 This is TWIS, this week in Science, episode number 595, recorded on Wednesday, November 30th, 2016. Weird in Spain. Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki, and tonight on This Week in Science, we are going to fill your heads with skin, living dead and leaky fluid, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The future of fighting over fresh water has arrived. We see it happening now in North Dakota and the rules are pretty simple. If you have influence over government, your water supply will be safe. If you do not, it will not be safe. It won't even be yours. An oil pipeline was set to pass near the city of Bismarck, North Dakota. Some town folk complained and the Army Corps of Engineers deemed this route too endangering of public waterways as they called it a high consequence area. So it was moved to an assumed low consequence area. Through an area of fresh water used by native Sioux people. Since the Army Corps of Engineers flooded much of Sioux land and towns with dams to provide water for people elsewhere in the past, this came as no surprise to the Sioux. The current path follows the reservation border with an environmental disaster and waiting. And since it passes under their source of drinking water, the situation can only get worse. And is what we can expect to see more of going forward everywhere in this country as public water rights give way to private influence. The phrase not in my backyard only works when you have political influence. Without it, we all will have to give up the water rights and there are two things none of us can live without. Clean water and this weekend science coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I want to learn it 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 want to know what's happening, what's happening, what's happening this weekend science. What's happening, what's happening, what's happening this weekend science. Yeah, science. You're kicking and blaring. And good science to you, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of this weekend science end. Yes, water wars are on. And for those of you who have not been paying attention, this is an ongoing issue, other news related to what's happening with the Sue Indian lands that are private lands, public lands. Now, whose lands are they? That's a big question. Anyway, another issue is related to water that Nestle, the Nestle company is going after and they're working on trying to get more water in Michigan for I think something like they're gonna be doubling the amount of water they're using for their bottling plant and only paying something like $200 a month more. So they're going to something like 400 million gallons of water a month running through their plant and paying like $200 for it. Yeah, cause we need more single use bottles of water. Yeah. That it's privatization of, they're using, they're using what was a privatization of government that created the problem to create a privatization of water to solve the problem. Their answer is always we need to privatize this. Yes. Well, this is where this is where we move into the science though. And we'll be talking a lot about science and environmental issues and water. There are some water stories that Blair has coming up. I know about that. But what I'm talking about today, I've got stories about hemophilia cures, skin understanding, the skin we are in and space eyes. What do you have, Justin? I've got, what the frack is going on when we frack the study of fracturing rocks. That's what that is. Yeah. Also, also I have an update on Lucy, the early hominin astrolipithicus afarensis fossil. They did a little more research there, some interesting finds. And it turns out even bugs have bugs. Buckety bugs. All right, and Blair, what's in the animal corner today? I have in the animal corner today some hope. And then I also have a little bit of invertebrate sex just for fun. Well, I hope so. Aren't those two the same? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Listen to find out. No, we will be talking about all of this in the upcoming time that we have. Let's dig right into the news. My first story is a little bit weird. Well, more so it is quantum weirdness, weird quantum space. So we've brought up on the show before and some of you may be aware of this prediction of quantum physics that particles will pop into and out of existence in the vacuum of space. That really the vacuum of space isn't a vacuum at all, but a roiling, boiling active area. And this kind of stuff has been measured in the laboratory, but quantum electrodynamics, QED, which is the theory that describes this interaction between photons and charged particles, such as electrons. It's also arisen from this theory that we should be able to see evidence of it in space under the right situations. And we know that very strong magnetic fields can modify space and affect the polarization of light that passes through it. And so if you've got a magnetized vacuum, it can actually act as a prism where a property that happens is called vacuum birefringence. Not a small word to remember, but vacuum birefringence. Birefringence. Yeah, is this prism of light, this prism effect that happens as a result of polarization of light because of strong magnetic fields and what happens in the space. Anywho, it was predicted, okay, we should be able to see this in space and so some researchers from Italy and Poland use the ESO's very large telescope to look at a neutron star. Neutron stars produce, they're very dense and they produce big magnetic fields. So hey, great idea, right? The star RXJ1856.5-3754 is about 400 light years from Earth. So it's not super close, but it's also not really far away either, but it's not very bright. It's a fairly dim star, but it does have this very strong magnetic field. They observed photons coming from or light emitted from this neutron star and they actually detected a significant degree of linear polarization that they think is due to this boosting effect of the vacuum birefringence. So basically, there's empty space around this neutron star and because of the magnetic field and these random little particles popping into and out of existence, the light is polarized in a very particular way which we were able to detect. Now, it's not, there are other things that could possibly have come up with this result. It could also have to do with like a cloud of dust but they don't think that's what's happening. They actually think this is empty space and these are this effect of this visible light moving away from the star. But the next step is to hopefully get more advanced telescopes that can observe in the X-ray frequency spectrum. So not just look at the polarization of visible light, but also look at the light that we can't see if there is some amount of polarization in these larger spectrum because like I said, this is a very dim star so there wasn't a lot of light coming from it to be measured in the first place but it does emit a lot of X-rays. So that's one of the next steps. Hopefully in the next 10 years or so we'll get another big telescope online that can actually do these measurements. But for now, this is the first example of a prediction of quantum electrodynamics that really strong fields can modify space and affect polarization of light that pass through it. Yeah, yeah, so it's pretty exciting stuff. It's really neat when we get hypotheses that actually get some observed evidence. So really very neat stuff. And then moving closer in space, astronauts, right? We've talked about astronauts in the past and the health problems that they have. So one of the health problems that astronauts suffer is those astronauts that spend a long periods of time in space tend to have vision problems. They, Scott Kelly returned from his space mission and came back with vision problems. Suddenly people have blurry vision where they used to have 20-20 vision. Their eyeballs actually get- Yeah, the action. Yeah. Their eyeballs get flattened, smushed. And their optic nerves become inflamed. So vision, not so great. And there's been this idea that because of low pressure it's just body fluids aren't doing the normal thing and there's different, it's just, it's been an idea that basically that there's fluid that's been moving up from the body and just kind of getting into the head and neck area. This is what they've- That's why they've been developing pressure pants and things like this. Exactly, so they can like- Or vacuum pants actually. Exactly, create higher pressure in the legs that gravity would normally have, right? Suck stuff back down, equilibrate the pressure. So anyway, a new study from the University of Miami, they've presented findings at the Radiological Society of North America meeting in Chicago and according to ours, Technica, they studied 16 astronauts and they looked at, they used magnetic resonance imaging of the astronauts' brains and eyes before and after spaceflight. And they looked, they compared also the differences between short-duration astronauts and long-duration astronauts and they looked at changes in cerebrospinal fluid and cerebrospinal fluid is this, you know, it's where you go get a spinal tap, that's the fluid they're tapping into, they're pulling some of that out and this is the stuff that bathes your brain, keeps your spinal cord happy, it's padding, it's also nutritious. It's good stuff for the brain, right? Well, the pressure changes in space somehow allow it to start leaking into the eye cavity. Oh my goodness. So basically the cerebrospinal fluid from this study, they found cerebrospinal fluid is leaking out of the brain into the optic cavity. Yuck. Oh dear. Yes, and so it's, yeah, it's not just random body fluids, it's brain fluid. Yucky. And so this is not going to be fixed necessarily by vacuum pants. Right, right, right. Yeah. What do we need? We need some sort of super high pressure element? No, that's not right. Yeah, like, is it just like there's not a cap on the top of it? And like, normally it doesn't really matter because of gravity, but when gravity isn't at play, now all of a sudden it's... What they need to do is remove your eyeballs. Right, and then just give them back to you when you get back down here, right? Isn't that... Or we could just, you know, get a stent, you know, and just drain cerebrospinal fluid. Yeah, just, you know, drain it so that you constantly have cerebrospinal fluid, yeah. Oh yes, identity four in the chat room says sump pumps in the eye sockets. That's right. Eyeball sump pumps for astronauts. That's what NASA's gonna have to work on next, yes. So, you know, at least it's a little bit of information in as to what is actually happening. And now the question will be, how do we go about fixing that problem? Because it's the microgravity, the lack of a huge gravitational pull that is affecting this, the cells in the brain, although the connections, those tight junctions maybe aren't working as well as they need to be for some reason. So, Hot Rod in the chat room is asking if we had artificial gravity in these space stations or ships or... It would probably fix it. It would probably fix it. So, let's work on that. Right, well, so far our best ability to do that is to spin things really, really fast. But then that creates a problem of getting on or off the ride. Right, right. Now, as you mentioned, if you accidentally flip over opposite problem, then for sure your eyes are gonna go flat. Oopsie. Just have to move the furniture to the ceiling and I think it'd be okay there. This is all turning into through the looking glass all of a sudden. Right, right, right. Yes, we're all going to have to slice and we're gonna have to pass the cake around first and then slice it after. Change places. Although totally unrelated, but my favorite, and maybe my only story about Johnny Carson, maybe you got the idea from somebody else, but there was supposedly this house where lots of people would go and have these big parties and the owner of the house had a room set aside where all of the furniture was bolted to the ceiling. He made the entire room, even the doorway, where everything was upside down. And so if somebody were to pass out after drinking too much at the party, he would take them and leave them in this room. And then they would wake up at some point thinking that they somehow were stuck to the ceiling. Have you ever become a mega-welper? You have too many rooms and don't know what to do. I've heard that if you laugh hard at it, you can have a tea party on the ceiling. But that's just, I mean, somebody called Mary Poppins told me about that. I don't know. That's right. Oh, Mary, oh, Mary Poppins. All right, this is this week in Science. Hey, Justin, what you got? Oh, I have a story that's ready to go here about bone fossils found by Donald Johansson and Tom Gray. November the 24th, 1974, the site Hadar, Ethiopia. They found these bones. It turned out they were 3.18 million years old in Australopithecus afrentis. But they didn't really know that point. They just knew that they had a fairly complete hominid skeleton. And so there was late into the night, drinking, dancing, singing, and the Beatles song. You see, this guy with diamonds was playing over and over. At some point during the night, no one remembers when or by whom the skeleton was dubbed Lucy and the name stuck. That's a good story. And now scans of bones from Lucy suggest how appropriate they might actually have been. She made diamonds. No. She made diamonds. Lucy had a lot of bling. No, according to a study published today in the open access journal, plus one by Christopher Ruff from John Hopkins University School of Medicine. Early human ancestors say they were thought to have walked on the ground, right? But determining how much and how well has been sort of difficult. They have long arms, longer than is needed for the average ground bound hominin locomotion. Might be even a little bit awkward having these as long arms as Lucy had. But in thinking of, does that mean that she was still climbing trees or does that sort of like how modern whales have toe bones? Early whales actually had legs to go with those toe bones. As with all evolutionary processes, these changes are often leaving a trade or two around longer than they're actually needed, right? So how much did Lucy actually need her long arms? Well, Ruff and colleagues compared X-ray micro tomography scans in which cross sections of an object are used to create a 3D model without destruction of the specimen, which you can't do because it's Lucy's bones and that's all you're gonna get of Lucy's bones. They did Lucy's upper arm bone and upper leg bone, so humerus and ephemer, and they compared those two models. It's not that funny. Sorry. They compared those with modern chimpanzees and modern humans. The scans revealed that the relative strength of Lucy's humerus and ephemer were intermediate. So kind of what you might have is correct. Somewhere between a chimpanzee and a human. It does, though, suggest that Australopithecus afarensis spent a significant amount of time using their arms to move through trees. Oh, Lucy in the sky. That's how I see it. Yeah, I got it. At the beginning, she's up in the foliage now. In addition, analysis of Lucy's femur suggested that maybe the walking gate might have been less than ideal, limiting mobility on the ground. So then you might need to be in the trees even more to escape predators or to do food foraging type of things. Based on the findings, researchers suggest that moving through trees may have remained important to some early human ancestors for millions of years. Rough adds, this is the most direct evidence to date that Lucy and her relatives actually spent significant portion of their time in the trees. With time. Oh, I can't see. Not even that much of it. Well, that's just the last phrase. Not even, I can't even hum it. Okay, nevermind. No humming, no, no. Not allowed. The internet police will be after us. Oh, that's great. That's just, it's so neat to have this one more piece of the historical puzzle, the ancestral puzzle. Where were we? What were we doing? Who even were we? Yeah. Where did we go? Was in the trees, or at least used a lot of the trees. Maybe it was very similar to, yeah, like the chimpanzees of today, where they kind of are in the trees and can do the swinging around and love the swinging around, but then also really use their forelimbs for that. Well, that's a thing. Probably not. By Lucy's time, it would have been an upright stance and it's sort of where the base of the skull attaches to the spine, whether the head is more or under, sort of balancing on top of. So she had a good head balance. She was an upright walker. Just, the legs weren't quite, quite on board yet. That doesn't mean they didn't walk upright. It just means they weren't as efficient as a modern human would be. So not a long distance runner by any means. Along a short distance sprinter to a vine from where she would swing from tree to tree. This sounds very Tarzan-esque. Yeah, Lucy was Jane. Yes. And Tarzan was the dandy men. Take that. Well, and, you know, Tarzan might have actually been an ape. I mean, this is also what we're running more and more that there's a lot of crossbreeding between things that we call the separate species. And this continual gene flow back and forth actually might have been a big part of how hominids became so dominant evolutionarily is that we were a huge experiment and had the sex drive to go with it, apparently. We're not too particular. Okay, philosophical question here. What if we could just get rid of the idea of species? And we only thought of things as mixable elements. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, what would that mean for humanity? What would that mean for any life on earth? We're the ones who think about these kinds of things, but I invite people to think about it. See, I think about this all the time because we joke about how species is an invented category because humans like to put things in boxes, right? But without- And some things breed and other things don't. Right, but then we find out that certain species don't breed with their own species if there are physical barriers between their species. Then we find out there are actual species that can breed with each other. So these things all get very gray, but the main function that I currently see for species that we would have to find a way to replace if we got rid of the species distinction would be protecting species. So right now we identify this type of animal is dwindling or is almost gone. It needs legal protection and it needs action and it needs activists. And how do we identify those breeding elements by their numbers, by decreasing numbers, all these things? It's or do you call specific habitats endangered instead of species? That may be a way to go. Ecosystems that contain so many mix and matchable elements. We gotta preserve them all because we might want to use them for something. So say let's protect the rainforest instead of let's protect orangutans. Exactly, yeah. I have a story coming up in the second half that might be another way that we can use to identify species. Great, fantastic, great. And I have a story coming up about this as well. Yeah, and do you know what time it is? Is it the same story? Right now I hope it might go yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. If you just tuned in, this is this week in science, but this is a very special time in the show right now. It's a very special time. I think everyone to sit back, relax, turn the lights down low. It's time for Blair's Animal Corner. My pet, little pet, no pet at all. Wanna hear about a pet at all. She's your girl. Except for giant pandas. That's called a battle of gold. What you got, Blair? I have the Great Barrier Brief. Filled with many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many animals. And, namely, a lot of corals, which are animals. A lot of people don't know that. What did you hear about the Great Barrier Reef recently? That it's dead. That it's dead. Well, no, not that it's dead, but that the largest proportion or percentage of the Great Barrier Reef has died that has ever been before measured. Yes. So this is something that I saw catching on like wildfire. On the internet, there was an obituary written for the Great Barrier Reef. And there was a lot of consideration about it being beyond repair and the Great Barrier Reef is gone. It's on its way to gone. Remember I said I brought some hope for our show today? It might not be quite as dire as we thought. Professor Terry Hughes, Director of the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, looked at aerial surveys right at the height of this most recent bleaching event. So there was a bleaching event in 1998 and in 2002. The one in 2016 is the largest we have seen. Now a coral bleaching event, just to remind everyone quickly, is when the teeny tiny little animals related to jellyfish essentially, the little Nidorians, that live in colonies on these reefs, secrete these bony structures that then make up the bony part of the reef, the coral reef. The corals live inside there, but they have photosynthetic algae living inside the zone. Zosanthellae, that is a symbiotic relationship because in a lot of these coral reefs, it actually is a space that doesn't have very much oxygen and doesn't have very much nutrients in the water. And so these coral reefs actually should be pretty desolate, except that the symbiotic relationship has allowed corals to thrive. And so they then create an entire ecosystem that is thriving with life. Right, because they're also a source of food, they are habitat for fishes, they're shelter, they're all these things. Yeah, absolutely. Not to mention corals, the Zosanthellae specifically in corals are responsible for depending on how you count around half or more than half of the oxygen on our planet. So they're pretty important. And bleaching is when a stressor, which could be any number of things, causes the coral to freak out and kick all the Zosanthellae out of their symbiotic system. Get out! And if the stressor goes away fast enough, the coral can get their Zosanthellae back. But if it doesn't go away fast enough, the coral can die before they get all of it back to get the nutrient exchange going again. So what's happening most likely in the Great Barrier Reef right now is that there's this little thing called climate change happening. And it's warming some of these tropical waters. And warming is one of the things that can cause a bleaching event. So on average, despite what you may have heard, 6% of bleached corals died in the central region of the Great Barrier Reef in 2016. Only 1% died in the south. This is looking at 67% of the corals have gone in the past eight to nine months. But you can hear based on those figures that it is extremely lopsided. This isn't across the board, we're losing all these corals. It's entire areas that have disappeared and entire areas that have almost remained intact. So all this intact reef means that these colonies can grow again, they can rebound and that huge expanses of this reef are still alive. I say this not to say, eh, we're fine. But to say that everything is not lost here. We have an awesome opportunity here to keep this space. The reefs that have survived, most likely survived because they live in upwelling zones. So upwelling brings cool water from the deep depths of the ocean. And that keeps them from having too much stress from warming and that allows them to continue to survive. So the patchiness of this bleaching means there is a potential for the ecosystem rebounding. And beyond that, what's very interesting is that this study looked at, additionally, the benefit from ecotourism. So the Great Barrier Reef employs roughly 70,000 people, generates roughly $5 billion in income each year. Think about how many people that means are visiting the Great Barrier Reef. So if this space continues to thrive, people will continue to see it. They will continue to care about it. There is a better chance of all of this pulling through. So I wanted to bring this up mainly because there was a lot of talk of doom and gloom about the Great Barrier Reef being dead and it's not. It's in trouble, it needs our help, but it still has the potential to bounce back. And also, just in case, it is still there. If you've ever wanted to see it, go now. Yeah. Because it might not be there later. Or go now, so your ecotourism money can go to help save the Great Barrier Reef while it's still there. Additionally. Right, it's still in the Great Barrier Reef. Additionally, I have another piece of news about corals from Penn State, simply saying that they are real old. So we've known that there are certain corals that can live up to a thousand years. The Elkhorn corals, Acropora Palmatta from Florida and the Caribbean are now estimated to be over five. Oh. I'm gonna say five years. That's very young. You broke off right when you said five. Okay. I'm sorry, chat room, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. Five thousand years old. Five thousand. Five thousand years old. So this means many things. This means that corals are pretty hardy. They can go through lots of micro changes in their habitat. It also means, on the Noggle Grades on, that corals, they take a long time to establish these large fertile colonies. So if a certain coral has been alive for 5,000 years and then a heating event puts that coral in jeopardy, it can't just regrow in a year. So it's still, I would say on the whole, this is good news that if an animal can live for 5,000 years, that means they're a little rough and tumble. They can handle some stress. But how much stress? Right, and it goes back to that age old, well, it's not age old, but it goes back to the point that we constantly bring up about animals and environments adapting to human induced climate change, which is that it's happening at a rate that we haven't seen happen before. Yeah, it's happening real fast. Yeah, so that's, it's fast. And so is it going to be too fast for these long lived genomes? Absolutely, that's the question. So if they've gone pretty much unchanged in 5,000 years, will this be too much for them? So coral reefs, they're a very important little animal. Don't count them out yet, but let's definitely keep an eye on them and remember what we can do to help keep them around. Yeah, and I was just looking at a map of Australia. I'm just peeking at a map of Australia, thinking of the Great Barrier Reef and where it exists in comparison to where people maybe go visit in Australia. So the southern end is closer to Brisbane than the northern end, which has taken the most damage, which is up near north of Cairns and on the northern side of Australia. Most of the touristy stuff, if you're gonna go to Australia, you're gonna go to Melbourne, you're gonna go to Brisbane, Sydney, this is all on the southern side of Australia. So hey, tourists, you still have lots of corals to look at. Absolutely. Go see them and donate. And elect politicians that believe in climate change and wanna do something about it. Just a thought. Wanting to do things? Yes, just a thought. If you like your fluids and gases. Privatize. No, wait. Where am I going with this? All right, you guys. Is that it for the animal corner right now, Blair? Yeah. Okay, well, we are gonna take a break. It's time for us to head into our break and then the second half of our show where we have all sorts of neat news. I've got hemophilia and skin. Coming up. You do have skin. I do. So do you. I didn't know about the hemophilia, that's news to me. No, I don't really, but yeah, we'll talk about that. And in the meantime, everyone, this is This Week in Science and I do hope that you stay tuned for more. I think the show went paperless. Hey everybody, do you know what came in last week? Sorry, I had to duck down and get it. The 2017 Twists, Blair's Animal Corner Calendar. It is a beauty and it's a little bit smaller than last year, but it'll fit in mailing envelopes better and maybe into those nice little spots that you have on the wall, ready to take this beautiful artwork, all hand drawn, hand produced by Blair. The calendar, the entire calendar, is lovingly created by Blair. She took the time to put in all these holidays and all these pictures and she made it really pretty. And we also have our listener, Patrick Hartnett, over in Baltimore, who helped with some of the art. You'll find that each of the art pages has ecosystem relevant symbols along the side, artwork and symbols along the side. So there's a lot of little neat nuggets in here. And so we've got things like January 19th in San Francisco, Twists at SF Sketch Fest Nightlife. That's right, that's where we're gonna be on January 19th. You can go if you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, you can really do that. You can go to the SF Sketch Fest website, look for the California Academy of Sciences Nightlife event on January 19th by tickets and you can go. You can meet us there and you'll know when it is because it's already on the calendar that you'll have hanging on your wall. Boom, so many amazing things going on right there. These calendars, they'll be going. So make sure you get them while we have them with a bunch of people have already pre-ordered calendars and I will be mailing them out very soon. So I hope you're gonna get on this, get your calendar. They make great gifts as well to the science and twist lover in your life. All right, you can go to twist.org to be able to get yourself the calendars. Twist.org is also where you can find all sorts of twist relevant stuff. So if you go to twist.org, if you're interested in supporting us other ways, you can find the website and our Zazzle Store. The Zazzle Store is where you'll find all of our hats and mugs and even Christmas ornaments. If you are missing a Christmas ornament on your tree, oh my goodness, Twist Blair's Animal Corner tortoise ceramic ornament. Really, you want one of these Blair tortoises on your Christmas tree. You do, you do. Yeah, and there's all sorts of neat art from the 2016 calendar on different products as well as the Twist logo material. And again, Blair, thank you for helping in this Zazzle Store. It's awesome. Back to twist.org, it's also where you can help the show just by donating. So if you haven't given away all of your money because of Giving Tuesday, just think of it as a continuation of Tuesday today and you can go to twist.org and click on the donate button along the right side bar and you'll be able to donate directly using PayPal. Or you can donate through Patreon and on Patreon. This is a platform where you can choose different levels of support. Click become a patron and ta-da! It's, you'll become a wonderful part of the Patreon family that we have created over there. Everybody, twist.org is basically where you go. If you're unable to support us financially, I hope you do go to twist.org and enjoy the content that we have there because we do put announcements on the website and we also do post the RSS feed there and some small videos and stuff. Check the website out every once in a while. But if you're not able to give financially, please help us out by telling your friends about twists. Give the gift of twists this holiday season. Load up a playlist of twist songs and share it with your friends. I don't know, can you do that on Spotify? I don't know, but on SoundCloud you can. You can do that on SoundCloud, we're on SoundCloud. You can also share us on YouTube, share us on iTunes, share us on all the social medias, Twitter and Facebook. Get the word out that twist is the show to listen to. All of you, we thank you for your support in this holiday season. We really could not do this without you. ...the lives that they lead need adjusting. They drive to the bookstore and blindly start trusting. The miracles and cures all lay down in black ink. Never even bothering to stop and fish. The real power that I do believe is the dollars and cents all these authors receive. And we are back with more This Week in Science. Oh, yeah. And Justin, what do you have for us? Science! Oh, yay! Oh, some of that. Sometimes you do that. What actually happens underground when we go drilling, fracking, questing things down there under the planet? Well, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists also have this question. And so they built an observatory a mile deep to study how rocks fracture. The observatory is part of the Department of Energy thingy. They're calling subter for subsurface technology and engineering research, development, and demonstration crosscut. United States currently relies on the subsurface for more than 80% of its energy needs. And I never really thought of it in that sort of context. But yeah, 80% of our energy is coming from messing with stuff underground. As important as the subsurface is for U.S. energy, the strategy or understanding of the subsurface responds to common perpetrations, such as those caused by pulling fluids out, pushing fluids in, is quite crude, our knowledge. Says Susan Hubbard, completely unaware of her pun at the time. She's the assistant director of Berkeley Lab and a lead at subter. We're not able to manipulate the subsurface with the control that can guarantee that we're not only maximizing energy production or waste storage, but that we're also protecting our environment, including minimizing greenhouse gas emissions, impacts to groundwater, and induced seismicity. That's a significant gap, she says. More so, she says, we know the subsurface will be a part of our energy strategy for many decades to come. We launched this initiative with recognition that whether it's old energy strategies like oil and gas or new strategies like enhanced geothermal or carbon capture and sequestration, we really have to gain control of the subsurface. So what is the key to controlling the subsurface? You might ask, controlling what goes on is about understanding how rocks fracture. So you want to encourage or prevent fracturing from taking place underground, depending on what it is you're doing. So this is Berkeley lab geologist, Patrick Dobson, we're concerned with the ability of fluids to move through cracks and pores. For applications such as engineered geothermal systems, you want fluids to move in order to mine the heat from the subsurface. So you want to create fractures. And others such as carbon capture and sequestration, we're sure the fractures don't grow, that the stuff you put down there stays down there. So to gain the predictive understanding of fracture control, Berkeley lab is leading us the subterr project to develop this underground observatory, which is already in an underground observatory. This is in Sanford underground research facility in South Dakota. It's a site of a former gold mine. And it's actually being used for particle physics research by Berkeley lab already. So this team chose a site that's 4,850 feet deep, almost a mile, right? And they've got the censoring things set up. So they're drilling holes deep, deep down under there, 100 meter deep experimental boreholes. They're pressurizing them, they're fracturing them, and they're taking all sorts of measurements to see how the fluids they're putting in they're dispersing and seeing at what pressures things are causing stresses and fractures. And also monitoring seismic activity as they do this. This is, the experience could also be useful for better understanding the earthquakes that result from disposal of large volumes of water created by fracking. So we've all heard about fracking causing earthquakes. It's apparently it's a lot to do with when they have the wastewater pulled back up, they go and shove it back down a deep hole somewhere else. The injection of wastewater has been known to result in the earthquakes and researchers are playing catch up, trying to discover how this is happening, when this will happen and be able to predict when it is likely to occur again. And this is also going to be a big, big thing right now. This is enhanced geothermal systems. As a technology where underground fractures are engineered in hot rocks in the subsurface, then they inject water that water turns to steam, it heats up. And they say this has the potential to generate enough clean energy to power millions of homes, but scientists need better methods of managing the rock permeability. So there is a good potential for us to come up with another clean energy source if we get this right, as well as a way to store, create carbon sinks or perhaps a way to store nuclear materials if we know what's going on. And it's also sort of interesting too that 80% of our energy is derived subsurface, and yet we're only now studying what happens. It's not only now, but I mean, really starting to ask deeper questions. I did that, I know I went there. One thing that ties in with this really well is the report about Oklahoma. And Oklahoma started experiencing increased, significantly increased seismic activity with the onset of fracking. And approximately, it was basically eight years, they have released something about 1900 years worth of natural science seismic activity because of the fracking. The states actually saw about 900 earthquakes in 2015. The injections started in 2002, skyrocketed around 2012 and 2015. There was about one earthquake of magnitude 3.0 or higher per year before 2009. And then it's the fracking increased around 2012. And that's when the state all of a sudden just, earthquakes just went up all over the place. And the state saw around 900 earthquakes just in 2015. So there's now legislation to reduce the number of injections that are taking place in the state. And so potentially they'll be seeing less earthquakes. And with this research that you're reporting on, maybe understanding how to do it better will or knowing exactly how certain materials crack in particular, where to do it. Yeah. And when I say there's been very little research into this, you're right, there's been tremendous research in how to extract the most stuff from down under there by fracturing. But very little research really into the repercussions of into what happens to groundwater. Like when you've done this fracturing, whether it's the fracking itself or the wastewater, high pressure putting down in there, what happens, how the water table responds to that and how that material moves afterwards has not really been focused on because it's not the part that people are making money out. Exactly. But yeah. Yeah. This is interesting stuff. And reading the story that you posted, I'm having a hard time with the acronym Kismet. To describe. To describe the observatory. I mean, I understand the K is the abbreviation for permeability and induced seismicity management for energy technologies. I get how they put it together, but I don't think this is the word to use. Yeah. Do you know what Kismet means? No? You're gonna tell us? It means fate. That's fate. It's like synchronicity. Yeah. It's Yiddish, actually. Yeah, Kismet, like it was meant to be, Kismet. But you get close to a word in your project, right? And like, how, we almost could call it this. Oh, wait, if we call it management for energy technologies instead of just energy technology. We could call it meat. No. Yeah. Then we can call it something. Oh my goodness. Well, moving from the underground, let's jump into what? Just real quick. Just real quick. If they, instead of using K for permeability, I'd kept it at P and hadn't injected the word management, it would've been pissed. Oh, so maybe they weren't gonna work around something. Yes. How many meetings did that take? I would guess four. Let's have another meeting. Let's put it on the agenda. We've got to talk about this acronym. We need to make an ad hoc working group for the acronym. Can we have an acronym for the working group for the acronym? Oh, bureaucracy. But you know what is better than bureaucracy? A lot of things. Yeah, one of them is your skin. Oh, the largest organ on your body? The largest organ on your body. And here is the question, and I love this. Okay, we lose about 200 million skin cells from our body every hour. Over the course of a day, we potentially lose 5,000 million cells, skin cells. They're falling off of us. We're leaving them behind us. You will know us by the trail of our skin. I've left them in the shoebox. I almost have enough for a whole another person. Okay, so our skin cells, they're falling off all the time, right? So how come our skin isn't leaky? How come our skin is such a wonderful, virtually impermeable barrier? Many, many layers, like all the holes in the Titanic. Oh yeah, there's lots of layers, I mean, if all the layers fit together, some ways it would probably leak, you know? And there are also aspects to the skin where there are connections between the cells, adhesions that are called tight junctions through which nothing's supposed to pass, thou shall not pass. And so when skin cells connect to each other, they create these tight junctions and they create this wonderful barrier. And so yes, many layers, the tight junctions, but still, it doesn't exactly explain it. And so researchers, I've been trying to really kind of figure this out. And so a group out of Kaio University in Japan working with researchers at Imperial College London have determined that it's the shape that is the trick and the shape of your skin cells. Are you ready for it? Is it tetrachydecahedron? Oh, I knew it! Yeah, it's a 14, okay, and it's great. It's a 14-sided 3D solid, three-dimensional ball, but it's 14-sided, you know, 14 sides, six rectangular sides and eight hexagonal sides. Yeah, and they studied mouse skin cells and they used two photon microscopes and they also came up with mathematical models and they were able to figure out that the packing, for the packing of these materials, our cells clumping together in the layers, the way that they stick together, basically having these hexagonal sides and the rectangular sides allows the cells to connect to any other cell. Whenever they touch another skin cell, boom, they can create a tight junction and it's a very tight fit. There aren't gaps that are in between because of the misfit of wrong-sidedness. So anyway, tetrachydecahedron. Yes, and tight. Kind of picture of what that looks like. Yes. Well, I don't know if the 3D aspect will actually pop out at us on the screen, but yes, let's see if we can put a picture up on the screen. I was wondering if it would look kind of like one of the diamond cuts that you see, but it's not a weird, it's like a weird Dungeons and Dragons dice. You know, it's not all evenly sided and it's going to have, it has oddness to it. So we have- That's why there is no 14-sided die in Dungeons and Dragons. Yeah, I have my 20-sided die right here. Yes, so we have rectangular sides and we have hexagonal sides, six-sided, four-sided. And so because of the flatness on the way that it will pack together, it all works. It's super weird. The skin you are in, it's a bunch of flattened tetrachydecahedrons. That's great. That's awesome. Yes, and this article actually, if you're interested, it's going to be published in E-Life, which is an open access journal. So everybody will be able to read it and access the logic of the researchers. Should they so choose? Yeah. Justin, you got another story? I do. How do we tell species apart? Whether they can make babies or not, right? No. You look inside of them. At their genes? Because it turns out- Yeah, their genes. Each- No. No. Turns out each animal species hosts its own unique community of microbes. That can significantly, according to this, improve its health and fitness. But also, what a wonderful tool to test divergence of a species, right? Like, the more divergent its microbiota are, likely the more evolutionarily diverse it could be. It's at least one of those things you could look at to make such a determination. If you have two species that seem like they're very distant from each other, but they have a similar microbiota, well, gosh, maybe they're not as different after all. Anyway, this is the implication of it. Not that, but that it improves health and fitness is the implication of a laboratory study that investigated four different animal groups and their associated microbiota. The research found that each species within the group has a distinctive community. So they also focused in then further on one mammal and one insect demonstrated that individuals possessing their natural microbiota digested food more efficiently and greater survival ability than those that were implanted with the microbial communities of a closely related species. So, right, so they took something like the insect they were studying and transferred over the microbiota from one to the other and it didn't function that well. So that's an interesting key that through evolution we are symbiotic, so much so that they've coined a new phrase here, phylo-symbiosis. According to Seth, board senior associate professor of biological phylo-symbiosis. This is associate professor of biological sciences and pathology, microbiology, immunology. That's a lot of ologies at Vanderbilt University. He directed the study. All animals team with thousands of different species of microbes collectively called the microbiome biologists are actively investigating the extent to which these invisible communities play a significant role in the host animals' life and evolution. They attempt to unravel the evolutionary relationship between hosts and their microbiomes. The Vanderbilt biologists investigated deer mice, fruit flies, mosquitoes and jewel wasps. First, the researchers characterized microbiota of 24 closely related species in the four groups. They then used statistical analysis to determine that the microbial communities form a tree of life that parallels that of their hosts. They also applied the same analysis to dising data on great apes and found a similar pattern. The evidence indicates that the relationship between hosts, microbiomes is not always random but can be shaped by host evolution or perhaps they're laying around, right? Next, the biologists raised colonies of deer mice and jewel wasps in the laboratory under highly controlled conditions. Each group, they transplant the microbes from close to lead species into some of the individuals and compared to how rapidly they grew and how long they lived compared to those who had their microbiota removed and that retained their natural set of microbes. In this fashion, they discovered when the microbial communities from house mice and different deer mice species were transplanted into one species of deer mouse, its ability to digest food was significantly reduced. You would think, right? You would think- I think that's fascinating, yeah. Right, like it's just both, they're both mice. One microbe from this mouse went to that, my microbiome from one mouse, that shouldn't be that significant, right? No, apparently it was. Very specific. As a result, they had to eat more mouse chow to get the energy they required. Similarly, when jewel wasps received transplants from a different related lost species, they had lower survival rates than those that had their natural microbiota. Final word here from Bordenstein, plants and animals evolved in a planet dominated by microbial life. So they had no choice but to tolerate microbes and as we are now discovering, they also evolved the capacity to garden them in order to enhance their health and fitness. That's his view. I actually think it was the other way around. We were probably more crafted than a microbiota happened to be. Absolutely, we're little spaceships. Yep. And not just humans, but anything bigger than the microbes is a potential spaceship. Yeah. Absolutely. Wow, yeah, that's what I find really interesting is the kind of optimization effect that even related species, the microbiota transplants, it didn't work. Even this very related fruit flies, very related mosquitoes, whatever, that their digestion, their metabolism was impacted by that transplant. That's fascinating. We are optimized. Optimized machines. I'm gonna tell you. Yeah, it makes you wonder too. It makes you wonder too, when antibiotics do sort of that cleanse of the human microbiome, what we end up with after, how well tool does it to help our digestive, to help our health? We have so much to learn in this field. Fascinating. Fascinating well to dip into for this week in science for many years to come. Antibiotics help our health because we don't die, but then we have to come back from it. So there are other effects to consider, but basically if we can keep alive, that's great. That's level one. Level one, am I alive? Doesn't really matter if you have a stomach ache if you're dead, right? Well, yeah, no, no, I'm not saying that, but what I am saying though is like, how hard would it be to create a little clone of your microbiome that you can... Right. Oh yeah, Dr. Justin's poop pills. Well, Dr. Justin's poop pills, but I think really specifically for Blair, you would want Dr. Blair is not a real doctor poop pills to be somewhere where you could get to them. See, no, Dr. Justin is collecting stool samples at this time to hold them in reserve for his poop pills, specifically designed for each of you. Individualized medicine is the way for the future. Yeah. You guys heard it here first. I went on. I've done 30 different specialty diets this year just to account for all types of humans. Oh my goodness. Well, not accounting for humans, but maybe someday, guess what? We cured something in mice. Oh great, what? Humophilia. Ooh. Wait, what? Yeah, using the CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing system, researchers at the Penn Gene Therapy Program, they have been able to cure mice. They've been able to basically put the protein back in that leads to coagulation. Humophilia, the problem, your blood does not coagulate because there's a protein, a lacking protein, or a malfunctioning protein. And hemophilia B, the disorder is also called factor nine deficiency. It's this missing or defective clotting protein. And they have put it back in. They have put it back in. And the way they did it is so cool. They used a two vector approach. So they used a first, so the vector is the thing that gets you tuned into the appropriate part of the body and the appropriate part of the genome that you want to be addressing. So they used one vector that expresses the SA-Cas9 gene, driven by a liver-specific promoter. So all this Cas9 gene editing stuff would go to the liver, which is where this clotting factor is supposed to come from. It's not gonna go insert itself into any other part of the body. It's just gonna go to the liver. So that's cool thing number one. The vector two, they has an RNA sequence that specifically targets this region at the five prime end of exon two of the mouse factor nine gene and a partial human factor nine CDNA sequence that actually makes it more accurate so that it's not just scattershotting into the genome, but very specifically hitting its target and going into the space where the factor nine gene is supposed to be or is misfolded or miswritten in the genome. So they used this and were able to put it into the genome and their mice coagulated. It all works. And they used increasing doses of these vectors in newborn and adult mice. These mice showed stable factor nine activity out over four months and eight weeks after the vector treatment, they did a partial liver removal on a subgroup of the newborn and adult mice and all of them survived without any complications or any need for interventions, say clotting factors, externally applied clotting factors and they continued to express this factor nine at normal levels. So this is big, big news because basically in the report, the first author says, basically we cured the mice. Boom, done. All right, let me not get into the specifics here. We fixed it. Fixed it, we fixed it in mice, but this means that it's not, I mean, it's still years off from being something that could potentially be applied to people, but the fact that it worked so well in mice, it implies that this is a possibility for humans in the future. Years off sounds great. That sounds like tomorrow, basically. That's awesome. Yeah, so. There's a kid I grew up with who had, who's in the infilia, right? And it was one of those weird things. When he knew it, but she didn't really know what that meant exactly until he got the smallest like scrape on his arm and the kind of thing that you just have a scab on, like pretty quick, just as soon as like the air touched it pretty much, he'd be starting to scab up and he just kept bleeding. And it was a, it was, you know, you know, like a scrape from falling off the bike or something like that. One of those things that you just spit on it and move on, you know, go to the doctor. You know, I think it was like, it was, it turned into a scary situation as he just kept bleeding. It was frightening. It's hard to even imagine what that's like. Uh-oh, all the times that I've cut myself, I've been like, oh my gosh, what's going on? Like all the time. That was great. I ripped the vehicle. I have to go to the doctor. We are, we aren't quite leaky at times. Yeah. There you go. Usually that leakiness has to do with, has to do with sharp objects. Yes. Yeah. Oh, and something from that story that I completely forgot to mention about the skin and the tight junctions, that this could have implications in, the research of the skin shape could have implications for understanding of skin problems, like, you know, the itchy skin. Eczema. Eczema, yes. Which could be an overproduction of some, some aspect of tight junctions in the cells. So. Oh, interesting. Psoriasis and eczema might be opposite sides of the same problem, but related to this. Very interesting. Yes, and that is the interesting, I totally forgot to mention that earlier. Dunno. Running back around. How do we hear the rest? Now you hear the rest of the story, exactly. Into the short end of the show stories, I have a quick story here about tiny tubes, tiny tubes and boiling water. How hot does the water have to be to boil? 120 degrees. Ah, no, wrong. Wait, is that Celsius? Am I confused? That's 100 degrees Celsius. It's 100 Celsius. And then like 161-ish or something? No, it's 232. Oh no, I'm a bad scientist. 100 degrees Celsius, you guys got that. Good job. 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Wow, that's really hot. That's how hot I thought it was. But. It's like just hit the math on the Celsius. But then we also have the freezing point of water, right? The freezing point of water. Zero. Good job, there you go Blair. We got it. 32. Negative 40 if it's Celsius. There we go. No. Zero degrees Celsius. 32 degrees Fahrenheit for freezing, right? A team at MIT has actually gotten water to freeze and not really freeze but crystallize at higher than 100 degrees Celsius. Possibly at as high as 100. Freezing hot water. As high as 151 degrees Celsius. So freezing water. They froze what should be steam. They froze coffee. Yes, no, no, it's just water. But the trick is that they put the water in little tiny nanotubes. Oh, so they couldn't move around the little molecules. And so they think that might be part of it, exactly. It's not, but it can get to boiling. So 100 degrees, it got up to 101, 102 degrees. We've got boiling water. But then somewhere around 100, 500 Celsius degrees Celsius. Around 105, 106 degrees Celsius, suddenly there is a phase change within the nanotubes. The freezing point is shifted or this crystallization phase change occurs at a much higher point because of the structure of the nanotubes. And they actually found that the size of the nanotubes, 1.05 nanometers versus 1.06 nanometers in diameter made a difference of tens of degrees. Okay, so I have a question. It's like they measured the temperature of this. Does this mean the order of phases was altered in this environment? So instead of going solid, liquid gas, it went liquid solid? That's a great question, but I don't think so. I think it's a phase that's put in there. Oh, okay, okay. Yeah. And the solid doesn't melt until, okay, so the solid doesn't melt until well above the normal boiling point of water. I see, I see, I see. Okay, I was about to be like. Yes, this is the way, this is the way. This is the way. So normally you would expect the phase change, the phase change that takes place, you have zero to 30, zero degrees Celsius, 32 degrees. That's the phase change from crystallized or frozen water to liquid water, right? And you have liquid water that gets hotter and hotter and hotter and hotter as you increase the temperature. And then at 100 degrees Celsius, 212 degrees Fahrenheit, you undergo another phase change and that's when you go from the liquid to the gas. And so instead at this point, it's inside the nanotubes and you heat it up and heat it up, but it's just crystallized water within the nanotubes. But then eventually at much higher temperatures, it does become liquid. So the nanotubes shift the phase points upward. Yeah, so they're saying it should be possible to make ice wires that would be, that could be used to- Ice wires. Ice wires that could be used to carry protons, water conducts protons about 10 times more readily than typical conductive materials. And so the researchers are saying that this would give us really at room temperature, it wouldn't be liquid water, it'd be this crystallized water. So the wires would be very stable. So you could create these nanotube wires with frozen water, quote unquote, frozen water inside of them and they could be these really cool, useful wires. So if I broke one of those tubes, would everything turn to liquid and spill out? Probably, I don't know. This is not something I know. Let's have someone on to talk about these nanotubes. I have many questions. I know, I mean, we have Will Dickel in the chat room right now and he's saying that water can line up in the nanotubes by hydrogen bonding and that it's not the same as the bulk crystalline structure. So that it's not the same kind of structure that you get when you have the oxygen and the two hydrogen atoms for the way that they crystallize into what you would imagine is the crystalline lattice of ice. It's not going to create that same thing. So this is some neat work out of MIT nanotubes, making high temperature ice. Potentially someday we'll have ice wires. Blair, what you got? You know how you have your two phases of life, right? You have growth and then you have sex and die. Those are your two phases of life. Grow. It's a whole phase of life lumped together and have sex and die. Have sex and die. Well, it might not be true for humans, strictly speaking, but it's true for a lot of invertebrates. They are terminal breeders. So they have their growth phase, and then they have their reproductive phase, which is immediately followed by death. Those are terminal breeders. I think of the Mayfly. Yes, or we've talked a lot about cephalopods that are this way, a lot of cephalopods. All octopuses, except for one so far that we found are terminal breeders. So all these animals that are terminal breeders, many spiders we've talked about on the show too, they have their growth phase. They have their sex and death phase. And researchers from the University of Vienna wanted to see what caused this drastic switch in their life history, in their tactics, let's say. And they found that it was a hormone, the molecule methyl farnessoate MF. That represses the production of yolk protein in female bristle worms. They're looking at bristle worms. So it represses the production of yolk so that interferes with the energy costly step of reproduction. So they're in their growth phase. They don't want to be in the reproduction phase. And then the MF switches off. And then they are allowed to go into reproductive phase. And then they have sex and death phase. So where this becomes especially interesting is that MF is actually not a new discovery to us. MF is the thing that is in many insecticides to repress the hormone pathway to keep pests from reproducing. Particularly things like mosquitoes, even more particularly tiger mosquitoes, the transit zika. The insecticides are supposed to prevent the mosquitoes from reproducing. So it prevents them to switching into this reproductive phase. That is kind of an issue. Because if we're using this insecticide for pests, but it is also something that can prevent animals from going into the reproductive stage that are not pests, that could have a huge impact on environments. So there could be a huge ecosystem impact from deciding to shut down the reproductive stage of all these animals. Because there are other animals that also respond to this hormone signal. Yay. So the next step of the research is to see how widespread this hormone is in other animal groups related to these bristleworms. That's things like snails, mussels, other animals that potentially have a large impact on their ecosystem. Mussels are filter feeders. They're incredibly important to water clarity for animals. So anything, animals and particularly plants, plants that photosynthesize, that give us oxygen, that live in the water, they depend on mussels to increase clarity in water so that sunlight can get to the plants underwater so they can grow. So if this is something that could be affecting mussels in runoff, that's something we absolutely need to know. So it's interesting that it all boils down to this one hormone. But let's face it, it's pretty much most things boil down to hormones, I feel like. Yeah, but this gets at that kind of fear of when researchers say, oh, this is something that's only going to, this only affects insects. So we can use this. It's going to be our insect animal control agent. And then we don't know everything. Whoopsie. Yeah, yeah. This could have bigger, wider, broader consequences. Interesting. Love to, but this is not the NDLBL study. This is the open door to more investigation. Oh, show. A new study has potentially given us a doorway also to get us closer to nuclear fusion. Researchers are looking at the Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, PPPL, and Princeton University. They've been looking at something called magnetic reconnection. And magnetic reconnection occurs in nature when magnetic field lines move apart and then reconnect. And in nature, we talk about things like solar flares, are a product of magnetic reconnection in the sun. So the magnetic field of the sun is going through these very dynamic movements. And so these magnetic field lines move apart and then we'll snap back together and reconnect. And so understanding the dynamics of how this works can help us actually control the magnetic fields within things like Tokamax that we are using to use magnetic fields to contain plasma. And if we can contain the plasma and not have weird magnetic reconnection that takes place, then potentially, we can have sustained nuclear fusion as opposed to short bouts of it that are then disturbed by random magnetic events messing it all up energetically. What's a Tokamax? Tokamax. These are spherical high energy physics plasma containment units that basically they're used for plasma physics experiments, but they are building large Tokamax to look into the possibility of contained sustained nuclear fusion by using the plasma to be able to actually tone in. And Europe is working on kind of a large Tokamax reactor for nuclear fusion. So anyway, understanding how to not break the fields, how to keep magnetic reconnection from taking place, that will help us understand it. So they had a huge finding that's going to get us just another step closer in how we do it. And then my final story, more large energy physics LIGO, the large inforometer gravity observatory that has given us evidence of gravitational waves. It's back online doing science again. They have upgraded and increased their sensitivity by 25%. So in the last year, we reported not one, but two events that were witnessed to form gravitational waves, the merging of black holes. And so now that they're doing the science again, higher sensitivity, hopefully we'll see more. I'm looking forward to more reports from LIGO in 2017. Yeah, maybe some predictions about that will be coming down the pipe. Definitely be finding gravity waves with LIGO next year. Definitely. Thanks, Justin. So next month, and now that we're at the end of the show, next month is December. That's tomorrow. So for some of you, you're already in tomorrow. So I hope you're having a good time in December already. But coming up, we have special shows coming up. End of the year, 28th of December is our 2016 Year in Review show, where we will be reviewing all of the awesome science from 2016, picking our top 11 stories. You don't want to miss that show for sure. And then our first show for 2017 will be the Prediction show. So look forward to our prognostication one month from now. And don't forget, everyone, these calendars for 2016, they were amazing. And next year's calendar is here. You too can enjoy a calendar just like this. Go to twist.org if you are interested in finding out more about the 2017 twist calendar. We are also going to be visiting San Francisco for the SF Sketch Fest on January 19th. And you can find information about that at the SF Sketch Fest website. I'll also have a posting about that soon on the twist.org website. Just go to twist.org. That's where you find all the information about the things and the stuff. We did it. Another show. 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Thank you for all of your support on Patreon. And if you're interested in supporting us, you can find information at patreon.com slash this week in science. Also remember, you can help us out just by telling your friends about twists. And on next week's show, we, oh wait, Blair's not gonna be here. I'll be in the most magical place on earth. That's right. Ignoring the fact that I am turning... Another number old. Another number old into a new tens column. That's right, but you know, Justin and I will be here. Right, Justin? Yeah, we're already in the 30s. We're already, that's right. Yeah, already. I'm just joining you guys. Yeah, you've got a ways to go. Yeah, I hope you warmed it up for me. Oh, tell me about, tell me about it. Actually, don't go in right now. You might wanna wait a little bit. Okay, so anyway, we'll be broadcasting live online next Wednesday at 8 p.m. Pacific Time on twist.org slash live. You can watch and join our chat room. Don't worry if you can't make it because you can find all of our past episodes at twist.org slash YouTube or just twist.org. Yes, thanks for enjoying the show. Twist is also available, of course, as a podcast. Just Google this week in science in your iTunes directory, and there we will be. If you have a mobile device, say an Android phone. You could look for twist, number four, Droid app in the Android Marketplace or simply again, this week in science in anything Apple Marketplace-y. For more information on anything that you've heard here today, show notes will be available on our website that we keep mentioning. What is it? It's www.twist.org, where you can also make comments and start conversations with the hosts and other listeners. That's www.twist.org. Or you can contact us directly, email kirsten.kirsten at thisweekinscience.com, Justin at twistmedian at gmail.com or Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org. 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I've got a long list of items I want to address. From stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness. I'm trying to promote more rational thought. And I'll try to answer any question you've got. But how can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one? This Week in Science. Science, science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Science, science. This Week in Science. Week in Science. This Week in Science. I'm here to do a whole show again. Start your music. And it just layers animal corner on loop all night long. OK. 24 hours of animals. Instead of that, I know you're going to leave early. Blair's going to go a little early. This is the after show, everyone. I don't know how long it's going to go on tonight as Blair has things that she must take care of. So, yeah. I love you all. And you're not, you're leaving early. And I know double whammy. But I'll be back in two weeks. By then we will have sold out of calendars because I wanted to sell out before my birthday. So, right? That's going to happen. So, everyone else, work on that. Yeah, hopefully we got to work on that for you, right? Yeah. Before the 12th, I got to try and do that. That's two weeks of two weeks of solid calendar sales. Yeah. Work it. Do it. And then everyone follow my Instagram and Twitter and Facebook for Disneyland pictures of me and my mom running around loving Disneyland. I love how you say it. And you've got, you just like, Disneyland. Oh, I've started at Disneyland. I don't understand. I don't get it. I started at GoFundMe thing. I can't live in Disneyland. For, for, if it's still there, if the thing is still going on in Standing Rock come January, I've been on visiting. So I did at GoFundMe to have a war chest of stuff because I'm from California and I own flip flops and shorts and not, not Arctic weather tents and sleeping bags. North Dakota frigid winter clothing. For the North Dakota January winter. If, if, if things are one way or the other resolved before then, I won't be going, but the funds would just be donated to the tribe. We'll probably have a tremendous amount of clean up to do. Yeah. In regard to this. Nice. Cool. Cool, cool. Okay. Claire. We're going to have to save your blonde wig for two weeks from now. Yeah. Yeah. I'll do it. I'll do it when I'm 30. Hot Rod saying blonde wig. Okay. Where's the blonde wig? When I'm 30. When you're 30. I'll be a blonde when I'm 30. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Good night, everybody. Good night. Good night, Claire. Good night. Whiskey renegade. Oh, teaser story about replacing species separation. No, I think it was just talking about different species stories. Like, Mine was about, Mine was about how. Biota. Yeah. Mine was about how you might be able to, without even knowing the species. Knowing anything about morphology that you're studying. Look at the microbes of two different creatures and call them different species. Or two things that maybe look very similar if they have very different microbiota. It could be that they have different evolution in the past. Another thing to look at. Oh, I wish I'd had this up when I was talking about, I just found it. It's hard for me to do the screen sharing on my own stories. I'm talking about them, but this is cool talking about the skin study. How they did it. They've got microscopy. I mean, people have looked at the skin before, but not in quite the same way. Flattened little weird dungeons and dragons die. That's what we're made of. Who is here still? What is going on? So let's see. Things that I need to do. I've got calendars to start mailing out. Need to reply to some calendar emails that people had. Questions they had about ordering. I will answer all questions in due time. Before Christmas. Before Blair's birthday. For sure. Oh. Dick tells us, joined while we were talking about the shape of the skin cells. Yeah, that the forces involved that the skin cells. I just closed the study, but the. Yeah, the tetrachydecahedron is just fascinating. Hexagonal and rectangle rectangular surfaces. Allow it to pack more densely and closely. So that at any point. The cells are able to, to, to contact each other and make a tight junction and be able to adhere to each other. To actually optimize. Their anti leak, the anti leaking function of the skin. Yeah, so the, I guess the forces that are involved in it. From the abstract. Yeah, just basically optimization so that the tight junction barrier works better. Shapes. Yeah. In multi cellular organisms cells adopt various shapes from flatten sheet, flatten sheets of endothelium to dendritic neurons that allow the cells to function effectively. Here we elucidated the unique shape of cells in the cornified stratified epithelia of the mammalian epidermis that allows them to achieve homeostasis of the tight junction barrier. We propose a spatio temporal orchestration model. Of these cell, of cell turnover where the classic context of form follows function. Cell shape provides a fundamental basis for the barrier. Homeostasis and physical strength of the cornified stratified epithelia. It's cool. Oh yeah, that would be awesome. If you could make a diktel saying in the chat room, he's thinking of weight, thinking of way to try and make a molecule with the shape. That would be neat. What is, it's a fascinating molecule, yeah. Structure. Ron sadly, or Rob sadly in Salem. So this helped my skin look like it did when I was in my 20s. No, but I mean, we talk about the interior of the skin, the cellulose that is inside of your skin cells and how the cells actually, each individually are hydrated and hold water and how they're structurally sound. So we know as we get older, the material in the cells starts breaking down. So the cells themselves are weaker. And so potentially, if you could figure out how to, not cellulose, cellulose is in plants. What's the molecule I'm thinking of? In skin. A molecule in skin. Yeah, it's not cellulose. Cellulose is in plants. Cellulose is not in people, but it's, it starts with, I think it starts with a C and I'm totally blanking on it. Skin. I was, I was, I was afraid to raise my hand in the back of the class. Collagen. Collagen is the first part of the lecture, but my mind was sort of wandering going like, well, it's one of those things I really didn't know. Thank you, Rob sadly. Yes, collagen. So the collagen in our skin breaks down. And so this is, you know, these are the internal filaments and the things in, where there's actin in there too, but there's collagen in the skin cells, the firming molecule, right? For our firm skin cells. So you want, and it breaks down as you get older. So potentially the structural molecules inside these skin cells, if you figure out how to keep those propped up, then you prop up the overall structure, right? And then yes, your skin looks firm and plump and like in your twenties. And this is going to be one of those areas of research that will either be forthcoming as longevity increases, because people won't want to live to 300 years if they're wrinkly most of the time, or our perception beauty will simply change. So that until you have your wrinkles. You're not pretty. You're just a baby. Flat skin baby. Oh, nobody's going to date you with that flat skin. You'll have people like trying to get wrinkles like earlier, so they can join greater society. I mean, who knows which way it'll go. Yeah. Dictal saying they recently found that graphene oxide does weird cells to weird things to cell membranes. And I wonder if it would disrupt skin. I'm going to suggest you don't go rub it on your hands to find out, right? Yeah, consider if what kind of weird things, what does it do to cell membranes? I don't know. I mean the question is, yeah, what does it do to the cell membranes? Potentially. Potentially. That could be bad. Something worth figuring out. Rob, sadly, and say, humans are too vain. Yeah. We are. And I wonder, well, okay, I disagree. I totally agree and I disagree at the same time. I mean, I agree that we're vain, but I think the reason humans are vain is because we have a level of self-awareness that you don't see in things that aren't humans. And things that aren't humans, appearance is very important to procreation status and all these sorts of things. So it just plays out. The bird with the right feather stripes or right coloration or the brighter color of that, you know, it does better, has more mates, whatever, take this any direction. The fact that we're aware of humans, not only that these things have an impact, but of our perhaps perceived beauty from others or parents, makes it so that we focus a lot on that so that we can, as we do with everything, hack it. We want to hack our beauty with fake eyelashes and makeup and a certain type of hairdo and the clothes that we wear or maybe the car that you drive or all these vain, status-y symbol things that we have in our society are from the ape world, okay? These are important factors in apeness. And being humans, whether we're actually aware that we're being aware of this or just, you know, animal brain is like, hmm, we must attract more mates. Best way to do it, sports car, you know, like we may not be entirely aware that we're doing it, but it is, I think, the self-awareness that pushes us, pushes us, nudges us ever so in vain direction. I mean, I'm vain. I think we all are. To some varying degree. Yeah, to varying degrees, absolutely. I mean, yeah. I could just eat whatever I want, and I don't... To talk like that. That would be enough. Talk like that. Do whatever I want. I can do what I want. Well, you know, and it's minor, it can be minor stuff too. Like, my girl just noticed that I had this neck hair that was about two inches long or something. It was like this really long, which I apparently can't see anymore when I do my morning shave. I don't normally shave my neck. I'm not a very hairy person to begin with. I don't have to spend much time shaving, but apparently some neck hair had gone on. And when she noticed it, I got really like, how did this happen? How do I have a neck? Not that I actually care, but like, you know, one thing I do is that one vain thing that I do, I guess, is I shave. I like to be smooth. And the fact that somehow in my ritual of shaving daily, I missed this thing that continued to grow out of the neck was caught me. Maybe subconsciously, you were just letting it grow. I'm going to get a little hair. I do have a little hair grow, be free. Where's my, oh my gosh, I've lost track of, I do have like a, maybe it's on my arm. I have a pubic hair that goes out of my arm. It's like one, one, or like, you know, like how some men have like coarse thick black hairs growing on their arms. I've only got one. And it's like up here somewhere. It's always, it's not a vain thing. I don't know why I'm talking about it. It's a hair with its own agenda. Thank you, Jesus. You're not obviously too vain about it. I love having Jesus. I love having Jesus in the chat room. Because it's like you can quote Jesus on stuff. That's right. Jesus never has been quoted on before. Jesus said that the hair on my arm has its own agenda. It's trying to reach out to other people. Yeah. Thank you, Jesus. I'm looking at this link that Dick helped put in the, in the chat room about the graphene oxide and how it affects the cell membrane of mammalian cells. Interesting. I'd wonder, I would like to know what it does to skin cells. That's fascinating. Oh, full text for free. Awesome. I like full text for free. There are things to have red hair, black eyebrows, and blonde arm and leg hairs. That is, unless you've been to, oh, and you're Hispanic. Well, I hate to break this, too, Jesus. But Hispanic isn't a thing. And when I say that, I mean, I mean that quite literally. Hispanic isn't like being a Norwegian. Hispanic means you're, you're in a melting pot of different humanities who traversed many, many, you know what I mean? Like it's, it's one of those places. Culturally. Culturally you can be, I guess. Culturally and, culturally and ancestrally. You can. Ancestrally is what I'm talking about. But that's going way back, but you're going way back. Well, I don't know how far back I'm going. Hispanic is one of those things that is so largely Native American or not, or Spanish or not, or, you know, French or not, or Dutch or not, or depending on where the origin of your Hispanic is, you know, if we're talking off the coast of the Caribbean, then it could be Caribbean, you know, which may be Dutch traders. Like it's Native Americans. Interesting. That'd be cool. 23 and me or something. What's the. You should totally 23 and me. But dark. Spit in a tube and check your DNA. It's awesome. So this is one of those interesting things. Me and guys, we're just, Eva Longoria. Some parents share a mother. There's the, it's the maternal haplogroup A2, which goes all the way back to the first six women or groups, a group of women that came to the Americas. It's one of the original populations. We both have this, which is incredible. It's mother to mother to mother to mother to mother to mother. It doesn't pass. But sons can't pass it. So I have the A2, but it's an unbroken chain of mothers back to the first mothers and the Americas. Right. It's also found in a young Incan girl. They found maybe sacrificed, but they always say sacrifice when it's a tomb of somebody who's in that way. And the Incan mummy girl had the A2. Eva Longoria. Longoria has this too. And she actually found out she has a very large Native American hit on her, on her genes that and the Native American genes are pretty, pretty evident. They're not shared almost anywhere in the world. There's some crossage to like Siberian, ancient Siberian and ancient Mongolian or a little bit of Eastern Asia. But for the most part, if you have Native American DNA, it's pretty, pretty blatantly Native American. So, so the interesting thing, dark, well, I'm not even going to call it that's redundant. That's just redundant. Just Jesus. It's the first part of your name is just redundant. So, but, but yeah, Jesus, it's one of those interesting things where there's, there's, there's no such thing as specific people. Very large extent. A lot of it is, a lot of it is false. There's been, like we were talking about with the apes and the hominins, early hominins and later hominins. There was so much cross mingling. There's, it's really almost impossible. I mean, the people who call themselves British might, you know, be like, oh, I want to get to my Celtic roots. But now you actually have more Germanic and Scandinavian roots. And you're British. Like that's why you're British. Not because of anything Celtic. Like those people might not be in your bloodline at all. Like the thing about people that we all have to understand is that we will have sex with anybody on some level, on some level in his story. Be for yourself. But I mean, we're not, we, there is no, like, there are, there's no group of people who are truly unique up into themselves for their genes. And so we're all, we're all a big family. Now brothers and sisters. Which is what I was, I was, I don't know, like, I was kind of getting at that with the philosophical question earlier. You know, What was the philosophical question again? We got rid of, you know, the idea of species, you know, could we also then, you know, and we decided that everything was just a big genetic mixing pot. You know, every, you know, every species is not really, it is a, it is a containment unit for a specific subset of these things that can be mixed and matched in any which way. And you've got a continuum of life, a web, a, you know, very interest intricate three dimensional web of life. That is, are these genetic units, you know, can we get rid of the idea of race? Could we get rid of this? They are the idea of the things that, that culturally we use to separate. Speaking of which, speaking of which, speaking of which, know what to be really fascinated to have a Neanderthal back for? What? I'm going to tell. To clone Neanderthal, right? To, to bring Neanderthals back. You know what to be really fascinated to see? Whether or not their fingers wrinkle in water. Oh, interesting. Right. So, so. I mean, could we bring Lucy back and find that out? You know, could, how far back door? Yeah, I bet Lucy didn't. I mean apes don't. This doesn't happen in apes. It doesn't happen in apes. Yeah. No, and, and what's really fascinating is there's this, what is it called? Pinnacle? Culture? What is it called? Pinnacle people? Can't remember what the name is. Something like that. Like, ask, something high up. Anyway, South African, well before the exodus from Africa. And there's evidence of them catching deep water fish. Like these people were diving down. You know, they were, they, they ate like mostly. Mostly like seafood. They were Southern coast of South Africa. By the, you know, in these, these hills and things are these cave systems right next to the coast. And they did fishing. They were fishers, you know, and, and what was sort of fascinating is I've always thought this, right? And we've talked about this, about how so much of archaeology has got to be underwater archaeology. And if we, if we are far out of Africa story and it's clearly there for the Aborigines, they followed coastline everywhere. Why do you follow a coastline? Because you live off of fish. Right? That's why you follow a coastline, because that's where your food is. If some hundreds of thousands of years of fishing and clamming created that need for our, as we know, it's not permeation of skin cells. Those are too tight. It's a nerve reaction in the head of the hand being in water that creates the wrinkly skin on the fingertips. And it creates better traction. Wicks water off better. And you can pick things up and grab things better. Like fishes. Grab those fishes, like gollum, gollum. What they call this, you know, like early man was a hunter gatherer. Probably not. Probably early man was a hunter fisher. Also, you can see this in our reproduction. Our reproduction was much greater than that of Neanderthals, right? Why? Well, Neanderthals were hunters. They didn't gather nothing. They hunted things. In a hunter society, you know, it makes sense to have your, your younger, and it's one of those things. They found a Neanderthal they thought was 14, turned out to be 8. Because they age really quickly. They have like full-sized human brain capacity by 8. Right? Even though they have a body of a 14-year-old. You have to be on the move. You have to keep following that, that game. You gotta, you gotta follow the, the mastodon or the whatever it is you're eating. And you can't do that effectively if you have a big group with a lot of young that take a long time to mature. However, if you're a fisher gatherer, a 5-year-old can pick berries. A 10-year-old can fish. So it allows you to have larger populations. Most of the evidence of this, of course, is going to be missing from our archaeological record because it's all underwater now. It's all along coasts that are now underwater. And you can't, I mean, that's why I thought that 9,000-year-old fishing trap in Sweden was so fascinating. You know, it proves that we had a pretty advanced ability to capture from the sea 9,000 years ago a technology that didn't show up again on the record for a long time after that. So, so I wonder, this is one of those fascinating things, like we, we know that Neanderthals eventually did start to eat different plants and stuff, but this might have been during the cultural exchange, right? We started hunting big game, but we might not have spent hunting big game until we met Neanderthals. They might have taught us to hunt. They might, we might have taught them, oh, you can make sense why we out outproduced them, why we were more fertile. Those things that we look at as saying, well, Neanderthals had genes that made them bit and fertile. It was actually an evolutionary advantage to them so they could stay on the moves. They had smaller population sizes so that they didn't have to wait for the young or carry their young during the hunt or during chasing game. They had to be small groups very mobile and that's why they survived so long. But the fact that humans were so productive tells you and informs the history of humanity that we were utilizing the youth to gather resources and that it was okay if we stayed in one place for a while which, which you would see in something like what you see in the population explosion during farming and agriculture much later, but the precursor would have been fishing and gathering in the early stages. So my, so the whole rant I think started with fingertips and I'll end there. I'd be very curious. I bet you and Neanderthal fingers do not wrinkle. I bet that's a modern human unique characteristic that developed during a prolonged period of relying on the sea and it would be interesting. I don't know. Neanderthals probably wouldn't have it either. Right. I don't think they'd have it and it would be interesting to see that and I'd be interesting to know if there's a gene that we can identify. It's so hard to consider that though because this is a brain reaction telling nerves to do something. I don't know if that has a genetic imprint. I don't know. Sure it would. Sure it would. Okay. So I'd love to be able to isolate and this is the so we got to do this. I'd love to isolate what that gene is and see if it shows up in Neanderthals or is missing. I bet it's missing. That's good. No oh god did somebody start are they talking about our earliest embryo stage we still have gill slits yes. Although I don't believe please nobody mistake this for the what is it the sea ape whatever what's the thing that humans like subsisted in the ocean for a thousand years. Yeah aquatic ape no stop that's not all it took was a lot of fishing otherwise we would are everything is wrong being in the ocean for any period of time. Unless unless humans had the ability to drink saltwater if humans could drink saltwater no other species could you go aha something must have but that's not how no that doesn't uh yeah monkeys can swim to some degree but then he can like so can elephants right like elephants are pretty decent swimmers so swimming is the thing that crosses a lot of you know waters the thing that all mermaids do exist benrothic but why do we always talk about mermaids why not mermans because I'll talk about merman I understand it's a mermaid hierarchy system but let's give some credit to the mermans they you know they raised the young they do do you think the mermen are the ones who are sticking around with the young that's why you that's why you always see mermaids and mermaids or mermaids don't see mermaids you don't see mermen I assume that they're hanging out together and the mermaids are going out and about doing the fishing or whatever you say oh the gulls yeah the only thing I know about the gulls is from the asterisk the asterisk comic book otherwise there would not know that they exist dark sin jesus again done it just jesus do you think that fire was discovered by accident in the cooking of meat for that matter I think someone tripped while carrying an animal carcass and the meat fell on the fire and they were like ah you know I actually I think that's a great question and and I do have I do have it of course theory opinion on this or course you do opinion my hypothesis on that is that fire was likely been early on utilized by modern humans because we weren't hunters it was likely utilized because we were scavengers and the early human oh yeah stone cutting tools that we were using to pull meat off of stuff and the evidence on bones was likely done on carcasses and the thing about old meat is that it could have infestations with bugs what have you but if you cook the heck out of it you can survive so those who were trying to cook the infestation or burn out the bugs from their meat are the ones that survive and that's why we have ah fire I think this is this is this is why I think it is this is the early modern human portion of it at least probably sucked it actually hunting anything and had to wait for an animal to already have been laid out dead ah under the savannah sun or wherever the heck it found it probably had to had to cook the heck out of the meat just to survive we found things burnt tasted great oh dear we found it that way we decided to do it again hey that link didn't work let me see if that works again strengths is it just too long of a oh there it is oh wait what kiva go when the twist google plus community has posted layers animated doppelganger how interesting I should head over I don't ever go to the twist google community we have a twist google how many people are people are posting over there you're a member ah by the way thanks ad for donating then Justin rock campaign appreciated the mention ah appreciated the mention it's actually all twist people ah Pamela's in there I don't know if he wants to be named but uh josea is there josea you know that's sweet josea posted on facebook today that he today or tomorrow he was going to be talking with the FDA about one of his um his crisper his crisper yeast kit yes genetically modified um kit that he's creating so he's got a meeting with the FDA we'll hear about whether that's good or bad we gotta have him back on too can I tell you aside from the fact that you just um you know can't put the answers you just donated for the uh now let's put him on the show but I tell his story uh once a week I tell the story about the microbes microbial it also happens I work in a town where I interact with people who are in some form of research or another quite a bit but I've told his story so many times that uh but yeah I can't wait to see what his next story is right what's the next what's the next thing he's been met he messes with all sorts of stuff it's gotta it's gonna be a good story no matter what that is for sure oh goodness gracious goodness gracious so many things so many things I am going to head out maybe get some sleep maybe read a book Justin left me here alone of course that just happened of course that just happened um so I'm very excited so excited my book isn't here though my book is around the corner so thrilled if you guys know the author Daniel Suarez who he wrote the book demon he just sent me a galley copy of his book that's coming out in 2017 his next book I'm so excited and it's signed and he wrote me a handwritten note Dr. Sanford I hope you enjoy my book Daniel Suarez it's one of the coolest things ever seriously I think he's a great great writer we'll see how this book is it's um it's going to be based on synthetic biology as opposed to um the webs which is what demon technology um the demon was based on in those books oh my goodness so excited she's there's so many things that I want to do and I don't know how I should just do them then I don't have to do to do to things I know Ed it's just fantastic it's very very cool oh reading that renegade no I did not see that let's see wait five Alzheimer's five-year study that just started it was on 60 minutes and they're trying to stop plaques from forming 20 years before the onset onset and patient brains that have a mutation that guarantees they will get the disease yeah that's awesome oh identity four that's right did you get your picture male is the male is a wonderful thing awesome hey Ed that's cool so the minion hangout gets auto-posted to the twist Google plus group I saw it in there that's awesome it's great yeah what else do I have I also got another book by a futurist that's kind of Amy Webb and it's basically a guide on how to be how to be a futurist how to make predictions about trends in the future I don't know how much it's going to help my 2017 predictions but I think it'll be fun to read might be fun to bring her on the show to talk about predictions of trends of sciences how politics affects policy affects scientific research and progress I mean we know that it massively affected stem cell research and progress in that area but you know what'll happen in the future in other areas like Elon musks batteries and solar roofs and self-driving cars you got a banana slug I know which picture you got hold on identity four you got this one I can't hear you you're muted Justin's muted I think that's my favorite so far actually the banana slug the flying banana slug very awesome that you've got the ridge because that one it has a depth to it that a lot of the others don't it's really the slug pops out and he's flying flying banana slug in the forest I love it that's great that's great oh no no no Ed he no one has gotten the calendar yet except for me I have them all I have not mailed any calendars out yet I'm getting to that point I'm organizing myself gonna sit down and crank them out oh I missed something here Jesus says he believes that fire was our first instance of community of gathering to share stories absolutely we hung out cooked rotten meat maybe fish that's a process where you sit around and everybody's waiting to eat something or hanging around for warmth and there's nothing and no other work to be done it's just there to wait for food or enjoy warmth and yeah that's when the conversations get going like we're doing now I'll huddle around the feet of the internet the blue glow of our screams matashuro you fell asleep oh it happens I hope you dreamed of wonderful things I was just thinking I think I need to make we need to make some new holiday carols Christmas carols we'll rewrite some Christmas carols for the Christmas season coming up yeah that's a good idea we need to get cracking on the next CD compilation oh yeah that too have you listened to the songs I submitted yet no still haven't had time just listened to there's some good songs on already I did listen to it I did listen to it yeah I did listen to it Matashuro dreamt of Justin freezing to death in North Dakota this is the reason for the fundraising thing I need a tent that's sufficient to accommodate a wood stove it's all about the shelter it's all about getting a warm shelter actually the ones I found are big enough but you can come with me Matashuro yeah come with me it'll be great chop some wood cook some breakfast deliver firewood I don't know yeah global warming this might be your last chance to see snow we really gotta look at all the possible bright sides well unfortunately there's not trees there they don't have wood actually people donated that was the early donation preference is people donated a lot of wood to the camps but I would try to bring everything I thought I would need for like a month of being there we still need the wood but that's what I'm saying we'd bring some by the time I I'd be going in January probably a lot of the firewood would be gone right so one of the things I would endeavor to bring would be more firewood and apparently there's a big demand for cleats Matajura sent me a link to things that they're requesting which is a lot of boot cleats to be able to manage the new conditions there log cabin out of Lincoln Logs nah yeah I think the issue right now is the Army Corps of Engineers are saying they're not going to evict people but they're going to basically shut down access so well they're not but the local sheriffs from the local sheriffs what they've done is they've stopped clearing the roads of the snow that fell and so now they're saying they're turning back people who are trying to get to the camp roads are unsafe which are only unsafe because they're not doing the thing normally do which is clearing so Matajura points out gets down to like negative 40s so I found a sleeping bag that'll get me part of the way there it's good for negative 25 however again the shelter with the work bonering stove is even if I'm burning wool blankets is going to be the thing that would keep me wet but again also if this is you know January and there's resolve the all funds will go to the people who were the front line of this fight in the Sioux Tribe who's been trying to protect their water if nothing else tremendous amount of cleanup they don't burn a chart okay so I'll burn the long underwear we'll figure it out once you have to choose what to burn to maintain warmth you're already in trouble yeah airdrop Ed that's a possibility also I was thinking maybe it's a half mile hike from from reservation territory that might be something that's possible there's a whole lot of other possibilities but I don't know what they are now because it's still I'm talking about something that's about a month away sled dogs sled dogs are okay but I'm telling you you need to have sledding polar bears if you really want to get anywhere in this world or a sledding or a sledding seal team of say you have seals they're used to the snow they can pull a sled just as well as a dog can don't let yourself speak all right it's time for me to go to bed go to rest good night minions see you all next week thanks everybody for watching and hanging out with us and chatting and I hope everyone has a great week recovering from the last holidays and as we enter the next bit of holidays can't wait to see you all again next week take care thanks thanks Justin oh wait