 This is going to be a boring show everyone. I'm sure of it. All right, as we wait for the queue from everyone out there, make sure we are live. And if you are watching the stream, make sure turn it off so we don't have the volume from the stream going out there. Okay, everyone watching, we're going live in three, two, this is Twist. This week in Science, episode number 710, recorded on Wednesday, February 27, 2019. Where for art thou, Planet Nine? Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki, and tonight we will fill your head with possible planets, zebra, camo, and yeast. But first, Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Say you want to say something that sums up everything that is known about a subject. The easier a time you have doing so, the less we likely understand about the thing you're summing up. In fact, there are few things worth thinking about that can be summed up succinctly. There are just too many things that we do not understand well enough to say anything meaningful about them without leading us to more questions. Which is fine, it's always been this way. It's a big wonder filled world out there. But there comes a time, from time to time, when humans attempt to make demands of the universe to tell a story that sums it all up. A text, shall we say, that summarizes the universe into chapters and verse. As if to say, everything that is not understood by this time tomorrow does not exist. This occasional human tendency to end the pursuit of knowledge has come and gone and lingered lavishly throughout history. But there is one place where the pursuit of new knowledge never rests. We're wondering humans never satisfactorily are silenced by answers. A place where the next question and not the last conclusion gets pulses pounding. And that place is right here on This Week in Science. Coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that 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 too, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back again to talk about so much science fun. Got stories, you know, we always have stories. I have stories about changing climate and making coal because we need more of that, right? What do you have for us, Justin? I bring you CBD yeast and the most abundant diverse biological place on planet Earth. Most diverse. All right, I'm ready to dive in there. And Blair, what's in the animal corner? Oh, you know, classic week. I just brought some zebra stripes and some gambling birds. Ha, birds with a gambling problem. Yes, let's get in there. And we also have an interview tonight with some planet hunters. But before we dive into that interview, I'd like to remind you that if you haven't subscribed to This Week in Science, you can do so by going to twist.org. Lots of information there. You can also find us on all the places podcasts are found, YouTube and Facebook. Search for This Week in Science. Also, if you're in the Portland, Oregon area, we will be having a live show at the Alberta Rose Theatre on April 3rd. You can find an announcement on our website. But now it is time for our interview. And I would love to introduce our guests tonight. Our guest tonight are Dr. Konstantin Bachigan, an assistant professor of planetary science and Van Nuys Page Scholar at the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at the California Institute of Technology. Also at the California Institute of Technology and in the same room with Dr. Bachigan is Dr. Mike Brown. He's the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy. With his Twitter handle at PlutoKiller, you may know him from the role he played in demoting Pluto status as a planet. And from his book where he titled it How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, we are thrilled to have him on the show to discuss their latest set of papers, suggesting a path to discovering and bringing our solar system back to nine planets. Welcome to the show. It's good to be here. It's fun to be here. Is this some sort of court-ordered restitution that you are being forced to make? Having killed one planet, you must find another to replace it. So I will tell you a true story, but only one. The rest of them I'll just make up. But this one's true. My daughter five years ago, which was a good year before we even started having an inkling that there was a planet nine. My daughter five years ago would have been eight years old. And she said to me, she said to me, Daddy, do you know how to get everyone to stop hating you? And I was like, why? Why you little daughter? How will I get everyone to stop hating you? And I was not knowing everyone to hate me. It's like, you need to find a new planet. And then they'll not hate you. And also you should name it Pluto when you find it because then Pluto will find it again. Pluto Junior. I will get right on that. And shockingly, except for the naming of Pluto part, we're well on our way. So maybe people will someday stop hating me. I don't think so. I have dreams. So you've gotten into looking at these solar system objects, hyper belt objects, cloud, these outer solar system objects. You also look at planetary dynamics. But how did you both come to this place of going? There's something going on out there. Well, look, I mean, this really started in 2014. I had just come back to Caltech and Mike and I had worked previously, but we kind of reconvened. We thought, okay, let's let's think about some of the interesting problems that are out there. And we were really inspired by work that one of, one of actually Mike's former postdocs, I guess back from 2002 or so, and collaborators had done where they had found this additional object whose orbit was unlike the typical Kuiper belt object. And we thought, that's interesting. Let's look more deeply into what's going on. And really it was actually on the first day of working together again on the outer solar system that we noticed that all of the orbits in the distant solar system, if you zoom out enough, they're all pointing in the same direction. They all lie in the same plane. They look like somebody has carefully corralled and arranged them. And that was really the first kind of staggering moment where over that June 20th or so week of 2014, we thought, wow, there's something remarkable going on in the outer solar system. And that's kind of how we started. And one of the things we said, you know, for 150 years, anytime anybody looks at the outer solar system and sees something slightly strange, the first thing they always say is, bet it's a planet. Bet it's a new planet. Bet there's a new planet there. And we said to ourselves, like we are not going to be those people. Those people are always wrong and always ridiculous. And we're not going to be. So we spent most of the first year trying to prove that it wasn't a planet. Indeed. I mean, that was really a, we dedicated a ton of work to working out every single hypothesis that wasn't a planet. And I mean, I remember this well. We used to make fun of the planet hypothesis every day. But, you know, after you spend. And you'd be like, oh, I tried this and I tried this. And I'm like, guess it's a planet. But I mean, isn't that, I mean, that's scientific inquiry, right? Disproving hypotheses. It's like, all right, let's tear it down. Let's disprove it. Let's get rid of all those other options. Standing up saying, you know, everybody for the past 150 years has been wrong. But we're actually right. But the thing is everyone on this freeway is driving the opposite way. Except for me, I'm going the right way. Yeah. But it actually, it may turns out it's true. Everyone for the last 150 years is wrong. Except I think we're right. What, what makes you different from what it was? There's Vulcan nemesis. There was planet 10 before we were demoted back to only having eight planets. It was an X planet X. Anyway, there are a lot of them. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, look, so each, each one of these models. I'm glad you brought this up because this is something that's a really good question. This is something that gets glanced over a lot. Each of these proposals, right? Every time somebody comes up with a planet, really what they're saying is that there's some anomaly in the data. And there's some physics through which the planet explains this anomaly, right? Traditionally, right over the last 150 years, what has been wrong is not really been the physics. It's been the, the anomaly, right? The data that that. Vulcan Vulcan is. Yeah, it's the only example where, where physics was. Vulcan, I'm going to, I'm going to interrupt just because it's because you brought up Vulcan. It's the greatest story, which is Laverier, who is the one who actually used physics to discover the existence of Neptune. Super famous for doing that and wanting to get even more famous. I mean, the man. We need more planets in Paris. I mean, how much more famous do you need to be than to have your stature in Paris? But he was looking at the orbit of Mercury and realized that like Uranus, which didn't quite follow the right path, Mercury didn't quite follow the right path. And he hypothesized that the reason was, is because there was a planet interior to Mercury, Vulcan, very hot. And it was a, it was a great analysis because because his, his, with the physics that he knew of that day, he was absolutely right. And when no one could find it, it was a big mystery. Mystery was resolved when Einstein showed that the reason that Mercury's orbit is a little bit wonky is because of general relativity that's, that's changed around some. So the observations were good. The physics actually just wasn't quite there, but, but Constance is right. In every other case, someone thinks they see something and the answer is, yeah, you didn't really see that, what you thought it was. Your data were just not quite as good as you wish it were. And, and you know, in our case, in the case of Planet Nine, we really did worry about this for, for a couple of years. And really it was only, I think, you know, this with the paper that you led back in January, that, that really kind of has the conclusive answer that there is a probability. There is a chance that all of this is wrong, right? There's a chance that all of this is a false alarm and it clocks in at about 0.2%. Yeah, it's two and a thousand. Which is still pretty significant. Uh, sure. If that, if you, if you want to make a bet, I'm happy to make a bet. If you're one of those gambling birds, yeah, sure. I mean, it's not Six Sigma or anything like that. No, I mean, it's, it's exactly what it sounds like. It's 1 in 500. So, yeah. So, from the, from the data, how did you start looking at it and start figuring out, okay, what is this? What was the anomaly? What that created this probability cloud of? So I'll tell you that the early stuff that went from when we were started looking at it four years ago, I remember I walked into Constine's office and I'm like, this is weird. Again, my, my former postdoc, Chad Trujillo had published this paper showing one, one particularly anomaly that didn't make any sense because you can't, there's no actual way to make it happen. So I brought it down to Constine. I was like, what do you think's going on here? I, it's, it, I believe it, but it doesn't make any sense. He's like, well, the, the, the thing that was measured was called the argument of perihelion of which we've had many arguments about perihelion since then. But this was the argument of perihelion. And he said, well, that makes no sense to cluster the argument of perihelion. Did you try adding that with the longitude of a sending note? I'm like, uh, I'm sorry. Why would I do that? And he's like, just do it. So I added those two together, plotted them, and they lined up beautifully. He's like, yeah, that's gone. Like, uh, okay. What does that mean? And what it meant was what he said earlier, which is that the, the objects, they all go around the sun. The sun's right here. They're going around the sun. They all have these very eccentric orbits going around the sun and all of them go off in the same direction. They should be, you know, like hands of a clock all going off in different directions. And they're not, they're all pointed in one way. And the only way that can happen is either dumb luck. And that's the point. 2% 1 in 500 or something is making them do that. And that was the insight that Constantine had, which is that, yeah, I know what can make something do that. Although we tried really hard to think it wasn't a planet turns out only a planet can really make things all line up in those orbits like that. And Kiki to answer your question. Wait, I answered your question. To actually to provide a good answer to your question. It was a long time. It took, I mean, the models that we built were imperfect to say the least at first. And we actually, for the first, as you remember, three or four months, we had developed a model where everything was off by 180 degrees as we later realized. So it was, it's one of these things where this wasn't a, this wasn't a eureka moment, right? This wasn't something that kind of all fell together and suddenly we went, oh my God, that's it. It was, it was like a series of eureka moments that all over a period of about a year built up to just something that that we both remember in kind of the fall of 2015. We kind of looked at each other and say, wow, this is, this is actually, this is actually there. This is actually a compelling theory. Neither one of us took it very seriously. I mean, it was serious science, but it was like, okay, it's easy to be shown a phenomenon and develop an explanation. Explaining is the easiest part of science. And the hardest part is predicting and getting it right. And so we had this explanation of why these orbits were like this. And we're both kind of like, yeah, but, yeah, but it's just like, no, neither one of us wanted to stand up from this explanation and say, oh, there's a planet, because that's, you know, most people who've said that for 150 years, they're wrong. When we finally made some things that we could predict and that we didn't know were going to happen, and then they happened and we're like, oh, there's really a planet. That's when we suddenly, like, I think both of our jaws dropped and realized, oh, holy crap, this is actually real. So why though a planet? Because the outer orbits sort of lining up on a plane sounds to me like they're just getting dragged along by the sun, and the sun is pulling a trajectory that sort of throws them all into this orbit. Why is it required to have a planet? Yeah, it's a great question. Yeah, it's a great question. The answer is, if there wasn't a planet, right, everything would be randomized because Neptune and Uranus and Jupiter and Saturn have the effect of randomizing orbits. You look at the Kuiper Belt, not in these very expansive orbits that we now understand are affected by Planet Nine, but you look at kind of the more compact, more proximate part of the Kuiper Belt. Just plot the orbits. It looks like there is no structure. It's very, very symmetric. And it's only when you go out to these very long period, really distant objects that you start to see all of them line up. What that's telling you is that you go far enough away from the gravitational influence of the canonical giant planets that you know of. And you start to see the effect of the planet that is effectively our solar system's dark matter, the planet that you don't yet see. And must it be a planet? Mathematically, no. But astrophysically, yes. There's no astrophysically plausible scenario other than a planet that can have the same gravitational effect. So let me actually answer Justin's question. Couldn't it just be that the sun is moving along and you're on a boat and you're hauling things behind it and they're trying to catch up? The answer is no. Gravity doesn't work that way. Once the sun is moving along, everything is moving along with the sun and the process that Constantine talked about would be perfectly happy having the orbits going in this way. If the sun's moving this way, we're going this way. It doesn't matter. The sun's motion, everything that we see in the solar system is relative to the sun is essentially fixed even if it's moving with respect to something else. So the sun's motion can't do anything. It really is something that has to be out there that's putting these things into its orbits. And then the question is, why don't we see it? Do we anticipate a retrograde type of orbit where all of our telescopes are tracking the wrong direction? Everybody pretty much acknowledges that this is a terrible time in our country's history. And it might be because Planet Nine is in retrograde. I'm going to start using that. Don't worry guys, just because Planet Nine is in retrograde. Why is it that it's going a different direction than the rest of the planet? Why is it so difficult to track your location on this? It's not because it's not anyhow more complicated per se. And it's mechanistically, it's not more complicated than finding a really dim Kuiper Belt object. The issue here is that there's only one Planet Nine and there's a big, big sky. And Planet Nine is so, so dim. It is unbelievably dim. It is hard to convey. I believe it. You believe it? I believe how dim it is. So I have a question. So while we were getting ready for the show, you guys were running tests or data sets, right? To try to see if you could find Planet Nine. So what does that mean? What does finding it mean? It means that we might discover it before this show is over. Let me start one right here. I don't think we have enough new data since we started. What that means is that we are looking for, we think we know enough about what Planet Nine's orbit is like that we know its path across the sky. And so what we need to find is any sort of data from any telescope in anywhere in the world that has covered the sky multiple times. We can see it. If Planet Nine would be here, and then maybe a month later, it would be here, and then it goes here, and then it goes here, and then it goes here. We need to find something that matches the orbit of Planet Nine. So right now, I'm actually looking at data that were taken over the past eight years from Haleakala on top of Monacoa, on top of that other one. Maui. No, it's actually on Maui. Maui on Haleakala. The telescope on top of Maui was just taking pictures of the sky. And I finally just got those data. And I'm just looking for dots of light that show up here, like one month here, next month here, next month here. The only problem is that there are about 10 million of them. And so I'm trying to find the one set that follows an orbit that makes sense. And so that's what it means when I'm sitting here right now, looking over here, continuing to run this data set to see if there's a new object that fits exactly where we're looking. And you're talking this thing, I then I assume, more often than say a teenager checks their Facebook, Instagram. Justin, Facebook and Snapchat. I don't know what the kids are doing now. But the kids in my day didn't have any of it. Yeah, that's true. And we don't check it as frequently because it takes days to weeks to run the full analysis. So I do check it once a day because once a day, it'll be a few new areas of the sky that it's looked through. And I'll look at them and then then I won't find anything and then I'll get really depressed and get the Jack Daniels that's sitting here on my shelf. From the chat room we have Kevin unique who is asking about the idea that this object is not a could not be a planet but maybe is a sum of masses that are all very closely oriented together. Yeah, that's a great question that that's actually been a model that we first considered that was the first idea that we had we abandoned it back in 2014. But it has come up both by Madigan and McCourt and more recently by a group out of Cambridge and Beirut. So that idea mathematically works out just fine. Why? Because Planet Nine's gravitational potential, the average pole of Planet Nine can be imagined over a very long period of time. As if it's a it's a ring of mass, right? So you can imagine smearing the the mass of Planet Nine along its orbit and having this ring of material perturb the distant Kuiper belt, you'd get the same answer. Is that plausible astrophysically, right? Is could such a ring actually exist? Almost certainly no. Wait, wait, you can have you didn't you need an eccentric ring and he's be tilted with respect to the planet. It needs to have an orbit exactly like Planet Nine. You can get an eccentric tilted ring. Do you know how you do it? Put a ring on it. With a planet. You have to have a planet. So you don't need Planet Nine, but you need a planet to make the ring that makes you not have Planet Nine. So it's it's like what like an asteroid with a ring big enough to make up for but then it by. So I mean the thing is like you would have to backtrack and say how long has this thing possibly existed in our solar system to not have formed a planet. And that's definitely that's definitely one angle. But there there's another more pressing problem, which is that such a ring, right, would basically get messed up by passing stars, right? Planet Nine can have its orbit changed a little bit, and that's okay. Right. In fact, Planet Nine's weird orbit is probably weird in part because passing stars changed it a little bit in the past. A ring would really need to maintain coherence. It would need to be pathological about sending all of those asteroids on trajectories that are copies of one another, right? That that is just that gets into into some solar system engineering, which I think is beyond the scope of what's possible. So where does this orbit? So the orbit of Planet Nine, we think is on the average distance is we have two different opinions. Right. Is the average distance is about it's about 10 times the distance of Neptune. So it's 300, a little bit more than 300 astronomical units where astronomical unit is the distance from the Earth to the sun. Neptune's out at 30 Pluto is out at 40. We think Planet Nine is on average, something like 310 astronomical units. So it's really more like forth. He's wrong. Do you include, do you include both of your ideas in the model that you've fed into the computer that's searching for? We multiply them together and take the square root. Yeah, divide by two thirds through. I'm doing the searching, so I mostly only include my models. I'm doing the actual theorizing, so I only, I only worry about. There we go. I'm sensing an issue here. Another interesting thing is that it's so the planet to make those eccentric orbits for the objects and the capable planet itself has to be on eccentric orbit. So it's only, it's about 40% further on on its most distance than it is on its on its closest. So it's probably at its furthest right now. So maybe it's 360. But it also has to be tilted by maybe 20 degrees compared to the planets in the solar system. So it has to be on a very specific orbit to cause the effects that we see. And if you wanted to have it be this ring of material, that ring has to be on exactly that same orbit. Otherwise it wouldn't work. So how you would make a ring like that that stays for four billion years is, I think it's alien. Why you would, why you would even bother? Are you giving it at that point? Because it might be aliens. So I have the really important question that is if you guys find the planet. Oh, I'm going to ask it anyway and everyone could just guess. If you find this planet, we don't need to name it. We only say one. Okay, you're going to say who gets to know when who gets to name it. I thought you were going to ask what we're going to know. No, no, no, no, no, no. So in the solar system, the rules for naming are all controlled by the International Astronomical Union, which sounds like a pretty nefarious organization. And they have rules for it's the deep state. It's astronomical deep state. They have rules for everything. So if you're a crater on Mercury, you have to be named after a poet. If you're a moon of Neptune, you have to be named after a Shakespearean character. I mean, they got names out the wazoo. The only thing that there's no rule for is what if it's a new planet because you're not supposed to find new planets. It's just a Wild West free for all when it comes to the planet. So we ended up with a potential Xena, right? That's my fault. That was me. That was actually me. Oh, nice. It's because I was a big Xena fan. And then when we found a moon of Xena. It was your sidekick. So such an obvious thing to name it, Gabrielle. I mean, it was perfect. So when we find it, there are no rules. But we assume that as long as we don't propose to name it something ridiculous. Which we totally will. Yeah, of course. There's already a planet, Uranus. How can you? Uranus. I would think you would call it. Yeah, my name is. So, I mean, we will, but we are as astronomers, I think as a bunch, tend to be very superstitious. And I actually always thought it's because of the way that our observations are so affected by the weather. You have all these, you know, rain dances. You do everything else. So one of my superstitions is if you, if you come up with a name for it before you find it, you will not find it. Right, right. Oh, my gosh. And what if somebody else finds it? Oh, what if that? I just will. You like narrow down bandwidths of where to look for it. And not only have we done that, but we have actually been very open about it. We have published our, where we think it is. In fact, today, our latest observations. And so it is entirely possible that based on the information we have made public, somebody else will go and find it. And I mean, it's not like. I won't go home and have a lot to drink that night. But in grand scheme of things. If somebody finds it before us, that means that they found it faster than we would have. And it, and it got to be known faster. I would rather sort of somebody find it. Magnanimous. It will be difficult. I'm not, I'm not going to lie and say that I don't care. I care a lot. I feel like, I feel like you should be able to pre name a plan. Like if the planet, if they're found, if a planet was found, he said, no, don't rename it. Don't rename it. What I'm saying is if a planet had gotten found in the interior of Mercury, it would have been Vulcan, right? Yeah. Did Laveria give it Vulcan? So here's, here's proof. That's right. Laveria gave it Vulcan before he finds it. No. You know what Laveria didn't name is Neptune. It's true. Because after it was discovered, Laveria said, you know, we should name this bad boy Laveria. And I mean, not in so many words, but insinuated. But look, I mean, at the end of the day, getting back to the question. So first of all, if somebody else finds it, we will drink enough to forget that they found it. Back to square one. They'll be looking for it. Right back to the telescope. And, you know, we, it's, it's so much better that somebody else finds it than us taking an additional 10 years to find it. Right. Go ahead. No, no. I was just going to say in terms of finding it and who finds it faster. I mean, it's been finding planets at one point. It was just telescopes, right? These very simple pieces of glass put together, the telescopes have gotten more complex. Now we have, we've got orbiting observatories that are giving us data in addition to these amazing ground based observatories and the speed of discovery can be so much faster. What do you think, what technologies are, are helping you do what you do now and could potentially help your competition find it? There's really just two important things that are related that have happened in the last couple of years that have, that are leading to the ability to find this thing quickly. And it's, it's, they're sort of simple to say that and simple things that everybody can understand. So the, the, the idea to find planet nine is all you need to do is cover a huge swath of sky and look for something moving very slowly. So how do you cover a huge swath of sky? Well, you get a telescope and at the back of your telescope is a digital camera. And when we first started, when I first started looking for these things in the outer solar system, our digital cameras, you know, this was like the early 2000s, our digital cameras were 400 by 600 pixels, like your handheld camera. And now the one that we're using has more than I can count. So I don't know, 400,000 by 400. So just means that every single time you take a picture with the telescope, you cover that much more sky. And without doing that, without that development and cameras in digital technology, you couldn't do it. And then one other thing that's not surprisingly related is the computer. So we no longer, when Clyde Tombell found Pluto, he found it by literally looking at the pictures and finding the one thing that was moving. We don't do that anymore. The computer looks through everything for us first pass. And now because the cameras are so big, the data sets are so huge. We now have clusters of supercomputers running through all this, getting it done. Without those two things, we could have done the math to show that there's a planet. That's actually not even true. I couldn't have done the math. It's good point. No, but like even the math, you know, we kind of start off by doing kind of board calculation. But to do the math, I mean, like the paper that we published today reports thousands of these large scale simulations that we couldn't have done 20 years ago. Right. So yeah, I think that's right. But I mean, oh, look, at the end of the day, all of this, all of this stuff that we're doing now is only made possible by the advances in computation, by the advances in digital kind of opportunity. And so absolutely we are driven and all of this progress is driven by technological progress. And yet still some layman with a digital camera attached to a telescope with enough pterodactyl bites of fixolation. Enough pterodactyls, you could do anything. You could potentially do a time exposure and see one little line that's going off in a different direction if they happen to be pointed in the right direction. You're absolutely right. You can't name a planet. Right. So, I mean, the probability is super small, but it's not zero. It might be like 0.2%. And those things never happen, right? We know that. At its brightest, planet nine could be bright enough to be seen by someone with a really huge backyard telescope. Not most amateurs would have one. Somebody with an eight meter background backyard telescope could legitimately find a telescope. It's not really a backyard telescope, but there are some of the super high-end amateurs have telescopes that I think are on the verge of being able to see it. But they only have these cameras with $400,000 by $400,000. That camera that we use, I think, is a $50 million camera. At least. So, it's Japanese. It's like... Convert to yen. Yeah, it's like five trillion yen. So, I mean, it's a super fancy camera. It actually has a lens on it. Not the telescope, not the mirror on the telescope, but it has a lens to collect the light, to go into the camera. The lens is taller than a human, this big around. And it's made by Canon. It's the largest lens. I think it's the largest lens in the world. And it was made by Canon, especially for this Japanese telescope. We take selfies with it all the time. And we actually... All the time. It's like, that's the poor right there on my lens. Yeah. There's the hair on my... Yeah. ...wart. So, you're talking about finding this dot of light out there. What does it look like? What do you think, based on the data? I mean, how big is it? What would it be like based on our understanding of the solar system? And if this is a solar system object, how should... Is it rocky? Is it more gaseous? What would it be? What a great question. And there is a simple... God, I wish I knew the answer. That's right, yeah. We have no idea. That's the answer. This is the most beautiful thing about... Is this like the same as an exoplanet? It's like, it could be anything. So, not only is it kind of like an exoplanet, the most common type of exoplanet that we have found to date is five Earth masses. It's this missing link of planet formation that we don't have in the solar system. Planet nine is six Earth masses. Whatever. Don't you... A range of masses for it to be, right? Six plus or minus one. Yeah, so we know the mass pretty well. The mass we know well, but the size, the composition, all of these things we don't know at all. It could be six Earth masses of hamburgers. We literally don't know. It could be... But the number of masses, be it gassy or rocky, the number of masses itself... That transitionary range and mass, where you go from rocky things like the Earth at one Earth mass, turns out Earth is one Earth mass. And the next one over is Neptune, right? Uranus and Neptune are the same. There's 17 Earth masses. And they have 10% of their mass in a hydrogen helium envelope, right? So they have a substantial atmosphere. Five falls right in the middle of that range. And we genuinely don't know. We assume that it has some atmosphere, mostly to make ourselves feel better, because then it's easier to find. It's brighter on the sky. But it could be just a barren, you know, ice ball that's covered in dirty slush. There's a part on it, like Pluto. Which might be more predictably, because if it has been affected by gravitation from other stars or something, it's, you know, you would think that atmosphere would be easier to strip off than in a rocky core would be something to be easier to maintain in a long-distance run. These are things we will find out when we find Planet Nine. Really, these are some of the most interesting questions that we have about Planet Nine, and we will get to study them if we are the first to find it. And if we do find it... When? When? When within, you know, like you said in other interviews within, also in the paper that you just released, within 10 years, you think it's going to happen, hopefully very soon. 10 years. Okay, with that? 10 years. When you find it. Doomsday prediction. Doomsday prediction at the most five years. Come on. When we find it, what is it going to tell us about our solar system? I mean, isn't it possible that this object was a lost planet and just a passer's eye that got stuck and was like, I like this neighborhood? Yeah, look, so... That's right, that's right. And there's actually been already a considerable amount of work done on the question of how do you form Planet Nine? How do you get it to its weird orbit? As cool of a scenario as capture is, turns out it's something like one chance out of 10 trillion... It's basically one out of... It's possible. Yeah, the most plausible scenario is that it formed together with the giant planets of the solar system and then immediately upon formation was scattered out and then was kind of perturbed by the passing stars and kind of parked on this weird orbit. For now, all of that is essentially speculation. Once we know things about Planet Nine, what does it look like? Does it have an atmosphere or is it just a rock? What kind of orbit does it live on? Precisely, all of these things will be... will not be answered immediately, but we can begin to kind of really quantitatively answer these questions. And with 76 trillion stars in the known universe and an average of eight to ten planets that we've conceived so thus far, probability, you're in a big pool of planets that were... or solar systems that did capture or didn't capture, too. So all of it is firmly on the table for this. So we really need to discover this. And not even knowing that it's... not even having found it yet, though, can't we model solar system dynamics to... I mean, we've discovered previously that there's been a lot of dynamic interplay between planets in our solar system. And then we have ideas that some planets have moved in and then back out again and that they've changed their locations... So we can definitely do these models and in these models, in these same models about how the planets have moved around, there's a very natural place for Planet Nine to have come from, as Constantine said, is that if it formed in that Uranus-Neptan region, it actually could have gotten thrown out of that Uranus-Neptan region during this whole process you're talking about. It makes a lot of sense. I actually... If I think where Planet Nine came from, that's the one that I think is probably true. But at the same time, as you said too, we don't know when we find it, when we study it. We hope to be able to find things about it that will tell us what its nature is, where it came from, and how it fits into the general story of the formation and evolution of our solar system and other planetary systems around us. And look, I work a lot on Planet Formation Theory, and Planet Formation Theory, I will be the first to tell you, has never made a successful prediction. Planet Formation Theory has only been in this mode of always catching up to the observations. Exoplanets get discovered. People say, oh my God, turns out things move around and we should have known that. And so we're always in this mode of kind of playing catch up. So I think the same thing will be true with Planet Nine. When Planet Nine will finally present itself to us, we will go, oh, of course, there's some trivial mechanism that we should have known, but missed. So that's where my bet is. If you were to tell an eight-year-old, as your daughter possibly, or like my son, an eight-year-old who's telling me about the dynamics of the solar system, if you were to tell an eight-year-old how to become a planet hunter like yourselves, what would you tell them? Actually, I have sort of an answer to that. You gotta, you know, the key is to work with the best people. I think it doesn't matter so much what you do. It's kind of who you do it with. And I have been exceptionally lucky in my life and career. I've had, you know, exceptional mentors. One of them was Mike. Mike was one of my doctoral mentors. And I've just had, you know, I've enjoyed this whole thing. It doesn't feel like, never felt like work because I've been surrounded by fantastic people. If I was surrounded by crappy people, I would never be successful in any of this. And I think that's true generically, right? It's a subject independent. I got into this completely by accident. I met my undergrad advisor at a party and we got to talking about chaos. And so that was that. I don't know, what about you? Well, I would say eight-year-olds have fewer options to surround themselves with the best people because they have to deal with the crappy parents. As my eight-year-old told me, everybody hates me. And so as an eight-year-old, I would say the other thing is be curious. Ask questions all the time and don't take either, oh, that's too complicated or you don't need to know the answer to that for an answer. Make people tell you the answer. Usually if someone says that's too complicated, it's because they don't know the answer. And that's fine. When you realize they don't know the answer, go try to find out the answer. And then when you realize no one knows the answer, then you realize this is something you got to go find the answer to yourself. That's great to know. Both of you are fantastic communicators. I've been watching Konstantin, Konstantin, you've been tweeting about your papers. You've been communicating your work. Mike, you've written a book. You've blogged. You're talking with us on a podcast right now. Is this something that... Did you do media training? Did you train up to learn how to do this? Or is this something that you just kind of... You are people who are good communicators. It's just always been something I've thought is super important. We have this ridiculous privilege to get to go explore the solar system. And a lot of it is something that is funded by the public. A lot of what we do is not. I mean, the telescopes we use are not. But a lot of the stuff in general science is something... It's a bargain, I feel like, we make with the public, which is that we will let a few people go do these ridiculous things, like go look for planets, and you tell us about it. And if you don't take your end of the bargain seriously, why do you even do it? Why would someone let you go off and find planets if you're not going to sit around and tell them about how cool it is? I mean, we could just wait and write the scientific paper and have somebody talk about the results. But I think people like to know what it's really like and like to hear about what's going on. So I think it's both an obligation and a privilege to get a chance to do these sorts of things. Yeah, and I would say to... I 100% agree with everything Mike said. Unless I say it's a 300 AU and you say it's a 5. Well, you say it's 3.10, which is sort of me. It's just a little detail. I mean, so the other... There's a selfish component to this, which I think is certainly there for me. When I go through the process of explaining it in non-jargon, non-equation, non-computer model terms, that forces me to conceptualize it in a way that's simpler. So I actually find that communication is a useful thing to do, actually to understand what you're talking about better. If you can't explain it, what that means isn't... It doesn't mean it's too complicated to explain. It means you don't understand it yourself. So I think it's just something that at this day and age, to some extent, more or less everybody should be doing. We should all be talking about this stuff, yeah. It's cool. It is cool. I mean, looking up at the sky, we all have that commonality, right? Being able to... We all have our feet planted on the ground, some of us less firmly than others. Yeah, but we all have this ability to look up and to look out and to discover. And like you said, Mike, be curious and ask these questions. And thank you both so much for sharing your story with us and for telling us about your science. And if people want to continue to follow this saga of Planet Nine as you dig into discovering its location, where it is, how can people follow you? Where can they find information? So I mostly these days, if I'm fine, if something new is going on, I'm tweeting about it, as you said, at Pluto Killer. Easy to remember. It's very easy. I also tweet about stuff. My handle is much more creative. It's at K-Betegan, K-B-A-T-Y-G-I-N. It's complicated. If you find me, you can see him because I follow him, so you can find it. But yeah, I kind of have been judgmental towards Twitter for a long time, but it's actually pretty cool. We sporadically update our Planet Nine blog at findplanet9.word.com, right? Dot biz. Yeah, I actually have three posts on there that I posted yesterday. More than all of last year combined. Sometimes I don't do very much. We don't do very much because we're really super busy looking for this dumb thing. So we don't always have time to post stuff and to do stuff. Yeah, we do our best. We do our best. And we appreciate it so much. And if listeners out there are interested in the paper that you've got out, Konstantin does a great job of boiling it down over several tweets, or you can read the actual paper that's like 90 pages long. It's pretty good. The first section is pretty good. Second section, I don't know. Push off. I wrote it down. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Second section. I wrote the first half. You wrote the second half. I wrote the second half. All fantastic. Thank you both. Once again, I really, yeah, just really appreciate getting. Congratulations on making it well past the 30 minute mark. Yeah. It always defines whether the interview was interesting or not. Just. All right, everyone. We are going to take a quick break. So stay tuned for more science from this week in science. Peace out. Coming up next. Put on a pair of goggles and go looking for the things I couldn't see. The answers lie somewhere within this scatterplot. First, the song should work correct. Let's prove the rest. It's hot. The methods are high, but the patience are the only things I need. Put on a pair of goggles and go looking for the things I couldn't see. Are you interested in seeing the twist team live in person? That's right. We can do that. You can do that. Join us. April 3rd in Portland, Oregon at the Alberta Rose Theatre for our live show. We will be broadcasting live at Science On Tap in Portland, Oregon. April 3rd show starts at seven doors at six. We have a special musical guest, the PDX Broadside, who will be joining us with musical whimsy, nerdtacular fun. We hope that you will join us there. If you're also interested in helping to support twists and keeping us going as a listener-supported show, well, there are several ways that you can do that. The first way is to go over to twist.org. That is our website where you can find all things twisty. And you can visit our Zazzle Store. 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Everyone out there, thank you for supporting us. Thank you for being a part of the show. We really could not do this without you. And we're back with more This Week in Science. Yes, we are. And now it's time for our favorite part of the show. This Week in What Has Science Done For Me? So good. The tonality there, fabulous. This week's letter comes to us from Seth in St. Pete. Seth writes in and says, Greetings, Twist Team from Warm Sunny Florida. I'm jealous of that because right now it's cold and snowy here. But I do like the snow. Anyhow, moving on. That says, I was fortunate to learn of twist after hearing Kirsten plug it on another science show recently. And I must admit that I'm really digging your work. Thanks. That being said, I was saddened to listen to a recent episode in which there was no listener participation for the segment. So here's my first contribution. It's not groundbreaking or revolutionary, but it did ignite a supernova within my heart and mind. I am a proud science geek and father of four young sons who runs a high complex laboratory. To break up the monotony of my work week, I often go for walks through a nearby country park that meanders through several different Florida ecosystems. Even though I am currently trapped in the lab, I am still a field biologist at heart. So when I come across something interesting, various herpetiles, insects, shorebirds, feathers, seed pods, et cetera, I will often snap a photo or bring home a specimen to share with my boys. Such was the case yesterday. And I happened upon a large, perfectly intact horseshoe crab molt, limulus polyphemus. Yeah, immediately I thought of my boys and wondered how they would react to my not uncommon, but still strange find. When I arrived home from work, I let them know that I had a science surprise to show them after dinner. The boys were super excited. I thought they may even get a little scared when they saw what appeared to be a bizarre alien creature from some sci-fi movie, but I was pleasantly surprised to see their eyes light up with interest as I pulled the shell from its box. They couldn't wait to run their hands over its smooth surface and gently touch the many spines. They thought it was an animal and were a little sad that it had died, but I took the moment as an opportunity to give a quick lesson on some differences between how invertebrates with exoskeletons and vertebrates with endoskeletons, such as them scouts themselves, grow. When I explained how this was just a shedding and that as the horseshoe crab grows it has to molt, I pointed out the open seam in the front of the carapace where the living animal had crawled its way out and then explained how its skin would then harden to form a new shell. What happened next blew me away. When the mini lesson was over, my four-year-old son Emmett looked up at me, his green eyes huge and full of wonder. Then with the biggest smile, he ran around the table, wrapped his arms around my legs and said, Thank you, Daddy. So what has science done for me lately? It rewarded me with a beautiful memory of sharing a love for science with my children, along with one very large, totally genuine and unsolicited hug from my very special little man. I'm looking forward to many new episodes of twists and catching up on all those archived goodies. Thank you. Awesome. I know. I'm going to tear up here. I love stuff like that. Oh, my God. That's my every day that I actually get to go out and teach. It doesn't happen every single time, but when somebody goes up to you for real in earnest and thanks you for teaching them something new. Oh, my God. That's great. I love that. Right. Yeah. Seth, thank you so much for sharing. We all appreciate this moment that you had with your son. It was a special moment for you and special for us too. Thank you for sharing. Everyone out there, if you haven't shared yet, come on, give us your special moment. Share, share, share. We love them. We want to hear from you, whatever it is, what science has done for you lately. Send me an email at Kirsten, K-I-R-S-T-E-N at thisweekinscience.com or you can leave us a message on Facebook. That's right, this week in Science on Facebook. Leave us a message. Let's get to some more science. Oh, my goodness. Planet nine is out of control. I love it. But in the meantime, we don't have another planet to go to. There are, you know, so far seven other planets in our solar system, but this is it. This is home, right? It is. So we need to figure out how it's all working and what's changing. So I'm going to start my news with some good and some bad news. Right? Okay. Yes. New study out. New study out February 25th in Nature Geoscience Researchers from Caltech and from NASA have the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And I believe also the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have worked together on a study looking at what are known as marine stratus clouds, stratocumulus clouds to be specific. And these clouds, if you look at the reports that came out this week, the news that has come up is that these clouds, if global warming climate change continues as it is, at a certain point, temperature or carbon dioxide levels will increase enough, temperature will increase enough that these clouds will disappear. And when they do disappear at that point in time, we'll already have increased in global temperature by about four degrees Celsius. Or I'm sorry, four degrees Kelvin. But the disappearance of the clouds will increase the surface temperatures of the earth up to eight Kelvin. Now, wait a second. Which is hot. So here, no, go ahead. Hold on just a darn second. I know this is the bad news, but I'm going to come back with the good news. So go ahead. Isn't all the evaporation of the ice caps and the ocean waters and the fresh waters going to lead to more cloud cover? Yes and no. So it's different kinds of clouds. And what the researchers did is they created a very small scale model of a representative atmospheric section above a subtropical ocean. And they simulated the clouds. Clouds are one of the hard things in climate models. We have not been really good at simulating what's going on with the various layers within the clouds, mixing within those layers and how the dynamics of it all works, especially over the open ocean where you've got this evaporation from the water as you heat. Yes, more water vapor, more clouds, et cetera. And clouds have a twofold effect. One is that they're clouds and by being white and fluffy they're reflective and some of them reflect light from and solar energy from the sun, which will help keep us cool. But they are also big and fluffy and absorb energy. And like Blair has said many times, there's like this greenhouse gas blanket that allows us to warm up. So we know from historical climate, around 50 million years ago during the Eocene, carbon dioxide. Well, we know that carbon dioxide levels were pretty high, but we don't think they were as high as they would need to be, which would be over like 4,000 parts per million. That's really high to allow enough temperature increase to do what happened, which is the Arctic was completely free of ice and nice and warm and temperate and had crocodiles in it, right? And so there's been a mismatch in our understanding of what was going on. And this modeling that they just did of these stratocumulus clouds, by discovering there's a particular point, 1,200 parts per million of carbon dioxide where these stratocumulus clouds disappear. And so without further carbon dioxide increase, you have a higher temperature. There is a forcing that happens as a result. And so this is new information that can be put into our models so that we can make things more accurate. And there's a group of people called the Climate Modeling Alliance who are trying to build a new climate model that is even more accurate than what we have now by taking factors like this into account from real-world Earth observations and simulations and to actually represent these clouds and other small-scale features that are not well represented in current models. Gosh, 1,200 parts per million. That's a lot of business as usual. It's a lot of business as usual, but it's estimated that we will get there within the next century. Yeah, absolutely. But I think that this is a great example of, hey, this is a really bad situation that we could get to. But it's avoidable still. Like there's still distance between that and where we are now. It's not an inevitability. There is an opportunity for us to steer away from that cliff. And yes, there is a possibility for us to steer away from it. Look, don't go that way. Let's not take that path. There's also, hey, this is a good example of how we can improve our models and the kind of work that still needs to be done to get us to an even more accurate place in what we're looking at. And yeah, I don't know. Hopefully we'll get there through new technologies like researchers just reported in a paper in which they have successfully, this is in nature communications, researchers from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia have taken carbon dioxide from the air and turned it into solid carbon. They are really, they're like, hey, we came up with a new method looking at these other methods that have been done through the years. But we think we came up with a method that can work to basically take carbon dioxide out of the air and put it back down in the ground as coal. How do we keep people from then using that coal again? Because that's what I'd be worried about. It's like, hey, free coal. Yeah, I mean, that's a big question. And, you know, there's no way at this point to stop that, but we still have coal processing around the globe. And if we can improve the technologies that are able to capture the carbon dioxide released from coal technologies and recycle that carbon, that's fabulous. If we're able to do it in an efficient way and this particular method uses a liquid metal catalyst based on gallium, gallium selenide, that works at room temperature, which is different from previous catalysts, which have to be, have to use very high temperatures. And so there's less energy input. And so when I say efficient, this is something that's at room temperature. There's no extra energy that has to be put into it. The second is that the way that this liquid metal catalyst works, a lot of other catalysts, they end up getting, they're solid and they end up getting build up. So you turn carbon dioxide, the gas into carbon again, but it builds up on the catalysts themselves, reducing the efficiency of the catalysts over time. And so you have to replace them or fix them and they get gummed up over time. And so this new method, it just produces the flakes of carbon and they, they flake out and they can be pressed and turn into a lump of coal for your child. That's very good for the short term. In the long term, those higher temperatures that you're talking about will be room temperatures. I guess it depends on when it gets deployed. I think it would be pretty cool if instead of turning it into coal, you made diamonds. I think carbon dioxide. Yes, I took this diamond from the air to give it to you. This used to be harmful carbon dioxide, but now the precious jewel. Yeah. And I mean, one of the things they still have to dig into, I mean, of course, this is early stages. They're like, oh, we can do it in a laboratory. That's great. You created this little tiny little piece of carbon, but one of the big things they're up against are the gigatons of carbon dioxide that are being released by industrial processes every year. We are releasing massive amounts. And so will this technology be yet another just drop in the bucket? It's not going to fix the problem, but it may be part of the solution. We'll see. Justin. Yeah. Justin, what you got? I have no idea. Let me go and see. Oh, yeah. This is a UC Berkeley synthetic biologists have been playing around with the East. And they did a little bit of engineering and they got East to produce THC and CBD, which is normally only found in cannabis. Feeding only on sugar. These East are, they say, an easy and cheap way to produce cannabinoids. Quoty voice for the consumer. The benefits are high quality, low cost CBD and THC. You're to get exactly what you want, says Jay Keasling. You see Berkeley professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, faculty science at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It is a safer, more environmentally friendly way to produce cannabinoids. So we talked about this, I think a little bit in the past about all the benefits of mostly talked about CBD. And also the Farm Bill, which is going to allow huge swaths of land that were formerly being utilized for tobacco growth to grow industrial hemp. Part of that, though, is that it's not a clean extraction in that it requires all the things that are required for agriculture, all the petrol fuel to run tractors and the fertilizers and the runoffs from that and all that other stuff. So to be able to do this, basically in a manufacturing process, also the CBD at least would be federally legal. It would work its way through all of the laws. Basically the laws aren't really that complicated. DEA laws regarding CBD only relate to the extraction from the cannabis plant. And you see nothing about the compound itself. So this would be completely legal for CBD. THC, however, they specifically outline in the DEA's laws, meaning it would be legal only in 11 states if you include the District of Columbia, which I am doing here. So medical research on more than 100 other chemical compounds in cannabis has also been very difficult partly because of the legal situation, but also because the chemicals appear in very tiny quantities. There's not a lot of it there in any extraction. So to be able to sort of engineer the compounds that are going to be produced is going to allow these 100 other compounds to be studied much more efficiently than they ever would have been able to otherwise. This is Quoty Voice again of Jay Keesling. The possibility of new therapies based on novel cannabinoids, the rare ones that are nearly impossible to get from the plant or the unnatural ones, which are impossible to get from the plant are now on the table. There's also, this is not in, the state also had previewed something that was talking about another cannabinoid receptor that was discovered in the human brain and making it at least free that we now know of. So Keesling's report results are available online in the journal Nature. There's on cannabinoids, join many of the chemicals and drugs that are now being produced in East, including hormone insulin, blood clotting factors and recently but not yet on the market morphine and other opiates, which is also interesting because of the opiate crisis. CBD has been shown to be one of the things that's very effective in getting people off of opiates and morphine. So they kind of ran into a little bit of a problem though partway through this process. So doing this, they basically trick the yeast, engineer the yeast to produce something other than alcohol from sugar and convert that sugar into chemicals that are then modified by adding enzymes to produce the products that they want, CBD, that the yeast then secretes into a solution and can be extracted. Researchers ended up inserting more than a dozen genes which actually, it's not a lot, many of them copies of genes that were already used by the plant. However, the enzyme that performs a key chemical step in making CBGA, which is the precursor to both THC and CBD, they used that from the plant in the yeast and it didn't work. We give up. You couldn't just put it right in there and get it to go. This is the thing, this is the gene that creates the enzyme that does the conversion and it didn't work. So they all then just looked for another enzyme that the plant produced that kind of did the same thing and stuck it in the yeast. Cody voice of Kiesling. It worked like gangbusters. Once they had yeast producing the CBGA, they added another enzyme that converted that CBGA to THC and then get another enzyme if they wanted to create the pathway to CBDA through the products the yeast produced were predominantly THC and CBD. They could also separate other tiny molecules from that and they had yet another enzyme that they utilized that could create CBDV and THCV, which are variants of the classic THC and CBD, which the effects of which aren't really that well known to science can be studied. And they could also put them in a state, the molecules that were being expressed by these yeast so that they could be then further altered in a lab to produce the more unique gambinoids that are produced by the planet so that those can then be made in greater volume and can actually be studied, something that hasn't been previously possible. So Kiesling started a company, Demetrix, which I don't know why he named it that. Pancid reasons. Yeah, but he's leasing the technology that he created from the University of California system. Yeah, that's the way it works. That's how you are. If you're a researcher and you develop something in the university system, it belongs to the university. So he's leasing the thing that he invented from the university to start a private company that will be making probably boatloads of money. Because then they will sell it then, probably to pharmaceutical companies or others for actual use in products after FDA approval. Yeah, and so there are a lot of research potentials. Actually, this is CBD, cannabinoids have the greatest potential for being utilized as concussion protocol, which means that when they go off to the sideline after a big head-to-head contact in a sports ball game, when they go into that tent to get looked over, they may be getting a CBD infusion to help protect the brain because it's been shown to have restorative facts, regenerative facts and protect against inflammation and things like that. We've already talked about, of course, a lot of the other things that it does over the years, but one of the interesting things here is there's also a big problem for doctors prescribing, even though it's FDA, there are medications based on CBD that have been FDA approved. The main methods of extraction from a plant come messy. They come in different dosages, they come with different compounds to be able to lab develop something. That is the pure molecule of which it is that you are interested in using as a pharmaceutical or in your study. It's game-changing in this and that. The consistency is going to be huge. It'll make a huge difference. Yeah, well, that's exciting. Go yeast! They help us make all sorts of things. There's little tiny creatures. Oh, speaking of creatures. I think I hear an animal call. They're texting during the show. Stop texting during the show, Blaire. We can all see it. It's your turn. It's time for Blaire's Animal Corner. With Blaire! Do you want to hear about an animal? She's your mom. Except for a giant panda. Let's go. It's an uproar. What you got, Blaire? What do I have? I have an update on a story that I reported in, I think, in 2012 in my very first year on this show about zebra stripes. So we've talked a bunch on the show about why zebras have stripes, potential hypotheses. Then they were disproved. Then they were reproved again. And now we have a pretty good test of one of those hypotheses. Probably the hypothesis that people enjoy the least because it's the least charismatic. But it sounds like the most likely now. And it is that it's all about deterring flies. Yes. I missed that one completely. Well, it was seven years ago. So you probably just forgot. This is an ongoing story. Yes. So back in 2012, and I reported on it, they just took painter trays and they painted them different patterns and different hues. And they found that flies didn't land on the black and white nearly as much. Black and white stripes as others. So in this update from University of Bristol and UC Davis, they wanted to see experimentally how this worked. So they looked at actual video analysis, looking at approach speed and success in landing of horse flies on zebras and horses. So they found that stripes don't deter them from a distance. Both zebras and domestic horses experience the same rate of circling from flies. But it's all about approach speed and the ability to land. Horse fleet. Yeah, go ahead. So the other hypothesis has been the one that jumps to my mind at least, is that this is camouflage of the herd from lions. This is what protects them from... So what you're saying is zebra stripes evolutionarily resource put in more important to deter flies than lions. So... How annoying does a fly have to be? This is sticky. This is a really sticky scenario because these stripes are a type of disruptive coloration. And there's a lot of animals with stripes or spots or splotches. And it does have this inherent effect to break up the shape of a body. And it makes it harder for predators to identify. So I think that... Like you look at a tiger and it's stripes. Is that camouflage or do tigers also not like flies? Now I have all these questions. Yeah. So there's kind of two different ways to attack it. So one is saying, okay, so they have stripes. This might help them with camouflage. But why is it black and white? Why are they so striped? There are other animals that only have stripes in certain places. Why are these animals covered in stripes? And why is it such a drastic black and white? There's nothing on the African savannah that's black and white. So why is it in this nature of disruptive coloration? So in this study, they found that the flies would just go right over the zebra stripes or they'd bump right into the zebra. But this didn't happen with horses and there were far fewer successful landings on those zebras in general. So their hypothesis is that the nature of the stripes reduces the ability to land on the zebra's coat because of disrupting visual systems because the flies don't have a very good... They have very low resolution vision. So the idea is that as they fly in, it's harder for them to see kind of the depth perception side of things to see exactly how far away they are until it's too late. And so they'll bump into them or they'll overshoot and they'll fly over. The part that I love about this is they went, okay, but there's one thing that we're not testing here. And that is maybe horses just smell more delicious. So the second experiment was to observe horsefly behavior around horses that they had previously studied but wearing zebra coats. So they put them in black coats, they put them in white coats and they put them in zebra stripe coats. They call them livery if you're in the equestrian trade. So this excluded a difference in behavior or smell between horses and zebras. They did find a difference in behavior of how they acted around flies between horses and zebras, more on that in a second. But in this study where they just use horses, they found that when they wore the striped patterns, there was far fewer horsefly landings compared to when they wore single color coats. So first of all, this is interesting because there's a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of money out there in taking care of horses. And if having race horses wear zebra stripe coats which might be a thing now will reduce the amount of horsefly bites and aggravation to the horses, this is something that we might start to see popping up. But where this gets evolutionarily interesting is that they looked, again, I'm going to loop back around to this difference in behavior. Zebras had more preventative behaviors such as running away and tail-swishing rather than horses. But horseflies that did successfully land on zebras spent less time there, probably because of that behavior. We know that in Africa, horseflies carry dangerous diseases that can actually kill them. But here in the Americas, that's a lot less the case. So if you look evolutionarily, it's not surprising that wild horses in the Americas don't have stripes and zebras do because zebras had to do pretty much everything they could to avoid getting bit by horseflies and dying of disease. And I like the fact that they did that livery study because otherwise I would have been like, maybe the flies just have different practice. Yeah, absolutely. So this took it even though it's just also really cool to see pictures of horses and zebra coats and that that might actually start happening now. I love that. But it's a really good example of going, okay, what are the different things that we could do to eliminate any confounding variables to make sure that this is why. It's not a coincidence. It's not that horseflies landed less on zebras and zebras are also striped. This is a correlation. No, they're trying to identify this causation. So this is, we're getting closer. So in this already in my awareness, five years of research just based on why did the zebra get its stripes? This is hundreds or perhaps thousands of year old question. This is, we're getting really close. I think it's very interesting, but I also think that zoos the world over are going to have to change their handbooks for sure. Very possibly. Something though that Schnago in the chat room is bringing up is the sample size. So that is one aspect that needs to be considered. But additionally, they did many hours of observations. And so while there were few individual horses and zebras that were studied, the observations that they took were more numerous. But yes, yet again, I mean, why not try? We have to get zebra coats on people, on dogs, on horses and just try it on many different animals and see if this kind of effect still stands. So I think also if you just wanted to look at a higher sample size of horses, if you wanted to give horse owners and horse caretakers zebra coats and you said this might reduce their fly predator, the fly predatory behavior I'm sure a lot of horse caretakers would absolutely take those in for free. That's going to be like the house houses are going to all look like zebras soon. Your front porch that you like to hang out with. So that is something that has not been extrapolated out yet. But I am because I'm doing it right now. Experimentally we have not looked at that. But I think if you live in a place with a lot of flies this might be something you should try at home. I don't know. This is a weird question wouldn't you expect way more black and white animals if this were the case across species? No. Not everybody figures out every evolutionary advantage. The earth is really old. There's certain things that like flight works really well. It's popped up a lot of times. Why can't we fly? Why don't we have gecko like clingy hands? I'm not saying it should happen everywhere. I'm saying it should happen more. How many black and white striped animals are there? There's not many. Justin if you would like to increase the scientific understanding of this I suggest you paint your school bus. Oh that's a really good idea. I love that. But you have to collect some data before you paint it. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe they have better resolution. They go after your CO2. That's part of it. It's not so much vision with mosquitoes. If that's the case it wouldn't work on mosquitoes because they're not gauging that. I don't know. I don't know that. But do you know what I do know? I would like to know. Birds are smart. Wait. What? This is why you think he's saying brains are amazing. Here's another story about an African gray parrot doing something smart. The reason I brought this today and it wasn't just another idea. We get it. We get it. This is a new cognitive task that I haven't seen specifically in a scientific paper that I think is really the methodology is really interesting which is why it caught my eye this week. This was looking at first the classic 2 cup test. The classic 2 cup test is actually what I shared a GIF of this week on my social media. It was a dog where there were 2 cups and a treat was in one cup and the other cup was empty and he had to pick a cup. There's a hidden reward in one of 2 cups. They're shown 1 cup is empty. Those that successfully choose the other cup are thought to employ a process known as inference by exclusion. If it's not in this one that means it's in that one. Is it in cup A or B? If it's not in A it must be in B. Children are good at this including infants as young as 17 months and a lot of animals from a wide number of species including parrots and dogs understand this process. This makes sense because in the wild if you saw animals foraging in a certain area and you went to one field and there was nothing there it's probably in that other field because there's food somewhere. I saw them around here. Evolutionarily beneficial skill to have. But where this gets interesting is stepping it up to the 3 and 4 cup tasks to see really how well they understand this inference of exclusion. So for the 3 cup test one reward is hidden in a single cup and another is placed in one of 2 additional cups to one side. So there's a divider in between one cup and then 2 and 3 are on the other side of the divider. When faced with the choice participants should pick the single cup as it is the only cup guaranteed to have a reward. So they're taught this that the single cup always has a reward the other two you have a 50-50 chance. This doesn't test inference by exclusion but it does test understanding of possibility of stakes. So it's what they consider a precursor to exclusion. What do I have the best chance of getting something good with? So tests previously have shown that until about 2 and a half years old human children fail at this task but so do apes. A singular African grey named Griffin used in this experiment sample size right one parent outperformed 5 year old humans in this task. Then they stepped it up even further to the four cup test. Rewards are placed in one cup of each pair. So you have two pairs separated by a partition one on each side has a treat. Then one cup in a pair is shown to be empty. So I'm going to flip let's say cup number two. Successful switch your first choice the Monte Hall thing. Yes very similar although with the Monte Hall it's a little bit more complicated it takes a little bit more explaining but this one is pretty simple it's just if you showed an empty cup on this side then they only have a 50-50 chance on cups three and four but you know to pick one because it is guaranteed to have something in it. Two and a half year old human children it says children in this study every single time and I'm replacing it with human children fail at this task as well they don't understand again inference by exclusion. So the last wrinkle to this is that they wanted to make sure that he hadn't simply learned to choose whichever cup was next to the empty one so they wanted to twist this test to force him to gamble so for a small percentage of trials they would put nothing on one side and show him an empty cup so if he wanted a reward and understood the system he couldn't go to the cup next to the empty one he'd have to gamble on the 50-50 side so they show they only put one treat in there he didn't he this is the researcher says quote and he hated it but he did it on all the trials in the subset the trio even developed a test in which he had the choice between the guaranteed small reward of a nut or in a small percentage of trials gambling gave him a bigger reward his favorite treat a Skittle so then they wanted to make sure he wasn't avoiding the empty side completely again he didn't so that he didn't always pick the cup that was next to the empty one if he wanted the special Skittle he'd had to gamble he had to go to the 50-50 side and he did this a good percentage it wasn't a hundred percent but a very good percentage what's really interesting is that if he lost the gamble he wouldn't gamble the next time he got burned he's like I'm not gonna do that again he's better than most people that way which is sort of interesting I wonder though if the young children human children as you described them aren't doing a mimicking behavior we have a two cup scenario and you knock one over so now it's your turn what do you do well that's only a one cup scenario over here I'm not mimicking here's a two cup scenario I'll knock one over because I'm mimicking what was done in the first example so I sort of wonder especially with the young children who aren't as goal oriented about the treat if their focus is about mimicking the thing that they saw happen and less about the ultimate result unfortunately I don't know the specific mechanics of how it was done so I can't tell you specifically if because that's a thing the huge thing especially in early early child learning is mimicking and mirroring things unless I mean young children hopefully in the experiment are well taken care of to the point where their immediate needs are always being met to where that's not a really high priority but the mimicking of a thing that they've seen mirroring of it is a higher priority socially when they are growing up when they're developing it's in a social mimic setting and so Irene Pepperberg the researcher her laboratory raises these African gray birds in a way that is very similar to how they would be reared in the wild with when they're trying to teach them words and mental constructs that we use as humans they do it in a model and response method where the researcher, the trainer will say a word, show a thing say the word, show the thing and then try and get a response out of the bird and there's mimicking that is going on definitely and it's play and it's mimicking and this is how the birds naturally learn their own bird language and their own bird behaviors in the wild it's being adapted to this laboratory situation and so what the interesting thing here is that this is taking that mimicking behavior but then taking it further to show the novel implementation of the behavior in a new setting so it's a new problem take what you've been modeling and apply it and that's with kids as well everything's mimic mimic mimic until there's some problem that needs to be solved and they have to apply their knowledge right I think what I find interesting about this in particular is I see a use of what I would consider logic by this bird trying to figure out what his best chance for a reward is that logic extends through values of rewards and in this it's all very anecdotal I agree but in this idea that when he gambled and lost he was hesitant to gamble the next time shows a really complex thought process going on in this bird's head because also it wasn't he never gambled again it was just the next trial didn't gamble and then if 10 trials later he was forced to gamble again he might do it again it was not an on off switch there was clearly something going on in his brain where he was weighing options parents are not degenerates I think what I think is interesting here also is also the kind of like we're trying to put a human intelligence age on an animal and these birds do stay with their family units for a long time in the wild up to like 2-3 years sometimes I mean they have a long youth at the same time they grow up into adulthood a lot faster than human children everything grows faster than human children so the comparison of like a 5-year-old kid and a 2-2.5-year-old bird and going oh this is amazing it's like well the birds do have a different brain structure but they have very there are pathways that are very similar and if the brain has developed to a more complex computational state it's going to be able to potentially do this I wouldn't even say more complex computational I would just what are the immediate survival skills that are required what are the development benchmarks that your brain is wired for at those points and depending on your species a deer must stand up and walk and run day one run from a predator humans don't really need to run to like this fourth grade PE class yeah so I think I think from my experience working at zoos and aquariums and stuff like that people get really focused on this this comparison of this bird or this animal is as smart as a blank-year-old human because it's just something that they can they can grasp that they can kind of apply and try to understand how smart an animal is which is part of this long-standing narrative in Blair's Animal Corner that animals are smart and we need to give up on this idea that intelligence is a uniquely human thing but I think it's part of that gap bridging for the average human who doesn't hear this kind of stuff to start to understand to start to accept this information that there are birds out there that probably can solve a puzzle faster than I could but as I always point out there are no average humans of average intelligence who listen to this show they are all above average intelligence humans but yeah so these kinds of numbers might be helpful to I don't know friends or family of twist listeners who are trying to communicate this to them later but I think it's a good benchmark for somebody that is still starting out on the pathway to understanding that animals have complex intelligence and we just don't know how to test it which I think is really what it's about right yeah and what it's about we have 10 minutes left in this show so let's wrap it up Blair you have one more story oh I do just real quick some of you may have heard about this on the internets this week so I will just say it briefly you can find more information on our website with show notes and things but a giant bee was found that was thought extinct this was a bee in Indonesia they have christened it the flying bulldog it is the largest bee on the planet it has not been found for 40 years and they found it how do you lose the biggest bee well Indonesia's it's hard there's lots of animals hiding there the body length is 39 millimeters that's about 4 centimeters so that's about more than an inch it's bigger than an inch long so they say it's the size of your thumb the wingspan is 63 millimeters so that's 2 inches wide that is a huge bee so this is just a reminder that hiding in rainforests and far off places or should I say far off to us westerners there's lots of animals and plants hiding waiting for us to find them and this is a great example of an animal that we need to preserve why we need to preserve these far off places these rainforests before it's too late for us to find things again the flying bulldog lives I need that t-shirt alright I have a couple of quick stories have you ever wondered why some lemon fruits are sweeter than others some are sour, some are sweet what's going on there yeah well no there's a lot to do with sugar it's not you'd surprise surprise and it is related to the reason that petunias turn red petunias turn red yeah so petunias if they have more protons and the more acid if you put petunias in more acidic soil they turn red otherwise they're blue and it turns out that this acidity has a very similar root in citrus plants researchers at UC Santa I'm sorry wrong place not included in the work at the university of no these are researchers who went to the university of California yes but only for a day they were just stopping by and then they left and went back to the university that they're from whether you're a researcher's base then no so this university of Amsterdam geneticists there we go from the university of Amsterdam they got plants from UC riverside they got genetic samples of sweet and sour lemons, oranges, pomelos, limes, etc and looked at the DNA and gene activity and they looked at a very terrific proton pump that is involved in the cells cell walls of red petunias previously thought only to exist in the outer cell membrane but they also looked at it in the citrus plants and the genes coding for this proton pump are pretty much the same in the petunias and in the citrus and if the gene is turned off there's less proton pump which means less protons going into little storage vacuoles in the cells means less acid means a sweeter flavor for a bluer flower similar in the petunias similarly in some of these citrus fruits they can have if they have more of the gene and they're more sour than the flowers can tend to be more purpley because they're incorporating a little bit more this red pigment that has to do with the acid as well so red flowers, citrus fruit proton pump and the same gene just a quick announcement nobody take the purple petunias there's been some reports of bad purple petunias going around that's why everybody be safe have a good time be a blue petunia and additionally if you're keeping track of the private space mission the Israeli mission to the moon they're sending a lander to the moon SpaceX helped to launch it great launch it's on its way it's kind of complicated doing a bunch of orbits around the earth and then it's going to get into the right orbit to be able to get caught in the moon's gravitational field do a bunch of orbits around the moon and then land well it's kind of complicated orbital maneuvers and it just restarted and they don't know why and they don't know what happened but they're trying to make sure they can still get to the moon man that's why you don't hot dog in space on one of those unexpected updates when you're like okay I got a lot to do today and your computer tells you no you're going to shut down you're going to reboot and then I'm going to spend a lot of time screwing things that you had to reset all the settings get back on track we're still on track to find the moon what's happening we'll see we will see we want this it would be cool to have the first private mission to the moon make it there love to see it Justin you have a last story I have representatives from almost half of all the known groups of microorganisms living on earth including dozens and dozens of previously uncultivated archaea and bacterial lineages have been discovered living in a single sapphire blue hot spring 8600 feet above sea level 10 miles into the back country on the edge of a caldera in Yellowstone National Park it's a kind of a unique environment it's a pool where volcanic gases rise through the spring to mix with snow melt and rainwater this phenomenon is allowing for exceptionally high levels of diversity says Dan Coleman assistant research professor department of microbiology at Montana State University Coleman found more microbial biodiversity in a thumbnail sized sample than is present if one were to combine all of the animal and plant biodiversity in Yellowstone Park some of the bacteria some were bacteria other were archaea two of the three main domains of life and fewer than half of them had been detected before in hydrothermal systems so some it says here may even be modern relatives of ancient microbes potentially offering lessons about life on early earth and the potential for life on other planets though to be fair we are all modern relatives of ancient microbes well Coity voice I'm a very major of a major major general of animal mineral I can't remember this song Coity voice we think that this work has some pretty broad implications that stretch across several disciplines says Coleman whose lead author of this paper and the spring is known as smoke jumper three which he refers to as SJ3 co-authors associate professor Eric Boyd doctoral student Melody Lindsay a Coity voice of Boyd I believe this time a lot of people are interested in discovering diversity that's the end goal that's admirable says Boyd admirably what Dan wanted to know is why why do we have so much diversity and why are some springs more diverse than others 14,000 springs in Yellowstone most of them contain like two colonizations for this one to encompass half of all known microbial life on planet earth amazing what happened insane so Coleman attributes that diversity to the unique geochemistry of smoke jumper geyser basin so as opposed to a lot of other factors that people might have previously thought to look in a place one of the things that gave them the clue when they first sampled just doing pH samples of springs this one was unique from the rest and that told them hey there's something sort of interesting going on here he said smoke jumper three pool is about the most perfect place to begin to understand geological processes that themselves to life so we show Cody voice we show that it is due to geographic location and not to mention that it is the top one of the world's largest active volcanoes is located at high elevation on the continent of the divide features that prevent deep hydrothermal water aquifers reaching this area Coleman said SJ3 and other similar springs are fed by high volumes of volcanic gases that are generated by boiling of hydrothermal waters and as those rise towards the surface these gases mix with near surface waters and so they're getting a what's very interesting and does have the implications of early life on earth and life on other planets is these are I'll say the volcanic gas that ends up is very different from gases that are present in our atmosphere in that lack oxygen so while we always are looking for those oxygen rich planets to discover life on exoplanets the really amazing thing about the gases that are infusing this pool is that they lack oxygen this is an oxygen free environment for the most part these are as a hugely biodiverse that's great yeah so and we know that our planets started pre-oxygenation with life and so to see an example currently on the planet with huge biodiversity and no oxygen and it's not deep under the water it's not a black smoker under the water it's a pool it says this is some more cody voice from void just looking at the hot springs doesn't necessarily tell you how biodiverse it is but as soon as we measured the pH of the spring and in our other measurements we knew that we were sampling a unique spring moreover many of the lineages that we detected have recently garnered significant attention because their potential didn't form on the evolution of methanogenesis the biological creation of methane in addition previously unknown types of methanogens and deep branching microbial lineages associated with subsurface environments underground environments and many other enigmatic lineages it is likely that additional studies of such systems of the intriguing organisms will yield additional important insights into microbial ecology and will shed new light into their role in the evolution of biogeochemical processes so this is you know the old school view was life started in a primordial pool of geese this is maybe a living example of a primordial pool of the best example of a medium and a scenario for which life to exist and to flourish and to be diverse so yeah tremendous find and it's in the national park great reason for us to keep those national parks maintained and imagine if that was a parking lot so very easily but we don't have to imagine that right now we've had a wonderful couple of hours of science and we have come to the end of our show so I want to say thank you to you for listening for being a part of all of this thank you to fada for helping with show notes and social media and thank you to dn84 for helping to record the show thank you to gord mclowd then rothig for helping out in the chat room keeping everything hunky dory over there and I would also like to say thank you to our patreon sponsors thank you to paul disney richard onemus ed dire stewpolic philip shane ken haze harrison prather charlene henry joshua fury steve develop alex 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This Week in Science! and we have come to the after show after show after show after show after show show show we're gonna show hey kiki guess who bought that uh raglan shirt you were talking about is that you yes me i wanted something to wear in portland oh that'll be good i was like i know what to do that's a great idea yeah it's a great idea i should do something like that too i want a cute twist shirt to wear that's why i did it yeah you can put it on all sorts of fun stuff that's what's so cool about it and i was like this will look great with a with a friggin friggin friggin friggin friggin suit jacket and a beer suit jet oops we're the show's over listen listen you didn't say a bad word i have been on the internet on this webcam for now eight hours today that's a long nope nine hours today i'm uh i think i've reached my limit of being able to censor myself and you're a web professional i just identity four wanted to redo intro bit up until the disclaimer so just to make sure you got the disclaimer identity you got the disclaimer apologies me i'm just clarifying i don't uh you have it okay so then then i will go i will record now beginning in three two this is twist this week in science episode number 710 recorded on wednesday february 27th 2019 where for art thou planet nine hey everyone i'm dr kiki and tonight we will fill your head with possible planets zebra camo and yeast but first disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer so much energy on there okay um what did i do oh i blare newsletter y'all i know we all have like the calendar and all that kind of stuff but i wrote a list i wrote it down and i have to eat i have to get it off a one computer and put it into the email um but uh yeah wrote down a list basically went through and we're like these are ideas for newsletters throughout the year great you know not that they are we have to use those things but if we need a writing prompt it's right there for us shall we make a google sheet like show notes so that we can fill it up with whatever we like and i can plop it from there into a newsletter i needed a new segment on the show what a new segment for the show what the segment is is questions i wish i'd asked when our guest was here one question is from last week's interview uh when we were talking a lot about redshift yeah is why are we talking about an expanding universe because spacetime is the same thing why aren't we talking about a slowing time universe like if it's a spacetime is indistinguishable why can't we just be saying no things are getting further away everything's just getting slower right like that's a great question and i would love to then in this segment on you know having reconnected with the the guest and asking the other the question i would have asked tonight which i i didn't occur to me till after the interview was wait a second if somebody gets to name a planet do they also then get to dictate like the how the naming of all the craters and the mountains are like if i if i discovered uh planet nine i called it planet tom waits do i get to call the peak uh the big mountain step right up but no no no greater i get the call i get to call fumbling with the blues and then yeah like another but like in the satellite is uh surface trombone right like we get like do you also then get to dictate all of the other discoveries the micro discoveries that come after you know what's helpful for that justin twitter that's right they're on twitter probably where it takes place but but they're you could tweet right to them and it would actually be a helpful thing to tweet like thanks for coming on at twist science question and they would respond and it our listeners would be part of that conversation because you've tagged twist in the conversation it'd be a it'd be a really cool thing yeah but i also um don't have a lot of follow-through capability this well justin when you called me out for texting i was trying to write a tweet so that's exactly what i was doing but i stopped halfway through because you freaking called on me like a kid in class this is a show has video and we're doing a show and you're like looking down it obviously like yeah okay if you think that it was right before you're texting and driving everybody around you knows you're texting and writing oh very obvious oh boy i tweet i text yeah i'm just saying like i was i was still paying attention oh yeah we're we're multitasking we're writing in the chat room and it was happening we're looking at the i was reading your article right before that too like that's that cool it's very interesting i'm i'm a hundred percent sure there will be weed bread but it wouldn't be weed bread it would be cbd bread oh oh yeah summer the one that i sent you that about the uh jumping oh yes i saw that one too it was a little bit new blue spider but i think i'm gonna i'm gonna i'll try to bring it next week yeah you understand it i got the cbd article sent to me ten minutes before airtime yes do you understand i had a whole other story i was gonna do in ten minutes before air somebody sent me that and i went oh my gosh i have to do that show so we just have very different work styles see i spend Tuesday nights and i spend between one and four hours looking through news articles writing them writing notes putting them in the in the show notes and then i read them again before the show and highlight them so what was interesting about this one and and we should probably do this in the after the after show is that i pitched the idea of doing this somewhere what i pitched the idea of doing what they did in that study somewhere which is why somebody as soon as it came out as soon as they saw it they sent it to me now are you talking about the cbd bread are you talking about the spiders um kiki are those eyeballs or breasts on that i like to make the eyeballs what is the difference what is the difference my favorite uh one of my favorite senator live things that my child from here is alien women from another planet land on earth and they have eyes and their breasts and it's because after many millennia of men just staring at our breasts we've evolved to put our eyes there so we could maintain the icon oh my god what is that is it a bucket head zombie the zombie oh i see it is his skin just like it's gray it's gray dark gray you know because he's a zombie yeah this is from necrotized right yes this is a banana and this is a zombie oh so it's a children's game so it's definitely eyeballs i get it no children don't play that game 40-year-old men play oh interesting this is this is actually the i don't even know demographic of video games is very similar to the demographic of twist it's pretty much the same crap all of the people what was i gonna say you didn't say so we can't give you a clue if you would say what you're gonna say just blurt it out before you thought about it we would be able to write you back to the thing you're gonna say but because you hesitated and didn't spit it wanted to think about it a little bit more before you said something we have no idea what it was going to be and therefore cannot give you a clue or navigate you back well we were talking about my new segment for the show what my new segment of the show things i can't remember that i wanted to say okay yeah it'll be really boring because i'll be like i don't know it was that it was the thing can i tell you guys something fun no i don't talk about the newsletter but yes i i took i had a i really uh a obscure a dream in which there was this amazing thing in my dream that i wanted to share with everyone so in my dream i reached into my pocket and i took out my phone and i took a picture of it so that when i woke up i could show people who which made perfect sense in the dreamscape that as long as i can get to my phone which is a real thing in my dream even the technology functions the same way it does in the outside world i could take a picture within my dream of this amazing thing i'm witnessing and then i could share it with people when i woke up and i was very disappointed when i woke up and i reached my phone i realized it's not going to be there and i still looked yeah and it wasn't there he's still looking that's funny still look that was the part that was crazy as i still look but my husband's been waking up and like picking his phone up and using it immediately upon waking and it's really weird because last night he wakes up all of a sudden and he puts the flashlight on in our room oh and i looked at him i'm like what what happened what's going on he looks at me he's all bleary with sleep and he says do you smell smoke but yeah maybe there's a thing like the phone is transcending everything's fine the phone is becoming a subconscious object because we so interact with it on so many levels that it makes sense to us that it could translate between the worlds of the conscious and the subconscious like it's a permanent object in both it's an appendage of the mind that should exist both in our subconscious and our conscious waking world therefore it makes perfect sense that in my dream state it it made sense that i could take a picture of a dream and translate it to the other part of my brain in the outside world and my outside world brain uh also thought hey there's a chance that this translates the thing that i do dream identity four had a dream last week that he ordered a glass of banana wine at a bar it cost 2850 oh american dollars it tastes good um i'm not surprised uh what i do all the time it's very frustrating is i and i'm not exactly sure if i'm dreaming that i look at my phone to look at the time or if i actually pick up my phone and look at the time but my brain just doesn't process it right and i think i'm i think i'm really late and i will get to the point of even like trying to like slot my face to wake myself up or like i will fully turn on the light to be like come on come on wake up it's time to go to work you're running late and then i'll finally wake up enough to pick up my phone and look again and i'll be like crap it's 3 a.m yeah also also i i i as much as i don't approve of psychics having any merit or weight within society i am uh on on a massive number of occasions psychic by about 10s to 15 seconds which is i'll wake up and i'll look at my phone right before the alarm goes off you know psychic you're just well trained psychic it's psychic ability but not the kind that lets you tell like the useful future it's just the psychic that allows you to have to wake up and wait 15 seconds to hit the snooze button because that's the first thing i do like my first alarm is a snooze alarm this is something my mom has been able to do my entire life whether she wakes up at 5 30 or 7 or 9 she is able to train herself and can wake up two minutes before her alarm yeah yeah it's it's pretty easy to do most people can do it but i think the thing my first really interesting is but the thing about it i think is that we are so tied to time and like circuit like you glare you were going to say circadian rhythms and we're so tied to it that are there's a part of our brain even when we're sleeping that is aware of how many hours have passed which is fascinating yeah i think that's really cool yeah and part of my brain is also aware of how many hours have passed since we started this show which leads me to suggest that it's perhaps time to say good night blair okay good night blair say good night just did we finish talking about the newsletter no we didn't tonight we did it all wait what is the newsletter oh my god um yeah i also was gonna rant about daylight savings time but you cut me off because my body i'm done now it takes the whole like six months for my body to get used to the new time and i get to a point where i'm really good and then it changes back i found out the time at which my body wakes up best and it is what is in the fall called 6 15 am that is when my body wants to wake up 6 15 am if i wake up in the 7 o'clock hour my body is all out of whack and i feel tired no matter when i went to sleep but if i wake up between 6 and 6 30 usually right around 6 15 my body i'm like up there's like a pep in my step i need less coffee like that is the time when my body is meant to wake up but then um daylight saving kicks in in uh and i guess it's november right and then that becomes 5 15 and that is too early for me to wake up is it 5 15 yeah all back if you wake up all back five in the morning it's still dark and nothing's open i mean i'd be fine with it i'd be fine if it was sleeping later no but what i'm saying is i'm tired then the all of winter no no no i'm tired no it goes it's it's the other way around when daylight savings time comes yeah in in the spring which is like a week away yeah daylight savings time it's going right up here the clocks go forward but because they go forward we lose an hour and we're more tired we're actually losing time that's not i found out that my body wants to wake up at that specific time so all of spring and summer that's when my body is waking up when it's supposed to wake up is what spring and summer 6 15 is but then when daylight savings kicks in in right in november well i guess it's it's back to normal i guess is what it is i don't yeah so in november when you fall back that's when my body's like no because then it comes you're a fighter you never fall back and springs springs spring back when you compress the spring it springs back forward it makes no sense it's just horrible well better than falling forward you knock out your teeth i'm gonna be i'm gonna be a mess for like a month after this daylight saving switch happens it just doesn't work for me no it doesn't work for me i lose an hour it's dark again in the morning and i'm like and then when the sun starts rising then i start rising with the sun i'm better at it but oh my gosh it's very silly it needs to go why are they messing it's you know what it's the Illuminati messing with our circadian rhythms so that everyone is sleepy so that they'll get complacent that's right keeping us in control yeah the man they're just beating us down okay anyway the newsletter the newsletter uh yeah do we want to make just next time when you make the march run sheet do you want to get it oh what because no no not put it in the run sheet but just also you can whip up the an additional um excel or sheet sheet document because i don't know where those actually live it lives on in in your world somewhere and then it's just shared with us so that's something that you could create so that you own it and then you share it with us and we can just have tabs for the different issues and we can put um in the name of the tab like you put when we want to release it and then we can plop in stuff into those sheets and then it would be very easy for me to make them okay we should figure out uh how much we can each contribute or what or win so i mean i feel like justin writes disclaimers every week i'm sure we could get some sort of musing from him a weekly rant of sorts um just a paragraph just something short just something science related something that you thought about yeah justin justin's amusing thoughts yes i can come up with i can come over three or four hundred yeah so i'm saying just just think think about something you want to write about that you'd want our loyal listeners and subscribers to our newsletter to know and even make this serial yeah that would be fun like issues yeah something that comes out over the course of yeah that would be very fun sounds like people are trying to put work on my it create creativity just a paragraph that word and it's not worked oh yeah just like one new paragraph yeah is it okay if it's all about um how to retrofit a bus for a little while for a little while and then it goes off another subject if it is science related then yes of course there is a science to everything including busking if it is science related i don't see why not giki yeah um i think people i think people would like the occasional bus update so so i do like reading a bus okay what i do like the prompt uh the prompting idea of like there's a place for us to go and like attack something with words huh huh sounds like a decent outlining plan oh great yeah i need creative for stuff excellent sounds good and break okay um let's see tell your friends i guess they're in different cities if you have friends in portland tell them about our show April 3rd um okay hey kiki there's a show in portland thanks justin do you have plane tickets yet how would i get plane tickets are you gonna drive up here how i've never booked a flight on my own ever in the history of my existence so there's this thing called google.com type in www.google.com and type in sacramento to portland flights and then something will pop up where you can put in your dates and it'll give you some options okay i did it even more just baseball like no like i'm not even joking like i have i've i've flown crisscrossed around the country in the world but i've never been the person who booked the flight or bought the ticket it sounds like it's time ever and pam this is exactly why justin hasn't visited yeah he's like what high time yeah if you like if pam if you hit me with it like an email like your flight leaves at this time you need to be at this airport by here i will be there i'll be on the flight i just have no idea where plane tickets come from it's kind of like babies and yeah so the store goes to www.google.com and types in sacramento to portland flights and then he puts in the dates and the times and compares the prices and then he hits buy and then he puts in some credit card information print those out and then supplies them to your door and justin i think you're now visiting pam so kiki i think this is a good time for us to bring up um should we start some sort of kick starter or specific campaign to do a twist australia tour that would be amazing yes that's good australia and new zealand i would love to do that i would love to do that that'd be great yeah okay let's think about that pam's like yes it's something i wanted to do i was nice it's like you know small continent yeah it's like it's one of the smaller ones it's fun i had evidence of my inability in the past do you remember when i was like overwhelmed looking at subway schedule oh i do in new york like i would have just walked in and everywhere and not gone on any sort of mass transit in new york because i didn't understand mugged for sure what the hell the symbols in the line yeah i feel like you would have gotten mugged what no i'm the least muggable person that's not true you're the one walking around pointing at things look at all the top yeah you're like you said you wanted to go on a boat ride i should walk up to this person that's shouting about free boat rides is that what hold up is that not where we got our boat ride yeah and they almost didn't accept our tickets just remember that okay no what happened was what happened was flair's like look like you know where you're going yeah and don't look anywhere and so we walked like we were going because there's people like who were looking for people who are tourists and we walked right past them and headed down a dead end and somebody's like okay it's obvious you don't know where you're going so you must be looking for the statue of liberty and we looked each other's like okay the goddess like yeah and then we bought the tickets and then the whole way the two mile walk to where the ferry is we were convinced the tickets were bogus and that we'd gotten taken yeah and big city girl who's been my guide this whole time is like go up to the canyon yeah i don't want to i don't want to look like i don't know what i'm doing the big city girl i have to know what i'm doing but you don't because you're country bumpkin go up to the counter and find out that these tickets are and it turned out they were legit they were so we went on our so we got to do the thing so basically what we're saying is throw yourselves uh into the confidence of others without knowing whether or not that's the right working out in our one hey i did a fine job navigating the subway and getting us to the top of the empire state building would not have figured out how the elevator worked there was too many buttons yeah there are a lot of buttons um i found us some delicious uh i deli food whoa whoa whoa whoa huh second second that deli was my idea not yours oh that's true but i found that was mine but i found it you have because it was on third that was weird it was a second avenue deli it was on third like how does i don't know like i kept walking up and down going like it doesn't exist and you're like you looked your phone if i do recall the sentence i just said is i found the delicious deli food but i did i chose it that was where i wanted to go there you go anyway um i am flying in wednesday morning i am landing at 11 just so you know good i on the other hand uh start walking that's right hitchhiking starting the monday before the wednesday so good at least you're planning ahead hope to make it on the two days isn't enough trust and confidence of strangers two days you can't hitchhike to portland in two days oh you can do it no because nobody picks up hitchhikers anymore you have to wait too long stopped because nobody hitchhikes anymore when you hitchhike people are like what is like no people don't know not to pick up hitchhikers anymore my god it's been so long since picking up hitchhikers was a bad thing i def don't pick up hitchhikers you don't pick up hitchhikers you don't no oh you should that's they're the best no way no way nope nope nope okay no can i just tell you can i just tell you can i just tell you you're buzzering it but you know who picks up hitchhikers constantly uber and lyft that's like all they do and it's a huge business true well they're not sticking out um for those say good night that's the icon when you hit the thing say good night Blair good night Blair say good night Justin good night Justin good night kiki good night everyone check us out next week we'll have a cool interview can't wait for that and also this Friday 1 p.m pacific time twitch.tv slash dr kiki for my dr kiki science talking chatting time and we're gonna work on another newsletter so make sure that you are subscribed good night everyone i hope you have a fabulous fabulous sciencey time