 I'm gonna try not to get too hot in here, but my child needs to go to bed. This is TWIS, this week in science episode number 579, recorded on Wednesday, August 10th, 2016. It's not aliens. I'm Dr. Kiki, and tonight on This Week in Science, we are going to fill your heads with a nice worm, generous spiders, and letdowns. But first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The world of man is the world of stories. Stories forge our religions, form our ethics, frame our political leanings, and foster our imaginations. It is how we read and write our history. Storytelling is the power behind the urban and the legend from Gilgamesh to Campfire Ghost. It is the fuel for our media as well. Books, movies, music, new poetry, paintings, photographs, social media, post sports, video games, and even the 22nd commercial are all telling us the story of the world. And in many ways, each of us is living in a fable, stitched together by the stories that surround us. And then, there are some stories that speak to us about the world beyond, beyond the ideological barnyard, past the pools of poetry and pontification, trending lightly over the latest hashtag hill, and sitting there just outside the gates of fairytale town, there is science. And the stories told by science can not only teach us our history beyond the fortunes and failings of its human inhabitants, but teach us the history of our planet, our solar system, and our universe. And, as well, teach us ways we can write our own future. And writing the course of future human history is exactly what we've come to expect from this weekend's science. Coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I wanna learn everything. I wanna fill it all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I wanna know what's happening, what's happening, what's happening this weekend's science. What's happening, what's happening, what's happening this weekend's science. Yeah, science to you, Kiki and Blair. And good science to you, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome to another show. Thank you for joining us once again for another episode of This Week in Science. We've come together. Come together in the name of science, right? All this science news we hold dear. It's not necessarily science as a tool. It's a way of looking at the world. It's the way of getting your news so that you can form opinions and then be able to get through the world in a daily manner. It helps to inform your lifestyle. It is not your lifestyle, unless of course you only live in a lab. But how many of us do? Anywho, on this week's show, I have tons of news stories. This was a good week for science, I have to say. My news stories are number one, first and foremost, not about aliens. Gonna put it right out there. So you're saying it's about aliens? No, it's not about aliens. Physics bummers got three of them right in a row. Bam, bam, bam for physics. And also an interesting conversation we should have about bird brains. Justin, what'd you bring? I have got some old tool news, as I have always enjoyed by the old tool news. I also have a ice worm story. And if there is time, I think we're both, may have been both going to be talking about the failings of science in physics or the misses in physics, but there's a story out there about whale ears, too. Not whale hips, but whale ears. That'll be interesting. And Blair, what's going on in the animal corner? Are you all ears? Not exactly, I'm all invertebrates this week. So I have information about how honeybee colonies breathe about generous spiders and about brandy fireflies. Oh, those brandy fireflies, you know, their lights blinking on and off and how they go. You know, just there. Look, there's one there, little blinking on and off. They're just talking to each other out there. Yeah, yeah, you betcha, you betcha. Is that how fireflies talk? I think so, they have like a, oh, hey there, you got some interesting lights going on there. Midwest Fargo accent happening in my imagination. Well, be sure to do that story completely in that accent. Perfect, perfect, oh, hey, hi, yeah, okay. Okay, number one, you guys, starting off the show, like I said, it's not aliens, it's not. So Geek Wire and also Gives Moto have reported on a paper that was published in the physics archive preprint portal. Caltech astronomer Ben Montet, or Montet fits French, I'm not sure, and Joshua Simon of the Carnegie Institute describe their results in this paper of a photometric analysis of Tabby's Star. And Tabby's Star, this, good to know, was first flagged in the Kepler Telescope Database by citizen science astronomers. So that's very interesting. Number one, number two, about Tabby's Star is that it was named after a female astronomer known as Tabby Boyagian. This is great, number two, Star named after a female astronomer. So the, the Star was discovered and since being discovered, it's gone through so many iterations in the popular press because it had some weird erratic flickerings. Astronomers were like, what is this? It's dropping light by like 20% and then it goes back up. Luminosity is defying explanation, maybe it's aliens. Yeah, obviously. Right, so there was the proposition that it was an alien Dyson sphere that the aliens were creating a massive energy collecting device around the Star. The, that didn't really pan out as far as alien signals that they went looking for and other aspects of the luminosity didn't quite match with it. So the second idea was like, oh, maybe there's cometary debris around the Star and that cometary debris is irregularly spaced outside of the Star and so what we're seeing are these comets flying through and dimming the Star and getting, and thus causing the dimming. So that's kind of where we were. However, there was another researcher who had been looking at this Star for a significantly longer time, but not, he wasn't looking at Kepler data, the Sky Bradley Schaefer of Louisiana State University used old photographic plates of the sky that went back about 100 years through the 19th century and he calculated just based on these photographic plates that the light had dimmed by approximately 19%, so consistent dimming over the last 100 years, not just the flickering, there's an overall diminution of the luminosity. So people were like, there's no way, became controversial, lots of holes started getting poked in the study and so it was like, Bradley Schaefer, whatever. So Montet and his colleague were like, hey, we need high precision data. How can we get this? Oh, the four years that Kepler was staring at it. So they got the Kepler data and they looked at the luminosity from Kepler collected about this Tabby's Star over the last four years and yes, it has the flickering, but they calculated that over the last four years, the Star has indeed dimmed and it has dropped in its luminosity, faded away by about 3% over that four year time period, which is interesting and nobody knows why. So still, it is the Star that defies explanation, but aliens are not among them. Aliens are not among any of the explanations that we have at this point. It just doesn't fit any of the models, that's all. Cool, cool, cool, cool. So it's magic. No, it's a Star and we don't know everything about the universe yet. This is what you're saying. No, it's a Star. Okay. All right, okay. Just to be clear. Just try to, just was saying. I mean, if I were Shouty Blair, I might shout it out, you know, and bolds, caps, meme lettering. It's not aliens. Yeah, that seems accurate. Yeah, it's just a dimming Star. We have no idea why. It's an interesting Star and so, of course people are going to continue looking at it to try and figure out if they can figure out what is going on. Mysteries are fun. It's only a matter of time until we find out. I'm sure there's some very interesting natural phenomena at work. Yeah, yes, there's gonna be a fascinating natural phenomena and hopefully it will not affect our Star. We don't really like that anytime soon. Yeah. So moving on from Tabby Star, which I love the name of it, we're gonna come back home to Titan, Saturn's largest moon. The Cassini mission did a flyby of Titan and on its flyby, of course, you're gonna take some measurements. You're gonna do some work. Cassini is there to do work and Cassini used radar to get an idea of what was in the canyons on Titan because Titan has this pretty intricate canyon system and the question is where did this canyon system come from and what lies beneath? And nobody really knew. There were guesses and now, based on radar, what came back was radar data that was similar to a reflection of a pond or a river. So it was flat with very, very little changes from that flat surface, kind of like if you imagined taking radar off of a mirror, you would get a very flat surface in response and so what they infer from the data is that the bottoms of the canyons are filled with liquid hydrocarbons. So like the Grand Canyon here on Earth was carved by a river of water, this canyon system on Titan could very well have been carved by river of hydrocarbons, which is fascinating. And so now we have a little bit extra data that supports the idea that the hydrocarbon rivers were there and could be involved in eroding Titan's surface. From the Science Magazine news website, they say that this was reported on in geophysical research letters and that this particular flyby hints that several tributaries in the river network also contain liquid and it's a hint that these rivers are still actively eroding Titan's surface. Not that it was something that happened a long time ago, but these are active rivers flowing to a sea of hydrocarbons and eroding in the process. I love thinking about how, I really love thinking about how the same processes that happen here on Earth with one material, water, can happen in another place in a different way. I mean, Titan is like 100 some odd degrees below zero. Water is ice, hydrocarbons are the liquid. Do they flow the same way? How do they erode? Do they have the same kind of viscosity? Do they say, how is the erosive process? Does it work in the same way? Is it different? Obviously, if this is happening, it is very similar if you're seeing these canyons that are so very similar to ones we see here on Earth. It's, I think about that and then I think about how we try to define life when we're looking for life and what it takes to make life. And if you're on a place that has such different environments that yeah, that water doesn't flow, but hydrocarbons do, a lot of the rules that we assume don't necessarily constrict all of the things that we're looking for there. It's just such a different place that that's part of the search for life that's always bothered me too, is yes, on our planet, you need water, you need flowing water for life. But is that necessarily always true? No, I do not believe so. This point started as a swar the hot ball of molten lava at the surface. And then we had a really super toxic atmosphere for a long time and then life emerged from this. So yeah, and life overcame what would have been, it existed at a time that would be completely toxic to all life that's on this planet now. You have these constraints that we've kind of imposed on our ideas of what it looks like to look for life. But we also have the time scale, of course, which is also totally not synchronous with other bodies necessarily. So it's hard to simultaneously expect that all things are possible and also never be able to fathom what it's like to be on Titan. But there's also this also pesky thing that I bring up, I think, every time we have this type of conversation, which is from what we can tell, life arose in one instant, or one instance, and evolved into all the different life forms on the planet. It would be sort of, maybe we just can't tell, maybe it was happening, but it seems as though all life on the planet is very related. I think it would be more interesting, and a better sign that it's possible that there's life on these other planets if we could prove that life had arose multiple times on this one planet that we seem to think is so hospitable to life. Because even our own existence on this planet maybe this is not a hospitable planet to life. This is now to the life that's evolved to be here, but maybe this is a bad, what we've got currently is a bad way to have a planet. That Goldilocks ideal is actually terrible for starting life. We need a more extreme climate, which actually then might lend itself to say that there could be life on many of these planets that don't seem like they're habitable because you have to start with a planet that's not habitable for the life to evolve and to habitate. I found an infographic from last year, 2015, from space.com about living on Titan. So it's hostile, right? It's super cold, lakes of liquid methane and ethane and the weather's crazy, there's no water, or if it is, it's caught up in frozen ice. So how could we live there? From the infographic, it has a dense atmosphere of 95% nitrogen and 5% methane at one and a half times the air pressure on Earth. Titan's atmosphere is unbreathable, but if you're standing on Titan, you would not need a pressurized space suit, only a breathing mask and protection from the cold. The gravity is much less than it is here on Earth. It's 0.14 versus Earth is 1.0 gravity. So we'd feel very light and bouncy. Bouncy, bouncy, bouncy. One Earth Day is equivalent to 16 days on Titan. Yeah, the length of the day, the orbital period in Earth Days, one Earth Day is 16 days on Titan because Titan's orbital period I guess is around Saturn. And the average temperature, much colder than here, 94 Kelvin versus 290 Kelvin here on Earth. And 94 Kelvin correlates with around minus 179 degrees Celsius. It's chilly, chilly. Yeah, a little chilly. So you wouldn't be crushed to death by the atmosphere, but yeah, you wouldn't necessarily get on very well with it either. This is as we can science, Justin, what would you bring? All right, let's see. What have I got here? Oh, wait, that's not the first story. Here's the first story. First, right, 10,000 stone tools have been discovered and what would have been a lush wetlands at the time of the tool makers and what is now a desert in Northwest Jordan. The team that discovered this examined 7,000 of the tools, including scrapers, flakes, projectile points, hand axes, quite an assortment of tools. 44 of these were selected for a sort of forensic testing. 17 of those 44 tested positive for protein residue, bloody bits or things of residue of animals, what black, I don't know like that was left over. Residual remains of animals were discovered here, including horse, rhinoceros, wild cattle, and duck. What makes this discovery particularly interesting isn't that our ancestors hunted ducks with axes, which is much, much harder than you might imagine it to be. They're quick and they can fly. So you have to just either have to sneak up on them, like be super sneaky or be really good at throwing that axe. But what's actually what's really interesting is that these were not our human ancestors. But rather the site dates to around 250,000 years ago, which is before Homo sapiens evolved, let alone left Africa. Researchers have known for decades, this is Quoty Voice. Researchers have known for decades about carnivorous behaviors by toolmaking hominins, dating back two and a half million years. But now for the first time, we have direct evidence of exploitation by our Stone Age ancestors of specific animals for sustenance, says paleo-anthropologist April Noel of the University of Victoria. The hominins in this region were clearly adaptable and capable of taking advantage of a wide range of available prey from rhinoceros to ducks in an extremely challenging environment. What this tells us about their lives and complex strategies for survival, such as the highly variable techniques for prey exploitation, as well as predator avoidance and protection of carcasses for food, significantly diverges from what we might expect from this extinct species, says Noel again. It opens up our ability to ask questions about how middle pleostein hominins survive this region and it might be a key to understanding the nature of inbreeding, intrabreeding, and population dispersals across Eurasia with modern humans and archaic populations such as the Neanderthal. So this is, it's also another thing it might point out is that other researchers with tools who found these sorts of tools in the past might apply this new sort of technique, this protein searching technique that they're using and identify perhaps remnants of these proteins on their tools and it might tell them what was being hunted. So this is a really amazing ability to look at because we look for bone fragments, other fossilized dead things or fossilized dead things around the discovery of these tools to try to discover what might have been hunted by these people. But just because you find stone tools which are already stone tool, they're basically, they're already fossils. They're already fossilized, right? They're stone. They survive much better and if you don't happen to get fossilized conditions, fossilizing conditions for the sort of garbage heap of bones that have been eaten and dismantled, you don't really get a look into what those tools were being used on. However, if you can apply this technique and get some of these proteins and it can actually identify what kind of animal it was that was being worked on, why, of course, you have science taking place. So this study's been published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Really fascinating technique. I would like to see more data come in and see more tools and get this tested. Yeah, it's such an interesting idea. I mean, of course they didn't, you know, fastidiously clean every one of their tools after they were used, right? So they're, you know, there's going to be little flakes of blood or tissue that remain on the arrowheads, that remain on a rock or a knife or whatever it is. That's just such a, yay, smart people. I'm actually, yeah, and I'm not sure how the process worked and how they were able to figure out that these proteins or these bits of blood and really identify what kind of animal it was from it. That's like, that would be a better story than what I just brought you. That's even more interesting, what that process was, maybe. But the idea that they could, yeah, apply this to other stuff. There's a wealth of knowledge out there, that's just waiting to be brought in. Yeah, it sounds like it. That's pretty cool. And it looks as though the paper at this point is available open access. So if people are interested, you'll be able to, yeah. So they were looking at, it looks as though they were looking protein residue for an anti-serum. So they were looking for types that they were positive for, like you said, horse decorinoceros, et cetera. And since they knew the location, they can probably narrow it down to more, and timing, they can probably narrow it down to more specific species based on that. Nice. Get a family, and then based on location and timing, narrow it down, narrow it down. Oh, brilliant. Yeah, so this could be, yeah, that could be used everywhere then. I mean, I was like, how do you, there's no DNA there. How are they figuring out what we're gonna aim at? The method of logical deduction. I'm gonna go dark for a second, because I've got to chase down this fly. Otherwise it's gonna drive me crazy. All right, well, don't worry about that, because do you know what time it is? Oh, I do, I do, I do. It's that time again. It's time for Blair's Animal Corner. My big little pet, don't pet at all. Animal, she's your girl. Except for giant pandas as well. What you got, Blair? Oh, well, for starters, I have some really exciting news about bee colonies. Then Asian giant honeybees, to be exact. And I've reported on the show before, and we've talked at length about how bees are really good at moving in synchronicity, and making sure that the inside of the hive is nice and warm, that outside of the hive remains cool, bees will cycle their way in and out so that everybody stays alive and healthy, even when it is super cold outside. That makes a bee colony almost a warm-blooded super-organism, some could say. Well, a recent study published in Open Access Journal Plus One by Gerald Katzberger of the University of Graz, Austria, and his colleagues found that Asian giant honeybees, apis dorsata, they have these large single comb nests out in the open, and that does make them potentially vulnerable to extremes of temperature. What they found is that these bees create an insulating bee curtain of five to seven layers of bees, covering the single central comb. And they had previously observed something where when you looked at them with a hydrothermic camera, you were able to see certain areas of the nest would be cooler than others. But it wasn't just the outside and the inside, there would kind of be these holes of coldness. And what they found was that certain bees in this curtain act as fanners during the hottest part of the day. What they actually do is they align their bodies so that they funnel air towards certain regions of the nest to cool them. So these bee curtains actually in certain areas move in synchrony to ventilate the nest. And it looks like mammalian inhalation. That's crazy. So this nest of bees is actually breathing. But over a much larger period of time, not like... Yeah, so what they do is they stretch their limbs against the comb, they expand the inner nest area, lowering the internal pressure, they create like a vacuum, like a suction, like a... And that pulls in cool, fresh air through the funnels from the bee curtain. And then they relax the nest interior, which presses the warm, stale air from the center out. So it's just like breathing, but yes, over a longer period of time. They call it like breathing. It's also bellows. Is it cool? Yeah, bellows function. Yeah, so it cools them, exactly. Yeah, so pretty cool stuff. So that's honeybees. So that's a group of invertebrates working very well together. It's amazing that they're able to coordinate in that way. And it's not all the bees. It's only the ones in the curtain. Right. Now I have a story of a group of invertebrates not working together so well. And that's social spiders. So yes, I said social spiders. I apologize in advance for all of the spidery dreams all of you will have later. But yes, social spiders, that is a thing. And Nelocemus aximius lives in South America and they are one of the largest social spider species, meaning not the individuals are large, but their colonies are large. They can go anywhere from one or two to tens of thousands. Okay, that's where the nightmares start. Yeah, so for example, the researcher who was looking at this originally saw a massive nest on the side of the road in Ecuador, about five meters tall, that's about 15 feet, four meters across. Yeah, so then they went back a few weeks later and this giant spider colony was gone. So in a study published this month in the Journal of Animal Ecology, researchers from UBC's Department of Zoology found that it was Ruth Sharp and her colleagues found that these spiders had a very particular personality flaw. And that is that these spiders, they are often very good at catching things and actually so good that they'll catch things that are too large for them alone to eat. And so when they nest together, they form this large web, they work together to capture prey. That could be things like bees, wasps, butterflies and other insects. And when they catch things that's too large, they share. But what happens is they discovered that when the spiders share, but they don't catch enough to feed everyone, even though maybe I caught something three times too large for me to eat, we will all starve. So about 21% of established social spider colonies of this species go extinct every generation. A fifth, every generation. And that's because the size of the prey captured increases with colony size. So as the colonies get larger, the individual things that they capture get larger. But what they find is that actually the larger the prey, the less everyone eats. Hmm. Yeah, so I don't know if this is sort of a carrying capacity thing, was where my brain went, was that, oh, okay, so this keeps us from getting, I don't know, football field sized colonies of spiders, haven't forbid. So that if as they get larger, they have less ability to feed each other to the right amount, then that keeps them from getting too large, it controls the spider population. I don't know if that's actually what's going on or if this is just a vital personality flaw. But it's interesting. Don't share too much spiders, you'll die. Oh, I don't like that video, you're sharing it all. Ha, ha, ha. Okay, and then my very last, my very last quick story before we head to the break is all about fireflies, which I'm sure some of you heard me go on and on and on about my recent trip to the southeast where I saw lots of fireflies and I got very excited. Well, fireflies may be affected by light pollution, which probably is not too surprising. But fireflies, both males and females, make signals. They make signals to ward off predators, but they also make signals to identify one another for courtship displays. And a recent study from UVA, University of Virginia, looked at fireflies and their courtship displays in different areas of partial light, whole light, and different types of light. They found was that LED lights really cut down on the amount of displays that females showed. So the males still flashed their lights in these LED lit areas, but the females didn't respond. And if they don't respond, then courtship does not continue. So they didn't leave the lit areas, which was their other hypothesis. They thought that they had lit areas and unlit areas. They expected to see a higher density of fireflies in the unlit areas. No, they stayed right where they were, but the males just went ahead and flashed their lights. The females did not respond. So what the other thing to keep in mind is that old street lights like sodium lights, they actually only have lower wavelengths of light, and those don't affect the fireflies as much, but it's these LED lights that have a wide array of wavelengths of light coming out of them that the fireflies do apparently have to have, appear to have a negative effect in their courtship displays with that light pollution. So if you live in an area with fireflies, use fewer lights, turn them off when you're not needing them, all that good stuff, and this is a good reminder because fireflies are something that we can study really easily, but what other animals are responding negatively to these LED porch lights that we haven't yet discovered? This is something that's very measurable and an obvious kind of cause and effect. Okay, you signal to each other with light. If we flush the area with light, you can't talk to each other. But what else is going on? Yeah, I- We know there's noise pollution in the oceans that's causing communications between whales and dolphins and that sort of thing to get too noisy of a room to even talk to each other. Yeah, so I mean, we're looking at fluorescent lights, LED lights, these different frequency lights as our energy efficiency saviors. They're gonna help us use electricity, help us not harm the environment, but there are other ways that we might be harming the environment. So now it's definitely gonna turn into a cost-benefit analysis of how much is that one porch light changing your bill or your energy consumption versus how is it affecting the fireflies in the ecosystem around your house? Where do you live? What's being affected and how much? And so, but I think this could be pretty easily soft, honestly, this doesn't sound like a big problem. This sounds like- No, it sounds soft enough for sure. Once in a while, they'll tell you, okay, they're gonna pick up the garbage on Thursdays, you get a notice from the city. You can water your lawns on odd days or even days and if you live in an area where there's fireflies, you'll get a thing in the mail that says, please make sure you use the old school light bulb for your front porch to help our firefly neighbors. And I think people will comply with that because fireflies is one of those things that you go, yeah, those are cool. Why would I want to mess with that? Of course, they do serve an important ecological role as well. They feed many local predators and then they also are really important decomposers in the system. And they're also just cool. Yeah, okay, so the thing that other people that they're fortunate is that they're cool, right? That's all you're asking, right? But I think that should be pretty easy and especially because those most likely to be close to an area where fireflies are in abundance are probably out in the country and they moved out in the country, not to destroy it because they like the country environment and they'll probably be the first to say, okay, no problem, I'll just switch the light bulb. Yeah, old school incandescent and I've even seen, I think I saw a story recently that people are working on, yeah, you can't still get them, but I saw a story recently that people are working on making the old school incandescent itself even more efficient. So there are people who love the incandescent and don't want to see it go the way of the dodo, so they are working on its energy-saving capacities, or at least getting it to reduce the heat that is lost. Yeah, I think there's a happy medium here for sure. Oh, Ed from Connecticut says, you used to see lots of fireflies in Connecticut, haven't seen any in a few years, also haven't seen any bats in the neighborhood either, could be connected. Yeah, if the fireflies are gone, maybe the bats migrated elsewhere. Don't you all migrate anywhere because you know what, we're gonna come back in just a few minutes from our little short break that we take here. This is This Week in Science, and we do hope that you will stay tuned for Ice Worms and Bird Brains and more. Y'all come back now, you hear? Hey everybody, I wanna say thank you so much for following us on YouTube, for subscribing to us, for helping us reach that 10,000 subscriber goal that we were headed for. We got there and we are continuing to climb and it is all because of you. Thank you so much and I hope you do enjoy finding us on YouTube and receiving our content on YouTube. We do broadcast through YouTube and Google Hangouts on air every week so it is a large part of how we bring twists to the world. Hope that you do appreciate it. Thanks for subscribing, really, really do appreciate that. Twist also has merchandise that you might enjoy so why don't you head on over to twist.org? What, you don't know twist.org? Well, twist.org is our website. Twist.org is the fantabulous place where you go to find our podcast to be able to see show notes every once in a while. 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Your support is what allows this show to keep paying the bills, to keep the equipment working and to keep everything going. And if you can't afford a donation, subscribing to us, getting your friends to subscribe to us, leaving a review someplace like iTunes or Spreaker or SoundCloud, these things all help. They all add up putting up flyers or even just telling your friends about twists. It all adds up and it all helps us grow our audience, which in the end helps us grow twists. We couldn't do any of this without you. We thank you for your support. Do to the juices and pills and the creams Your body's lost toxins, whatever that means You stopped eating all of that sinister food Your dinner tastes awful, so it's gotta be good And still you can't believe what a skeptic are you I can't believe you believe in that show We disagree, but I still give a damn And we're back with more this week in science. We are back and Justin, it's your turn, whatcha got? Project Iceworm. In age gone by, though clearly still with us, the world was on the brink of a very nasty set of ideas that somehow talk would become too tiresome, negotiation too treacherous, a task, and that we might ultimately have to resort to solving all of our ideological problems and differences by reading the planet of living things. We call this age the Cold War. And in 1960, when the scheming, flooding, planning, and frantic prepper, like precautionary primping was going on, the United States military went forward with a one-stop-secret project codenamed Iceworm. The idea was to build a network of mobile nuclear missile launch sites under the Greenland ice sheet. Medium-range nukes hidden under the ice, close enough to quick, straight targets within the Soviet Union. We didn't tell the Danish government who governed Greenland, let alone the people who actually lived there or very near there anyway. They did have a cover story called Campus Century, though, which claimed to be a scientific-ish project to look into the feasibility of subclacial architecture. Yes, we're going to build a facility under the ice. Won't that be cool? So, location was about 150 miles northeast of the Tule Air Force Base, 100 miles east of what is now Kanak, where I once had a chance to spend a few weeks, and where this picture was taken. Looks like Justin in a parka on an iceberg. Yes, that's pretty much, and that's the city of Kanak, which actually used to be where the Tule Air Force Base is, 100 miles to the south, but the Air Force said, we want your town, and so they forced the people to move 100 miles north, and eventually there were some reparations. But anyway, we go on. 20 feet deep, or 28 feet deep, two miles of tunnels were cut into the ice. Nuclear reactor was brought in. Mobile nuclear reactor provided power for amenities such as shops, movie theaters, and even a hospital. Water, of course, was all around them, but shortly after moving in, it became clear to the scientists who were there studying what could possibly go wrong, that things were going to go wrong. The glacier wasn't going to remain a stable ice fort for very long, and they predicted only a few years before the ice would degrade the proposed launch tubes into unusable states. Despite looking solid, the ice cap is constantly in motion, slowly spreading outward from the center. The spreading movement causes the tunnels and trenches to narrow, walls to deform, bulge eventually leading to a collapse of the ceiling in some areas, and by mid-1962, the ceiling of the reactor room where this mobile nuclear reactor, which, by the way, this is 1960s technology, mobile reactor, let me think of all the problems we've had with those that aren't mobile in the modern age. Anywho, the ceiling had started to drop and they lifted it five feet and soon, okay, anyway, they abandoned the base. Forget it, this is a bad idea. With all the pesky waste that was there, though, they thought that might be too troublesome to take with them, and now that the ice that entombed the waste is melting it free, including sewage, diesel fuel, persistent organic pollutants, PCBs, and, of course, radiological waste from the nuclear generator. It's all still there. Current efforts to remove the toxins are non-existent and the threat is right in the backyard of the people who already had to move once. Very nice, and you've heard me talk about this on the show before, too. These are the nicest, kindest group of people I've ever met in my entire life. The Village of Connacht, it's only about 600 people total, I think, of even that, but it's like one big family there. So this is one example of an unforeseen problem with global warming. Also, there's also some other things in there, but it also sort of reminds me of what's going on in Russia right now. Russia right now, they're having an outbreak of anthrax. So anthrax previously has killed millions of caribou, and they dealt with it by killing off caribou and burying them in the tundra. Now, they didn't bury them deep because it's hard to dig deeply into the tundra, especially when you've been tasked with burying diseased caribou and you just want to go home really badly, right? And so currently, there's a few thousand caribou that have died from this recent outbreak. And what's sort of also interesting, there's also mass burial sites in Alaska that were from, I think it was the Spanish flu outbreak, right? So this is, we're starting to see, we're starting to see all these things that we thought, ah, you bury it in the ice somewhere up north, it'll never come out again, right? Ha ha ha ha. That's a problem for tomorrow. That's tomorrow, guys' problem. Well, tomorrow is today, it's our problem. Although they're staying still, it's possible because there's snowfall and all these other excuses they might not have to deal with the ice worm project problem right away. Although. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon. So Justin, Justin, is this a science news story or is this your screenplay? Because this is sounding very much like a summer blockbuster film. It does, right? The ice is melting. What are we going to do? Ice worm coming to theaters next summer. Look at where they found it in the X-Files movie, right? This spaceship was buried in the Greenland Thunder. Well, you don't even have to wait for the aliens to come back for it. It just might melt free again, right? So, slightly staying on the tangent, though, of Cold War, this is also in the news this week. They revealed that in May of 1967, the U.S. Air Force was preparing aircraft to engage for war for a nuclear strike, thinking they thought that the nation's surveillance radars in the polar regions were being jammed by the Soviet Union. Suddenly, all of our eyes looking for missiles went dark. They just, everything stopped working. We went, oh my gosh, they've figured out a way to jam our radar, and now they must be attacking. That's the only explanation. But, thankfully, military space weather forecasters conveyed information that they had just sort of deduced about the sun, which is that solar storms, solar flares, have a potential to disrupt radar and radio communications. Therefore, the planes remained on the ground. The U.S. avoided potentially nuclear weapons in exchange with the Soviet Union, thanks to scientists who were looking at the sun. So, yeah. Thank you, solar scientists, for helping us avert nuclear war. That's good. That's the whole thing. It's like, you can't only have one set of eyes. Is radar your only set of eyes? Is that how it works? Is that, you know, you need to have multiple sets of eyes. And this is why when we look at things in space, we don't just look at them in one spectrum. We try and look at them across as many spectra as possible, because one set of eyes is not all the information and can potentially be disrupted. Yeah, and stay for another second or two here on this Cold War era mentality. So, we're talking about a potential nuclear base that just had a nuclear mobile reactor in it, and they left the waste behind thinking it's solid, it's frozen, it won't go anywhere. You look at the way they dealt with anthrax outbreaks in Russia, the Spanish flu in Alaska, and you also then have to think, what don't we know? How many biological weapons have we decided, or waste have we decided we could easily hide and discard? I mean, to the Russians it must have been with all of the ice and tundra at their immediate disposal. It's been a pretty easy solution to deal with a lot of problems. Just put it in the ice, it'll be there forever, right? The US doesn't have as much direct access, but who knows what else we did to Greenland under the nose of the Danes and the Inuits, and what have the Canadians done? Well, probably not much, but at least then there's Alaska. So, as this global warming thing happens, as the thaw takes place, we may start to uncover a lot of skeletons in our previous pasts. Which is great, because we don't have enough. We need more skeletons, that's fantastic. But these ones sound like major vectors for these diseases that we're dealing with. Yeah, maybe trouble, yeah. Watch out for anthrax, everyone. Oh, they don't have a methane in there. Going across the tundra, just beware of the anthrax. So I've got a fun story. I kind of wanted to bring this one, because last week we talked at length during the Blair's Animal Corner about the kind of anecdotal stories, about the orangutan who was helping us learn about language development. And Coco, the gorilla, versus Kanzi, the chimpanzee, and these like single individuals who have been used as, because they maybe are exemplary and extraordinary for their species and their abilities. They have stood out also for humans, trying to understand more about animals, the animal behavior, and ourselves. Betty the crow is another one of these standout exemplars. Betty, the new Caledonian crow, a few years back, 2014-ish. A study came out in which Betty just took these wires. These new Caledonian crows are known for tool making, for using things and making particular tools. But at the time, all they knew was that the crows could shape stiff or flexible twigs into tools that had kind of a barb-like hook, like a fishing hook at one end. And they used those to get grubs out of trees, to stick them in and try and pull the grubs out. And then Betty came along. And Betty, fashioned a hook from a material she had never encountered before, not a twig that she'd seen previously. It was a brand new material, so this was an innovation. She's like, oh, novel material. Let's see if it does this thing. And it had never been observed in the wild for them to pick up any other kinds of materials. And she knew what kind of shape to make to be able to solve the puzzle that she had been given for this particular study. She was the only crow that really did it, of the multiple crows they looked at. And so Betty made a splash as the evidence that new Caledonian crows at least had the possibility of innovative cognitive thought, that they could come up with these new ideas on the fly based on the challenge in front of them and the materials at hand, kind of like a primate or a human. This really, really implied advanced thought. But yet again, it was only one bird. And so a researcher, Christian Roots, who's a behavioral ecologist at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom, has spent four years studying 18 wild-caught crows that were kept in aviaries on New Caledonia temporarily. They caught them in the wild, put them in the aviaries so they could test them in controlled conditions. And they made videos of the animals doing all their work and the animals, these birds made 85 of their twig tools. And most of the crows followed just the standard method. 10 of these 18 birds, however, bent the tool by curving it or sticking it and pulling it is very similar to what Betty did. So the researcher was like, whoa, this is what Betty did. And there's 10 more crows who just did what Betty did. So it maybe wasn't just, this is surprising, but maybe it wasn't like Betty innovating on the fly. Maybe it was a behavioral pattern that given the right material, the birds tend to use. And so this postdoc says, we now think that they bend their tools to get them ready to use. Bending is thus part of their natural repertoire. Yeah, I hear that. I also just see several crows finding a similar solution to a similar problem. Yeah. So where, how do you know the difference? How do you know the difference between something that is an innate natural behavior, something that is the easiest way to solve a problem and these animals are really smart so they find the easiest way to solve the problem or whether they are doing the same innovation several times in a row. I feel like it's probably not the last one. It's probably not a miracle random event that has happened several times. But I also feel like there's a good chance that given a similar challenge in order to get your food, a curved tool is the best way to get your food in that case. And so if they bend it no matter what kind of thing it is that they're bending, that doesn't to me make it less awe-inspiring. It makes it more amazing to me because it shows that Betty wasn't a fluke. It shows that these crows know how to solve a problem presented to them and that these crows have the same kind of logic-based solution building going on. Right, and so I guess the question is to determine whether or not it is logic-based solution building or a hardwired response. And that's what they don't, this study does not determine. Frans de Waal, who was interviewed for this says that his response is that not all the wild crows in the study bent their tools, which suggests it's not hardwired and that was more likely to be novel because it was only 10 out of the 18, not all of them. They were all given the same controlled situations, yet not all of them did it. So the other question is did 10 of them have an opportunity to learn something that the other eight did not? Was it a learning during development kind of situation? And then Nathan Emory from Queen Mary University of London says that this really leaves open the question, you know, that yeah, this was significant that Betty did this, but did the bird have a hook in mind when it was creating it? Oh, great question. That question is wide open. We don't know if that was the bird picturing. I need a hook. How would you even know? How would you even know the answer to that? Yeah. I mean, I feel like we've reported on other stories where crows have picked the right tool by looking at them or assessing what they're made out of or all these different things. So I don't doubt that presented with a stick or a hook, they would still pick the hook. But the question is, do they make a hook saying, I need a hook? Right. Wow. How would you even test that? This requires a hook. This does not. I think you could do it by doing another version of the thing, just like you said, where you'll provide the hook. Provide the hook to some, don't provide it to others, and see if the others make the hook. Or if they try multiple tools before turning to the hook and finding success versus going after the hook first and going, oh, that's the thing that works. If they tend to go for the hook when it's already provided first with a selection of different tools to maybe pick from, and they tend to fashion the hook, I think then you're saying, yeah, then they're making the hook with the hook in mind. They really want the hook. Now, this isn't this week in designing new experiments. But what I would do is teach a crow how to use a touch screen so that whatever tool they drew, or the shape of tool they drew with their beak is what they get. And then, yeah, see, because then they would make a hook shape and get a hook. Or if it, I mean, maybe just tap on a hook shapes where you offer a shape, associate the shape with. How is that different than just picking the hook tool? I like mine better. Mine's more simple. Well, because one is cognitive. It's a cognitive separation. It's looking at a picture, which is just an image, which is just a representation, and taking a representation to actualization. If I click on a hook picture, which doesn't mean anything, really, but once the bird learns that they're going to get a hook, then you know that they can recognize it and that they are specifically looking for a hook as opposed to just picking it out of a hook. A little bit simpler. You have little box or latch lids with a picture of a hook or other tools that aren't hooks. And if it goes into that one to grab the hook out, it saw the hook on the picture on the outside of the box and then went in and grabbed the tool. You don't have to teach it the text. That's unnecessary. We don't need to over-technology. Use too much technology as an experience. Just a little box lid that has the picture of the hook. Then would that satisfy the conceptual to the choosing? I still like Kiki's mine better. They're just trying to get a free iPad out of this. Justin, do you have another story? I do, I do. OK, so this is a story that begins in a drainage ditch in South Carolina. Actually, it begins before that. 27 million years before when a previously unknown species of whale died there. Echovenitor sandersie was found with a complete fossilized ear. And by CT scanning the ear, they can tell that the whale had high frequency hearing. Quoty voice, our study suggests that high frequency hearing may have preceded the emergence of echolocations as Morgan Churchill, New York Institute of Technology. So they CT scanned the whales ear compared it to those of hippos and 23 fossil and living whales. Those analysis uncovered many features found in today's dolphins, which can hear ultrasonic frequencies. It also suggests that the evolutionary ancestors of two whales could hear higher frequencies than their relatives who were on land at the time. Churchill says that the inner ear of Echovenitor is surprisingly similar to that of modern whales with only a few aspects that could be considered primitive in comparison so that the hearing of these whales 27 million years ago was already quite advanced. It's also remarkable in other ways, Churchill notes. The whale was small compared to its ancestors, suggesting a drastic change in body size early in tooth whale evolution that most likely influenced a range of variables from brain size to ecology. This is just one, though, of many fossil whales from the South Carolina ditch. I guess that they were excavating to do something with found fossils. Had to call them the scientists and now the ditch. I guess drainage ditch needed to be moved. But this is only one of many whale fossils that they found here, so they're still processing them more to come. That is cool. That whale looks, he does look very dolphin-like. It's a very dolphin-like. If you would show me, I'd just say that's a dolphin. I wouldn't even call it a whale based on the artist's representation. But it is interesting that it still uses a similar technique of vibrating through or going through, being conducted through the jawbone to where it's then vibrating the inner ear. It's like the way that they're trying. What is it? The jawbone hearing thing for phones and stuff? It's supposed to not get a lot of extra sound and it's supposed to just vibrate through your jaw so that you don't, it's just hearing in your head. No, yeah, it's an earphone kind of thing you could use, yeah. That's cool. That's a neat finding. In a ditch. Well, it's a big one. Yeah, and they also say that just because of how advanced the ear already is in comparison to the relationship to maybe what they thought it would be at that point or what the rest of the whale looks like, that this ability to hear is dates before this 27 million year time. Like this is an older, they say it's older than even perhaps toothed whales that we are somewhat accustomed to that. So this kind of like this using sonar, high frequency hearing and possibly using sonar to be able to find prey. High frequency hearing, I think we would predate that. We'd predate the sonar, yeah. Yeah, but yeah, it's a very, very advanced whale. So whales, I'm gonna add it for, I mean, my goodness, 27 million years of being whales. And this one is called a covenator. Yes. And we've only been being human humans, modern humans for a couple hundred thousand. Yep. Something to be said for the longevity thing. Something on the planet. Yeah, speaking of things that were kind of on the planet for a second, we thought they were, but now they're not. I have the triple threat of physics letdowns. Waw, waw, waw, waw, waw. That's exactly it. So last year, researchers at the Large Hadron Collider, Stern, announced that, oh, we've got signals for a possible particle, could be the graviton. No, no, no, no, we don't know what this is, but it's just, I'm suspecting there's a fantastic new batch of insides from back up. I guess this is the kind of thing we've been looking for, but we didn't expect to find, but there it is anyway. Yeah, so the way that they look, just to go back on this a little bit, is that their search, because they have so much data to go through, is motivated by theoretical ideas. And so last December, there was a hypothesis about gravitons, suggesting a way in which they would decay, producing two high energy photons. And so Atlas and CMS detectors looked through their data for collisions that produced two photons, and then compared their numbers to predictions, all based on the standard model. And so they turned up in apparent excess at 750 giga electron volts, and it showed up in data from Atlas and CMS. But it wasn't significant. It was promising, but not significant. And so, they didn't have all sorts of data. They only had four, less than four inverse femtobarns of data. And they added another 12.9 inverse femtobarns to the analysis since that original moment. So this is a lot of data. They're just adding, dumping in massive amounts of data. And this new data, that little bump that was, isn't. So the CMS detector's team says no significant excess is observed over the standard model predictions. And so it doesn't necessarily mean that a graviton doesn't exist. It just means that this particular predicted graviton at this particular place does not exist. Well, was it predicted to be at this place? I thought, I didn't know it was predicted. No, it wasn't. I don't think they got the blip and then were like, Oh, this could be it. They were like, many, many papers about what would explain that blip being there and how it could fit into the picture. Back engineering, if that thing actually exists, why is it there? What is it doing? What could it be? But it's not there anyway, so. So all those papers are gonna have to go back onto the stack until they find a blip somewhere else. And then they can go, why is that there? What's it doing? And basically pull out those old papers, rewrite them again for this new blip. And there you go. Second kind of story of what was but isn't. There is a lot of lithium seven around. There's a lot more lithium seven than there is then lithium six in the universe. And so the question is whether or not the estimates are wrong or whether there's a discrepancy because based on physics and the way things work and primordial atomic formation and stuff, they should be pretty similar fractions. We shouldn't have such a disparity between them. So the Omega Laser Facility, which is this wonderful laser facility that has a laser that produces 17 kilojoules of energy in 10 to the minus 12 seconds, 600 picoseconds. And so it's about 28 terawatts of power in the laser. And they smashed hydrogen and helium together, kind of trying to simulate the Big Bang conditions. And the plasma has this temperature and conditions that are similar during the Big Bang nucleosynthesis phase, which would be the phase of the Big Bang in which things were starting to cool down. And atoms were starting to smash into each other, nucleus was reformed and you start having atomic formation. And so tritium and helium ions fuse to form lithium. And they found that there was not enough lithium, that their experiment that basically standard physics, based on their measurements, standard physics cannot account for the total amount of lithium that we observe here and now in the universe. I mean, maybe we're estimating it incorrectly, according to ours technically, but yeah. Physical reviews, let it review letters paper and it's very possible that right here in this one particular place, the standard model of physics breaks down with the atomic formation of lithium. Mm-mm. And it may be... What's going on? Whenever, yeah, the standard model is probably not broken, but there's probably something in the process that took place during that, that created a buffer that utilized some of the components of the building blocks to do something else and go a little bit in different directions. But the fact that we don't know is franticistic. They should have been able to measure that stuff in their experiment, but it was kind of messy, so maybe they didn't. This is a messy early universe and there's temperatures and pressures and forces and things going on. I am sure with a little bit more time and effort, this puzzle will be solved, of course. The lithium mystery will be solved. And finally, the last dash, the last blow of my show to hopes of physics beyond the standard model. So it's like, okay, we have standard model being upheld at CERN. We have the Omega Laser Facility questioning the standard model because of lithium, but standard model is once again being upheld by the Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory Experiment in Antarctica. The world's most powerful neutrino observatory observes all sorts of neutrinos zipping through. And if they were to see a strange neutrino, didn't quite act like the three predicted by the standard model, maybe it might see a sterile neutrino. Sterile neutrinos have mass, but they interact via gravity as opposed to the weak force. Other neutrinos interact via the weak force and so they don't really interact. We have, in the time that I'm talking right now, there are like hundreds of thousands of neutrinos shooting through me. Ah! Yeah! Get your tinfoil hat. But because I'm made of matter, massive forces, they don't really interact that much. They don't, they really don't interact with us. That we are nothing to them. It's like we are these transparent sheets. It's like air. It's like throwing a ball through air. Yeah. That's what it is. We're not even there. However, sterile neutrinos, they would react even less because they interact through gravity and we're not that, you know, we're not hugely gravitational and we have all these cells that make us up. But anyway, IceCube figured out a way that it could be used to try and detect sterile neutrinos and they looked and they looked and they looked and they looked and they looked and they looked and they looked and they were like, please can we find some sterile neutrinos because really it would solve a few questions about ambiguity about neutrinos that have been observed over the last 30 years and that would be really cool. But, yeah, no. No sterile neutrinos found by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. Yeah, is this something though, like we were looking for gravity waves and not finding it for a long time. Long, long, long, long, long time. Is this something that they think, well, we just need to be able to take a better look for them or is it more like this is where they should have shown up for pretty darn sure, otherwise they don't exist. No, there's a wonderful video that's available from the NSF and the IceCube experimenters and they interview a few of them and they make some interesting comments on that. But the take home is that this helps to tighten up the boundaries of where the sterile neutrino could be found if it will be found. And so we had certain boundaries posed by the neutrino observatory based on their confines and their limitations, no finding. So now the next set of experiments or the next set of analyses will be based on these findings, narrowing, narrowing, narrowing it down. And every time we don't find them, it'll make our hope for them be even less because sterile neutrinos are not predicted by the standard model. They are something that are outside of the standard model and if we were to find them, then that would potentially open an interesting Pandora's box of new physics for physicists to be excited about. We've been really trying hard to open that box. The lid is very heavy. It's been really interesting actually, like watching this kind of push by physicists going, damn, new physics, Higgs boson, yeah, whatever. We're gonna find this and we're gonna find this other thing and we're gonna, we'll find the Higgs boson but we're gonna find this other thing and we're gonna find that they have it. And it's just been a few years now and of course science is gonna be, this kind of science is big science and so it's like decades in the making. It's gonna be centuries in the making but to really understand it but it's just interesting watching this back and forth of the scientists really wanting something more than the standard model and hoping that there's something more than what they've already discovered. Something more than the predictions of what they're there. You can also look at it just as thoroughly vetting. Yeah, there's that. The idea that we're running with at the moment. The more we discover that the fringes of the theory are staying pat and holding solids and yeah, you know, this is, science isn't just about discovering a new thing, it's about disproving other possibilities. Yeah. Hey, Blair, you got a story? Yeah, what if I told you that you could figure out what animals were living in a body of water by testing the water and looking for E-DNA? What is E-DNA? Environmental DNA. Yeah, so a new study from James Cook University and Charles Darwin University using cutting edge E-DNA techniques to look for crilly endangered large toothed sawfish in remote Northern Australia. So after testing water in a lab where certain bodies of water had the sawfish in them and certain bodies of water did not, they were able to detect trace amounts of this animal's DNA in the water where those animals were living and then they were able to take that out into the world and successfully find out which bodies of water had sawfish living in them by testing just the water for sawfish DNA. That's clever. This is why I need to worry about my hair falling out and like flying out the car window. Yeah, because they can clone you just from. I'll be able to find my hair in a gutter. Yeah, so for a... My T.A. lives in this gutter. That's right. For a endangered animal that lives potentially all over the planet and we don't know where they live or what areas to protect, being able to test E-DNA to track these animals globally could help them. But I do think that this technology probably has a lot of potential outside of that as well. Yeah, absolutely. I have a quick one. The XPRIZE, which we know for offering cash prizes, cash money for so many large feats of technology. They have partnered with IBM's Watson for a new open source kind of competition which is gonna pit international groups against one another to develop and demonstrate how humans can collaborate with powerful AI technologies to tackle the world's grand challenges. And interestingly, there's really no rules to this study yet. They're being an open source, not study, but challenge being open source. They are asking the teams that enter to develop their own goals and their own rules and to set their own bars for judging, which is an interesting way to go about this. What do you think? I don't know. Oh, and it's a $5 million prize. It's not a little one. I think going to the moon is much less than that. I think going to the moon has a less, less expensive prize. But which is more terrifying or beneficial? Both, either, neither. Yeah, I mean, when I hear about stuff like this, there's part of me that gets very excited and I'm like, yes, AI, it's gonna help us solve so many data related problems, problems related to climate change, related to poverty, related to education, so many things that we stress about and we worry about. I mean, if we could get AI, technology, to help us work out the kinks on so many things where human viewpoints are not able to get past certain biases, it would be amazing. But then, but then, yeah, but then there's the, oh, it's AI and if it gets programmed even slightly wrong, with even the slight wrong, just a little wrong instruction in there somewhere and it could lead to human destruction. First, I'll tell you though, the first human destruction that's gonna take place from this AI is going to be, you know what? We were gonna hire a few thousand scientists to work on this big physics project, but the AI is actually now capable of looking at this without having to hire them. We might hire one or two just to do some sort of checking of the work and that sort of thing, but we now are doing this project where we're gonna test all of the oceans, waters in search of these rare fish, you know, based right with the E-test, right? But actually to analyze it and even go out into the field and do the testing, we've got these little submersibles and we've got an AI that can, you know, I mean, warning to scientists, this is your livelihood. Dude. I mean, this is why we have people in the fields still picking fruits because they haven't trained a robot to do it yet. So beware, this is- Or will this make it better because you'll be able to do five years of PhD research in a summer because a robot doesn't have to sleep or eat? Right, somebody will be able to do that. But again, all of the researchers and the undergrads who got to cut their teeth doing science, working on this project- It's just a new tool. I'm just saying, once they don't need as many people to actually do science, there'll be less people actually working in science and that's going to thumb down our general population. Or it'll make it more accessible. It'll be, oh. It could make it more accessible. I was thinking about becoming a scientist or maybe going into VCR repair. Of course, typewriters can get jammed. So I thought I might work on that too. This is just don't get yourself obsolete. Don't love this to happen. So I was wrong, the Google Lunar XPRIZE is $30 million while this one is five. So the Lunar XPRIZE was more. I was wrong. Justin, any more stories? I'm good. You're good. Blair, you all tapped out. I'm all tapped out. All right, you guys. We have done it. We have finished another episode of This Week in Science. Thank you so much for listening, staying with us. I'd like to take this moment to thank our Patreon sponsors. 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Thank you for all your support on Patreon. If you are interested in supporting us, you can find information at patreon.com slash this week in Science. Also remember that you can help us out simply by telling your friends about twists. It is that easy. On next week's show, we will be back once again with more science coming your way, and we will be broadcasting live online at 8 p.m. Pacific Time on twist.org slash live where you can watch and join our chat room. But don't worry, if you can't make it, you can find our past episodes at twist.org slash YouTube or twist.org. Yes, thank you for enjoying the show. Twist is also, of course, available as a podcast. Just Google this week in Science in your iTunes directory, or if you have one of those mobile type devices, like a phone, for instance, and it's an Android. You can look for Twist4, that's Twist, TWIS, the number four droid app in the Android Marketplace, or simply this week in Science in anything Apple Marketplace. 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We'll be back here next week, and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news. And if you have learned anything from today's show, remember. It's all in your head. This week in science, this week in science, this week in science is the end of the world. So I'm setting up shop, got my banner unfurled, it says the scientist is in, I'm gonna sell my advice, show them how to stop their robots with a simple device. I'll reverse all the warming with a wave of my hand, and all it'll cost you is a couple of grand. This week science is coming your way, so everybody listen to what I say, I use the scientific method for all that it's worth, and I'll broadcast my opinion all over, cause it's this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science, this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science, I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news, that what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science, you may just better understand, but we're never trying to threaten your philosophy, we're just trying to save the world from jeopardy. And this week in science is coming your way, so everybody listen to everything we say, and if you use our methods to roll in and die, we may rid the world of toxic plasma, got the eye, cause it's this week in science, This Week in Science This Week in Science Science This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science Science I've got a laundry list of items I want to address From stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness I'm trying to promote more rational thought And I'll try to answer any question you've got So how can I ever see the changes I seek When I can only set up shop want? This is coming your way You better just listen to what we say And if you learn anything from the words that remember This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science Science This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science It actually means that we're in the post show Maybe it's time for more sunglasses Maybe Maybe it's time for more sunglasses Do you really want to have a sunglasses fight with me right now? Where's sunglasses fighting? And don't even get me into this sunglasses fight I have multiple pairs of my old glasses I don't even need sunglasses Look, I'm wearing three pairs of prescription glasses right now Are you ready? Oh my God, seriously Look at all my prescription glasses How old are you? How old am I? I have a flower too I have a flower, that's pretty Sunglasses and a flower Young whippersnappers I know, I look like a spider, right? Ate-eyed spider Thanks, Whiskey Renegade I think we did a good job picking our stories this week There were good stories to choose I have so many more, but they're not directly reachable by me I have another one I'm in my sunglasses drawer, and you don't even know I know, we have sunglasses downstairs We have so many sunglasses downstairs These are actually, hold on, I have to keep track of this These are my actual prescription sunglasses currently So I have to take care of them Take care of your glasses The prescription ones are really cool I had it for a hot second Before my current pair There you go They're okay These ones are very large Can you even tell that they're not that different from the ones that I was wearing Can you see? Yeah, the problem is I found out So when you have a bad astigmatism That's how I do Big lenses like this Actually cause you to feel super like dizzy So I kept thinking I had the wrong prescription Maybe I have an astigmatism And then it turns out I just had too large of a frame Just wearing sunglasses makes me feel weird Do you ever have that problem? I mean you wear glasses all the time Yeah I have a weird thing, I put on sunglasses And I'm like, whoa I feel unsafe driving a vehicle When I wear sunglasses I only wear sunglasses if the sun is absolutely In my face and I can't help it Because sunglasses make me feel weird I don't like it I like my flower I do like your flower It's my Nomi light Nomi light I don't think the light works in it anymore But it's got an LED bulb in the middle of it A little flickering LED light that flickers Or at least it used to It needs a new battery What are you doing? My glasses ate my hair Okay, what's going on chat room? Who else with us? You guys, I went to where dinosaurs live You did, so tell me about this theme park fun ride you went on I mean a car adventure through Northern California I did, we drove So first we went to Oh gosh, we went to Fort Bragg And then And actually on our way to Fort Bragg We stopped at the rock stop We looked at rocks Then we went to Fort Bragg And then we drove to Ferndale Ferndale was lovely Ferndale is Fantastic, I love it We stayed in the western most hotel In the United States In the continental So we stayed there And then we went to Papa Joe's diner for breakfast Things moved very slowly in Ferndale It took us like an hour to get our eggs They were just kind of like meandering along Just the way things go in Ferndale I want to live someplace and have a life Where nothing is ever a rush Yeah, it was pretty wild And then we drove to Prairie It was called Prairie Creek Open Space Preserve And went to Fern Canyon And it was magical And then we went to Patrick's Point State Park And looked for agates And I found an agate on the agate beach And then we went to a gem and mineral museum And then we went Oh, I'm getting my days mixed up We went to the Malele Dunes Which is in Samoa And we stayed just outside of Arcada Went to Lascaux Brewing Company for dinner Delicious, I got the sampler And then the last day we went to Humboldt Bay Wildlife Refuge Which was really cool It was a giant slew that you could walk around I don't know that I've ever been to that Yeah, and then we went Oh, on the way up we went to Confusion Hill To mention that, the home of the Chippalope Yeah, that's a fun little tourist drive Yes, although my friends didn't want to go in the gravity house So we didn't end up going in the gravity house Oh, why not? I know, I'm so frustrated I wanted to go You have to pay like an extra 10 bucks or something Yeah, and they said Oh, we went to the Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz It's basically the same I was like, but I haven't Can I go? And they're like, you can go We'll wait in the car And I was like, fine, I won't go Oh, you should have done it I'll go to the one in Santa Cruz But I did check out all the Chippalope merchandise And then I went Oh, I have a Chippalope postcard, actually Oh, but the last day, yeah, we went to the Wildlife Refuge We went to the Rockin Mineral Museum And what am I forgetting? We... Oh, Avenue of the Giants That's what we did Yeah, with the redwoods Look, a Chippalope Chippalope Chippalope It's so cute They're all over it there That's amazing You just have to be sure You have to really be careful that you Don't try and feed them by hand Because you can get nasty bites I'm like hitting a regular chipmunk Kind of thing on the road These ones can actually puncture tires Yeah, you gotta be careful of those antlers Gotta be careful of the antlers So, I have some official news Okay We're going to Baltimore, man Oh my gosh, how exciting Yeah, beginning of November November 4th, I believe is the date We will be broadcasting live From Baltimore, Maryland And the Maryland STEM Festival Nice It's so cool Yeah Yeah Exciting Cool I know, right? So, our show's on the 4th Well, let me check out the dates What did I email? So, it runs The festival runs from November 4th through 13th And we're kicking it off And, yeah, I believe Yeah, we are officially a go That's the email I got from them So, November 4th Is when we will do it So, I assume that... Yeah, are we still going to do a twist on the 2nd? Good question I don't know I mean, that might be pushing it a bit Oh, if Gold is 8 or we're here Towel Man is in the room Towel Man was dancing for me The naked husband Let's see, so, I sent him in Yeah, November 4th And... Yeah, so we will probably fly in on the 3rd And then leave on the 5th or 6th Depending on, you know, what day's hotel They're able to get us comped And whether, you know, we could stay with somebody To stay an additional day or whatever Mm-hmm Yeah, but basically, yeah Put it into calendar It's in there, I got to request my days Request your days off of work Yeah Everybody, November 3rd is the Baltimore Whiskey Festival Well, let's make sure that we leave early On the morning of November 3rd So that we can get in there for the evening Yeah, that would be part of it Yeah I couldn't miss it The Whiskey Festival, that's great Although it might not be good timing for me Yeah, you don't be hungover We work in the next day, yeah Actually, I think that might benefit This is my Q&A Coolio Yeah, so everybody in the chat room right now If you are around the Maryland area If you know people in the Maryland area Let them know, we're going to be putting the word out Starting to put it out soon And yeah, we're going to be heading across the country In a couple of months That's very exciting Maryland, here we come Maryland, here we come We're going to bring the science Yeah, science Excited Yeah, and we will, oh yes We will be, as far as I know Broadcasting from the National Aquarium Yes Which will be awesome Who? Raw Yeah Rover Desk says we should do a double show On October 28th Double show, what is, what? And then have the second covered Not a bad idea, actually Wait, what, the 26th? Pretty good suggestion, I like it Oh, Halloween is on the 31st It's on a Monday That's a bummer That is a bummer It's so hard for trick or treating with the kids Or for other things I like weekend trick or treating Come on I think Halloween should be just a floating holiday That's always like on Saturday At the end of October Yeah, agreed I think it should just kind of sit there I think we should move it It's going to be a Monday? Yeah Garbage Right See, I hate that, because then some people dress up Like Friday, some people dress up Saturday Some people dress up Sunday And then you're like, what day if it's Monday Then I guess I'm dressing up for work today But I just dressed up all weekend for parties And do I have to wear this costume again? And then you're like, for me If you have an unconventional work schedule Do I wear it to work on Saturday? Right Because people will be showing up with a zoo In costumes And then I have Mondays off So then am I going to things dressed? It's, yeah When are there parties? It's all very complicated I think the parties will probably take place The weekend preceding that Monday Yes, yes, Fridays or Saturdays But which one? Probably both And even Sundays, well, if you look hard enough It'll be okay Yeah, and from Connecticut Patrick lives in Baltimore I know, that's exciting I also have another friend Who is a beatboxer Shodakay, who's amazing Who lives in Baltimore So hopefully he's around that week I have a friend who works for the Pentagon Who lives in Baltimore I'm sure, we have to get all Got to tell all our Baltimore people Let them know what's going on It's a STEM festival in Baltimore And we will be there And if we ever play kind of 100 miles north of the Tully Air Force place I think I still know a few Drinking buddies Yeah, and not just Baltimore Baltimore is close to places Like Washington, D.C. Let's go to the National Zoo It's free Yeah, we could get there Let's see Yeah, take a train Yeah Yeah, Ulysses is in West Virginia Virginia One of the Virginies Yeah, and I know there are People in Washington, D.C. So, Ben Rothick You'll be lamenting 35 Oh, poor Ben We'll celebrate for you It sounds like a good birthday Good 35 Oh, there's a big What is that thing? Big insect Up too late at night Attracted to my light Who are you? You're gonna burn Bugs are in full force at Davis Right now, they're everywhere Summertime finally Yeah, so your audio, Justin, tonight It went like robot for a couple of Like a little bit And then it was fine And it was only a couple of times Was it early on? Early on, yeah Okay, because I was experiencing For whatever reason It was some sort of web lag Or computer lag or something My websites were like disappearing Like you go change tabs And then it's not the site wasn't coming up And I had to reload a couple things And everything was Like Google took A bit to load Which never happens So I don't know if that was my interwebs Do you have Dropbox Installed? Probably not on this computer No, okay Because someone was saying that Dropbox Is a big Big memory hog Yeah So actually apparently is the Cortana thing Which can't be removed Whenever I spoke quietly While robotized I was completely Incaherent Okay, I will never speak quietly again Now I will be yelling Everything that I say Look at this cool rock you guys That's pretty cool Granite with a quartz band Yeah I found it on the agate beach And then I found This really cool Granite that's all speckly I love speckly granite That's pretty And I found one agate One agate I don't have it anymore One agate, two agate Three agate, four When you get the agate We have this red handkerchief Granite How many computers am I running? I'm running only one computer Oh, there is another computer Over there that is Possibly paused on something Haha That is possible There is another computer running on this InterwebStream Which for all I know is actually Like playing youtube videos Probably That's probably just got some big memory Hogging open Because there is a computer over there Ish somewhere That my kids use to bring up Shows they want to watch videos they want to watch And I have noticed sometimes they will just Oh and the headphones are plugged in So it could be They could have just turned the monitor off and walked away And it could be like videos playing That's totally possible Oh hey shouty Blair Who's Karen I don't know It's just like I pictured Like Like Your annoying work Like co-worker That always like bogarts your snacks And they just Karen sounded perfect So for those of you in the chat room I'm going to screen share Our notes for the show tonight And Blair's Blair's spider Very spider story Where spiders that over share Starve so And here comes shouty Blair That's why I don't want to give you A bite of my lunch Karen I just thought that I'm glad you enjoyed it I was like is that A particular person at work Or what's going on here Karen's not a real person Opportunity for a person of big No I think from now on Karen will be the scapegoat For all things Like should be Gosh darn it Karen What do you have On your head now It's my parks bandana No Parks are good they deserve bandanas Check it out Humboldt redwood state park Bandana Oh nice you carry your Yeah and I bought this At the visitor center And then we're driving out Of the avenue of the giants And I'm like pull over And that's where We saw Blair grove Blair grove is a real place And so Sorry so then I just Happened to have bought this Which I got very excited about So then I marked Blair grove was and I marked it On my handkerchief right there That's awesome You're like right here This is Blair grove This is my grove you guys My grove Yeah so I have this now Yeah identity 4 you're right If there is anyone named Karen watching or listening This is not about you Maybe it is about you Karen Maybe you should take a minute Karen and really think about yourself Okay Karen Don't eat Blair's lunch Don't even get close To Blair's food Don't get close to Blair's desk No Yup There you go with the neck bandana Neck or chipping it Neck or chiff Neck or chiff Scouts Is there anybody over in the Twitter Yeah Karen That item was clearly marked in the fridge Clearly marked What really happened Where did this come from I don't know I guess it just It kind of fit a trope That you hear about right About like the person Who steals your lunches in the office There's always one Why is there always one Why do they think it's okay It doesn't happen where I work now But one of the places I used to work There was a lunch thief And Just like almost every day Somebody's lunch would be gone And a couple of times it was mine And it was You know a bunch of times Like every day it was somebody else That this lunch thief was just like No I'm going to take this person's Leftovers or I'm going to take this person's Sandwich Like why would you do that Every day It's not cool to double dip Karen Gosh Karen Oh my goodness Get it together Karen Poor Karen But she asked for this No No she didn't She just didn't know It's okay I think Karen knows Karen knows Good and well what she's doing Karen knows Nobody wants to listen to Coyt Karen Coyt K-O-I-T Take that soft rock Off of the radio Karen Oh okay now I know who Karen is What happened to my Racers Karen Now I know who Karen is So rock at work I got her That you have all the Paper clips Karen Meanwhile I have none Karen It's my stapler Karen My stapler My stapler Red stapler I like my red stapler You conveniently requested the fourth Of July off again Karen Hopefully it's not the fourth of November That will cause a problem Yeah Karen There I sense you've got some Head up shoutiness about this Make-believe person named Karen Who seems to be the culmination Of all Slites against you Are you watching youtube videos Karen because I'm trying To upload these files and they're taking A long time Karen The Jimmy Fallon clips can wait Karen Karen Oh Lord Oh Blair do you know what I saw Karen doing She's feeding the squirrels Right outside your back door What Karen No Karen I Swear to God if I Find a squirrel on my desk Karen Karen I'm going to knock your computer Over and throw it on To your Honda Civic I still work place Blair everybody I don't know I don't want to work with I don't know All over your car Karen So that the seagulls know just where to go Karen There you go That's scary This is starting to turn into scary Blair I know where you sleep Karen Oh is that a picture Of your family Karen Noted Wow I'm really starting To become afraid of scary Blair Oh my God Meanwhile I'm wearing A Boy Scout Neckerchip Doing that It's always the nice little Boy Scouts Causing the problems Shouty Boy Scouts Oh my God Hold on I just got an excellent tweet Karen gets all the cool Pokemon Top Jackson Junior Karen took my lunch and Shared it with Bill from accounting Karen this is not a buffet Karen Nobody wants to hear your call With the podiatrist Step outside for that call Karen I don't need to know about Your corns Karen Just imagining Karen Clipping her nails at her desk Nobody needs to see What hat you put your cat in last night Karen Put that picture away Karen Speaking of cats Have you guys seen the kitten Olympics No Kidlympics Oh yeah let me show you this Video it is Door Open it Nope not the whole big screen How do I make it bigger There we go Oh my God Forgettable Meowments Oh my God Forgettable Meowments Oh my God I love them No don't love them Oh my God Vertical bar or on the What do they call them Parallel bars No that's not what I want to show Go away stop Oh my God Oh my God Catlympics are pretty Kittenlympics are pretty awesome Therapy Llamas In Portland Are you kidding Llamas spit and hiss Yeah Llamas I could believe Therapy Alpacas Therapy Llamas sound like a bad idea Yeah Stop feeding the cat catnip Karen I'm really tired of your cat Using my leg Cat tree Karen Don't sit in my chair you get cat hair all over it Karen That would be one That would be such a goldmine Too much fun Stop dotting your eyes with Hearts and inter-office memos Karen Justin's down Almost to the spit take All over all my electronics Oh God Oh good Casual Friday doesn't mean it's for Pink flamingo sweaters Karen I have been out of offices For a really long time Nobody wants to smell Your boiled fish for lunch Karen Oh God Eat that away from your desk Karen Good God What video is Strengths Okay now I'm getting YouTube Here it is Sanjay Gupta Is in Portland And He's looking for Therapy Llamas Which window is it This one Oh my God A llama and an alpaca If you go to a minute 50 You have to go Back and forth Yeah right there Look Oh my God they're adorning the llamas Let me adorn Lama Oh my God That's so weird Women don't wear Cargo pants Karen Oh my God Hate that Lama therapy It's really Speakerphone is an option Karen So good Speakerphone is an option We don't want to hear you face Timing your cats Karen Oh God You know there is somebody out there Face Timing their cat right now There is Absolutely Have you eaten your food today Did you go potty in the box Mr. Whiskers Is everything okay over there Are you sure you've taken care Of everything alright You're such a good kitty I love Mr. Robot What are you talking about I haven't seen it yet but I've heard good things I've only seen the first season I'm waiting for the second season To get all in But the first season was Mind-blowingly good Mind-blowingly Buglingly fabulous Layer upon layer Of Interest It was great It's okay so I don't have anything against anyone You need Karen Mr. Robot is not actually about robots It's true It's all about the emphasis Enphasis And about It's the two syllables And the hard K And the way that you can say Karen With such disdain like Karen Yeah that's why it works That's why it works I apologize if anyone was named Karen And they're upset So Karen It's not that We're not interested You're a various cat I'm not sure how it fits Into the weekly action plan meeting You have one job Karen It's to write the minutes Karen and we don't need Doodles of cats On the minutes Karen So Karen I get it I get that you're disappointed But I don't think that Maternity leave Is designed for bringing New fur babies I just I know I don't think that's What they were thinking when they wrote that Mr. Whiskers having a cough Is not a suitable excuse For a sick day Karen Yeah It's just a personal opinion Karen It's not I don't mean that You know but it's You know I think 18 cats is probably enough Nobody wants A donation To research feline AIDS As their Christmas gift Karen You like that one Actually one year I did have a co-worker Donate a goat To a tribe in Africa In my name for Christmas Which was pretty cool But it was funny because it was one of those Classic things where she handed me this envelope And I was like ah sweet something cool Is in here and then I like opened it up And it was a picture of a goat And said a goat has been Given to some African tribe In your name and I was like Alright So it is Your parking space Karen it is your parking And I get it You're parking on the street now instead But it doesn't mean that You can build a cat shelter For feral cats In the In that park it's designed You can give the parking space To somebody else to park in But you can't create your own Feral cat refuge I'm sorry You can't use my keyboard After feeding feral cats Sardines Karen It smells It's quite obvious that this is A helper animal companion animal Or companion animal And training and And actually the vest is obviously Made for a dog which is why Your cat isn't moving Oh Oh my god No Karen I don't think I don't think as a policy We should make everybody keep their windows Cracked just in case they have An animal in the vehicle A lot of people here don't have Pets and wouldn't bring them to work And leave them in the car so I don't know Why we would make everybody keep All of their windows open A milkshake is not a fitness Smoothie Karen No no Karen I totally believe you I'm sure urban life is fantastic I just I really I'm not I don't I don't think I need Beyond a new diet But thank you for all of the brochures You left at my desk It was I didn't find it at all Cluttery It was an informative morning I had I know I would give them back but Unfortunately I had Set them aside and somebody Put them in the shredder It wasn't me Otherwise I probably Should have thought of that But I had them stacked Because I was going to read through them Later once I was done working But somehow Somebody must have Accidentally put them in the paper shredder Your cat can't Come as your plus one to the Christmas party Karen No No No No No No our kid may be added to the health plan No They can't I know they depend on you They still It doesn't work like that There isn't I know We're looking into finding a way to add a Veterinary benefit to the health plan As if we haven't The HMO that does that I swear to god Karen If you show me that Sarah McLaughlin Video one more time Okay I'm I was kidding when I said I'd never heard of Phil Collins But that I And thank you for sending me All those lovely videos Through the company email That won't face attention Anyway Hey Yawning Yeah Yont I can't have a pet Martin Karen I know I know I know I can't have a pet Martin Karen Yes Karen You can listen to this we can science at work So just Again to cover this I think we've talked about this a few times now But The Company trash cans are They're basically For Trash that we generate here At work And Bringing Anything let alone bags Of Cat litter And dispose of them at work Is not something That we would encourage in the future No Karen We can't relocate All the ants Oh she cares she does care Karen She's a Terry Karen I like your picture Of the crows crow lady Blair Yeah Nice like in it The crow flock So very goth So very goth-y Yeah I wish I could be that cool Can't do it You want to see some cool art That I'm really digging on right now Body painting and It is amazing Look So she paints these scenes and then paints The people to look like part of the Paintings Alexa Mead I've seen this before Or something like this before Very cool So everything is painted to actually look Like a painting and be a painting As opposed to I love the way it looks Yeah Oh my goodness Oh that one's cool The black and the white oh I like that Super cool They're so neat looking That would be really creepy To have somebody in a painting all of a sudden Like turn and look at you They're always following you Oh which reminds me That's a project I need to work on I forgot to mute things while I blew my nose didn't I I just realized I need to figure out how to do Good night identity 4 We missed him 3D printing I think I have a 3D printing 3D printing cool For the last time Karen Stop replacing my science checks With Judy Bloom novels I like it Alright you guys I like the Karenisms This is good Did somebody get a list of all these Somebody was saying They should make a sound board out of all No God damn it Karen Why do you have to make me Side off of this week in science I didn't do it Damn it Karen I was having fun in the after Show Alright you guys Sorry I have to schedule an 8am staff meeting Karen Because it would be Karen that would do that She would She would do it across town And it would be like on Monday morning When you should be sleeping And she wouldn't bring any snacks Classic Karen I think it's great That you gave all of your cats Their own individual facebook pages I just I have this sort of policy of only Friending Humans Stop asking me to friend you on LinkedIn Karen it's not going to happen You're good I will not come visit Your niece's Girl Scout troop Karen Oh that's just me That's just me That's just me Oh man I won't buy their cookies Karen The thin mint ones Whatever those are They're the coconut ones Come on Karen Karen I'll buy one box but please Please Stop selling the Girl Scout cookies at work Karen The crumbs get everywhere Everyone's irritable from all of the sugar Karen cut it out Alright And for the love of God Karen Don't touch The old fashioned Glazed donut Karen That's my donut Karen Karen replaced the candy bowl with apples Classic Karen Classic Karen Shake a Nightmare Night Karen Shake a Nightmare Good night player Say good night Kiki Say good night Karen Of course she won't say good night Classic Karen She's already left Until next week We will see you again Thank you so much for joining us tonight Have a wonderful, wonderful week