 you today. Please, everyone, set your cell phones to silent mode. Because this is TWIS, this week in science episode number 559, recorded on Wednesday, March 23rd, 2016. Shuck, break out! It's like the disco entry. Hey, everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki. Tonight on TWIS, we are going to fill your heads with a bit of dust, rats, and our favorite parasite, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. What you are about to hear is, Lynn, like anything else you have ever heard. We are certain of this for the very inescapable reason that nothing you were about to hear was known before we said it. Well, maybe a little But this is not a recap, a reduxy reinterpretation of an old, formulaic, plotline, archaic theme or out of print fiction magazine. No, what you are about to hear is all new. So new that much of it is happening right now! So current are the stories that there is a chance of getting swept away by them. So intimately and indispensable involved with our daily lives are the tales to be told that there may be tears of fun farewell when it's over. But it's never over, at least it's not now over. In fact, it hasn't even begun, otherwise it would make absolutely no sense for me to say, this week in Science, coming up next. What's happening this week in Science? What's happening? What's happening? What's happening this week in Science? Good science to you, Kiki and Blair. And good science to you, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there, welcome once again to another hour of this week in Science. Dish? Dish, our ish of this week in Science on my ish wish dish. Alright, I brought all sorts of fun stories. I have some stories about dust from Africa. Africa, that's right, blowing in the wind. Also some first light caught by NASA's Kepler, and additionally some space news, series and Pluto, some big news for them, and then some bacteria in space because that's always fun. Justin, what did you bring? I've got a parasite that needs no introduction. I've got getting to the bottom of mortality and clumps of a feather as well as possibly maggots maybe. Ew, I'm never okay with maggots, ever, ever. Alright, Blair, what did you bring for the Animal Corner? Oh, I brought a very expensive flea. I brought panda ears. I brought unlikely friends. And guys, I gotta tell ya, I have a rat problem. Oh no. Alright, thanks for letting us know. It's good to be warned, forewarned on this show on the 23rd of March. Time for science. Let's get in there, yeah? Science! Let's dig into these fun stories. So, okay, let's just get the climate change stuff done, right, off the top. We're gonna just dig right into the, yeah, climatia, right, climatia. That almost sounds like a child's name. Have you met my eldest, climatia? Oh, that's a problem. That's just not okay. So, James Hansen, a researcher we have discussed before, and very recently we discussed a paper that he had just started talking about and publicizing before it had gone through peer review. Got a lot of criticism for that, but just wanna put it out there that his massive, this is like a 50-page massive review paper has gone through peer review, finally. It is now published and it is published in an open access journal, which means that anybody who wants to can go access it at Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. So, go look for the open access journal titled Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. Look for James Hansen, he's not the only author, but his work, which is now entitled Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise and Super Storms. Evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling and modern observations that two degrees Celsius global warming could be dangerous. Which, thanks to peer review, is no longer titled Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise and Super Storms. Evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling and modern observations that a two degrees Celsius global warming is highly dangerous. It's very slight language change, actually, but it's something that people believed was a little bit sensational originally and now has been toned down. Yeah, because, yeah, Sea Level Rise and, you know, the end of the world. These are things we don't want to alarm anybody with. Yes, so the process of peer review, we know a lot of changes were definitely made. They actually added two new authors to the paper in the process. Yeah, and one of the big things that comes out in this paper is their postulation of what's called stratification of the polar oceans. And they hypothesized that what's going to happen, and we've already seen a little bit of it in the thinking of the blob, which are these patches of warm water that don't get mixed with the rest of the ocean, that the oceanic mixing, that the currents that are usually there mixing everything together are slowing down. Not working as well. Water's not upwelling from down below, from the cool depths to mix this warm water in. So we have blobs of warm water that trap pools of cold, fresh water on the surface. And these blobs of warm water as they come in contact with ice caps, other things like that, they're going to melt them faster. So what they see and what they predict based on their models is that there are going to be more of these blobs. There's going to be faster ice melt, faster sea level rise, and just basic, you know. And let's also not forget, there's a fair amount of carbon that's locked away in this ice. There's a fair amount of methane if we're talking about tundras of Siberia, but there's a fair amount in the ice caps, polar ice caps. There's a fair amount of carbon that's actually locked up in that ice that as it melts will release, and therefore accelerating the situation. Absolutely, so it'll be accelerated. So their model accelerates things and predicts much more rapid change or sea level rise specifically than the IPCC report. And the latest data from NOAA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, does show that there are these patches of cooler water and patches of warmer water, which people think might be these blobs and stratification that Hansen's paper predicts actually happening earlier than Hansen predicted. And the authors predicted. So, you know, this is all just early, early kind of stuff, but you know, we can always hope for the best. Yeah. But you should, even though you hope for the best. Prepare for the worst? Yeah, like it's not caring for the worst. How many times do you get into your car without your seatbelt because you don't plan on getting to the accident, right? You put it on every time. You take the precautions against known danger. Which we are not doing. We are not wearing our carbon caps and are therefore going to be stuck with climate. There's a famous political cartoon that said, what if all this climate change stuff is fake and we make the world healthier for no reason? What if... Yeah, there's no reason. Oh my goodness, not just the betterment of everything for everyone. That's articulate too, because it's not like the only way to prevent global warming is by burning massive amounts of carbon and putting it in the atmosphere and ruining the air quality for all life on this planet. It's the only way we can solve this, folks, is by poisoning the air. What a choice to make. No, it's quite the opposite actually. It's the only way to make the world healthier and fight this at the same time. This is really interesting too, because one of the metaphors that they use to explain how climate change disrupts the waterway system is that the ocean is like climate's heart. When you disrupt the heart, when you inhibit the heart's ability to pump, that's heart disease. Then you have clogged arteries or you have blood not circulating through your body and that's exactly how the ocean works. Is it circulates warm and cold water? It also helps circulate warm and cold air around our planet. If the circulation isn't happening, it causes this systemic problem and these blobs of warm water are doing just that. They're not moving around like they're supposed to. It's like a clogged artery. And to take your analogy one step to the sort of ridiculous, they actually have been testing and putting stroke victims into a super cool chamber to help them recover better immediately after a stroke. That's just taking the analogy. A really ridiculous place. Very ridiculous place, yes. Speaking about the circulation of air and the circulation of water, in other climate-based news, researchers have been trying to figure out how we've heard for years about how the winds start blowing in Saharan Africa and that starts a chain reaction which leads to dust traveling across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas where it actually plays a big part in the ecology of South America, Central America, because of all of the nutrients in the dust and the bacteria that hitch a ride on them as well. Additionally, the dust that travels across the Atlantic Ocean is part of shielding us from energy from the sun. It actually is a part of keeping things cooler because of the dust when it's traveling across, we don't get as much energy into the Earth's atmosphere. It reflects things away. It's like a dust blanket. The elephants use dust on a hot sunny day to keep themselves cool. Researchers have been trying to figure out what's the mechanism? How does this system work? Where does the dust really get started? How does it get blown out of Africa? How does this system piece by piece fit together? What they've discovered is that there in Saharan Africa, in the Sahel, there is a Saharan heat low that occurs. In the Saharan desert wind, there are high temperatures. The really high temperatures and this high pressure actually slow down the winds, which are called the harmatan, which come from the mountains, because this wind, this air gets funneled through the mountains and it speeds up. The mountains hits the eroded sides of the mountains and starts picking up dust and hits the edge of the Sahara, and this harmatan begins the whole process. However, really high temperatures can lead to a heat low that block the wind and that really slow it down so you don't get the kind of dust storms that we see many times. They are also looking at the impact of water vapor and they think that most likely that vapor is going to come from the Mediterranean Sea. Water vapor in the air will tend to increase temperature and can intensify this Saharan heat low and also slow down the harmatan. So, you start putting all these things together. You slow down the harmatan. You have reduced amount of dust. Their work, this work coming it's coming out of CNRS, out of France and US team as well. They say that over the next 100 years because of increases in the Earth's atmospheric temperature, we are going to see a decrease in the dust load from the Sahara. So, the Saharan dust load that gets put into the atmosphere which also helps the system to stay cooler is going to decrease, decrease, decrease just as we probably need it to be increasing and helping to keep us cool. So, further accelerating this systemic fluctuations, yes. So, the way this whole mechanism works with air vapor the high pressure and temperature that either influence block or accentuate the winds that come out of the mountains these and it's also going to lead by reducing the dust it's also going to lead to higher sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic which will lead to more stronger hurricanes in the Atlantic. And more water vapor less and more water vapor less dust but also more stronger hurricanes, yes. So, yes, another great fun study. Yeah, so yeah, we might think about more positive things like exploding stars. Those are always fun. How far away from us is it? Because that is a direct relation. As long as it's not ours. Is the sun okay? Then it's fun. The sun is okay. Great, let's hear about it. These are very far away. So, researchers at the University of Notre Dame Indiana, led by Peter Garnovich we're using the Kepler Space Telescope data not to look for exoplanets but to look for the brilliant light signature of stellar explosions which we know as supernovas. Supernovae. If you want to try and pronounce that AE at the end of the word appropriately. What they found by looking at light captured from Kepler every 30 minutes over a 3-year period. They looked at 500 distant galaxies. They looked at 50 trillion stars in the field of Kepler's view over this 3-year period. And they found two red super giants that exploded. They got the signal from two. The first one is KSN 2011A about 300 times the size of our sun only 700 million light years away. And the second KSN 2011D the KSN representing the Kepler Space in 2011 the year being in which it was discovered is roughly 500 times the size of our sun and 1.2 billion light years away. One much closer than the other. These are massive, massive stars that the researcher says to put their size into perspective Earth's orbit about our sun. So where we are around our sun would fit within the girth of these stars. Those stars just chew us up. We'd be right inside of them. So what they found was this amazing blip. And it's so great to see. It's just this miniscule signal out of the noise. And what it is that they saw. They only saw it in one of the stars. Not both of them. But it is, you see the noise of the light signal the brightness of this light signal that they're watching. And there's just a blip. There's this amazing light that takes an exponential curve up to an asymptotic maximum. It's maximum brightness. So what we see with the little blip is what the researchers are calling shock breakout. And shock breakout is the moment of ignition or the moment that we see the light from ignition in which the explosion makes it to the outside of that star. So it's the first brilliant light of the ignition of this explosion that we see. The shock wave rippling out from the star. And this is the first time that we've ever seen this before. We have seen this in, we have seen supernovas before. This massive explosion, lots of brightness. We got tons, you know, millions, billions of lumens. You know, we've got so much, so much more brighter. More brighter, I've got good language today. So much brighter than our own sun. But we've never seen this particular moment before. This particular moment of the shock wave first emerging. And we didn't see it in both of the stars, because one of them is, they think maybe surrounded by dust and gas, but then again these are different sized stars, slight difference in their energetic possibility. So maybe one of them was surrounded by dust and we didn't see the shock breakout, or maybe the energetics of how the shock breakout occurs is different and works along a sliding scale. So as of now, we have basically two points of information about the beginning of a supernova. Of the type of information that is that hard to get, getting to right there, that's pretty fantastic. Oh, it's incredibly fantastic. And there's a great animation. It's not the real thing. If you go looking online, this animation from NASA is not the real thing. It's an artist interpretation. Researchers used the data they had in order to work with an artist to develop something that they think approximates the shock breakout at the instant of the supernova. So some pretty interesting stuff there. It's also interesting, the shock breakout supernova was the name of my surf guitar punk fusion band. There you go. I was waiting for something like that. It's my surf disco fusion. Shock breakout. This is this week in Science. Hey Justin, what you have there? I've got a common parasite that needs really no introduction on this show. Ew. You have a parasite? Well actually, it's much more likely that you actually are having this parasite. Third world's population have it is linked to psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, suicide attempts, car accidents, and it blinds babies before they are born. Crazy cat lady syndrome. Yes, a long time friend of the show. Toxoplasma gondii is in the news once some more. This time a study has linked it to repeated bouts of rage. Disorder known is intermittent explosive disorder, also IED. The study released today, March 23rd in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry found that people with IED are more than twice as likely to have been exposed to t-gondii than individuals who are healthy with no psychiatric diagnosis. This is the first time we've confirmed this idea in humans. It says Tia Dor Postalace a professor of psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and an author of the study. It indicates that this parasite could be having significant effects on anger-related emotions and behavior in people with mental illness. This study is based on the combined expertise and aggression and inflammation of the authors University of Chicago's psychiatry professor Emil Coccaro and Dr. Postalace's knowledge of t-gondii and neuro immunology. They looked at 358 adults and found that chronic latent infection with t-gondii is associated with the IED and increased aggression. So this is again one of those studies where it doesn't say it's not claiming even that toxoplasmic gondii causes the disorder. But it is saying that because those with the disorder or who can be diagnosed with the disorder are twice as likely to be infected with t-gondii it may be a trigger. It may be something that there may be a disorder of some sort that's just present but could be latent and not being triggered, but perhaps the parasite is doing something to inflame the situation to make it more active or more apparent. And this could be across all of the things that t-gondii gets associated with. It could be that it's just creating regulation issues of some sort of these disorders. Is it inflaming something that they're already predisposed to have or is it something that it's creating? Or is it just what happens to you when you get scratched by a cat and you've done nothing wrong? Or is it that you are kind of predisposed to this kind of stuff anyway and you eat more meat than other people and you have rage and because you eat more meat and maybe more rawish meat you actually just got infected with t-gondii because your behavior really predisposed to do things that make you more at risk to infection. Which is a possibility. That's another way of trying to get away from the fact that this thing only procreates in cats and cats is the only vector that we know of that's spreading them because it's the place where it completes its life cycle. But yes, they said they're going to continue this work between the relationship between toxoplasmic gondii, impulsivity and aggression and collaborations with researchers from Sweden who are studying people of recently committed suicide and Germany who are studying aggression, impulsivity and neurotransmitter dopamine. I hope they're studying the brains That's probably Just studying the people I don't know Not going to get much behavioral stuff out of them at this point. Yeah, and it's also important they say because toxoplasmic is known to reside in slowly growing forms and brain tissue this is actually a recent understanding and it has the potential to intermittently reactivate so finding those connections to t-gondii and what it might actually be doing in the brain and what triggers these sorts of reactions and people not so much down the line of figuring out what toxoplasmic gondii or carrying toxoplasmic gondii infections but actually in figuring out the signaling or the pathways or what's going on that triggers these events or creates manifestations of psychiatric disorders more so in these populations I'm wondering how this fits in with the last study that we talked about related to t-gondii where I think it was a meta-analysis and they determined that really there's not any evidence suggesting that there's any increase in impulsivity or any behavioral change pretty much at all So in that study though what they looked at was does the infected population have a greater propensity for one thing or another but I don't know they didn't find anything, right? they didn't suicides but they didn't much in anything else but that's one study that right now is a complete outlier to everything else that's on because part of also what we've begun to understand about this doesn't manifest like a disease it's not going to have the same symptoms manifest in every person it does seem though that there are these categories of either disease or personality behaviors that seem to correlate amongst the higher the higher groups and not everybody is affected the same and the one study on driving reactions it was the pH of the blood that seemed to be a correlating factor whereas those with certain pH blood types didn't seem to have any of these symptoms of slow reaction times and others in another blood group did you can have toxoplasmic gondii and it doesn't make you schizophrenic or crazy cat lady or any of your issues but there's a higher percentage of those people who exhibit those traits that do have it much higher, twice as much as often so they're twice as likely to be in this case of the IED twice as likely to have a toxo infection so that's the interesting thing about these correlations it may not be the cause of a disease but it may manifest it may allow things to manifest in ways that they may not have without the infection I think it's really interesting and we'll always bring up the stories as they come up correlations are fascinating because they can mean everything or nothing the one thing that we do know and understand about toxoplasmic gondii is that cats are what spreads it speaking of cats we got our own crazy cat lady in what part of the show no is it time once again that's right it's time for Claire's animal corner I'm calling her a crazy cat lady what you got Blair? not cats we'll tell you that no I have a very hot button issue on the show not toxoplasmosis but invasive species we talk a lot about invasive species on this show prower conch prower conch prower conch prower conch invasive species on this show prower conch mostly conch yeah so the difference between an introduced species and an invasive species thank you introduced is something that we did and it worked out perfectly and we did it on purpose and everyone's winning invasive species it's like we said hi yeah that's so good so a recent study looking at the true cost of an invasive species looking at a lake, one of the great lakes in Madison, Wisconsin so from the University of Madison looking particularly at a little spiny water flea looking at the true cost of an invasive species a fascinating story because in previous studies they've mainly looked at the cost of removing an invasive species and that's what they consider the cost so for example looking at in another great lake in the five great lakes looking at poison invasive or looking invasive sea lampraise looking at the cost of poisoning them of moving them out of the great lakes that cost $20 million a year so they look at the cost of an invasive species and they say the invasive sea lampraise cost us about $20 million a year well this study out of the University of Madison particularly Jake Walsch a PhD candidate at the UW Center for Limnology and lead author of the report looked at the true cost of an invasive species so particularly looking at the spiny water flea which is brought to the great lakes via ballast water a lot of invasive a lot of invasive species come from ballast water those cargo ships they suck it up in one port and then they're like oh we don't need that and they spit it out in another right so he wanted to look at the ballast waters from these cargo ships brought from Russia these spiny water fleas they made their way into the great lakes via the ballast water and then they actually moved inland via boats and bait buckets and now they are found all over the great lakes area in particular in a lake in Madison, Wisconsin they are feasting they're these little zoo plankton little animals that float through the water they feast on smaller zoo plankton that are native called Daphnia Pulasaria and that Daphnia species eats mainly algae so he wanted to look at the function that is being disrupted by this invasive species and the cost of that not just trying to remove it so by eating the Daphnia what they're doing is they're actually taking the cleaning ability away from the lake so this is Lake Mendota so the Daphnia eats the algae and that's actually what creates clear water in the lake and the Daphnia is so cute too they're pretty adorable so the spiny water flea which is gross an invasive and not just to be there eating the Daphnia Daphnia can no longer clean the water the water is getting more and more foggy and not only then is that affecting the ecosystem but on top of that the people that swim, that fish that give money to that area in order to recreate on that lake that money's gone so that's an impact of this invasive species then trying to fix that problem they have two options one is to get rid of the fleas which essentially just means killing the lake if they really wanted to get rid of those fleas they'd have to poison the entire lake out and start over that's not really possible so the other option is to take out the secondary thing affecting the water quality which is the fertilizers on the surrounding land that is dumping phosphorus into the water and making the algae grow in order for them to actually remove enough phosphorus in order to clear up the lake they would have to take a 71% reduction in phosphorus in the neighboring areas which would cost 80 to 163 million dollars a year in lost profits in the fertilizer because they're saying that reducing the fertilizer would make the agricultural land less fertile and so it would be less food but it would be helping the lakes so this is just a very good initial study looking at truly assessing the real cost of an invasive species which right now has over 180 species in the great lakes that are invasive and have been brought there by ballast water so I've got an idea this is just one I've got an idea why don't we find something that eats this and put it into the water problem solved nothing can happen from that if that thing becomes a problem and we'll find something that eats that we'll put that in the water and we'll just keep going chain of introductions with invasive species that are trying to find a balance in a totally unbalanced environment yeah anyway I do find this besides just really depressing I do find it very interesting because I think it's the first study that's starting to really scratch at the surface of assessing the real cost of an invasive species so it allows us to kind of take the step back and go what is the cost of removing the animal it's not just the function being inhibited by that animal it's not the extra function they're delivering it's the effect on the neighboring agricultural land it's the effect on the trades on that land there's a million things going into the real cost of an invasive species and I think that's a really important lesson to remember and Ed from Connecticut is asking how easy is it to clean ballast water and it seems as though once you have an economic argument you can say you're not going to lose as much money by putting equipment on to clean your ballast water or we'll find you X number of dollars for dumping your ballast water because it's going to cost us this much money to fix this problem per year this is not going to cost so people who do this kind of stuff can then do a cost benefit analysis exactly so right now it costs nothing to dump your ballast water so you're just dumping extra money to filter and sterilize the water before you get rid of it in most places so once yes once there are more regulations and we start cracking down on this then everyone has to get microscopic filters and they have to get UV sterilization things in their ballast thingies that's the scientific term in their ships to actually properly sterilize water before they release it so I'm kind of curious I hadn't thought about this until of course this story but is there no regulation on this right now or is it a scenario that we're talking about like for the past 50-80 years this has been going on and only in the last 10 did we start to regulate and nobody dumps ballast water in their neighbors ports anymore or is it still an ongoing thing because this has been going on without anybody giving a thought to it for so very long according to Wikipedia the Coast Guard issued ballast water regulations according to the National Invasive Species Act of 1996 in 2012 and the EPA issued discharge permits for controlling ballast water under the Clean Water Act Authority and so there are general permits that are allowed that sets numeric ballast water discharge limits for commercial vehicles vessels 79 feet in length or greater which is going to affect most cargo ships but very recent development this is so we do we have there is the laws going into place to attempt to do this but what we're looking at is the problem of the last I don't know 50 really actually wouldn't have to go back 50 most of this damage is probably done in the last 20 years you know more and more ships more and more ballast water likely and there's an interesting question in the chat room about doing filtration in the ports and ultimately the only way to actually completely stop a lot of these planktonic animals from moving around through ballast water is by putting the filtration processes on the boats when they pull in the water that's really going to be the only way to stop it so unfortunately it seems like most regulations are towards dumping of the ballast water when really the regulations that should be in place is to have this stuff on the boats your boat cannot enter our dock unless it is equipped with these processes because then that means that any water on your boat is clean and that really would be in my opinion the only way to actually stop this problem so invasive species bummer here's another bummer what it's a happy sad story there's a half and half so peyandas turns out they have this really cool ability they can hear sound at the ultrasonic frequencies so a recent study at San Diego zoo found that by working with pandas and the animal care specialists that work directly with the pandas they were able to train the pandas to respond to sounds and then they were able to gauge when pandas could hear and not hear sounds and they found that giant pandas are able to detect sounds at way wider ranges than we thought cool what good would that do them well I'm so glad you asked because pandas depend on vocalizations in reproductive processes and all of those vocalizations happen at it turns out the ultrasonic level the problem there is that we create a lot of sounds at ultrasonic frequencies that we can't hear but that bothers the animals so this is we can have a car going down the street and a machine going around and to us it's really quiet actually that's a vehicle making very little noise as it drives by and it can be making a tremendous amount of noise and sound outside the limits of our hearing but we aren't bothered by it so nobody tries to dampen those sounds or block those sounds because we don't even know they're there exactly and it turns out that their ability to not only hear these reproductive sounds but to discriminate between fine scale differences is very important for muscle reproduction with pandas so if it's being muffled, if it's being competed against in the ultrasonic range that's going to cause all sorts of problems with their reproduction so it's possible that this is causing some of the reproductive difficulties with pandas it's possible pandas are sitting there like dudes killing my mood we're drowning out all the sweet talking that goes on before copulation we're really ruining their scene that's what it is they don't know that any other pandas are interested because they can't hear each other anymore maybe they sing each other sweet sweet love songs whisper sweet nothings and then it's more like you want to do what what are you in the mood for what are you in the mood for you want to eat some more bamboo ok that's Friday night for pandas now because they can't hear each other so you can look at this two ways this is oh we're really messing it up for the pandas are really pandas you're this sensitive why are you so sensitive if they're communicating ok so it would be there then like you going out and dating but during the date you're not allowed to talk to the other person at all it would be a hindrance that would be kind of a big deal and you'd be missing the signals and the signs and everything else so here's the next step here's what they have to do to see if pandas have been so decimated by the sound pollution that they've forgotten how to sweet talk they need to make the panda mating zones sound proof sound proof see what happens yeah you're right that would be the way to find out you're exactly right that's the next step we should tell the San Diego zoo yeah too bad they didn't find that pandas are into the subsonic range because then maybe that would explain like their wanderings last week because the subsonic stuff you can hear for long distances so maybe that would explain how they wander and then it's ok but yeah it doesn't go there no subsonic curious so curious oh pandas this is this week in science we're going to come back in a few minutes with a lot more science news for you we have bacteria and Justin's going to tell you to sit down so with that stick with us we'll be back just a few with this week in science alright everybody if you like twists you know we talk about pandas all the time and with the pandas it's all about communication they're not communicating right so let's communicate right I want you to 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your support we really could not do this without you it tastes awful so it's gotta be good and we're back with more this week in science yes we are Justin what you got there in that goodie bag of science mostly you're sitting down while listening to this show which is well and fine most of the time but you may want to stand up for what I'm about to tell you there is a silent killer mostly science killer in your midst it is there when you are at home when you are eating while you are watching television while you are working on your computer it even follows you to work and lurks behind you sometimes and it is responsible for 3.8% of all deaths of all deaths what is this monster of murder in mayhem by what name does this beastly bringer of all cause mortality as scribe sitting yes sitting well Kiki and I are good we're standing right now standing I got my standing desk yeah sedentary behavior particularly sitting has recently become a prevalent public health topic and target for intervention get up stand up you stand 100% of people that sit die everybody does yes this is true but increase sitting sitting periods of more than 3 hours a day is what they ascribe this is worldwide if you actually look at the United States it is higher than that increase bottom time is beginning to take a big toll on our bodies because both at work leisure activities we have shifted over the years from standing or running in our physical activities to sitting we sit at a computer desk we sit and watch television we sit and play video games we sit we sit we sit so much sitting going on so investors estimate that reducing time to less than 3 hours per day would increase life expectancy by an average of 0.2 years which might not sound like a lot but you have to understand this is across the all cause mortality menu of ways in which you can die this is everything from asphyxiation by boa constructor cancer and car crashes struck by lightning or trampled by zebras 0.2 years on average across the unexpected death spectrum is actually pretty good couple of months that's just on average but that's going across every way that you can die you can die at any age early too this is 0.2 on the average life of all humans regardless of when they die this is actually much bigger number than that although I don't know what that number is in order to properly assess the damaging effects of sitting the study analyzed behavioral surveys from 54 countries around the world matched them up with statistics on population side actuarial table overall deaths researchers found that the sitting time significantly impacted all cause mortality accounting for approximately 433,000 or 3.8% of all deaths across the 54 nations in the study this is of course a correlation but still they also found that sitting had higher impact on mortality rates in western pacific region followed by european eastern mediterranean american and southeast asian countries very respectively this type of information they say is crucial to evaluating the effects of sitting on our lives especially in light of recent research that shows prolonged sitting is associated with increased risk of death this is the key regardless of other activity levels okay so a minute ago you said that a couple hundred thousand people died by sitting what does that mean death by sitting is that they just sat and they sat and they sat and they weren't active and the sedentary nests over extended periods of time during the day affected the cardiovascular health so like they died of heart attack or car crash or zebra trampling if it's across all that then your cause of death isn't sitting you're saying that cause of death sitting again they could have run fast enough to get out of the way of the bus this is just the correlation the increase in deaths amongst those who sit a lot versus those who do not this is what this is comparing those who were sitting nations who were sitting a lot nations who were not sitting a lot this is sort of how this works but what was interesting is that researchers now believe that periods of moderate or vigorous physical activity might not do anything under the detrimental effects of extended sitting so it's not that you sit for the more than three hours a day and then go jogging for less than three hours of your day and didn't jog, you're actually better off that's very interesting I have a gig that I don't sit very much but still even in that three hours of sitting would be a really hard threshold to get under even at a job where I'm walking around most of the time that three hours is not very much time and this is sort of also taking into account the idea that sitting is a natural thing for people to do but kind of unnatural at the levels in which we employ it today it's not what our bodies were built for the opposite or the corollary that you should have a standing nest and stand all day long that's not true either because if you're standing all day long you're not necessarily doing movement either and you're potentially if you're not moving around and if you're not engaging in some kind of dynamic movement, you're not going to be affecting all the things that would be really helping you out balancing it and going from sitting to standing and sitting to standing or at least having something that engages you to move while you're at the standing desk we would think posture correctly is important we would think that but just based on this going for the jog and the workout is not enough and actually doesn't help if you've been sitting that much it's the sitting itself that detrimental and yes it's across all causes of death so it's like do they get extra points if it's a car crash while something like I don't know how they've waited this exactly I do like Ed's comment though a desk job might be a tad safer than hunting in Grizzly Bear Country you would think but maybe not, maybe that turns out actually those Grizzly Bear Hunters live to ripe old age I haven't seen the data Ed another person also made a reference to another area where we sit that could contribute to some time well if you're spending 3 hours there yeah you might have some other issues but it does add up I mean it adds up it should not add up to more than 3 hours a day I'm sorry how much math should go with that thing there should not be yeah but you think about our lifestyle and you think about you just go from room to room where there's different types of places to sit and if you're standing for more than a few minutes somebody somebody will go up to you and go do you need to sit down would you like a seat I'm sitting you're sitting would you like to sit it's so interesting that's such a big part of our culture because sitting conserves energy well also you bring up another of the conditions of our culture people commute long distances to work now they could be sitting for a half an hour an hour and a half each way to work I mean not even including being at work maybe they get to work and they sit there all day and they get home from a long day of working and driving and now they want to sit down in front of the couch at some point they're spending the majority of their time sitting let alone this three hour threshold which seems truly unachievable and then you know what we do we lie down but then our spine elongates so that's good I've been wondering about the benefits of just hanging myself upside down well but then your blood rushes to your brain and that's probably bad for your brain it's bad for your eyes you know what the number one killer is the number one killer being alive got being alive there you go nobody gets out of here alive anyway stand up sit down fight fight fight woo let's go to space oh yeah we don't have to sit or lay down in space no I know exactly so someday when we are all on ships heading out to visit series to see the view that NASA's Dawn mission has been giving us has given us amazing images from uh we will one day gaze upon Ocater crater it's a 57 mile wide crater on series that we have found from Dawn's images looks as though it's got a a peak something of a of a I don't know if you call it a hill or a peak but there's a dome kind of like half dome sticking up from this crater and the view of it makes it really look like okay it's a crater and we've got this dome and this looks volcanic it looks as though there was geologic activity and probably fairly recently we've also been looking at we might have heard of the bright spots on this dwarf planet and these bright spots people have been like what is that is that water ice what's going on there and there are these reflective deposits which are just reflecting reflecting reflecting light from the sun and the deposits they think are the result of sublimation so maybe they're what there's water on the planet that this ice has been sublimating into space so just going from ice to gas and going going away getting wicked away by space and in the process leaving behind salts and scientists think that is a mix of hydrated magnesium sulfate so it's also known as hexahydrite and it's these bright patches and streaks have been spotted at the Lonnie crater and Oxo crater as well on the on series and the gamma ray and neutron detector known as Grand on Don has been people have been analyzing that information and it looks as though there might be deposits of water ice as still beneath the surface mainly in the polar regions of this little world so there are going to be more analyses to really test it to know to find out for sure whether or not water ice is on the series if it's surviving beneath that salty surface and there's a lot more data to come from this little dwarf planet very cool very interesting stuff pocked with craters also streaked with streaked with linear fractures and features that make it look as though the surface of this dwarf planet has been creaking and turning and struggling against either some internal forces or other gravitational forces some neat stuff some very beautiful pictures from from Don's series and over at Geekwire one of our favorite authors Alan Boyle one of our favorite reporters has been reporting on it and will probably keep us updated there is any new news additionally other dwarf planets in our solar system you know the one our favorite Pluto taking a big look at Pluto again guess what they think they've seen lakes of frozen nitrogen frozen lakes of nitrogen that's what they think they've seen pretty neat stuff so New Horizons headed out to Pluto and MIT's Richard Binzel said conditions conducive to creating a lake of liquid nitrogen might have existed 800 to 900 million years ago when Pluto's axial tilt was shifted enough to be able to expose a wide area of the surface to sunlight for long periods of time and so millions of years ago we might have seen a lake actually reflecting the sunlight but not a lake of water a lake of liquid nitrogen and that liquid anymore but rather really frozen so the axial tilt shifted no more sunlight and now frozen frozen frozen and again this article that I'm looking at is from Alan Boyle and he says this lakes on Pluto scenario emerges from computer models that run the sequence of shifts in Pluto's orbit and the tilt of its axis backwards for billions of years and that Pluto right now is at an intermediate point between its climate extremes lots more cool stuff coming with Pluto we've got some lakes it's got frozen mountain tops it's so much more than just a ball of rock orbiting in our distant solar system so so much more Justin you have any more stories I got a couple more new research from the University of Covenhound reveals that bacteria which a glutinate before entering the body glutinates another way of saying clump together aggregating themselves into like a biofilm a glutinate before entering the body are far more resistant than single cell bacteria and that this may be the cause of chronic infections from bacteria so ever since the discovery of bacteria at the bottom of Antoine van Leunhoek's microscope in 1966 people have been going EWWW bacteria researchers on the other hand have primarily studied them but studies on bacteria as organisms that enter the body individually and only then accumulator a glutinate creating what is known the biofilm inside so we study the bacteria as these individuals they sneak in the single bacteria sneaks in and then inside it starts to form this biofilm and this is this infection however the new study is conducted by researchers at the faculty of health and medical sciences the University of Covenhound among others indicates that this view of bacteria needs to be revised this way of looking at the infections need to be revised this is quotey voice bacteria that enter the system enter the bloodstream as biofilm are stronger than bacteria that enter separately this is something we have to pay far greater attention to in trying to prevent infections for example in connection with operations as professor Thomas Bjarnholt from the biofilm center University of Covenhound I wonder I'm just all of a sudden going back to the invasive species study that Blair brought up and there's all this question of you know how many individuals does it take to set up a permanent population when you're an invasive species right so if there's a whole bunch of them grouped together they probably are much more successful than if there's just one random individual right so with bacteria it might be very you know this is maybe a very similar maybe analogous like situations slightly except this is also the sort of the implication I think I'm reading through this is that it's not even if the individuals in there group up and create the biofilm within the body it's still not as infectious and not as resistant to antibiotics than the biofilm that entered as a biofilm that was already a unit that was sort of surviving as a unit out in the world and not sort of trying to create its own colony so they found a significantly different type of growth than previously seen in their experience the biofilm takes the main part of the nourishment available and thus outmatches single celled bacteria this makes biofilm the most important player according to Bjarne salt this is something we need to pay attention to while performing operations like we have a lot of bacteria on and in our skin which are clustered as biofilm and potentially pathogenic if they enter the skin in this way biofilm can penetrate to be pushed into the body when a surgeon cuts a hole in the skin containing a biofilm antibiotics are not designed to fight biofilm they're designed to fight bacteria they're sort of tested one on one mono and mono not a unitary group or platoon of bacteria working together often antibiotics are not sufficient to fight chronic infections this may partly because antibiotics are to a large extent designed to fight single celled bacteria and not biofilm so they're just saying sort of let's look at how they actually get into the body and exist in there and fight that and not just do our isolated tests also because in the past we've also seen and learned that one of the interesting things about a biofilm is that works as a community there's different bacteria doing different tasks so I can see how an individual bacteria may react differently or be attacked differently than a community of them with different tasks with different relationships to the rest of the outside world so the bacteria are cooperating and working together this is terrifying and they differentiate tasks too so some may be terrifying toxin to defend themselves against other bacteria others may be working on an antidote for that toxin so that they themselves aren't affected by it they can some are collecting nourishment some are just using it to generate more bacteria they really sort of specialize within a group whereas a single player is just hoping to reproduce itself with it absolutely terrifying speaking of more bacteria I have a I guess kind of not related but just a bacteria study that really caught my eye because the citizen science component but also because it was about bacteria in space yeah so science cheerleader which is a citizen science website and it's the idea that was started by Darlene Cavalier and the idea is that you use the there are all sorts of cheerleaders who are also scientists and there are also great spokespeople for science and so there are many events now where there are science cheerleaders who go out and try and engage people in science and this was one of their projects and they actually went and these science cheerleaders went and collected samples of bacteria from all sorts of environments here on earth so Darlene sampled Benjamin Franklin's foot we also have her swabbing the crack of the liberty bell other cheerleaders sampled candlestick park and the grass on the park as well as the seats in candlestick park they announced this project which is called project mercury and there are youth cheer teams that contributed microbes and sampled their local environments their houses their places of work and all of the bacteria were sent to the international space station where bacteria were grown and pretty much the majority of bacteria just grew like normal completely normal bacteria growth these cultures were just fine except for one particular species of bacteria which grew 60% better in space on the space station than it did than it does here on earth which one was that one it's called basilis suffensis it's JPL Myrta 8.2 basilis suffensis JPL Myrta 8.2 it grew 60% better in space than on earth and so researchers now are interested in why this particular bacteria really liked space so much why did it grow so much better no gravity but the other bacteria were normal so why that one why that one species why the microgravity well of course it would have to be the microgravity because they I'm sure grown it without microgravity and found that it didn't do that I was going to say no competition thing but no it's probably not it something else it's something else there's something else so this was published in peer J peer J is an open access journal which I have written articles about in the past and anyway open access citizen science bacteria in space I've got a quick proof of concept study cool North Carolina State University researchers have shown that genetically engineered green bottle fly larvae can produce and secrete human growth factor molecule that will help promote cell growth and wound healing so they had they had these lab rays green bottle fly larvae basically maggots that they used in this therapy they're applied to non-healing wounds they used diabetic foot ulcers in one example to promote healing maggots clean the wound remove dead tissue and secrete then the next step because maggots already did that this is like a frame this is like a very ancient method of sort of treating a wound as you put maggots into the wound they do a good job they get rid of the rot right that could cause the green and the worst problems but now these particular maggots are secreting anti, well they already secrete antimicrobial factors but now they're also secreting this growth factor which then accelerates the healing so a very ancient technique being updated for today's modern gladiators with big cut wounds and for diabetics they went through a few techniques they ran through they had this they used different temperature settings for these modified maggots they shocked them with electrodes they were trying all these techniques in which they would secrete this they would contain the human growth factor but they were having a hard time getting them to secrete it and they finally got them to do so one of the uses of this too is they think it's something that once these maggots are out and about they can utilize them for middle and low income countries as a way of treating wounds without the need of antibiotics or high tech lab or hospital a facility for somebody to go into this can be done in the field that's great yeah yeah and speaking of other advancements in medicine someday we're going to be able to replace people's hearts like basically with their own cells like we are basically going to be able to build new hearts from scratch and a study that was tweeted to me from David Eckerd this week researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have published in circulation research about their work in which they have figured out how to pretty much scrub a donor heart of all of the living cells so it becomes a matrix and it doesn't have any of the proteins that it's like a scaffold for heart to grow on and it doesn't have that rejection proteins yeah we had a guy working on this scaffolding on the show before right but in this case it's not building is not engineering a scaffold it's taking somebody's heart a donor say somebody who's died and is a donor if you give your heart to somebody else they're going to have to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of their life but these researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital have come up with a way to get all of the living cells and the proteins the immune system proteins that would trigger a rejection off of the heart and now have added to it so it becomes a scaffold that doesn't have to be built I think that's what our guy was doing that was the building of it was removing everything else but this is but they hadn't gotten to the point where they could repopulate it and now they can repopulate the scaffold so they take and it's not even with embryonic stem cells it is with skin cells that have been reprogrammed to be heart muscle cells so they haven't completely like made a brand new heart they're not there yet but what they were able to do is to get to basically populate this scaffold with with these IPSCs these induced pluripotent stem cells so that they ended up getting cardiomyocytes that turned into fibers and then became spontaneously contracting tissue after days in culture and then from there they were able to put them on to this heart whole heart matrix and let them grow and so the regenerated tissue found dense regions of these cells that were derived from the pluripotent stem cells that had the appearance of immature cardiac muscle tissue and demonstrated functional contraction in response to electrical stimulation yeah so the researchers are definitely right the researchers are definitely saying ok we're not to that point of making a whole heart yet but we're a few years away from it maybe and what they're pursuing right now is being able to create patches of this of you know the person matched cardiac tissue that could replace damaged tissue we're so close we're so close yes basically they're at this point where they can maybe take your skin cells in a matter of a number of weeks be able to a short number of weeks be able to grow cells a patch that they can then put into your heart that responds to your heart's natural electrical activity so yeah there's some big things happening here this is very exciting there's some yeah I heart it I heart it Blair you got some more stories I have a couple actually both of my quick stories this week are from co-workers of mine they sent them my way this week which is so great they sent me all of their interesting stories so the first one is actually from my old boss and he found an awesome story about hyenas being transplanted into a wolf pack in Israel so in the Negev desert which is the giant desert that's pretty much the entire bottom half of Israel there are quite a few large predators the main ones being grey wolves and striped hyenas the hyenas we think of in Africa are spotted hyenas so if you've never seen a striped hyena I would strongly suggest you google it because they are beautiful but they are carrion eaters they eat things that are already dead they're scavengers grey wolves are mostly hunters they will scavenge as well but they spend most of their time hunting and a while back some researchers found footprints of a bunch of wolves and a hyena and they appear to be traveling together well then so later they actually saw through an eyewitness account a pack of wolves of grey wolves with one hyena in the pack hmm yeah interesting I mean hyenas are pack animals so if there's a hyena who's lost its pack that there are you know that maybe it's socially at a disadvantage for finding food well and also in times of scarcity these two groups are actually perfectly situated to help each other because one specializes in things that are already dead in scavenging hyenas have fantastic sense of smell they're really good at locating and zoning in on dead things for many miles away they're also better at digging and cracking and tearing apart so that otherwise wolves could not wolves are more agile they're good at working together and they're better hunters so those two things together mean they can they can get to and exploit all of the meat in the area and in a place like a desert it benefits to help each other right so this is the first time we've seen that so again they saw tracks and then in the exact same area four years later they saw the eyewitness eyewitness account so we don't know if this is a one off or if this is something that happens a lot but now we have reason to set up camera traps and check it out looking for those hyena wolf friendships and then I also wanted to talk real quick about my rat problem so this is from my co-worker Stella she said this to me because it appears that in low income neighborhoods rat problems are more strongly linked to depression than other symptoms that you might expect so it turns out rat infestations are considered on par in some situations actually more strongly linked to depression than drug sales, threats of violence crime in general so nobody likes living around rats they're a sign of disease they're a sign of poverty they're a sign of low governmental support as well because rats are usually where there's bad sanitation processes so all of that together in surveys actually all in Baltimore they found that rats have a stronger link to feeling that an area is low income or down and out than these other symptoms and maybe if there are lots of rats and then I don't know does rat urine affect people's mood oh it certainly could that's a very good question if there are any compounds in rat urine yeah that's a great question I mean it would make sense for us to respond to that because that would be a sign for us to get out chemically right because it would not be clean it would not be safe so we would want to leave so that would be a good thing for our brain to tell us based on that smell that's a great point overall so cute though they are very cute but it still is upsetting when you hear scurrying sounds in your wall or on your bedroom floor yeah that would be awesome and I think recently there was a picture of some very large rats that have been found in I think New York City very very large rats they get giant are you not talking about the UK rat picture there was a there was something that was saying like giant rat found but the guy is holding up the rat to like the camera is it an opossum? no it looks like an opossum by the size but it's like me going the largest battery ever seen because it's being held up it's held on a stick but it's being held way up next to the person well anyway the point of the story was that people get sad when there are rats but that means that that's something that government should keep in mind when they're trying to turn around the mentality in a low income area so Baltimore is now particularly looking at improving sanitation they're giving out trash cans to people to try to reduce the rat problem so that that actually can help curb that problem because there are other things that go along with that there's this kind of feedback loop of if people think they live in a poor neighborhood they will act differently and they don't take care of it as well so that's often used but it's absolutely untrue it's not that the area isn't being there involved I'm not saying one is the problem there's definitely a hand in hand relationship when you don't have the park equipment getting repainted when you don't have the public areas being maintained because the business owners the idea that the people themselves aren't taking care of the area but also the it makes us imagine that a well kept area is because the people there are picking up trash that's not what I thought at all I'm just pointing out just let me just say if I can do the finger wagging thing there is that misnomer that people in lower income areas are less likely to take care of their their immediate surroundings when in fact the people who are living in a well maintained area likely aren't doing any of that themselves and it's an economic issue and it has nothing to do with people's desire to live but it also comes down to where money goes in a municipality and if the overall aura of the area is that it's less poor because there are less rats around people will be more likely to put money into that space as well it's just a lack of education because really a proponent of rats means you're much less likely to have a large rural cat feral cat population less likely to get toxoplasmic gondii which means suicide I would rather have toxoplasmosis you just need the education that goes along with it I would rather have toxoplasmosis than some of the terrible things that rats could leave you behind you're gracious my quick stories here at the end of the show there is a new molecular printer that has been developed by researchers at University of Illinois and researcher Martin Burke who is in the department of chemistry heads up Burke Laboratories and he has created this machine that basically takes the building blocks of chemistry and can create just about probably just about any molecule possible it's pretty amazing this machine says we wanted to take a very complex process chemical synthesis and make it simple simplicity enables automation which in term can broadly enable discovery and bring the substantial power of making molecules to non specialists and the idea behind this is that it also instead of having to synthesize molecules over long periods of time sometimes you know the synthesis of things takes a lot of time money effort now it can happen in a very very short time frame this machine can utilize over 200 different building blocks along with thousands of other molecules to be able to eventually piece together and 3D print so to speak billions of different organic compounds the vision for the future is that anyone who needs a specific small molecule can essentially print it out from their computer they are really excited about the immediate impacts that this will have on drug discovery oh I was going to say yeah there's another type of discovering drugs that can take place from this thing it's like this isn't this because this becomes a drug manufacturing like lab and anybody's printer yes and it's actually you can print it out right there on the paper already with the little designs on it and everything well that might just be my thinking actually I need one of these well it's a fairly big bulky machine and the building blocks themselves are probably it takes a little bit of cash to be able to put all the building blocks together but they're able to create with this device that's basically a series of tubes and pumps and hoses able to 3D print these molecules and they use the analogy of Legos so they've got pieces of chemistry broken down like Legos that you can put together just about any which way you want they also think that the possibility of creating molecules that we've never found in nature is a high probability because you can I think it's breaking bad for everyone yeah that's what this turns into you get a drug lab you get a drug lab this is gonna be the thing right that's gonna be the first time prescription drugs well yeah there could be that or print your own medicine for diabetes print your own aspirin print your own I'm gonna use it for aspirin do you think this will break the monocle like that my hands on legally it's so hard to go down to the store and get a bottle of aspirin for 4 bucks no I'm gonna get a $3,000 printing machine for that put these molecules up put all the molecules that are available open access on the web you know what goes into it can you print it can you make it so this means that things that are currently patented or protected or somehow somebody has the rights to it that's because it's the process right it's the chemical process that they have the rights to not always chemical process sometimes other times it is a molecule because they've done something that isn't found in nature a lot of drugs have to be the molecule because somebody else could come up with a slightly different process to achieve the molecule right this is gonna be used for the molecules are not the same as what we're talking about when we're talking about DNA it's different because there was a manufacturing process in the first place to create the molecule but that's the molecule itself so it's patented they could change the process to get to it but somebody else couldn't just use a different process and get to it and say aha this is the process I used so yeah probably terrorism illicit drug trade are the two reasons you and I won't be able to have one of these at home I don't know there are a lot of things that we can have at home and I mean I'm imagining for a very long time this is going to be a technology I mean right now it's a machine that looks ugly it's in a lab and it's going to be you know the technology is going to be developed through a private company and a private company is going to make it prettier and more efficient and probably fairly expensive and so how long will it be before the machine is affordable enough and also the the building blocks are affordable enough sleek and has a big one circular button in the middle and then yeah to the patent question it's like mp3s you know was like oh what's going to happen to the music industry well it didn't go away but yeah the cd stores are folding they replaced the record stores CDs are so much better and now there's who buys a cd right it's instant download and it'll probably go to the drug companies will be out of business our chat room is saying yeah this is going to be big delivery is big nobody it's going to have to be cheaper than buying drugs at the store actually gordon makes a good point though maybe it's worth paying a little more not to have to go to the store anymore people like ordering stuff and having a rot to them they're getting used to this exactly researchers have proposed in quaternary international very popular science journal proposed that neanderthals may have aided and abetted in their demise because of the fact that they were cannibalistic oh yeah come on guys yeah so the idea the hypothesis is that their win resources became scarce neanderthals went back to cannibalism and that cannibalism as their populations were fracturing and that they were competing against a non cannibalistic species early humans that it led to the new species gaining dominance and the cannibalistic species losing ground they modeled it and they pretty much determined that the cannibalistic population gets displaced from the richest areas lives on the borders with arid zones a situation which is remarkably similar to what we know about the end of neanderthals yeah so maybe cannibalism hmm have we done it? I think so I think we got there we ended on a high note maybe cannibalistic neanderthals yeah just the story gets better and better alright everybody thank you so much for joining us for this show this week it's time for us to thank our Patreon sponsors I would like to thank Kevin Parachan, Keith Corsale, Steve DeBell, Patrick O'Keefe, Jason Snyderman, Ruthie Garcia, Gerald Sorrell's Greg Goothman, Dave Naver, Jason Dozier Matthew Litwin, Eric Knapp, Jason Roberts Patrick Cohn, Chris Clark, Richard Onimus John Ratnaswamy, Byron Lee E. O. 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Go tell them right now. On next week's show once again we'll be broadcasting live online at 8 p.m. Pacific Time twist.org slash live. You can watch and join our chat room which is an awesome place to hang out I have to say but don't worry if you can't make it you can find our past episodes at twist.org slash youtube and twist.org Thank you for enjoying the show! 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with Haiku that comes to you in the night please let us know we'll be back here next week and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news and if you've learned anything from today's show remember it's all in your head this week in science this week in science it's the end of the world so I'm setting up a shop got my banner unfurled it says the scientist is in I'm gonna sell my advice show them how to stop the robot with a simple device I'll reverse all the warming with a wave of my hand here's 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 this week in science this week in science this week in 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 get understanding but we're not trying to threaten your philosophy we're just trying to save the world from jeopardy this week in science is coming your way so everybody listen do everything we say and if you use our methods then roll and I die we may rid the world of toxoplasma 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 the laundry list of items I want to address from global hunger to dredging Loch Ness I'm trying to promote more rational thoughts 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 what we say 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 and it is time for the twist after show after the show there is a show it's called the after show love this video of series sorry JPL put it together and it's just very pretty finding out about series and the pictures of this rough it looks like a moon series looks more like a moon than anything it's pretty so what were you going to say I was going to ask if you got a cat nope no cat did you visit any cats we tried but then it didn't work out well no cat why what happened tell me about it it was just a weird situation we drove up to Vancouver for the Vancouver Humane Society to go up there and then you went to Canada Washington Vancouver Washington it's just a half an hour away 20 minutes away I didn't realize you were so close to Washington yep right up there you could drive over the river the gorge and you're in Washington yeah Portland is right at the very top of Oregon very tippity top oh yeah um yeah but we went to look at kitty cats and then we found out the cat viewing and adoption stuff was supposed to start at noon and so we made sure to get there a little bit early but it turns out we had to be there at 10am to like get enough to draw a number and if we had a number we would be in that order to see the cats it was all messed up and so we missed it we missed out yeah it's so funny when I was growing up and even when I was in college it was like no problem to get a cat like we'll pay you to take this cat there are people like throwing cats at me they're like do you want a cat do you want a kitten I've got a cat who had kittens here have a cat here have a cat I didn't have to do anything to find a cat I had I got two wonderful cats it was amazing and now it's like this massive effort I'm about to say forget it I don't even care find a cat on the stairs if a cat comes into my life then we get a cat but I am done with this active searching it's such a bummer because I'm sure there are so many cats that need a home sure bring them to me I'll meet them yeah but what is the issue here like this cat that needs a home oh dear what have you done to the cats you don't like cats with people mouths or how about burrito cat cat burritos thanks identity 4 get a chimera cat look at the chimera cat it's like a harlequin look at it it's a harlequin cat yeah that cat with a human mouth there that nope nope go oh my goodness I just google searched the word cat where you came out cat breading cat breading are you kidding I love cat breading that's so great I've never heard of this before why do people do this cat breading why am I keeping that to a cat cat breading is amazing I don't know what kind of crazy cat lady Blair is the kind that's really mean to cats oh my god look at this cat bread it's like egg bread look at that one cat egg bread oh no look at that one here's bunny bread oh bunny bread see that at least it's like alliteration look at this one bunny bread here's a cat that looks like a loaf of bread these cats are not happy cats with the bread on their heads none of them look happy oh that one got a pita cat breading talk so overload look at the kittens top 10 cats with things on their legs the internet is so useless oh my goodness I talk all the time about how Google made a machine to scan the internet and the first thing it did was find cats oh here's a cat with some toilet paper rolls on his legs that's not even that funny that's kind of funny now that's weird that one was weird no no no no I would have nightmares from that one these are not very creative well everyone just did toilet paper except for these cannolis oh no those are baguettes baguettes somebody put a baguette on their cats oh my goodness puts some boots it's for top 10 cats with things on their legs overall not that interesting let's see let's see so we have gotten a positive so far positive response about going to Maryland in November for their STEM festival Phil who has been contacting me says he needs to get I need to send him some information and then he has to go to the steering committee and see if they can move everything but yeah he says he can let us know whether or not we're in by the end of April oh that's very exciting sound interesting let's go to Maryland where should we go in Maryland because the STEM festival is all over Maryland for that period of time I'm going to eat so much lobster is that a thing? Baltimore Baltimore, Maryland I have a friend in Baltimore this will be awesome you know who's in Baltimore? I know there are lots of rats in Baltimore is Patrick Hartnett still in Baltimore? yeah Patrick's in Baltimore help to make a calendar yep we could take out the rats in Baltimore that's right Whiskey Renegade identity 4 I don't want to make extra work for you actually it would really help this week because it's spring break so Kai is home all week long I have had very little time to get anything done this week? it's spring break this week San Francisco is doing it next week yeah this week is Portland Public School spring break and our preschool decided to do spring break in conjunction and Marshall has to work and so we're just kind of here I didn't plan ahead and get him into any camps or anything like that I mean that's like extra money and it's expensive so he's hanging out here at home with me so I wonder I should have done the economic analysis of work I'm not getting done work I'm not pitching because my son is home and I'm entertaining him all day long every day or the amount of money it would cost him to send him to a camp yeah but tomorrow we're going to go to Omsi which is the science and tech museum here it's awesome awesome science day with my son tomorrow it's going to be crowded though we went to the zoo today with my youngest we go at least once a week and because of the spring break my middle child was able to go with us fast but I've never seen that many people at the zoo it was so slammed with people that'll happen the busiest weekends in usually that I see are Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends are just you can barely walk yeah I'd really like to go to the zoo here in Oregon and I in Portland and I'd plan to do that with him this week but it's just raining so I thought hey outdoor zoo lots of rain nope zoos are fun right after rain because then he could jump in puddles and stuff and animals are usually also jumping in puddles right but when it's raining everybody's taking cover right yeah well mostly yeah I don't know I haven't been to the Portland Zoo so I have absolutely no idea what it's like well when I'm coming to visit you're going to see if you like it or not yeah we're going to do that yeah so okay what am I doing and I'm trying to figure out so May so I haven't responded to the guy but going to San Francisco I've been invited to give a talk either I think it's May 18th ish or in mid September and so if I come to San Francisco maybe we can coordinate some some other stuff but I don't know is May too soon to try and coordinate that kind of stuff or like doing something at the zoo or cause you had talked about your boss being interested in that yeah uh we could it's probably pretty close for the zoo but what about night life or they plan pretty far out too as far as I'm aware I think they only do a couple months yeah well it's also possible we could fit with a theme that is already there since we're just you know science science pretty loose theme the exploratorium because their podcasted video don't trim I tried to coordinate with them before I moved and they were like super difficult yeah cause they do Wednesday nights I think or is it Tuesday nights I think it's Wednesday nights then the academies Thursday nights we could also just do like a meet up we can also just do a meet up or what are they called oh nerd nights we could do a nerd night maybe at a cafe or something yeah the nerd nights in San Francisco those are pretty packed and popular I don't know if they do like smaller things but I think we could record a show in a cafe or something potentially I mean I feel like the internets you always need the internets for this show unless we just recorded audio off our computers I don't know there's so many details so we could record it ahead of time and then just play it Wednesday at 8 and then be in the chat room when it's playing and then there would still be a live component right I don't know we could do that too just spitballing nice any thoughts Justin? yep yep I like the idea I'm all for it the other thing on the horizon is that we find out what I think next month if we get nominated again for the Academy of Podcasters Awards right and that is in Chicago this year ok yeah I have noticed poor video audio synchronization in your shows have you noticed this? yeah I have noticed it when I'm watching it there is not much apparent delay while we're doing it just maybe very very slight but when I do watch later there seems to be delay and as identity 4 is saying this is normal with YouTube Hangouts especially if some of the participants have crummy internet and computers I'm hardwired yeah we've all done the best I've turned off my wifi we've done the best we can to be hardwired and to get our computers running up to snuff yeah I think it's just sometimes there's just a lot of pull on the various internets and we're also we're also a live video cast without a giant production behind it so that there's all those things if we had the mo mo money like the way mo mo money the way mo mo sink it even dub it it could be coming through it in a different language we could speak a different language and then have it dubbed in English if we had the finances to do so duh duh uh and as Gord is saying really we're an audio show it's always been radio first audio first and so the video is the live bonus and then I've been pushing the YouTube a little bit more you know just putting it out there and making it happen but you know it's not it still is what it is and our main audience is definitely audio we are audio we do it all though I wish we could sync up on a super high bandwidth one gigabit connection for each of us right I mean I can't really tell I don't know if I'm out of sync I feel as though I'm perfectly synced no it seems fine right now it seems absolutely fine it's just for our viewers maybe it's not and later on for the YouTube video it's not always I feel like you're not synced though wait hang on I'm not I think she's not now there is a slight delay oh yeah oh you got a pretty good delay on you Blair what? oh yeah oh that's cause I'm loading a page oh why are you doing that now see I xed out of the page am I fine now yeah now I'm fine it broke it it was fine until I did that I think in my little viewer at the bottom there is just showing me in real time and so what you're saying could be delayed hmm I don't know I can't tell I can't tell if what I'm seeing is live or if it's google memorex hmm I don't know man memorex oh I've got a new guitar coming oh cool that'll be awesome yeah you didn't know that I play all the time I can't abandon stuff no actually I don't play I've been learning to play come on with this I've been learning to play I can play a little bit I can do bar chords really fast but I've been trying to learn how to play surf guitar in the guitar I've got that coming isn't a surf guitar at all so I'm already thinking about the next guitar but but yeah I've already got like five guitars here but I've been learning to play over the years different ways we're doing a show next week right there's no talking about it yes we are doing a show next week we always have a show it will be March 30th okay what was I going to say Justin what was coming up I love these calendars looking up what's coming up end of the month in April is world day for laboratory animals so I'd like to do that interview with the people that you met related to the mice I thought that would be a really interesting thing to sync it up with so if you can send me if you can find it and resend the information to be able to get in touch with them that would be cool looking around as though the information is just right next to you it might be I don't know where you put things I know neither do I I know the name of the place is Jackson Labs it's probably all we really need to talk to their PR department okay the guy I met was a technician or something this is the we can either get interviews with scientists they have this whole outreach side of what they do mm-hmm like the PR department could put us in touch with the scientists or they themselves could just talk about the wonderful things that they do cool but I think it would be fun to talk to a scientist there also about how CRISPR has been impacting their business because it sounds like they are having a huge uptick in business providing these mice interesting because the CRISPR-Cas9 has allowed researchers to really target what the knockout mouse is doing it's not just a sort of blanket knockout now it's very specific things being sort of sharpied out in the text of the DNA and this is to facilitate research that wasn't even possible to do before CRISPR because it was hard to isolate certain things to this degree so it's a big uptick in research that's being done there's probably tons of research that was on the you know sort of on the the if we could only get a perfect example of this to study sort of a pile of potential science to be done that's now completely possible so they're very busy they're utilizing CRISPR-Cas9 and it's sort of a as requested from the researchers it's sort of this interesting thing researchers really have to telegraph how many of the specimens they're going to need so you do the CRISPR-Cas9 thing and then you sort of just breed the mice but not all of it takes in every generation and it's not as simple as if it's knocked out in both parents of the next generation it's not guaranteed that it will be knocked out in both the offspring so it's very interesting so yeah I would love to talk to you so perfect day to do yeah I think it would be really neat they're kind of tight in jackson labs no relation it's not any self self promotion of any kind jack's home that would be this contact oh yeah and they have jacks which is for a website jacks j-a-x they do not have a phone number that I want to call okay in Sacramento yeah but I have somewhere in the catalog of photography taking a picture of the card it's a matter of figuring out where that is we'll figure it out unlimited data but finding anything it's crazy yeah oh I just thought of something that would be if people want to help twist out I don't know maybe I can get a get a list going or something but the time codes it would be awesome to get the youtube time codes for like the back catalog of twist videos so I can start cataloging our stories by time code mm on youtube and go back back through the catalog is it something that we can keep track of as we do the show or is that going to be too difficult yeah too difficult I would start there's no there's no time code here so it's not I don't have a time code on what I'm seeing I don't know is for people watching you guys watching can use is there a time code that you're that you can see I don't have a time code yeah because if we knew exactly when it started I could start like a stopwatch function mm-hmm and then I would have and then every time somebody started something I could just write that down like in the show notes next to I can time stamp next to it I would be happy to do that during a show that would be easy I wouldn't be able to do the ones while I'm talking someone else would have to step in for those but for both of you that's something I could totally do as long as we had a way to know when to start the stopwatch exactly therein is the problem that is the problem yes the quacious is doing a lot of joining and quitting going on the quages what's happening identity for building came back to so I think something really scary look time code generator Kiska say what you find there there oh it's a thing mm-hmm wave time code is a wave file interesting yeah that's kind of awesome yeah the gem doctor we don't have a red line therein is the problem plus I think all of you are a few seconds off from one another it depends on when you hit the refresh button when exactly we started the show so that's why some people comment on things it's slightly different times even though it's a great time it's all of you are probably slowly out of sync with each other and with us and so it's really hard for us to tell how that works so the only way that we could generate time stamps in the show is if one of you did that while you were watching it yeah exactly yeah we don't have a red line like you do I don't got it no red line but if you're watching it's there mm-hmm control room cameraman I'm going to open apps and see this is a camera thing control room that just lets me mute people we can do that that's effects too much work I know why guy too much work I feel the hit a little button every time somebody somebody starts a new story and all I just do is go hit the M button for mark and it just marks it that would be great that would be amazing that would be like my dream mark it's a new segment mark oh and for Ed his timecode is working backwards interesting let's see I don't think I have anything I have anything I wrote down this week no okay I need to schedule a Patreon a Patreon hangout for the end of the month and so how about we schedule a Patreon hangout for those of you who are night owls who want to hang out for the hour after the show next week great so we'll hang out with people after the show next week whoever can do that I'll send a Patreon message to people remind me that I said to do this and then for other people I can also do a second hangout on Friday April 1st and I promise it won't be an April Fool's Day joke where I don't show up April 1st yeah looking into my calendar I think I could make that too if it was after work oh yeah I don't know if I could do after work for you that's fine I'd love to do that yeah you guys can do hangouts without me too what? never alright I think it's time to go to bed I'd agree with that time to have my last beverage for the evening relax a little bit calm it down center myself prepare for the lying in bed and having my head spin directions everyone thank you so much for joining us tonight Friday hangout would be great okay Ed awesome awesome awesome thank you so much for joining us tonight Blair Justin good show thanks for coming everybody what are you doing Justin what do you mean hang on I was looking for I had texted you a picture of the card did you email it maybe I could have but I'm not finding it anywhere maybe I didn't maybe I thought I did that's a picture of a toad picture of a toad you say you can't just say that and then not show me if you're drawing the toad oh it's a drawing of a toad that I did it's from the calendar before it even got colored yeah apparently it's not in here interesting I can go look it up but I don't have it oh look maybe I've got it just did I give you the card I feel like I gave you the card when we were in New York oh that seems like a mistake hey now that you're across the country from where you keep all your things sure I'll take that awesome yes perfect darn it I'm gonna search for Justin I will look I will look so was it in January alright I don't have it either this is probably riveting video and did Justin just leave yeah he did is he strumming playing the guitar for us practicing awesome did you see I sent you an email a couple weeks ago of the person who or the company that made the calendars someone had reached out to me and asked if we were gonna make calendars again I think I sent you an email about that and I said well yeah only if we can do it for the same prices last year and essentially the answer was yes so that's good news yeah I have to figure out I have to work my shipping costs a little bit better than this year but I'll figure that out eventually these details details details and I have one piece of art ready for the calendar awesome or for a patron yes for both for a patron which I have never yet heard back from or gotten any info back from the Gino project folks really you sent off your DNA seems like things should have progressed it should have progressed by now reach out I totally forgot about it thankfully I didn't throw away the box otherwise it would have forgotten about it entirely it would have been like months from now and you'd be like oh what where'd that go alright you guys we're gonna hang up hopefully the twist minion science island hangout happens tomorrow I hope you have a good meet up for that I hope the scienceisland.org issues fix themselves Ed I hope that works out so anyway glad everyone could stop by tonight to hang out and chat about the science we've got more science for you next week more science more science more awesome people together have a great weekend or I guess end of the week it's hump day so let's get past it let's just keep going forward night