 This is TWIS, this week in Science, episode number 599 recorded on Wednesday, December 28th, 2016. It's the top 11 of 2016! Hey everyone, I am Dr. Kiki and tonight on TWIS we are going to fill your heads with a countdown, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. You can't be everywhere at once. And while this may be true for you, it is not true for science. Science is everywhere at once throughout all time. How is this possible? Is science a time traveling faster than light superhero, bending the laws of physics to her will and whimsy? No! Is it time traveling faster than light superhero, bending the laws of physics to her will and whimsy? She damn sure be using science to do it. Science begins with that most human of all human traits. Observation. We watch a thing. We try to figure it out. Maybe that thing is another human, so we watch them. Maybe we watch them try to figure something out. Maybe that thing we watch them try to figure out is dangerous, like the best way to fellow mastodon, what poison berries taste like, or what fire tastes like. Maybe we watch them try and fail to figure something out. And in our observing, we learn something about the world, what we can or what we cannot do. And therefore, science! Some discoveries are everywhere all the time. There are some that stand out more than others. And that's why we've peacefully put together for you the top 11 news stories of 2016 for This Week in Science. Coming up next. I've got the kind of mind I can't get enough. I wanna learn it all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I wanna know what's happening. What's happening. What's happening. This Week in Science. What's happening. What's happening. What's happening. This Week in Science. Good science to you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. This is our year end, year end review episode 599, no less. Oh my goodness. So you mean we're making our predistitutions. I made that word up. We're making our prediction. Wow. In episode 600. Is that right? Right. Episode 600 is going to be our predictions show. How fitting. The numbers line up very nicely. Synchronicity or not. Anyway, yeah. Next show we're going to be joined by guest Amy Webb, futurist and predictor person. And she's going to help us understand what it's like to really do predictions for a living. But so I thought that would be fun for our prediction show. But you know what this show is? This is the top 11 countdown show. It's our countdown recap. And what do we do in our countdown show? It's not the top five. No, that's not enough. No, that's definitely not enough. Is a top 10 list, but we decided to give 110% to it. And that's how we... One more. It's one more science recap than you would get anywhere else. That's right. One more science. That's right. We got to go to 11. We got to take the science to 11. We've kind of over the years gone to top 11 categories. So each number has been swelled. Other stories in it. Yeah. It's not just stories, but sort of genres of stories or groupings of stories or disciplines of science that were very important in the year. Because there's so much that's so good. Oh my gosh. Whittling it down is nigh on impossible. And so we decided not to try. Good night, everybody. We'll see you next year. But it was really fun putting it all together into what we thought was the priority of things. Now, where we think these stories or these categories really fall within the importance of 2016. Also important for 2016. We still have calendars left. You can go to twist.org to get information about calendars. If you are interested in having one for 2017, wonderful calendars made by Blair. And we're going to be in San Francisco at the SF sketch fest in 2017 on January 19th. So go to Facebook, our Facebook page, facebook.com slash this weekend science to find out information about that. Okay, that's done. So what is the story? This is actually some in some ways the most important story of the top 11. Because it is the story that if we didn't go to 11, we wouldn't have been talking about. I know we got to take it to 11. So what's 11? Are we going to start there? It's time to time to begin. Yeah. Number 11, 11, 11. There we go. Thank you very much for the reverb. Zika. Zika sits at number 11. And the reason we kind of put it out there. The outlier of the top 10 is because. It wasn't important. It was an important story this year. It gained international importance. It was made a disease of. International importance. By the World Health Organization this year. And this is the year that we saw lots of understanding about how Zika started interact, not started, but how Zika interacts with the human body. How it gets into. The developing brain. What molecular, what molecules are important for, for Zika getting a hold on the developing brain. We actually saw this year. The study, the studies that actually confirmed that Zika does get into the brain and cause microcephaly. You know, so this is the year that we act, you know, there was, there were these ideas floating around about Zika in 2015, but 2007, 16. It's really when this all kind of came to the fore. Also creation of Zika vaccines. Which is, I think why I ended up on the 11. Because if this had managed to fester swell or become pandemic, it would have been a much bigger story. But the scientists really kicked its butt like right away. We have been, I mean, it's, it has. It is pretty almost a pandemic. I mean, it's been spreading among South American, Central American and Southern United States States. It's, it's spread across the United States, not necessarily by mosquitoes, which is the vector for Zika, which we have learned, but by people who are carrying it into the United States from other countries, we've learned how, how terrible it is for pregnancy. So there, we've been able to warn pregnant women, not to travel in countries where Zika is present, is present. Even men who have partners with whom they would like to bear children are being told not to go because we found out that Zika hangs out in the sperm. So this year had a whole bunch of interesting stuff. Treatment wise though, a couple of clinical trials are going. We also saw an antibody that was successful in protecting pregnant female mice in their offspring from developing complications related to Zika infection. So the antibody might be useful as a therapeutic agent until a vaccine is widely available. So there's good news. There's bad news because we're understanding this virus with a lot greater depth, but the good news is also coming because we are figuring out how to protect ourselves, how to, how to genetically modify mosquitoes, all sorts of fun stuff like that and also creating vaccines and antibodies for treatments. So good news, bad news, but Zika was definitely in the news. All right. Let's move on. What's number 10? 10, 10, 10, 10. Space news. So space is really big. So it's kind of like, it's kind of cheating to give space a top news story, but it was making news all over space. Kepler saw a supernova explode. Saw the shockwave breakout. Wow. Cassini mission exploring Saturn's moon Titan over several years and a bunch of papers talking about the polar oceans. Yeah. Do you know what else happened? I don't know. Do you know? No, you know. Orbiting around Jupiter. Getting lots of good information. Planet B. Planet B, maybe. Maybe another, it's a closest star to the Earth has a maybe planet around it. Yeah. Proxima B or is it a hashtag proxy map? Proxima. Hashtag proxy map. The plan at B. So if stuff doesn't work out here, we know where destination one is at least. Yeah. There were a couple of things that we were looking at also that were kind of things aren't really proven, but are just kind of questions about stuff. So planet nine was talked about a lot. And the whole planet B is making me think about that. And then also Tabby star. We talked a lot about different ideas about Tabby star. We know it's not aliens, but we don't know what's going on with this interesting star. Right? So it's probably aliens. Space X. They launched a rocket and caught its booster. That's like so awesome. Yeah. And then we went to Pluto finally. Yeah. And then we went to Pluvian a bunch of times. Pluvian. If nothing else, New Horizons allowed us to say Pluvian on a number of occasions in 2016. But we learned about Pluvian mountains. And I think we learned about Pluvian. Atmosphere. Atmosphere as well. Yeah. And series, the moon of Pluto. Yeah. Space X landing. Blue Origins flew and reused its booster rocket several times. I mean, Space X was exciting because it landed on, you know, a water platform. That's pretty awesome. Which is pretty awesome. But I mean, Blue Origins, two companies that are flying reusable rockets into space. This is so great. They did have their, you know, their down moments, but that's all very exciting. That didn't happen in space. You're right. Yeah. And then there's the, because of planet, not because of, but also in line with the Proxima B discovery, there's the breakthrough star shot that there's money to try and send a bunch of tiny space kites to Alpha Centauri. Shoot them with lasers. Shoot them with lasers and maybe they'll go to Proxmab. Proxmab. Proxmab. I really do like saying that. I just get excited. I mean, I don't know. Proxmab. You're just over there saying Proxmab. I'm over here going Pluvian. And I'm saying number nine. Oh, okay. Speaking of, you know, just saying words over and over, let's talk about intelligence. So we learned a lot of things are smarter than we previously thought this year. That's a pretty much a running theme in a lot of the show and especially in Blair's Animal Corner. We found out that apes understand that people's expectations and people's vision of reality is not always accurate. My favorite part of that experiment was it involved a human in a King Kong outfit. We found out that cuttlefish can count or rather they can approximate differences in amounts and they can also have a preference dependent on their state. If they're hungry, they'll want bigger shrimp. If they're less hungry, they'll want more smaller shrimp. Can I also say the ape story? Yeah. Not just the false belief kind of thing, but this really pushed at the idea that apes have what's this theory of mind, which is supposed to only be humans or it has been forever, you know. Yeah. And especially the more we know about that, that's actually something that's directly affected by autism spectrum disorder. The more we can figure out this theory of mind and where it is in the brain and what causes it to trigger and all these kinds of things, there's a lot of benefits to humans from that as well. But it's definitely once again something we thought was strictly human. Oh look, apes can do it, turns out. Yes, the cuttlefish can count. We all do it. Monkeys do it. We all do it. Capuchin monkeys, for example, make tools very similar to hominids. They were found making tools. It was difficult to say whether it was accidental or as a byproduct of a behavior they did to get to food or if they were actually particularly making these tools, but it was happening time and time again. And they were similar to tools that we find in old hominid areas with fossil evidence as well. So that was pretty interesting. Another human behavior we found generosity or pro-social behavior in magpies, a bird that people often think is vicious and only caring about shiny things. They actually love magpies. They're great, you know, so smart, but they actually were generous. They would provide for other individuals in their group without being asked. And then, which is better than the chimpanzees that we talked about last week, right, that couldn't give a hoot. Right, that do not show altruism, which then brings us back to this, is that even a human thing? Is there such a thing as generosity or altruism? I guess I'm guessing early prediction for 2017. We're going to talk more about that next year. And my personal favorite stories relating to intelligence this year were all about slime molds. We found that slime molds, a mass of cells without a brain or neurons, can actually make strategic logical decisions. And they found that out by a modified version of the two-armed bandit problem. So if one method over and over again gets you a higher payoff, they will learn that and use that method from there on forward. So they learn, they make strategic decisions based on experiences. And then, just last week, we found out that slime molds can transfer memory by touching each other. Right. Hello, slime mold. Hello, let me shake hands. Here's everything I know. They're the greatest. Yeah. And we also discovered that we can buy slime mold on the internet. Yes. How did I, twist minions, how did I not get a slime mold? It's not too late. There's still four more nights of Hanukkah. It's true. It's true. I want a slime mold. Anyway, that was intelligence this year. Yeah. I mean, we talked about it as we were planning for this year and it just seemed like this was the year of, yeah. Okay. Animals are doing things that we didn't think they could. Duh. Yeah. Oh, only humans can. Oh, no way. No, there's another animal who's doing that. Never. Oh, but humans are the only ones that can. Oh, no way. Yeah. Memes for 2016. This was one of them. Yeah. If you just tuned in, this is this week in science. I'm Dr. Kiki Justin and Blair are also here and we're counting down the top 11 science stories of 2016. Right now we are at number eight, eight, eight, eight, eight. And this year. AI made it in for number eight. Artificial intelligence was big this year. I know 2015 was the year of. Dangerous warnings about the future of life with AI, but this year was really seeing what AI could do. There was an application of AI all over the place in technology, whether or not you knew it or not, there's AI everywhere in your life. But some of the interesting stories that we reported on was I. Alpha go Alpha go is an AI. That was created by Google deep mind to play the game. Go and it. Bested the European go champion and then in March. It beat the beat another champion. The world champion at go. So Lisa doll was beaten handily by the computer. I remember reading about it and people said that the computers seem to be inventive and have unique ways of addressing. Strategy problems so deep learning actually is a an amazing tool for artificial intelligence to be able to develop intelligence to. Work at things like strategy game of go it was not expected that this feat would occur for another decade. Happened this year 2016. Also, there was an AI named Alpha that beat a human opponent at aerial combat for the first time this year. Oh, yeah. Yes, let's teach robots that. That's a great idea. There is also the AI X prize. The new X prize is a $5 million competition that was announced in this year in partnership with IBM's Watson to put different groups against each other to develop and demonstrate how humans can collaborate with powerful AI technologies to tackle the world's grand challenges. This is the AI save us X prize. And Google's deep mind seriously Google's deep mind. It was so big this year deep learning machine learning was also big, but deep mind AI made from Google made big headlines this year. They took a step forward using learning and in learning and reasoning using memory rather than programming. So as opposed to just following programmed decision patterns actually learning and reasoning. This is the one in which they AI figured out how to get through London's. To navigate London's tube system in the most efficient way. Additionally, there was a story that I had taken a look at right before the show started in which Google's deep mind AI looking at language translation. They had shown it given information on how to translate from Korean to Japanese and also from Japanese to English. Or from Korean to English and Japanese to English. Those were the two translations. So you'd think that if the AI was not given the information, it would use English as an intermediary to be able to translate Japanese to Korean. The AI did not do that. The AI actually created its own intermediary language because it learned the concepts represented by the words in each of the languages and was able to directly translate Japanese to Korean on its own. It figured it out. This is a philosophical language development in AI. This is also a new language that we are all going to be forced to learn that. Well, this is huge. It reminds me too of that story. I do want to just briefly mention it that we talked about on the show where we were using citizen science basically. People were going onto the web to teach a computer system what was terrifying. Yes. So that the AI could learn and then adapt images on its own to make normal images look terrifying. That's another great thing to be teaching robots. Yep. AI was very big in 2016 and it's poised to only get even bigger. So I'm excited to see what happens in 2017 for artificial intelligence. What's up at number seven? Number seven, human evolution. And there was tons and tons of human evolution news this year. First of all, we can start with the old story, which is there was a new hobbit fossil found. This is the Homo Floriansis that was like a decade plus ago discovered. They found a new set and what's amazing about this new set is they're really old. They're 700,000 years old. The last finding was probably as recent as 70,000 years. This is 700,000 years old and it's almost in the same size and dimensions as the more recent find. What's interesting about that is the whole prevailing theory that finally people settled on for Homo Floriansis is that it was a Homo erectus that wandered on to the island, got stuck and experienced island dwarfism. Although 700,000 years ago the species was pretty much exactly as it is today and there were already some other problems with that theory. So Homo Floriansis, new finds, it's also good there is we have a 70,000 year old find. We have a 700,000 year old find. Very likely we're going to have more discoveries of these and more examples of these fossils to study in the future. We also learned a lot about Neanderthals. Neanderthals and their genes, how those genes help keep populations low so that they can be on the move and be part of these quickly moving small population groups but that also made them kind of inbred. And it also, those same things that were an evolutionary advantage to a small group of traveling Neanderthals and not so much in humans. There's Neanderthal links to a lot of things that cross infertility in the like. Right, and then wasn't there a story about Neanderthals eating each other like the baby cannibalism might have led to their demise? No, there's no cannibalism led to their demise. There may have been examples of cannibalism but they don't know if this was like hunted or this is after the fact kind of stuff. And modern humans, they probably learned it from modern humans because that's what we did. We learned it from you. Actually, one of my most, my favorite of these, of all the discoveries from this last year was, there was a modern human sequence that was found in an Altai Neanderthal which means it was, there was a human that was raised amongst Neanderthals. And as they sort of separated out that which was modern human in this, they discovered, well, first of all, the time frame of this was 100,000 years ago. Our oldest recording, like the people of Papua New Guinea made the news because their genes were tracked and they were found to have left Africa 72,000 years ago. This is 100,000 years ago in like Siberia. And what's also interesting, they think this group of modern humans sort of separated from the group of modern humans that we're all more familiar with and related to 200,000 years ago. So this is some group that left well before at least 30,000 but probably even well before that, Africa, ended up living with Neanderthals in Siberia and interbreeding with them. And then sort of in that scenario, the culture disappeared. Where did it disappear to? Well, it's in the genes of Neanderthals there. So we have another example of humans and Neanderthals merging only in this case, it was the Neanderthals that we only, at least that we have example of at the end and not the modern human that's happened in the later scenario. Yeah. Wasn't there a story, not Neanderthal related, but there was another story about DNA found in, DNA found in ancient humans that suggests that there was another species of ancient human that we haven't found yet. Yes. And there's also, I mean, there's this. That's the one I thought was really interesting. Yeah. Like this is one note. This is one that this is a mystery human here in this scenario. But yeah, there's other clues that there's modern humans that may have split off and come back again. And then when we're talking about the evolution of humans, we also talk about intelligence a lot, which kind of goes back to what we were talking before. And what it was sort of an interesting story. I thought it was fascinating where one of the, I guess one of those things that they've, researchers have looked at to sort of determine brain capacity was just brain size and the importance of the brain getting bigger over time and the folds and all of this. And this group sort of found a much closer correlation to the amount of blood that circulates into the brain, more so than brain size. And what they did is they looked at the openings where the arteries, major arteries deliver blood to the brain and they watched as that, that opening got larger over time. And they say you can actually sort of track perhaps the amount of cognitive energy that was going on in the species that has this increase of blood over time. So really interesting stuff in human evolution this year. Yeah. And I mean, yeah, there was a lot of really interesting stuff out of Africa too. Oh my gosh. Oh, and then the other, the other big one was the finding of the Lucy aged, right from trees outside. Yeah. Outside of, outside of the Rift Valley, which, which is, this is Astrolipithecus outside of the Rift Valley, which is fine, which doesn't change anything. It does say what I've been saying. I'm saying a long time, which is the Rift Valley isn't necessarily the bread basket of human evolution or the origin point. It's the, it's just a cornucopia of easy archeology. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Things we found. We found it there. For millions of years, we have to stray it as this Rift Valley pulls apart. It also exposes the past as it goes. So everything's in this nice accessible record. You can go back through these layers quite easily. And so when we do find stuff, it's easy to date it's exposed. It's also an area that got flooded and there was silt and all this. So that's surprising that Astrolipithecus didn't just live in the Rift Valley. And we're going to be, we're going to be I think finding that this human experiment is much broader and it's going to be harder to define, you know, what we would like to think of as a direct human ancestor because in the end result, it's likely all of them. That's right. So many, so many. But you know what? This is what brings us to number six. Number six. Six is all about medicine, which is a pretty large category, but there is, there has been so much progress in this field over the past year. First off, Tycho Bactin, they, it's chemists succeeded in producing that antibacterial agent. We just discovered it last year. So now this year they've been able to produce it. And, and so this could be a huge leap forward in treating human infections. Basically it's a new class of antibiotic, which would be great. Speaking of antibiotics, science discovered a compound, a compound called pterosin that reinvigorates antibiotics. This takes antibiotics. It basically takes the whole idea of an expiration date on antibiotics out of the picture. So adding the pterosin in reinvigorates it makes it effective again against bacteria, which obviously would be a huge boon to the, the general community for so many reasons. First off, just economically. The antibiotics that we wish would, would keep working. How do we keep them working? And if the pterosin, if pterosin is something that is effective and approved already, then let's do it. Yeah. And not to mention you can't make this stuff ahead of time because it'll expire. Now you could. Now you could make huge batches ahead of time, ship them overseas to communities that would need them. And then you can just reinvigorate them as needed. Also, we found in the human microbiome genes that researchers could use to make antibiotics. So within us, there's antibacterial agents. It's because all of those bacteria are fighting each other. Yeah. They're doing it for us already. We brought a site back to mice where they had severed the optic nerve. They were, yeah, they found that they could, they could retrace the former roots and reestablish connections with the appropriate parts of the brain after regenerating those tissues, which obviously huge. There, there's a new step in the progress of cutting out HIV, actually literally being clipped out of genes by an enzyme called Brek1. That should be a huge jump forward in fighting HIV. And just in the weirdness file, three parent baby. So, you say weirdness today. Yes. But it could be commonplace tomorrow. The reason this is in medicine is that actually this was used to fix a mitochondrial issue that these two parents were having with all of the babies that they kept having. And so, you know, all of was actually just two, but they, they were eventually having this problem. So they were able to take the nucleus of a different female egg, transplant it into the egg. Oh, they took the nucleus of the mother transplanted it into a donor egg and use the husband sperm. So a three parent baby. Yeah. So you basically have mitochondrial DNA nuclear from the donor nuclear DNA from the mother and then nuclear DNA from the sperm. Three parents. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I don't find it controversial. I find it fantastic. Yes. I think we have to make it controversial by just using that word. Absolutely. Let's stop it. Yeah. I mean, especially, I mean, if it's, if it's just, if it's supposed to be for the novelty of it. Yeah. That's kind of whatever, but this is to solve an issue that this couple with that this couple was having to make healthy babies. What is wrong with that? Right. I can't see anything, but it's pretty cool. It is very, very cool. You know what we're going to do right now? We're going to take a quick break. We have hit the halfway point. We did it. We did it. We have counted down from 11 to six when we come back in just a moment. We'll be talking the top five science stories, categories, stories of 2016. Stay with us. Don't go now. You know, you want to know what we think is number one. I know it's moving quickly. Everybody, you know what? This year moved very quickly, but we have calendars for 2017. I still have them. I can mail them. I have some more. They're in a box right next to me. I could mail them to you. You just have to go to twist.org and click on our calendar order button. It says pre-order for 2017 now and you can do that. You go to twist.org and you click on that little button on our website. I know it's got a picture of the 2016 calendar, but I promise you, like I'm holding up right now, I have 2017 calendars. Hear them wriggle, wriggle, wriggle. Click that button and you'll be able to order your very own 2017 Blair's Animal Corner twist calendar. They're great. Art, science holidays, all sorts of fun. Blair has hers. Why don't you have yours? Do you have yours? Why don't you buy one for a friend? Click on that button. Twist.org. Click on that button right now. Also, while you're at twist.org, maybe consider heading to our Zazzle Store. If you go to our Zazzle Store, you will find all sorts of lovely items for purchase and all of the items support twists. 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This is super, super important for us being to be able to keep doing what we're able to do. Any way that you're able to help us, we really appreciate your support. We really could not do this without you. Thank you. You believe in that shell, we disagree, but I still give it in. The ramification of treatments from holy men leaves me slightly queasy. And we are back with more This Week in Science. Oh yeah, we've come back yet again to begin. Number five! That's right. Five. Oh, it's a big one. This is a big one. A lot of people have put this at their number one, but it's not our number one. It's good. It's good. It's really good. It deserves the number one spot in regular top 10 list. Yeah. Regular top 10 list. But in a twist top 10 list? No. Or 11. Or 11. 110%. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Gravitational waves, you guys. This last year, January, it was announced that we have had discovered gravitational waves. This supported and proved an aspect of Einstein's theory of relativity, which, you know, for decades, it's been like, yo, Einstein said this, we should find this, right? Do we have, do we have space time? Well, if we do, there should be ripples in it, right? And the LIGO detector announced the discovery to black holes, massive black holes, like over 30 solar masses a piece merging into a over 60 solar mass, giant black hole, some 1.3 billion years in the past. And now, you know, the, the ripples that they're detecting are not giant black hole size ripples. This is little tiny ripples as you, you know, if you look at a rock throwing in a pond, initially they're big ripples, but then they get smaller and smaller with distance, right? Where the edges of the pond, kind of the way that works. And so seriously, this LIGO detector is looking at differences in, in frequency of basically like a, it's like a proton vibrating that the LIGO detector is detecting to be able to do this. And they're able to get rid of all the other junk, all the other stuff that's happening in the universe that could be shaking things and making ripples and wobbles. And they were able to find gravitational wave ripples. But they only found it once and it was such a narrow fight. You know, it's still, you couldn't raise the little spectrum. They found it twice. Oh yeah, that's right. They found it twice. That is right. Again in June, again in June, confirmed. And so they had, in these were even smaller black holes than the original monster pair. More gravitational waves, more ripples. And then the LIGO detector went for improvements in a November opened up again with a greater sensitivity. And now we're looking at an Italian part of the detector coming online. And there's also an Indian detector that's coming online and put all these things together. We should be seeing announcements of black hole collisions, maybe like once a day in a year or two. You know, it's, it's going to start coming fast and furious. I've always said it's just a matter of time. Back to those prediction shows of the past, Justin. Actually I might have it. I'll come up in some next week's show. I think we're going to be talking about this just a little bit. Just a little, just a little. Yeah. So anyway, gravitational waves predicted for a long time. Finally confirmed big news. But you know, there's other stuff that's more pressing for what we're doing on an everyday basis. So number five. What's next, Justin at number four. Number four, four, four, four, four. Number four. Back to you and the microbiome. My goodness. The microbiome made a lot of news this year. I almost think we had. Some microbiome stories. In every single. Yeah. Probably it was, it was. It was pretty, pretty much the norm. Right. Yeah, it was kind of, it was kind of like Zika. Bacteria were everywhere in 2016. They were. And it became a household word microbiome, at least here in the twist house. And I mean, I'm running into more and more people who, who recognize this word, understand this concept now. One of the interesting, some of the interesting stories, there were so many of them. Duke University researchers showed that manipulating dopamine signals in the nervous system, a nematode worm controlled the inflammation in its gut. Suggesting that you could perhaps. In one direction tackle. Gut inflammation with antipsychotics and sent in a very similar experiment. They kind of went the other way around and showed that. Yeah. The, the, that there was a, a market shift in your microbiome that may affect your mood. Right. And so it's kind of a two way street here. You could actually tackle perhaps problems that people and mental problems or anxiety problems by treating the gut microbes directly by changing the microbial mix. There was a link between a specific types of gut bacteria and blood pressure. There was also an interesting study on twins in the UK that found parts of our microbiome might actually be inherited. And not just because we have close contact with our families, but because we have genes that might work to limit or, or encourage certain types of microbes to live within us. And then that study also, it's possible that they've found a link then between gastrointestinal issues and having the wrong bacteria for a particular genetic makeup. Right. This field is just, I mean, the directions it's taking us, you know, we started with talking about how you put the skinny mouse the microbe in a, in an obese mice and the mouse becomes obese. That was like last year to really understanding that this is key to human health and, and mental states on top of this, right? Like it's going to be talked about for everything. We were talking about bacteria in the teeth. This is a story that made Blair cringe because I think it was, what was it? Was it that it was had fuzzy tendrils on certain layers, but they had, it was sort of like a, it's own biofilm that created on the teeth. Right. Oh yeah. Tooth sweaters. Those gross me out. Why brushing your teeth is such a fantastic idea, but also helps scientists understand bacteria. Ah, hedgehogs for teeth. Yeah. It was fantastic. Yup. Bacteria was, I just, I was, I was taken by a lot of the, the gut brain connection stories this year. Basically the mental health like you, like you brought up, those were the ones that really got to me. There's also, there was also some look into studying bacteria and compared to a biofilm that we need to work more comparing this to working with a lump of bacteria or a, you know, the biofilm itself because bacteria operate differently. When in large communities, they start to be, have more segregated duties and they change their behavior in the sense. So everything that we know about a bacteria isolated in a lab might not mean anything when that bacteria is in a lump and is in a community. A biofilm. Yeah. And we've already seen it when like we have antibiotics that work on a bacteria and then don't work on a biofilm or a chronic infection. Right. So we, we're learning what we don't know. Let's see. This scientist at Oak Ridge National Lab, he succeeded in growing nanobacteria bacteria that lived in crazy acidic hot springs in Yellowstone and have previously eluded culturing. Yeah. But this was, this was, this one was interesting because it was all thanks to genomic sequencing. So they basically, instead of just trying to put the, put the, put the, take a sample and then change culture conditions randomly to see what would grow. They actually were able to sequence the DM DNA within a sample to be able to determine what would be the best conditions to create a culture. And so they were basically able to just say, oh, this is what we need to do. And therefore be able to grow the cult, grow the culture, grow the bacteria in the culture. I mean, this is the, this is how bacterial culturing is going to move forward in the future, especially for finding bacteria that'll help us discover new antibiotics. And this is one of the problems. We've only maybe identified and grown in the lab, like 1% of all bacteria on the planet. This is what we need as genetic sequencing. So we know what they need and we can feed them appropriately. Yeah. And I mean, and it's very likely that, you know, like we have this new antibiotic we derived from, from a got back microbe. This is our new rainforest of drug treatments going forward. There's, Yeah. There was talk about probiotics, being useful in certain types of cancer. There was how our immune system relies on bacteria to actually control the glucose metabolism in our eyes. So, you know, we have a, a just huge field that is literally exploding within our guts. It's gross. It's as we explore. I should have said to stack with the rainforest. Yeah. Yeah. That was, that was much less gross. As we explore this, this field, I think it becomes more and more clear that our bodies, our vessels for bacteria, we may have our own plans for life and our five year plan, 10 year plan career aspirations. Really, we're just a giant home to microbiota. We're how microbiota healthy. They're happy. Yeah. I think this year also brought the understanding that maybe not all poop pills, all the fecal transplants are good. Because pathogenic bacteria also pass through the filters that we have in place. And so maybe there needs to be better screening. You got to be careful about that. And we also got to speak with, with our good friend. Josiah. Josiah Zayner. Yeah. Performed a big microbiome transplant on himself. DIY microbiome transplant. And he's been in the news all over the place lately for, for his work. So yeah. Fascinating stuff there. And I have a feeling that these stories as, as well as probably all of these categories are going to continue to be big in the next year. I think that this is, this is a field that we're going to be talking about for as long as there's a twist. Yeah. I think that it just makes more sense. The more we learn about ourselves and the complex community within us, the more our medicinal treatments will mirror the actual interactions in our body. So it makes perfect sense that the more we understand our microbiome, the more we understand the inner workings of how all these things are connected, the more we'll try to key into that when we try to cure illnesses or, or resolve issues within our body. And the more we'll veer away from drugs. Right. And this is totally off the subject and a little bit more personal. Of course. Of course. Where would we be in a twist episode without a tangent? Without a slight tangent here. So I went to the, I went to the dentist recently and I've got, I've got terrible, some terrible plaque issues like that. Hardness and stuff. All right. It's down in the gums. And, and my dentist is explaining that it's a bacteria that creates this. And I'm like, okay. But you know, is it, is it a bad bacteria to have really? Cause she was pointing out, it's like, well, yeah, there's another bacteria that causes cavities. You don't have any of that. Cause I have like, like no cavities. I'm 40, I have like 44 years old. I've got no care. I got, I got two. I got two on my wisdom teeth because it got up under behind the thing. But so they're like, yeah. So I'm something like, if I didn't have this bacteria that's causing plaque that you're going to have to go in there and clean, I could have the other kind of, I'd have cavities everywhere. And she's like, well, it's sort of how that works. And so then they're going to, you know, do the cleaning and they're talking about, they can put lasers in there. I'm like, yeah, lasers. And we're going to put the lasers in there and kill off all the bacteria. I'm like, wait, wait a second. Good night. Doesn't that sound like we're getting rid of the thing that sort of been preventing the cavities? Cause I'd rather go in there for a deep cleaning once in a while than ever have to have a tooth fill. Right. So I'm passing on your pew. If I had the cavities, I'd be like, shoot it up. I'm passing on your pew. Yes. That's perfect. Right. I hope that's verbatim. What you said. All I have to say is dentist lasers for the wind. I would, if I had cavities, I'd have them lasering it all out, but for I kind of like partial to these things that they've kept me out of drilling for all of these years. Yeah. Did she also talk to you about gum disease and heart disease? Okay. Anyway, just quick, quick note, quick note, taking quick note. The heart disease connection actually is not there. That's, we talked about this on twists and bazillion years ago. The other one is, the other one is, I doubt anybody's ever gone into a dentist's office and they said, you have no gum disease. Well done. It's a function of being a human and eating food. I'm saying that. That has never happened. Right. All right. Let's move into the next one on the list. Number three. Number three. Number three. Are you guys ready to get out your, your hankies? This one's a sad one. It's time to talk about climate change. Or climatea, you know, the disease of the planet. Climatea, climatea, climatea, climatea, climatea, the carbon caused lady. I have to say, I don't think there's been a top 11 show, maybe one or two top 11 shows that has not highlighted climate. This is probably the lowest it's ever been. This is like the dentist. This is the dentist visit conversation about the year. The thing about climate change, it is the environmental issue of our time. I say that definitively. That's an opinion of mine, but that is my opinion. Learning to live with climate. Global emissions of carbon dioxide stayed steady for the third year around 2016. That's good news. That's good. However, atmospheric carbon dioxide continued to rise because of El Nino. It decreased possible carbon sinks. And they found that no country is currently reducing CO2 emissions fast enough to keep us below a two degree global temperature increase. Ice core studies have marked the 1940s as the earliest point at which the Pine Island, Glacier and Antarctica began its retreat started in the 1940s. That's one strong. 2016 was real hot. The first six months of 2016 broke all temperature records. What? Winner, winner, winner. We won it. We've done it folks. Number one was a bullet. January to June was the warmest half year on record with an average temperature 1.3 degrees Celsius. Warmer than the late 19th century. That's not good. So the Northwest Passage is now clear enough for cruise liners to make their way along the passage. That's unprecedented. Santa's workshop was unseasonably hot this year. Low sea ice and warm airflow from a wavy jet stream set the Arctic up for an unseasonably warm temperature about 20 degrees Celsius above normal. Celcius, not Fahrenheit, Celsius. When you said wavy, I was hoping you were going to talk about like wavy gravy. Wavy gravy. Ice cream is not going to fix the problem, I'm afraid. It's going to melt. A military base called Ice Worm under snow since the 1950s will soon be unearthed. Along with that, a whole lot of stuff we don't want revealed. Things that are going to cost a lot of money to clean up because military bases often do. They assumed it would never be unearthed, you know, because it was under so much permafrost, but no. Carbon dioxide and waters have made some serious issues, not just temperatures rising. Ocean acidification, a new study looking at fish behavior found that fish exposed to high amounts of carbon dioxide causes them to swim towards predators. Carbon dioxide actually made them alter their behaviors and act in ways that are deeply, deeply bothersome to the survival of their species. This weekend's shark news. Global warming is good for the diet. It makes it easier to hunt. You're right. Carbon dioxide also in the waters, ocean acidification caused, most likely, is the cause behind the Great Barrier Reef Bleaching. We reported on this twice this year. It made quite a splash because 93% of the Great Barrier Reef experienced some sort of bleaching this year. They expect, overall, about a 50% mortality in the northern sector, the central and southern portions, most likely, fingers crossed, will recover, which actually brings us to the other animal side of things I wanted to mention here. Frogs. Frogs were identified as the first group to be at such a great risk from climate change. It surpasses the, historically, what was the number one reason any species was endangered, habitat destruction. Climate change surpassed that for frogs. The reason that's terrifying, frogs and other amphibians are indicator species. When amphibians go, the rest of vertebrates follow along in their wake. So if frogs are the first group to be greatly affected by climate change, by reduced habitat from climate, by rainforest fires, which are a thing now, there's expectation for other groups of animals to follow. And sea level rise. Yes, they're froggy canaries. That's exactly what they are. And sea level rise. Four papers in PNAS found that sea level rise is the fastest it's been in 2,000 years. So all this, not great news. Here's the rosy side of this. We have the science. We've been sequestering the data to save it, which we reported on recently. We have the information. We have the ability to do something. Now is the time for us to do it because this is a pressing problem and the science is there to prove it. Or it's too late. That is the defeatist attitude and I don't like it. It is unproductive. And I won't hear it. Now is the time to buy beachfront properties. Several hundred. Or, you know, we could all band together demand that our politicians pay attention to this issue. Demand. Yeah, we could band together to create new legislation, which we did, by the way, we have done. We will continue to do. And I think this is a perfect point to move into number two. What's number two? Number two. Number two is policy. Yes. Science. There we go. We talk a lot. We've for years have talked a lot about science policy on twist and a lot of times we're down on things that are happening in Washington and stuff that's going on. But this year, there were several events in policymaking that were very, very promising. In June, the U.S. Senate ratified a reform bill that changes the out of date and decades old toxic substances control act. So that there's more science involved in the regulation of new chemicals, where before companies could just put new chemicals out into the environment. There was a having having to prove harm after things were already out there doing stuff. Now they have to be shown to be okay before. Wait, I thought we already knew DDT was harmful. This is DDTB. Right. It's a new thing. It's a new thing. Okay. Let's do what it does. So there and there's science. They're using science of chemistry and chemicals to be able to regulate as opposed to not science. So evidence, they're bringing evidence to bear on stuff. Additionally, the FDA, we've been reporting for years on antibacterial agents in soaps. FDA finally voted to ban 19 specific substances, giving manufacturers only a year to phase them out. So 2017, you should see products with no. Trichlo sand. No trichlo, trichlo carbon in them. These compounds. I can't wait to see my soap that says, yeah, my soap that says no anti-brat. Microbial agents. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That'll be funny. That'll be funny. Additionally, the FTC voted for science. They've made new rules for marketing over the counter, homeopathic products that are released based on the finding that lots of them were misleading in their claims of efficacy. And they recognize that an OTC homeopathic drug claim is not, that is not substantiated by competent and reliable scientific evidence might not be deceptive if the advertisement or label where it appears effectively communicates that there is no scientific evidence that the product works. And the products claims are based only on the theories of homeopathy from the 1700s that are not accepted by most of modern medical experts. Science. Evidence. There was quite some pushback from that, too. And there was a lot of pushback from it. But this is science evidence pushing through in policymaking. And finally, in December, this is the best one. The House and the Senate approved the 21st Century Cures Act. It was sent to the president for signing earmarking funding for the Cancer Moonshot, opening up the FDA to fast-tracking medical devices and drug treatments. So many big things. Potentially bringing more funding to the NSF and the NIH. We don't know that for sure yet because that's going to be budget issues in 2017. But big policy in 2016 that was moved forward because of science and evidence-based reasoning. So I was excited about it. And as much as people might be down on aspects of 2016, I think these are bright spots. And that they're going to have effects for years into the future, which is fantastic. So this brings us to... Is it time? It's time. Are we ready? I just wanted to... Number... Number one. Number one, number one, number one. What is it, Justin? CRISPR, Cas9. This is... Oh, crass, anything. Like all the CRISPR stuff. RNA. CRISPR, RNA. We managed to get RNA that was editable. And what's fascinating about this is if you can do the CRISPR-Cas9 and get sort of custom RNA, RNA is something that, once the genes are already there, can tell the genes which ones are going to be turned on, which proteins are actually going to be manufactured. You can do a real-time therapy as this progresses, as opposed to like in your next generation's offspring, we're going to remove the gene that does this horrible thing. Now, this could be applied as a real-time therapy to somebody who's already living in on the planet. The scientists also use CRISPR-Cas9 to repair retinal stem cells with a defect for retinas pigmentosa. Cells could be potentially transmitted back in the same patient to treat the disease. We're... All those things we've been talking about in the last couple of years about what CRISPR might be able to do, it's already just the next year and they've started doing it. Yeah, it's doing all the things. Not long. Yep. Yeah, they've implanted CRISPR cells back into people to treat cancer. I think those... Are those blood cells that they were... Immune cells. Immune cells, yeah. Yeah, and then there was the single nucleotide mutation editing and this is big for the potential... I miss this one so much. So this is point mutations basically. This is allowing... This is what's really going to be a big effect on human genome editing in the future. If you can go in and edit a single nucleotide base, a point mutation, not a large chunk of DNA, but one single base. And the single nucleotide mutation editing that occurred back in April but has super... The accuracy of it was very high to begin with. And so I don't know, very promising for a lot of single nucleotide polymorphisms which underlie disease, which is a lot of what underlies disease in humans. So that's big. And mice researchers used a two vector system to specifically return the function of a clotting protein to an hemophilia B. So yeah, sure for hemophilia. Yeah, possibly. Isn't that crazy? Wow. Yeah, and then... I remember talking about this because I remember this story because there was a kid I'd grown up with who had hemophilia and I told the story then too. And I watched the kid get like a small cut and just continue to bleed and it was the... It's the weirdest thing. Because you're so used to as a kid you scrape and you get a scab, no big deal. You spin on it, whatever. It's good how to go to the doctor. He had to call his mom and everything over a tiny little paper cut because it didn't clog. It was going to keep bleeding. That would be huge. They're looking at methodology for repairing sickle cell anemia. They're China's into human experiments and cancer treatments. Yeah, this one's very exciting. We don't know exactly what's happened yet, but they have actually done... They've taken a terminal cancer patient, leukemia patient, or maybe it's lung cancer, lung cancer patient, I think. And they've taken immune cells out of them, used CRISPR to edit them and then put the immune cells back in so that they fight the cancer. And so the idea is that it'll help the patient fight off the cancer and survive better. And we'll see what happens with it. There's so much exciting stuff. There was another leukemia study where they used not CRISPR, but something called CAR-T to reprogram T lymphocytes and the T cells. And that was very successful, except in the patients where it didn't work, it was really bad, where the immune cells actually kicked off a cytokine storm that led to death in a couple of patients. And so there was a lot of unknowns in the how the immune system responds to stuff. So I don't know, this CRISPR approach is really fascinating, but I don't know. The human gene editing. Yes, there's a lot of this stuff in mice this year, but in humans, they're starting to move in that direction, you guys. And even not in humans, it's application, CRISPR's application across the board in understanding molecules and how proteins work in different systems, across different organisms, allowing researchers in a very fast way to just dig in and highlight specific genes, specific mutations. And with the moonshot. And with the moonshot and the fast-tracking. We're not the moon to the moon. It's just the last one. The cancer moonshot. We're likely to see a lot more CRISPR stories related to cancer. I mean, this is a huge direction. And these are the sorts of trials that if you see something in the mice, you're going to start, you're going to fast-track it right to humans to see if it continues to work there. Yeah, so CRISPR, it was, I think, number one on our list last year and it remained number one on our list for 2016, even against such fierce competition as gravitational waves. Well, think about all of the things that can go wrong with the human body. There's so many things. How many of them have some sort of basis in genetics? All of them? Unless you're talking about something fell on your head. Right, so CRISPR, kind of a game-changer. No, absolutely, absolutely. And in fact, even though we're in our very primitive stages of using CRISPR in our very primitive stages of understanding the human microbiome, there's probably no greater place that it will be utilized than in the future, than in customizing probiotics. For people based on their genetics and any sort of discomfort or disease that they're making a tribute to that microbiome. It's probably going to be the field, I think every field is going to use this, but I think that's the field, the combination of understanding the microbiome in humans and the ability to use CRISPR combined is probably going to be the most significant shift in human health since the first antibiotic. It's great news for me. I know that twist listeners know, I plan on living to at least 200. So this is fantastic news. Yeah, and it's the difference between editing embryos versus editing adult humans. And the cancer research that's ongoing right now, that's dealing with editing adults. That's helping adults change some aspect of their biology. And this is very exciting news. How does something go in and change so many cells in your body? Fascinating stuff. So additionally, like the sickle cell anemia trials that are potentially going to start next year, like there's more in the next couple of years, there is some very exciting science coming up. And this is also how we're going to be able to bring back to Neanderthal. Well, I'm glad you want to do that and not the mammoth. I'm more on board with the Neanderthal than the mammoth. Oh, good. That's weird. I would rather bring back a mammoth than a Neanderthal. Are you kidding? Let's talk about it later. Maybe after a show. You're funny. OK. For no other reason than to see if its fingers shrivel when they've been in the water. Right. If for no other reason. It's 2016 and we still don't know where I get prunee in the bath. Right. Well, 2016 brought all sorts of different science stories to us. These are just the top 11 and we've thrown a whole bunch of stuff into these different categories. There was one segment of stories that we did. There was quite a few stories that that that fell sort of outside of that regular preview. Right. It didn't quite fit into any of these categories yet. Blair was insistent. Then we had to include it in the show. So we have an honorable mention category. Goes to sperm. That's right. Sperm. Sperm. Sperm. Sperm. A story that trended throughout Blair's animal corner. It did. The sperm trended across many different stories. OK. Let's stop it now. I feel like that's going to get somewhere. It's going to get close in moments. All right. So sperm. We learned a lot from sperm this year. I had a nickel. So first a really cool epigenetic story with sperm looking at mice. There's evidence that tRNA hit your ride on sperm as they travel down the epididymis to alter protein expression in offspring and affect metabolism. So stuff that is not directly in the little DNA packet inside the sperm hitches a ride on its way out. This one was really exciting because it was following the sperm. This is potentially the Lamarckian evolution pathway. How does a non-genetic change? How does something in, say, the dad's lifetime, or even just close to the time of procreation affect the offspring? And this is a possible mechanism. There's a lot to be learned about the tRNA that's held close to the sperm and it is in the seminal fluid. It's fascinating. Yeah. And directly related to that, a study with Narid Flies, they found that the females would end up copulating with multiple males. And even the one male would be the father. Seminal fluid from other males that she had engaged with would have effects on the babies. Right. So this is very similar. They have effect mostly on metabolism of the babies. But there's something in the seminal fluid that is affecting the growth development, what have you, of the progeny in a way that we still don't understand. Could it be RNA? It certainly could be. We don't know yet. But that would be the thing that you could imagine. And you could infer it. Those other males had tRNA that they sent out. And then RNA doesn't care who won. It's going to jump into the mix. Yeah. So the idea is either it's RNA or the seminal fluid is somehow helping the female grow better babies. Which segues perfectly into the next sperm story, which is about red flower beetles. And that the females would continually have sex with more males after they had fertilized eggs. Why? Because they were thirsty and the seminal fluid gave them hydration. You know ladies, on a hot summer's day. It's so much more than a gene package, you guys. You're laughing. I find this fascinating. Because the conventional wisdom has been the males deliver this DNA packet and that's a piece out. That's all they've done. That's all they need to do. But guess what? All of the stuff in there is part of this huge system of benefits from the seminal fluid. And in animals that have sex with multiple partners, there's a benefit to gaining more of these resources than just, you know, we've talked about sperm competition inside females, all this kind of stuff. No. This stuff purely just resource management. Fascinating. And then last I will end on a sperm story about humans. They are animals after all. About selecting genders. So a study actually found out that they could pre-select the genders of sperm. So we all know that the females have, we're all XX. So every single egg is going to have an X chromosome. And so it's the males, it's the sperm that indicate whether you're going to have an XX or an XY. So they can actually follow, the sperm follow chemical trails differently. If they're a male sperm or a female sperm. And so you can actually select out. It's much easier to select the males because those follow these chemical trails faster. So you can select for male sperm. Or they are currently working on methods to select female sperm. But the expectation is that spending for cytometric sorting is estimated to be at $140 million a year. So they think that this would be a fairly low cost service, low cost quote unquote. I mean, this would have to be an in vitro situation. So already that's pretty expensive. But you could essentially pre-select for a male or a female baby if you cared that much. You could, especially if you're doing IVF. Yeah, exactly. Which if you're already doing that, I mean, why not? I think anybody who signs up for that should also take a counseling course on if your child turns out to be gay. Because, you know, you only get so much, even with this, you're only going to have so much of your own choice before this becomes its own person. Absolutely. But I think that it's very interesting that, again, we think that sperm is just this chemical packet, this just packet of DNA that just, here it is. But there's so much more going on that the sperm actually respond differently to chemicals, whether they're male or female. Mm-hmm. There's a lot more going on with those little sperm than with that. Listen, sperm is the window. Two. Is that where you're going with that? Sperm is the window to evolution is what I was going to say, because sexual selection drives so much of evolution. Yeah. And we have so much to learn from reproductive strategies and the combination of DNA from partners that I find it fascinating. Yeah, and in other news this year, stem cell researchers in Japan were able to create, using a mice cells, they created oocytes, egg cells from skin cells. Yes. So that was a huge advancement. So eventually what we're going to be able to do is for individuals who maybe have had cancer and lost their ability to produce eggs or lost all their eggs, we'll be able to produce eggs for them. You know, and then we'll be able to choose the sperm from their partner to be able to exactly create an offspring, but it'll never happen. Blair will be able to have children at 158. Yes. No, thanks. That sounds terrible. That's only if she takes care of her microbiome to keep her young, right? Either that or starts drinking the blood of the young. Yes, and also just going in for weekly CRISPR treatments. That's right. Was it this year? This year was also some of the, the sewing mice together. And was there some, there were some of those aging studies, the vampire, basically finding proteins in mouse blood that contribute to aging. No, that's older. That's like two years ago now. We've been doing this for forever. I know it's an ongoing story, but I think there were more advancements this year. They're starting to really hone in on what some of those proteins are, which is exciting, which means too late for 2016. You're going to have to bring those stories to 2017. Special honorable mention for this year, I would say goes to the slime mold, which, which didn't slime mold. I talked about it. Yeah. Oh, did you really miss? Yeah. And intelligence. I talked to all about the slime molds, but it's special. They're just lovely. They're great. Yeah. I talk all about the slime molds. We love the slime molds. Oh yeah. That's right. We were going to have to, we're going to order some. I'm officially a slime mold enthusiast. Yeah. I'm, I'm going to say also synthetic biology was very exciting. Not as much synthetic biology this year. I liked the, the origami robots that you swallowed. And then they opened up and performed a function inside your body. Yeah. What was the other technology stuff? We had DNA being used to make a really tiny diode. Yes. 3d, 3d printer for chemicals. Yes. I loved that. Let me just, let me just print out a quick vaccine for you real quick. I know. There was also, we didn't highlight this story with, but CO2 being added to volcanic rocks in Iceland and basically putting carbon dioxide back in the ground, which was a big one. Yes. That could hopefully the technology will advance so we can use it in the future. A lot of paraplegic kind of stuff and it's been some tele, teleportation. One of my favorites was about how a small robot that looked kind of like a toy turned people on. Right. So that's why you really need that next. iPhone. It turns out it's, it's not just cool. It's a deep, deep desire. I don't know if it's still being discussed anywhere other than we blurbed on the show once. The Hungarians who found a fifth force of, fifth force of nature. Right. What was that? What's the fifth one? I know. Like. So this is the, their proto phobic force where it's a proposed fifth fundamental force. They haven't, they've been a few studies. It's very, it's, they're putting a lot of evidence forward. It's actually, it's Hungarian and also UC, UC Irvine researchers, I think. And they've put a lot of evidence forward for their model of a proto phobic ex boson. There's some anonymity that the current maths can't make a radioactive decay. And they're proposing that new force, fundamental force of nature. Yeah. Why not? Let's just add another force. They're proposing it. So I guess we, that's why they didn't make the top, top list. Isn't that kind of like, when you're like, I feel like that's like, when you're supposed to do a proof in geometry and you can't find one of the steps. So you go, magic happens. And you could just say new force of nature. We'll just put that in there. Therefore it's erecting. Yeah. They're also, what was that? The organoids, the little mini brains. Researchers created little tiny brains out of skin cells. Oh man. So they, they basically created little tiny brains, they're organoids, but they're all nerve cells and glia and all sorts of stuff. They're complex structures made from skin cells, but reprogrammed to turn into brains. And they're using them to study the effects of drugs and brain disorders and stuff. So it's. Needle. The oldest forms of life on planet Earth, like the oldest that there have been. Yes. That had ever been under the sea. Oh, that's right. And my favorite story was about the primordial soup saying, maybe it's not a soup, it's a vent. Maybe it was a vent. Exactly. Which is a pretty big difference when you think about trying to recreate the soup and make life generate. If you add extreme heat. And a bunch of sulfur that kind of changes the expectation. So flavor of the soup. Absolutely. It changes the flavor of the soup. You're right. Yeah. And then there was also scripts from researchers that started evolving ribozymes to replicate the RNA world hypothesis to basically show that RNA really could have could have self-replicated and predated DNA in biology. So maybe it started in vents as RNA and then moved. Right. Oh my gosh. I love it. I how cool if like I picture my kids or my grandkids that they're biology they're going to talk about this. Are going to have this kind of. Yeah. I mean. Please. Those are my great, great, great grandchildren. But yes, I just I think about the advancements in science and just how much has changed since I was in school and I had these textbooks and already they're probably way different. But just a couple more generations down the road. Those textbooks are going to be almost unrecognizable compared to what we had when we were in school. And I think that is the power of science and it's awesome. Yeah. Also, I don't think there'll be paper anymore. Right. They'll have their little kindles. Yeah. Yeah. Or it just it'll just be some sort of implant. Right. An implant. No. Hang on it. I know kung fu. Is that what you're talking about? It's going to be like the matrix will plug in at a certain age you'll plug in download all the information and there you'll know everything. What is the fun in that? Yeah. Like why even plug it in? Like why like why even bother people with it? It's like by the way, you're you're now a physicist. Oh, what do I do? Just run this app. It does everything for you. Okay. So that's that's kind of the idea of saying, oh, we have calculators now. You don't need to know calculus. Yeah. No, no, no. I mean, I agree with you. You do need to know calculus. You do, though. People need to know intervals and limits. Yeah. But here's the thing. A lot of stuff now they let you use a calculator for. But you need to know how to use the calculator. You have to know how to understand. Yeah. How do you calculate the area? It's a point you'll just need to know how to curve the app that makes you do your job. Well, by auto, like you're not even going to have to. But then it's. However, will I know how quickly my donut shaped swimming pool will fill? This is this is a good question. You should work. Step one actually isn't through the math. Step one is get a donut shape. Yeah. Yeah. Calculate. Turn on the water. Calculate the volume of your swimming pool. What is the flow? Yeah. From your hose. I remember very clearly the day that we learned how to calculate the volume of a donut in calculus because my teacher brought donuts. So much amazing science. As long as we have donuts. Yeah. As long as you know why you're doing it, right? Because I like donuts. Yeah. That's why. Because donuts are awesome. And so is science. So it's like a science donut. Yeah. Right. Yes. Twist. Bringing you science donuts. Yeah. Every week. That's right. That's right. Oh my gosh, you guys, so many great stories. It was really fun as you were going through the past year and figures, looking back at everything that we covered and really taking a look at it and putting it all together as a big picture for the year to see where things are going. It's always really fun to take this view kind of the year long view. Yeah. And if you liked any of those stories and you want to hear more about them, you can find. Listen to the entire year of shows. No. You can find the show notes, which we're going to talk about in a second. You can find the episodes that those are from based on when the story came out and you can listen to the entire episodes and then you can hear us go more in depth into each of these stories, which will take you, I don't know, probably 10 hours. Just a little bit of time. Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, this is what we're going to be doing for the next year ahead as well, which we're very excited about. I'm excited about 2017 and looking at everything that was discovered in 2016, there's just going to be more amazing stuff, stuff that's going to blow our minds, stuff that's going to make us giggle, stuff that's going to make us just so excited and it's all coming and there's another year of science ahead of the next year's review show. Yes, we've run it all down again, but next week we're going to be discussing predictions. Our annual prediction show, which is fun. It's a fun show. This is a very lighthearted show. We take a look at the predictions that we made in the previous year to see how we did kind of rank it all up and then we make predictions for the next year and we are also going to talk about the future. We have a great friend from the web who is a technologist and futurist who has written a book about predicting and how we make predictions about the future and so we'll be talking with her about her book and all of the methods that professionals who predict trends in technology, how they should be looking at the future and the information they have at hand to be able to do that. This is the twist calendar. It's still here. 2017. If you want me to keep making calendars, you have to buy this one. That's right. That's the deal. Blair hand-arded. She hand-arded all the art for every month of the calendar year. I hope you are surprised of science holidays, things that are fun and interesting and also all of the days of twists throughout the year. Check it out at twist.org if you are interested. Additionally, go to facebook.com to be able to find out about our SF sketch fest appearance at the Cal Academy of Sciences in San Francisco for shout-outs to our Patreon sponsors. I'd like to thank our Patreon sponsors for their support. Thank you. I'd like to thank our sponsors for their support. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for all your support on Patreon interested in supporting us through Patreon, you can find information at patreon.com slash this week in science. Also remember, you can help us out simply by telling your friends about twists. Really, it really helps. And once again, next week, we're gonna broadcast live online at 8 p.m. Pacific time on twist.org slash live. You can watch, join our chat room, which is a great place to hang out. There's great conversation that happens there all the time. But if you can't make it, don't worry, it's okay. You can find past episodes at twist.org slash YouTube or just twist.org. Thank you for enjoying the show. Twist is, of course, available as one of those podcasts. Just Google this week in science in your iTunes directory. Or if you have a mobile type device, you can look up the twist fordroid app in the Android marketplace, or simply Google this week in science in anything Apple marketplace. For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes will be available on our website. That's at www.twist.org. What? Oh, yes, it's www.twist.org. One more time? www.twist.org, where you can also make comments and start conversations with the hosts as well as other listeners. Or you can contact us directly. Email kirsten at kirsten at thisweekandscience.com, Justin at twistminion at gmail.com, or Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org. Just be sure to put twist, T-W-I-S, somewhere in the subject line, or your email will be spam-filtered into oblivion. 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I use the scientific and I'll broadcast my opinion all over the earth. It's this Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Science. Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Science. Science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. That what I say may not represent your views. But I've done the calculations and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science, you may just get to understand that we're never trying to threaten your philosophy. We're just trying to save the world from jeopardy. This Week in Science is coming your way. So everybody listen to everything we say. And if you use our methods, better roll than a die, we may rid the world of toxoplasma. Got the eye, eye, eye. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Science. Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Science. Science. I've got a laundry list of items I want to address. From stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness. I'm trying to promote more rational thought. And I'll try to answer any question you've got. The help can I ever see. The changes I seek when I can only set up shop one. This Week in Science. Science. Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Science. Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. We have science another episode. This is Twiss. It's now the end. Hey, everybody. How's it going? That's fun. That was really fun. Yeah, that was a good one. I always love the review shows. They make me so happy. Like, look at all these things we did in the last year. Look at the stuff we talked about. Look at what people discovered. Well, because otherwise, I forget. Like, we go through every single week. We whittle down our stories to what, you know, five. I read probably 40. Right. And then, like, how many do we read versus how many we actually put in the rundown? Right. So then, I can't remember them all. So going back, it's so fun to, like, be reminded of the amazing things that we found out. Amazing things. Oh, everybody over on YouTube. Thanks for watching on YouTube. I've had fun checking out what people are chatting about over there. It's been interesting. We're on the YouTube. We're on the YouTube. We're on the YouTube. And there's a chat over there. A live stream. Oh, there's a chat on the YouTube. Yeah, there's a little chat room over on the YouTube. And then, we've got our own chat room that we do. And Hot Rod was just saying, but the administrative kind of things, Blair, I think, the Twist YouTube channel needs a link in the description to the IRC channel. Yeah, that's not a question for me. That's hilarious, Hot Rod. Oh, my God. You're killing me with that. That could be something we could add to the IRC. I don't know. I might. Yeah, I mean, yeah. Actually, I do think that should be something that. It's always been a puzzling thing. That is something that should have always been there. Mm-hmm. It should have been there. I guess they're like two separate worlds, but connected. Have it then slowly. People migrate over and they find it. You know what? It's like a slime mold bridge. Can we get the slime mold to touch? Yes, yes. Teach me what, Gord? How to put links in the YouTube. No, I have enough things. Has everybody noticed Claire's Leia Buns? She's wearing Prince Leia Buns. Princess Leia Buns is awesome. They're very pretty. Anyway, wait, do that again. I got to put you up there. There you go. Very nice bunnage. Those are good buns. I wear them all day today. Those are good, good buns. My hair's not quite long enough. I am the force. The force is with me. Yeah. Today was a sadness yesterday. Just take a moment. Not just for Carrie Fisher, but for Debbie Reynolds. Yeah. She was in a movie where she acted like a dude as a woman. And it was great. Both of them were ladies that could hold their own, held their own, didn't want to be told what was appropriate and not appropriate for a woman versus a man. They were great. They were great role models. Yes, one of the role models. Oh, 2016, are we done with you and the deaths yet? I mean, I know it's going to, 2017 will be full of them as well. I mean, this is just the generation we're in at this moment in time. All of our heroes bite in the dust. So we have at my office, this is going to sound so silly, we have a giant taxidermied alligator hat. And his name is Al E. Gator. And we dress him up for various seasons or holidays. This entire year, he has been dressed in tribute. He has been Prince. He has been David Bowie. He has been Gene Wilder. And today, he became Princess Leia. Did you know that this year we lost a Duke, a Prince, and a Princess? They used to call but David Bowie the Duke. Right. Duke, a Prince, and a Princess. The royalty is dying. Way. It's hard. It's weird because like I was talking about before we went on air, you haven't met these people. So it's not like you missed, you're missing a loved one. Yeah. But there are certain figures and certain people that used their presence in the public eye for non-trivial things and helped bring people through times that were difficult, whether they be puberty or defining tastes or defining what kind of woman you're going to be or defining whether you will be defined. And a lot of those individuals left us this year. And I think that's what makes it so difficult is that it's not that you suddenly feel the fact that they're gone. It's that you will no longer get new inspiration from those individuals. Yeah. And so probably now more than ever, it's worth going back and revisiting the inspiration that you have felt before. Yeah, although I totally disagree with what you just said. There's no new inspiration, but you can revisit. It's like, yeah, these people, their works of art are out there, so they're constantly accessible. Yeah, and they mean something new. Yeah, and they mean something different to you at different points in your life. Right. And I say this from the perspective of having some of the most meaningful artists in my life being dead authors. The work will move. The work will continue. I mean, it will be discovered and rediscovered and rediscovered for generations to come. So I don't think you should say that we've lost that part of it. At least that's the only aspect I'm actually doing. Well, I'm saying that me personally, selfishly, there are not going to be tweets from Carrie Fisher about Trump anymore. That's not going to happen anymore. That's what I'm saying is that you can find relevance in previous works, and we all need to continue to do that. But there won't be any more new works and new statements that we can draw energy or inspiration from. And I think that's what hurts. Twitter, Facebook, inspiration. Let's go back and appreciate what they did put out there. I mean, how cool that Rogue One came out and that movie was made. And she made it through that. And the story is basically done for her. So it's like, yeah, well, kind of, I mean, I mean, but I'm assuming she shot some things for the number eight, whatever that one's going to be called. But I'm sure they're already in the editing phase because it's supposed to come out next Christmas. Right. So there's got to be. I mean, they might still be shooting, but I would doubt it. This has made me very nostalgic for something that can't exist. Like, I want like Nietzsche to like be tweeting at Trump. Yeah. Like Karl Marx to be trolling Putin on the Internet. Fantastic. We are missing. I never put it in the context of like if the dead authors could tweet. Right. There are. There are people who have created. Mark Dwayne could comment on the current state of politics. Yeah, I mean, they do, but they're not real. But I mean, like, yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, there are people who have created accounts for these people. Yeah, which is kind of fun. And if you can follow those, maybe maybe it's fun. I don't know. It's better of finding them. Some of them are fun. I'm looking for some now. I used to really like Batman's Twitter account. He said some great stuff. Right. Ed from Connecticut. In music, it could be the year of the transgender. People aren't hiding as much. Hmm. Right. Right. Exactly. Made in New York. We don't have to worry. Twitter will tell us what they would have thought. Someone will make up an account and they will live on. Exactly. Too soon. And Gord, yeah, I'm kind of concerned that 2016 will be the new normal for us because it'll be these are the people we grew up and grew up with. And this is the age. It's the age when it starts kind of falling apart and things start falling apart. The cancers, the heart disease, you know, the people who are 20 years our senior, 20 to 30 years our senior are going to. Especially if maybe they they they went a little bit strong for several decades in in pursuing their desires. Perhaps they didn't get a lot of sleep or or take a lot of vitamins. Maybe they were taking some other things that can have an influence as well. Yeah, I mean, Carrie Fisher was very open about her her struggles with drug abuse. And when she went through electroshock treatment, too, through electroshock treatment, so was almost lifelong smoker. She's I mean, she smoked forever. You know, she had all sorts of stuff going on. So, you know, and maybe she who knows? Genetic predisposition to heart disease. Maybe it ran in her family somewhere. You know, we don't know that stuff, but yeah. Yeah, I think our generation probably is. I mean, there was there was cocaine and heroin. Before the rock stars and the actors. Yeah, but maybe it maybe rock and rock and roll and acting in Hollywood kind of brought it to a new level of prominence in the culture. I would I would guess it it brought access is what it did. Yeah, Gordon saying in the in the chat room we posted from earlier. Justin Robert Young had an interesting thought about this on Twitter. He believes and Gordon agrees that with the explosion of media we're experiencing. We've opened ourselves up to loving and connecting with more things than ever. More celebrities than ever. And so our list of people we don't ever want to die expands indefinitely. Yeah, it's a great point. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, I was thinking about Carrie Fisher on 30 Rock today. She was so great. I loved her arc on 30 Rock. It was fantastic. I don't remember Carrie Fisher on 30 Rock. Yeah, I watched almost every episode of that. Re-watch her arc on 30 Rock. She so she comes out or she she comes to help Liz Lemon and she was one of the first female writers on late night. OK, whenever. OK. But yeah, she's great. Let's see, what did somebody else say? I was following somebody on Facebook and they said that celebrities now are modern man's fertility gods. They represent the ideal power, youth and immortality. So when a celebrity dies, it reminds people that even celebrities die and right and if celebrities die, then I'm going to die. So what we have is a veiled mourning for our own mortality projected onto the passing celebrity. Interesting. I thought that was an interesting way of looking at it also. I'd buy that. I see I see some truth in that for sure. Yeah, it's very interesting. Oh, Ben Rothig, you bought a calendar. Thank you. Glad to send you one. Yeah, we sold the calendar. That's awesome. Too sweet. Too sweet. And anyone who brings a calendar to our SketchFest event, I will sign. Yeah, if you're in San Francisco, bring calendar with you. Bring a t-shirt. I don't know if you have a t-shirt. Do you have twist swag that you've bought off of Zazzle or calendar or something? We will sign things. You want to come? We'll sign it. Yeah, definitely check out the Zazzle store. There's a couple of things in particular I really like. There's there's what's the word? Melamine, right, is like plastic plates. There's a melamine. So those are one of my favorites. They're all the travel mugs turned out really good. There's coasters, which I think are great. And there are phone cases. Clocks, clocks. Yeah, they're clocks and ornaments, although it's too late now. They're buttons. So check it out. I'm going to my next step. I'm going through. I'm like weeding out all the things that don't work. So I've reduced the number of pages, so it's kind of easier to go through. I'm editing the ones that will work so that the the branding is there and well centered, but that my next step is to actually add more design. So I want to add some of the designs from the calendar this year. And if anyone in particular has any desires for a particular design to show up in the Zazzle store, tweet at me. Let me know and I will work on it. Yeah, that'd be fabulous. Ed from Connecticut is reminding us that this week, the Minion Hangout is not happening tomorrow. Ed's taking the week off. He's having a holiday. So Ed, I hope you have a wonderful holiday. I hope everybody has a great holiday. It's almost the New Year's weekend. Oh my goodness. No Minion Hangout this week. But next week, hopefully he'll be back online. And as he says in the chat room, East Coast, West Coast, Australia, Finland, all in real time technology, bringing the people of the world closer together. It's true. And I think that's one of the best things about technology. Someone in the YouTube chat room was asking, was complaining about the fact that we were so positive about technology and CRISPR technology and that we weren't talking about, I'm sorry. We're not very skeptical. I'm putting that I'm putting that voice on you and I don't even know if you're still in the chat room or. Well, I mean, I totally. But let me let me say that was come on mates. It would behoove you to be honest to your listeners. Nice to promote the light of the tech. But the dark is there. Beware. Yes. I made some jokes about robots and stuff like that. But I think I think that ultimately. Living in a world where you're afraid of technology, getting into the wrong hands is not beneficial to society. Like living, living in fear. You can't do it anymore. Yeah, of handing off the technology that's. Yeah, exactly. It's it not only is it not productive, but. We're past that. The internet exists. We are sharing information. Any technology we make, people will have the only way to make sure that it's used for good is that we make sure it's used for good. And the way to do that is to not stop people from using it. Yeah. And that's kind of like what Josiah Zaynor is working on with his DIY CRISPR kits and, you know, putting the technology. He really, really wants to put the technology in the hands of people. You know, the majority of people are just going to be doing fun things like putting fluorescent genes in yeast or bacteria. Like he's working on creating, you know, a beer that's slightly fluorescent, which is kind of fun, you know, and it's a it's a fun idea. It's something people can do on a weekend or in their in the garages or their kitchens or kids can do in classrooms and learn really how molecular biology works. You know, this is hands on teaching that he's democratizing the science, democratizing the understanding of the science. And I think this is also we talked about it with him, which is the majority of people and actually the majority of living systems are not going to be amenable to just any old change. You can't just throw any old mutation in with CRISPR. And this is something that we have talked about before. This was the top 11 show. So we weren't bringing up that part of it, but we've talked about it before. You can't just go, I'm just going to stick any old mutation in whenever, wherever I want. I'm going to pack and cut and put whatever I want in there. You can't do that. I want a forked tongue. No, not necessarily. I mean, maybe a forked tongue would be easy to do. But, but if you put things in the wrong places without understanding of why certain bases are in the places that they're in, it's going to cause deleterious mutations, which will lead to the death of the organism. You're leading the majority of this stuff. Petri dishes, bacteria and yeast, yeast, right? And they won't survive. They'll die because of whatever effect it has on the metabolism of the organism as a whole. And so with CRISPR, it's even though it's a useful tool and is going to advance science rapidly, it can't just, it doesn't, it's not magic. Right. Well, I think about, OK, there's still biology and the systems. Think about the Internet. When the Internet happened, I'm sure there were people that were very worried about handing all of this information straight over to the public. And yes, there have been issues with everyone having access to any opinion substantiated by any fake evidence. There have been issues with that. Any new jump in technology is going to have to withstand the pressures of becoming normalized. The way to get in front of that is to get science in front of that and to educate people how to use that new technology, which now we're kind of playing catch up on. I mean, I deal with this with my teen volunteers. Every day I work with them. I have to ask them when they're doing a research project. And where did you find that information? And who runs that site and who pays for that company? And is it a reputable source? Oh, Wikipedia, though a good place to start, is not a reputable source. So now we're playing catch up. So, yes, I think it's an important it's an important point to make that when we have these huge jumps in technology, we need to get in front of it. We need to get scientists working with that technology sooner. Actually, to get in front of that, and we need to educate ourselves on how best to use that new technology and to try to say that that we shouldn't allow some of it or that some of it shouldn't be accessible is a losing battle. Yeah, it is a losing battle. You can't it's it's out now. It's not like we can hide it for only certain responsible individuals to use. And then how do we know who those responsible individuals are? Who's responsible versus somebody else? You know, it all has to do with what people want to do with things. And a perfect example is that the sperm sorting. I was talking about before, if suddenly everyone is able to decide the gender of their babies, what will happen? We have to figure out through social science. We have to figure out through testing, through through surveys. We have to find out are people going to start selecting for more males than females? Is this going to create a lopsided gender ratio? I'm going to get I would guess that if it were something that could happen in Western culture, people would choose for a male and a female child. Right. So it would be evenly balanced that people that people want. Most of the time, they're like, I'd like a boy and a girl. You know, it's like, especially in America, not America, United States of America, it's like the white picket fence and a dog and the cat and an Arvina girl. Yeah, you have our two kids, one's a boy, one's a girl. That's just the way, you know, that's the dream, you know, you're going to have a job and you're going to have to stuff. And it's a boy and girl and your RV and your boat and whatever. You're going to add things on in the two story house with. So in that case, it's fine. Or even if you have China, right, where suddenly it's all males because of social factors that might actually work to our advantage, because the population is growing so fast. Right. This is how we beat China. This is how we don't destroy the planet. Where did Justin go? Yeah, it's going to end badly. It will. All technologies will be utilized to do harm at some point. No matter how positive or beneficial a technology or a concept it is somewhere, some place in the world, there's somebody who's only trying to figure out how to utilize it to do ill. Right. Right. That's always been true. We'll be on Silence Science Island when that happens and you can come join us there. But otherwise, what are you going to do about it? You're going to use it for good. And if if if I were to create the ideal world. All science would be done within Science Island. And then we'd parse out bits of that technology to the rest of the world 50 years after we were kind of come up with it and know where we would. That would be like that would be the thing is like. So this is less of a Science Island and more of a castle with very high walls. Every tower. Very high. Yes. And ivory tower of sorts. You got it for being firing out of like this is. Like, yeah, no. But I mean, to that point, the ideal scenario would be that you would. Create all of your technology. You would find out where it leads and where it goes and what the next generation of technology and what the next generation and next generation of technology are. Before you would entrust it to humanity. Right. I mean, that that's the only way you could say, OK. As far as we can tell, right? Like the invention of the the hot air popcorn popper doesn't have a militarized side to it. We can now release this to the public. You don't know that. Right. And then some genius outside of Science Island goes, oh, I know exactly what to do with this and then away it goes. But. But I think part of part of why we have technology, which has always been a little bit weird to me, because I'm like, why isn't America hoarding all of these advancements and not sharing it with the world? My gosh, like we could be so much more prosperous if we just doled out bit by bit, this stuff. And the reason that doesn't work for one, you don't have an audience for the product you just created then. And the other one is. You learn from the other science funding that goes on in the world. That sharing informs the science that we do. To a great effect. So so in order to progress science, you need to share it. You need to get other people who are funding science in other countries to participate in your research. It just makes it for a stronger, healthier community. The best scenario for for doing away with, you know, worrying about evil doers in the world is to force everybody into a lab job somewhere where they have to go in and just do lab work for science all day. And that way, you know, I mean, it's it's not ideal for everybody. Well, it can only really be one evil genius, you know, the rest kind of have to put the pieces together for the innate. There is a factor in it to me. Yeah, this is always going to be bad things. That's not because you can go backwards in time and be afraid of everything, right? There were there were people who were afraid of driving more than 20 miles an hour in a car, right? Because they were afraid that it would leave the soul behind. What? Yeah, they were like, they're like, OK, it's OK to have a car. But keep it under under 20, 25 miles an hour. Otherwise, you may accidentally leave your soul behind. It might. I think all these people in this generation, they just need to, you know, stop using cell phones because cell phones are going to suck your soul out of your brain. They're going to just. What? I can't hear you, though. What? My cell phones, what? It's going to make me more popular. OK. OK. Let me just snapchat this conversation real quick. Television will turn your brain to mush, which is true versus a good book. However, now it's evolved into the internet in which you can do a physics lecture with the click of a button and you can sit back and take it in, which you couldn't get from the television and might have been too hard to get through in a book. Like it's like these things evolve in stages and steps. And there will be. There will be points at which things are mistreated or want to be abused or commercialized in the wrong way. I think we've done pretty good as a planet in the society of avoiding pitfalls of using technology too much except guns, except for that one. Strength says he thought it was because people thought they couldn't breathe at that speed. You know, those might be other people when the first I don't know where it was. It might not have been Iran. It was somewhere in the Middle East when the first car landed there. The people put like hay and feed offerings out in front of it because they thought the foreign donkey must be really hungry from the trip. Like, you know, like people didn't quite know how to interact with the thing within new technology. It just sometimes takes a little time. Science is real. Science is real. Science is real. I like that they might be giants album. It is real. It is real. It's working, guys. This is our last show, 2017 and our last show of the five century. It's true. I'm posting about that right now. Is our last episode 600. It seems like just 100 episodes ago. We were celebrating the 500th episode. That was a fun one. You guys came to my house. Super duper fun. Came to my house and we had we had champagne and Blair and I wore dresses. We did. And we did a show and that was very fun. That was awesome. So 600, we're going to be far apart, but it'll be a fun prediction show. And I think it would be fun. You know, it was 600. So it's only 100 past the last big mark. So I wasn't really ready to do a big party or anything. No, and we'll be in San Francisco soon. We'll be a thousand before we know it anyway. I think so, you know, only right around the corner. Eight more years. Well, unless we start doing two, three, four, five episodes a week. And then we. That makes me feel tired. Um, why don't we just do 750 next? We could have a big 750 party. Three quarters of a century. Yeah, we'll work at it. Something that I thought. So yeah, I got it. I have to go. I have to I have to share this number that I saw recently. I just I just want you guys to to know. In the go ahead, hit me. There's not a number I haven't seen before. So this might be a number that you've never seen before. I've seen a lot of numbers. I know you've seen a lot of numbers. You log in. How did I do that? Oh, I might not be able to log in and let you know. I'm going to have to figure this out. Oh, yeah, Ben. That's right. I have to log in. Baths have been a frilly dress. You get it. Next time I get the dress. OK. I knew I should have written this down. I changed my life. So get me with this number. Is it between one and a million? No. Is it between a million and 10 million? Yes. Marrying it down. No, we I need to figure out my log in. I'm not going to do that right now. No, we have been our podcast, according to Libsyn, has been downloaded over eight million times. Get out of town. She did already. What time would you want her to move to now? Get back in town. And at some point, I will actually get my log in information so I can get you the accurate number. But it's we have been twist has been downloaded by people around the world several million times. That is the coolest. It's really it's really cool. I want that etched in gold. Great. Like I'm kind of looking at the number and I'm like, OK, when we hit 10 million, I'm going to be like, boom. And maybe we are there. I don't know. I need to I need it's over eight million for sure. Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah. I've been downloaded millions of times. I don't even know what eight million looks like. Right. Right. It's a lot. It's pretty awesome. People have downloaded us. They listened to us. It's pretty awesome. I'm impressed by us. I am impressed by our listeners. And our minions for putting up with us. Thank you for downloading us. Right. I didn't mean for millions. Millions. Just want to say. You did that download 500,000 K words. Did you download the entire back library hot rod? Several times. Don't want to talk about it. Serving science up like it's McDonald's. Yeah, Ben. Gordon has a suggestion for you. He says that to picture eight million, picture the number eight and then six zeros trailing it off to the right hand side. That's how you should not the left side. No, not the left side. That would be the number eight. What night identity for was the next week. That's not how numbers work. That's how numbers work. Yeah, that's exactly how numbers work. Let's talk about number theory. I have a question. I need to buy my ticket to San Francisco. Yeah, you should definitely do that. That's what I need to figure out. Oh, me too. I haven't even thought about that. But next week, next week, we're doing predictions. Are we bringing any stories that aren't related to our predictions from last year? No, you don't have to find any new stories. I mean, you can if you want to. We can put stuff maybe in the short, the quick bring up. But I feel like we're supposed to be saving the really good stories for SketchVest, right? Isn't that the deal? Yeah, yeah. So next week, we're going to do. So yeah, next week, it's just going to be a filler show. No good content. Justin, no. This is not true. We're going to have an immediate interview. OK, oh yeah, we have a great interview. And you can bring a story. Like, here's the story you can bring. Hang on, sorry. Here's the story you can bring. You may, I know I'm talking over you, but because I got to fix what she said. You can bring a story if you predicted something and then that happened. In 2016. Yeah, you'd obviously want to bring that story that confirmed your prediction. Right. And they're not all stories that we actually reported on in the show. Some of them are, yeah, some of them will be things that happen that we didn't actually report on in the show, but is related to a prediction that we made. And then we're making predictions for next year. So. Exactly. So we don't have to bring current, current stories. But if you can find something, even if you really have to stretch it to make it connect to your prediction. Yeah. Those are worth bringing. Indeed. Indeed. I think they are. I'm excited for that. Stretch your predictions. Yeah. So if you have something to bring for your prediction itself, yeah. And then since we have the interview, we can also, at the very, very end of the show, do our quick stories if we feel like there's a few fun things that we just wanted to throw in just for beeps and giggles. OK. Eeps. I said beeps and giggles. Oh, beeps. Beeps and giggles. Because I like beeps better. Because I'm trying to not say bad words. OK. Beeps. I like the phrase. The phrase involves a bad word. Because like when you get really excited, you go, you go, eep. I do go like that sometimes. So yeah, eeps and giggles. Eep. Eeps and giggles. Yep. Yeah. And from that I say, now is the time for the Minions to take their bets. Go back to the prediction show from last year and figure out who did better at predicting. Place your bets. Place your bets. Who won the year for predicting? Right. Well, there's still several days for you guys to prove one of my predictions, correct? And that is that I would sell out of calendars. So help me make that prediction accurate. Yeah. Your money's on Blair. You got the big money on Blair to win the predictions. This is how you come. Who doesn't want this mammoth? You guys. Actually, I do. I want that. Too bad. It's framed in my parents' house. But you can take the calendar, you see. And when the year's over, you can then frame. Cut it out and frame it. I got to say that is the best one ever. That's my favorite. It might be my favorite. That's my Cucaburra. Cucaburra's in the old gum tree. It's my favorite. That's your favorite? And all the gum drops he can't see. Laugh, Cucaburra, laugh. Cucaburra, save some gum for me. Where's my, which one's my Hanukkah present? Which one is it? It's, it's arriving tomorrow. Tomorrow. I'm going to tell you. And I want to see it. You and Kiki, both your Hanukkah presents are arriving tomorrow. Fedek says. I have one. Tomorrow. I have one for you. OK. As well. But I'm going to just wait and like hand it to you. So let's see. Count how many calendars? So Justin, yours is currently as of this morning at 9 11 AM at a local FedEx facility in Sacramento, California. It is scheduled for delivery tomorrow by 4 30. I got to learn how to sell things better. Kiki, your present is at a local FedEx facility in Portland, Oregon, as of 11 53 AM this morning. And its scheduled delivery is tomorrow by 4 30 PM. Why don't they just bring it to the mailbox today? I don't know. Can I show you what I got? The two of you? Thanks, Daniel. It's mine. Yes. Can I say? Hang on. Here we go. I got a jacket and a pair of boots that didn't really fit and a scarf and a makeup box. And I also get Christmas box of chocolate. To remind me about life. Life is like a box of chocolates. Yes, FedEx is Santa. FedEx is a code name. Code name Santa. Code name FedEx. What's that? Banana slugs? What is it? It's banana slugs. It's banana slugs that you can apparently put anywhere. I know. Banana slugs stay there. Ooh. They're not real, though. No, I didn't get you real why of banana. I wouldn't try to keep anything alive. But I haven't opened it, so I don't know exactly how they work. But they seem like they're slimy, and they stick to things. So yeah, have fun with it. I honestly thought they were magnets when I bought them. But as sort of as I've read the back panel, it seems like this might not be. If your sticky slugs get dirty, you can clean them with water and mild soap, or by gently pressing a strip of adhesive tape against them. And then they'll stick again. So whatever they are, they're not magnets. Just stick to things. Oh, what present got Kai the most excited? He's very excited about his three-dimensional quicksals that he got. Is that like Minecraft in real life? Yeah, so no, quicksals are these funny little plastic things that you can create little, it's like pixel art. They're like these little plastic cubes that you put next to each other and then use water. And it kind of melts the plastic, and the plastic self-adheses to itself. And you can create these little pieces of art. But now we have this device that allows you to do it in layers. So you can make three-dimensional structures out of it. And so he got really excited about that, and we made one of those yesterday. And then what was the other thing? Oh, and we also, he got, what's the name of the robots? Transformers, robots in disguise. Cubots, I think that's what it's got. Cubots? Cubelets, that's what he got. He got a Cubelets Robot Construction Kit. And so it's really cool. There's no programming involved. Each cube has a different function. And so you put the different cubes together, and you can make robots that do things. Like there are cubes that have wheels on them. So you can make a rolling robot because you can put, there's another cube that has a light sensor so that it moves, it senses light and goes toward light. Or there's another one that, let's see, there are a bunch of different modules that you put together. And then there's like, there's an inverse cube. So say you've got the cube that senses light, you can put an inverse cube next to it. And so instead of rolling toward the light, it stops and moves away from the light. And so you basically put the cubes together in different conformations to create different kinds of robots. A little vampire robot. It's like, yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, it's fun. Kai's had, we've had a lot of fun with that one. He really liked that one. He really, really liked that one. And then, oh, his Yo-Kai watch. What is that? What words are those? Yo-Kai is this funny Japanese cartoon that basically is to sell toys. Okay. Really likes, it's like, it's very Japanese anime. It's very quirky and very weird. Like a lot of, it's funny. Strange characters, like the man-faced dog. Like it's this, so Yo-Kai are in the mythology of the cartoon. Yo-Kai are these demons or spirits that go around and basically usually they mess with stuff and like make people do weird things and not do things they would normally do or make things be messed up. And so this guy lost his job and wandered around out of his mind after he lost his job. And somehow a dog came up to him and while that dog came up to him, a pile of wood fell on the two of them and because they both died at the same time, they turned into a Yo-Kai that's this man-faced dog. And so the whole, it's funny because then the episode goes around and they've got this whiny, I used to be a human and now I'm just a man-faced dog. It's really funny. Nice change. There's a lot of- Nightmares. Really strange stuff going on. It's very, it's quirky. It's funny. Anyway, I love it. So my oldest just wanted money so that he's building a supercomputer that he hopes to take over the world with. Awesome. That's cool. So he's been collecting cash from all relatives. But why fear technology? Exactly. So he can buy and build this supercomputer. Sats, this is my next oldest, she wanted dolls. Look at those dolls. And these dolls are pretty, this is still in the box. I can't open it for you. But these are the- I'm on Netflix. What? MC Square dolls. Ooh. So each doll comes with a science experiment. Ooh. Yeah, so I got her like a half dozen of these. Like this one is how to make your own puffy paint. This one is how to make your own hanging garden. There's one where you use an apple as a conductor and this little panda speaker. It's totally cute. But once the apple is in there, it completes the circuit and then your music will play through the speaker. There's one for foaming bath fizz and then there's some other thing, right? And then the youngest just wanted a, this was like, she wants a pink princess scooter with Ariel on it. Okay, did you manage to get that? I found it almost like right away. And I bought it and I, and so there was like the first gift I got because like I found this thing and in a place that like, I'm like, I don't even know like if she's seen this, but she, this is what she created. And then to sort of offset all the pink and the princessiness of it, the other thing she mentions is you wanted light up shoes. Like shoes when you walk on it. So I got her the, whatever the new R2D2 is. I don't know what its name is. BB8? The BB8 light up shoes. And Darth Vader, like knee pads, and elbow pads. Yeah. We got a little bit of the dark side going there too. That's good. And then I've got her super cute helmet. We also, we also did get some science stuff for Kai. We got him a little microscope kit, went a bunch of slides with different tissue preparations on them. Oh yeah. And we got him, we found online, we found a place that like, I guess I think it's probably through Amazon or something, but basically like a lab coat. So we got him a white lab coat. And we also got him a little kitchen chemistry set. So we can do little chemistry experiments and stuff. Nice. I'm so excited. We get to do science. This is going to be after school activities. It's going to be fantastic. Yeah, I did that last year. I'm probably a terrible parent. I have very bad follow through. We have the digital microscope with the screens and nobody like, we can all see it together. Yeah. But it's like in a box. Really. And we got this slides and they got into it at first. And they were like, and then there's this kit you can get, which is like a sort of like a clue, solve the mystery forensic kit. We've got like different carpet fibers and different samples from the crime scene. And then you compare them to other samples under the microscope microscope and see which ones match to find the killer. It's like this whole thing, but they didn't do it. They've got the more important things to do. More important. More important than looking at a microscope. What? Yeah, right. My child's still young enough. I can make him do what I want. Oh, I'm kidding. They might be electricians. Like they've got the snap electronics. They got one of those big kits last time around. And every once in a while they get dragged out and they'll make like a little AM radio or something that makes BB sounds or flashing lights and stuff, it's pretty cool. It's really easy because everything just snaps into place. You just have to follow the instructions on how to do it. Easy is good for parents. Where did Justin go? He's like, I don't know. He just disappeared. He's like, I gotta go following instructions. A little hard. If you like, I will leave the audio and video rolling. Don't need that. If that's what you're asking. He's like, please, Justin, do not leave us even though you're clearing out your snot locker. So this year I got everyone in my office for the holidays, inspirational unicorns. So I bought off of this favorite website that I found. Now on my favorite website. This is his favorite. Right. A bag of defective unicorns, parentheses, still magical. So actually, let me read you the item description. I'm gonna have to show it to you or read it to you. The item description for the defective unicorns. Well, I decided to make them inspirational unicorns. So I looked up inspirational quotes and I wrote them on the unicorns in Sharpie. So this is the product description. Aren't we all defective and magical? When we got in a shipment of defective unicorns, there were some cruel people here who wanted us to throw them away. We refused. We think each one is valuable and special in its own way. They just need you to take care of them. There will be approximately eight unicorns and pieces of unicorns in each bag. Some can stand, some can't. Some have lost their horns. Some are missing a leg or two. The one thing we know for sure, each one is just as magical as it has always been. Looking for forever homes, no returns. That's funny. So yes, I gave everyone inspirational unicorns. One of them, my favorite one, had a Leslie Nope quote on it, which was, here we go. What I hear when I'm being yelled at is people caring really loudly at me. And then the one that I ended up taking home with me was, if you can't find a good role model, be one. Oh, that's actually not bad. Yeah. And then another one I really liked was, stop looking back, you're not going that way. That's a good one. I liked that one a lot. That one actually, that might have been my favorite. It's so simple, but it's such a good point. Oh right, yeah, I can't redo those things. So let's just keep moving forward. Good. That's kind of like biting a little bit into wherever I go. There I am. Right. But it's also important to remember to reflect on past experiences because you want to learn from things that happen to you. Don't look back, you're not going to do that again. Everything's going to be different going forward. But you can still, you can still grow. Yes, I'm making fun of it. I'm actually marking the advice. I'm saying, yeah. No need to learn from the past. I obviously did everything right. I'll just go forward. I'll run into new stuff. It'll end better next time. Anyway, my inspirational unicorns. I like them. I wish I had known about that. I did have a few little unicorns that I had, kind of that wonderful set of unicorns that I was keeping in the box because I liked the unicorns in their box. And then the children found it and then the unicorns were broken. Unicorns got thrown away. But they were still magical. They went somewhere else. Maybe somewhere else. Very magical for your people. Probably Michigan. I've been I've been using the word unicorn. Just to describe anything that's like kind of rare. Or if it's something's very common, I say it's not a unicorn. It's not a unicorn. Like if that's actually pretty a common thing, that's not it's not. So I was called a unicorn all the time. This is getting personal now. In the dating circuit in San Francisco, when I would meet guys, they would call me a unicorn because I was born and raised in San Francisco. Oh yeah, that makes you a unicorn. Yep, that makes you a San Francisco unicorn. I know nothing but born and raised in San Franciscans. Because you were born and raised in San Francisco. So it's not weird to me at all. But every time. Oh, you're a unicorn. Okay. That's the thing I didn't like. Cause somebody that's got brought up because they're the former principal of our kids. One of my kids elementary school made everybody call him doctor. Not principal, whatever, but doctor, whatever. And somebody just like, and I was like always annoyed me. I was like everything I needed to know about this guy. I learned before I met him because he made everybody call him doctor, whatever. And somebody said to me, it's like, yeah, especially in a town like Davis, which has such a hyper capita of like PhDs. It's you're not a unicorn in this town. Like wherever he was from, maybe it's a unicorn to be a doctor, but it's not in this town. And the fact that you make people call you doctor you could be made to call everybody doctor in this town. Like everybody who talked to it would be doctor, doctor, doctor, doctor, doctor. It would be the same, right? And like that was like a year to go. And ever since I've been like, yeah, if something's unique, it's a unicorn. If it's not, it's really. I think I've hit my limit. Yeah. I gotta go. It's 11. Can you take it there one more time? Sick of that, Kiki. You know what? We took it to 11. We did take it to 11. We turned it up. Good night, Kiki. Good night, Kiki. Good night, Justin. Good night, Blair. Good night. Good night, Minions. Bye, calendars, everyone. Good night, Minions. Sleep well. Make it so I can make 2018 calendars. Bye, calendar. Blair enjoys it and it's fun. And they're good calendars. They're awesome calendars. They're very helpful to you. Thanks, you guys. See you next week. I'll see you in 2017. That's right, I can't just say next week. I'll see you in the next year that I forget what year it is and don't write it on checks. I mean, who use checks anyway? What is it, Jack? See you next year. Ashley.