs have been anomalies but this new analysis of climate model data shows increased frequency to nearly one in every three years by the end of this century spring of 2012 with it's summer like warmth brought plants out of dormancy and then had a lengthy freeze this was of course a nightmare scenario for many growers and it showed us a snapshot of what global warming might look like in the region of the northeast to come says toby alt assistant professor and earth and atmospheric sciences at cornell university basically uh when when we get these earlier springs it doesn't necessarily dictate that the growing season is just starting earlier because we could have free snaps we get all sorts of plants and animal life that come out of dormancy from winter that start to get going but then the timings don't match up perhaps with migration of birds or the migration of other insects and so we have chaos chaos so basically just having a warmer longer season maybe not so good for agriculture yeah not so good because it's a system nothing is isolated everything fits in the puzzle with everything else the multi-dimensional puzzle crops economic issues problems problems let's just try to keep things how they've been for the last yeah no ten thousand all right let's just status quo way to go status quo it's been working so far we're like i like a reliable dependable keep earth boring people keep earth boring that's right okay well you know what's not boring this show is not boring at all but it is time for us to be done so i hope that you 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in science this week in science it's ten o'clock you know what science you've got you've got you got this is this week in science after show. But because it's 10 o'clock I'm afraid that very soon I will have to go. Look, I rhyme. I really should be a songwriter. I should just give up on this science career, the science commentating career, become a songwriter. Maybe that's what I should do, right? You think? I got a future there. I'm looking at the fonts that Identity 4 found at SaintManouche.com. Fonts. These are good sciency fonts. Someone has used these fonts. Let's look at these fonts. These are good fonts. There's a font called Montalban. Montalban. Is that like from Fantasy Island? I am Ricardo Montalban. And this is Fantasy Island. What's the top one there? SaintManouche.com. Here I'll make it bigger and see more. Hello, chat room. What do we have? The final two to nine. Yeah, they're all star-tricky, sciency, but they're kind of sciency fonts. They're kind of nice. Down that. Oh, there's a Starfleet font. Oh, nice. Federation font. Also some Klingon, maybe? I don't know. I can't actually read it. No, but it's still cool. But it's still cool. Fonts that you can't read because that totally makes sense somewhere in the universe. Oh, SaintManouche. Fada, you're right. Yes, Star Trek Manouche. There we go. It's not SaintManouche. It's Star Trek Manouche. That's how my brain was working tonight. Thank you. No, stop science, says Identity Four. Yeah. No, stop. Keep science-ing. Have a good night, Eric in Seattle because you're probably not in Seattle right now. Manouche? Well, I like to pronounce it Manouche. Yeah, it's actually the way the French pronounce it. Manouche? Not Manouche? No. I still don't know what Blair's Manouche. Manouche. What's Blair's Manouche? Managerie. Managerie or Managerie? Managerie. Managerie. Managerie. It's halfway there. Managerie. Managerie. Managerie. It's a soft. It's not Managerie. It's Managerie. You've got to the G. Managerie. Managerie. I'll eventually get there. Oh, direct messages. Fada. What are you messaging? Oh yeah. There's no link in the run sheet on the Codex story. Do we? Yeah. Okay. I got it. You got it? Can you put it in there? I can fix it. I can fix it. Thank you. Oh wait, I forgot to take. I'm focused on my- And then it's also, yeah, not under last two, I did it. Okay. Um, my back is aching. We're out of space. There's no place to put it. Are there any, what? Just, you can insert a lot. Here, I'll insert a line for you. I don't know. I need two lines. You need two lines. And it was after the fillet, right? Yeah. Is that good? Yay. There are going to be three lines even. There you go. I've done it. Wow, make it. What are you doing there? Give you lines. I'll put lines in there. Strengths is asking if any twist shorts or other work are currently being edited for publication. So, I'm supposed to be working on a project right now that I'm really guilty about because I'm getting paid for it and I'm running way behind schedule. But school has started, which makes me happy. Oh, yes. So, I'm actually back to doing work again, which is nice. Can I tell you, I had a really rough start to school. You told, I remember you were talking a little about your experience, right? Thanks, Hot Rod. Yeah. Mine was different. My child had no problem going back to school. None? I was freaking out. You had the problems. I was. I was like, what do you mean we're supposed to leave? I was. Like the teachers sat me down at a little short table with a little tiny chair. I'm like, it's okay. Child, we'll be happy to see you again when the school day's over. Normally, we have this conversation with kids about the parents coming back, but your kid will come back. It's not forever. It's not going to be okay. Yeah. I had the judgy teacher. We usually have at least one or two of those kinds of kids. Oh no. Take your kid out. This is what I would have done. I've been like, okay, I'm out. I'm out. And this is supposed to be a really, really good school in the school district. I don't want them to go to public school. I can't home school though because I could not do that. I'll figure it out. Right? We'll figure it out. We'll be okay. And I had every issue with, I'm like, there's nobody watching me right this instant. There's like, you know, and I just, I'm not good. I'm bad at letting go. Oh yeah. I'm terrible at letting go. I cried. I spent the whole day after I dropped him off the first day. Crying. I went downstairs to work out. Like maybe if I work out, I'll feel better. So I'm like gasping for air in between sobs as I'm doing jumping jacks and push-ups and stuff. More push-ups. Okay. More setups. I gotta, I gotta get handed a bunch of busy work, a bunch of honeydews. I got handed a honeydew list to do. Yeah. Right. Just to keep my, my mind and attention elsewhere. There, my, actually, gosh, this is my biggest story this week that I totally missed. That we didn't talk about. Yeah, I'm gonna bring it next week. Okay. So that's fine. This is actually, because it's my biggest pet peeve when it comes to kids, um, which is people who have fur babies and bring them like to the park and let them go off leash. Oh, off leash. Yeah. Yeah. And they let the dog run up to your kid and they're like, it's okay. That's all right. It's a really nice dog. Nice dog. I'm like, okay, around you, but you're a stranger. So I don't know you. And, and now your dog, which I also don't know is around a kid, which it doesn't know. And dog, I've seen dog owners, they will ascribe anything bad that their dog does to just the fate of unavoidability. It's just literally like, oh, I'm sorry. Well, you know, if you, if you hadn't moved quickly, right? If you hadn't talked loudly, my dog wouldn't have tried to bite. It's just, they were reacting to the environment around it. Like, I don't know your dog. And, and to me, a dog, I mean, I understand most, most dog bites happen. And this is what this talks about. Most dog bites happen within the family where the dog is. And it's because they assume the dog couldn't do no harm. And they tend not to observe or allow, you know, the dog in a young child to interact a lot. And this is why most dog bites happen in the family home. I'm gonna talk about this week, but I have an analogy, which nobody seems to care for. But my analogy is that if I went to the park, like my reaction to this is I want to go to the park with an unloaded rifle and point to the people's dogs. Right? Don't try this at home. But this is my analogy. And if the dog owner seems at all stressed by this, I could say, don't worry. I know my gun. It's a good gun. It won't go off around your kid or your dog. Right. And then I would just keep tracking the dog with the firearm. Right. It's okay. It's not loaded. Trust me. I'm a stranger with my potential weapon that I'm pointing. You know, that's that's sort of that's sort of the analogy. That's how I feel when somebody's strange dog runs up to my kid at the park. That's exactly how I feel about it. So yeah, because you know, I think that's, I think that's the thing. You know, people as dog owners, pet owners, they look from their perspective and they, you know, they're, it's a dog, dog wants to run, dog wants to play. I get that they want their dog to have fun at the park, but they're not looking at it from the other people's perspective. And some people might be terrified of animals. Some people just might not want the opportunity for something to go wrong. You know, if it's a not, I mean, there are special off-leash, off-leash parks, but I think most parks. Yeah. And I had, unless you're, unless you're, unless your dog is so well trained that it will not run out. But nobody around you knows that. Nobody around you knows that. And I had an ugly moment at a couple of fourths of Julys ago where I had my like pretty much newborn child. Right. With me at the fireworks, like who brings the newborn to fireworks? I know. That's my fault. But people bring dogs to the park where we watch fireworks in this town. And you know, they're usually, not, but not always a small dog. And you figure, gosh, if they're brave enough to bring the dog to a fireworks display, they may have a, must have a pretty good grip on what this dog. But so we sit down, we got our blanket down, we got there early. And this, this couple comes in and sits down with the dog right next to us. And, and I'm just, I just said, you know, just, just for your information, if at any point your dog comes over here, I'm going to freak out. They're like, no, no, no, no, we have a really good dog. We have, you know, a dog would never do anything. I'm like, I'm not. The fireworks. Now listen, I'm actually, here's the ugly Justin moment. This is Justin getting real dark and ugly with somebody. I'm like, I'm not worried about what your dog is going to do to me. I'm worried about what I will do to your dog. And I feel so bad on some level, on many levels, but also like, this is what I needed to say, because this is the truth. They got up and they moved. Well, they should have. They had a scary moment with a stranger. They had a scary moment with a stranger who seemed rather unpredictable. But this is what I was trying to telegraph to them. Exactly. I don't know your dog fireworks about to go off. I've got a young, a newborn and other children here. If your dog is freaking out and comes in this direction, I am going to defend my blanket turf territory from your mad beast, which I see as an unloaded weapon ready to go off. Yeah. So, yeah, dogs freak out of fireworks. Exactly. And they're not supposed to bring your dogs to a crowded venue. They do this at the farmers market too, where there's like signs like, don't bring your dog. And then people take their, or don't have a dog off a leash at least. People bring your dogs and then have them off the leash when they can't stand it. Pet peeve. Yeah. But there's a study. There's a study that's got evidence in the direction that I've been bitching about for years. So I'll bring it. I'll bring it as part of the second half next week. You're like warning everyone. It's going to be rant time. It's going to be very ranty. But I think I might have just ranted it. You might have just gotten it out. Maybe we'll be fine. I could rant this one. Yeah. So I'm going to answer a strengths question. Any other things that I'm working on? Well, I have the B piece, but I'm afraid that my card, my card got corrupted or something. So I don't have all the audio. My audio, I lost audio. And I have another zoo piece for Blair that I'm supposed to do. And so I'm hoping that I have all the audio for it. But you also have this other, you have like a paid project, right? I have a paid project that I'm supposed to be working on. And I have a whole bunch of stuff going on. So I'm not going to be working on any of it for approximately the next week and a half. And then I get down to business on the video projects. So mid, mid late September is when I'll be getting back on the video projects. But yes, there will be more things coming. That's the plan. Also this Saturday, I'm going to be at the Mini Maker Fair in Portland at Omsi all day long. And since I'm going to be there, I think I might just do some hangout stuff while I'm there. Hopefully the Wi-Fi is good enough. And then I'll just get online and we can talk science. So I'll be announcing it probably on Facebook and Twitter. So what time are you going to be there? 10am to 5pm. So I'll probably, if I do stuff, I'll probably start like, you know, kind of like, everyone's like, if I do things, it'll probably be like every hour I'll start something new, except for noon, because I'll probably go get lunch or something. I won't be available for any of that, unfortunately. Ah, that's a bummer. Yeah. But anyway, I'll make announcements. You've got a hot glue gun that I've got to go figure out how to operate. It's pretty easy. Usually you just plug them in and pull the trigger and the glue comes out. I'll melty. Yeah, I've never used one. So of course, nothing could possibly go wrong. Nothing could possibly go wrong. So I'm going to try it for the first time on a project, like not practice. Just do it. That's going to go well. I'm optimistic for you. Thank you. Thank you. One of us ought to be. Oh, what else do I have? Oh, thankfully it's not the one holding the hot glue gun. I know Christmas is only three months, right, hot rod? I had a moment. I had a moment. It was over Labor Day weekend. It felt like fall. And I realized that Halloween was two months away. Thanksgiving was just a jump after that. And then and then Twistmas is coming. And I just kind of had a moment of like, Oh my God, how did this happen again? What happened to my year? It happened. It's fall already, folks. We got a lot of stuff to do. Oh, hang on. Let me get, I'll get some, let me go grab some. Don't go away. Where are you going? Oh, dear. And then, then and then tomorrow, I'm having a conversation with the Maryland STEM Fest folks to talk about the STEM Fest in Baltimore, Maryland. Well, it's all over Maryland, but I'll be going to Baltimore. Can't wait to talk with people about that. So that'll be a tomorrow conversation. We're going to go. Twist is going to go to Baltimore in November. You guys, you guys have to tell your Baltimore friends or people who live near Baltimore to come see us live. I know in Colorado, it's like, it's like, if fall hit all of a sudden, we were hot hundreds here in Portland, and then it just went bam fall. We're done with summer. No, no, no mildew, no mold taking over the pumpkin vines. Say it isn't so. The apples are coming. I'm excited about that. I love fall stuff. Fall is just awesome. It's such a great season, but I am not ready to do the planning and the presenting. And why does it go so fast? And I actually realized that this year, I think I need really to get a planning calendar for the first time in my life because things are going to go away. I know in Baltimore, things could be really, really cold, right? In November, we'll see. So I got this. Fata thinks that we're going to still have some warm fall weather. All right. All right. September, at least, into October, and then the rains come. What did you get? What is this? Is this visible? This is not visible. No, liquid rubber. Okay. Yes. I got silicon. I got a portable silicon. I got a bunch of hobby board, which this is the flashy side, which I'm not using. This is the boring side. Now the foam board that I'm going to make some cutouts. I've got things to mix, mix, mix, mix. I've got a hot glue gun still in the packaging. I need to go back to the store and get scissors. You need to buy scissors to open those. I hate that package. So I've got this whole, this whole silicon casting project that I'm working on. I got about 10 pounds of clay doing a thing. Got some other stuff. I'm going to see if this works. And if it does, if it does, it will be a thing that Minions may be able to get right before Christmas. Minions might be able to get. Yeah. Yeah. How's that going to work? How's what going to work? How are you going to give away something to Minions to work before Christmas? Well, by making it before Christmas. I have all the tools, so if I don't get it done tonight. Are you going to do a giveaway? Are you going to do a contest? Oh, that's a great idea. What are you going to do? What did you just tease, Justin? I'm going to make a thing. I'm going to make a mold with this. And then I'm going to pour, I don't have it here, but somewhere I have a plastic resin that I'm going to put in there. I'm going to make a thing. Maybe more than one thing. I'll probably make a bunch of things. And then they will be decorated. And then they will be offered out maybe as a, what do we call them when we got a thing that if the people put the donation to the thing? A premium. A premium. It'll be a premium thing. Or maybe a premium thing and a contest thing for the, for the Minions. It's going to be a cool thing though. I can't wait to see it. Yeah. Me too. I hope this works. Or it could be, or it could be like a new burn cast that I'm wearing. Like I could just turn into something went really bad with a hot glue gun. And then, or it could be like a hot glue gun in a silicone cast. Like, ah, can't get rid of. I now have like Edward scissor hands. I'll be just in hot glue hands. Anyway, so I've got something to work on tonight. I gotta, I gotta go take care of this thing. Yeah, I should go to sleep so that I have a good night's sleep because now I have to get up early to take my son to school. I don't even understand what happened to my life. Just change this week. All right, you guys, I think we are done for the night. Thank you so much for joining us, AstroCook. I am going to, I'm going to follow up with you, your scientist friends in Baltimore. Maybe they want to be a part of the show. Maybe that could happen. Maybe we can incorporate them in the show somehow. We will see. I got to find out what they want me to do tomorrow with a phone call. But anyway, thank you for joining us for another episode of This Week in Science. We'll be back next week. Check the Twitters and the Facebook for info on Saturday for if I'm going to be live broadcasting or anything like that. We'll see. Yeah. Have a wonderful science weekend. What am I supposed to say? You're supposed to say goodbye, Justin. Oh, goodbye, Justin. Goodbye, Kiki.