 It's it's now it's okay. So, let's see. I'm going to wait for people in the chat room to say that they see us. Uh huh. And then and then just this mic stand that I'm going to trip on and fall. Okay. Chat room, can you see us? If you see Kiki, it's the wrong show. Right. Yeah. She won't be joining us tonight. She's having an amazing time and she deserves it at a concert. Also a pre-show note. Yeah. Any of our Canadian listeners, if you could send us whatever paperwork is required to obtain citizenship. We would just like we just want to look it over. We just want to look it over. Just thinking about it. Scroozing. Look it over. Do any of the Canadian zoos need staffing? Or whatever I do. Yeah. Pipetting. Are there any pipetters or swabbers needed? Okay. Are you ready? Uh huh. We're going to do a show now. Yes. Is this is this where it starts? Hold on. Wait, did we already start? I don't know. I'm trying to be ready. I see the whole like Kiki like professional intro thing. Ready? Okay. Here we go. There's a motorcycle. Okay. Could you hear it? Couldn't hear it. No. Couldn't not hear it. Fantastic. All right. This is TWIS. This week in science episode number 675. Recorded on Wednesday, June 13th, 2018. It's science, Daddy-O. Hello, everyone. Dr. Kiki's not with us tonight. I am Blair Basderich, and tonight we will fill your head with world robot domination, Pandora's viral box and philandering birds. But first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Humans are accomplished like remembered for by whichever life form takes sentient center stage in the far flung future. The first thing to remember about trying to accomplish anything yourself is that failure is. Failure is made. Thomas Edison didn't just have a bright idea. Stop, stop, stop. What happened? You froze for the first several seconds of that. Did I really? I didn't freeze on my end. I kept going. You froze twice. Okay. I'm going to start again one more time. Are all of your your plugs plugged in? I have all the everything's. Oh, wait. Yes. Everything's always the way it is. Okay. Nothing's downloading or anything like that. Hey, this is disclaimer about things not working. This is fantastic. Are you ready? Yes. I'm going to start again. Okay. This is TWIS. This week in science episode number 675. Recorded on Wednesday, June 13th, 2018. It's science, Daddy. Oh, hello, everyone. I'm Blair Bazderich. Dr. He is not with us tonight, but tonight we will fill your head with World Robot Domination Pandora's viral box and philandering birds. But first disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Humans are the most accomplished life form on planet Earth. Accomplishing amazing things is what they will be remembered for by whichever life form takes sentient center stage in the far flowing future. The first thing to remember about anything you try to accomplish is that failure is imminent. Failure. The art of getting it wrong is how all good discovery is made. Thomas Edison didn't just have a bright idea for a working light bulb. He invented a thousand dimly lit bulbs until one day he failed to get it wrong. For every accomplishment that seems to show greatness, brilliance, or genius, we must remember that this is the result of a tremendous embrace of failure. That any accomplishment casts a long shadow is only because of how late in the day we are seeing it. Embracing failure, learning from mistakes, and pressing on isn't just the sort of thing that some great inventors do. It's what we all celebrate together. This is the first time we tune into This Week in Science coming up next. Good science to you, Blair. And good science to you, Justin. Welcome everyone to this week's episodes of This Week in Science. We have a great show ahead on this week's show. We have tons of science news. I have stories about artificial intelligence for good, for bad, and maybe some questionable applications. I have information about therapy dogs in veterans with PTSD. And I have lots and lots of science news about science mishaps and what we can learn about it. What do you have, Justin? I have a potential breakthrough in the origins of the genome. They what? Yeah. Volcanic climate, yeah. Lots of nano, what is it? Lucy in the sky with nanodiamonds. And what God really looks like to some people in a survey. Oh my goodness. Okay. Well, as we jump into the show, we're going to get right into it. We do not have Dr. Kiki with us tonight. She is on a much-deserved break from the show this one week. So we've got the helm. Hopefully we can keep it together. Patience will run the asylum. But I will remember, as she would say, that we want to remind all of you that you can subscribe to TWIS on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher Spreaker. Any place you can find podcasts you can find us by searching for This Week in Science. You can also go to twist.org to find out all the places we're available. But first, we are going to start off with some news. I'm actually going to start with, speaking of Justin's disclaimer, I have the perfect science news story to start with tonight. And it's all about when science goes wrong. So we're human, right? Even scientists will admit are humans. And so humans sometimes make mistakes. And there is something that came out on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine looking at retracted and republished studies. In particular, this was one on the Mediterranean diet. And there were actually five other corrections this week as well. Most of them had to do with food science in some way. And separately, Cornell University was investigating some allegations of research misconduct, quote, unquote, against more food marketing and food research studies. So this is kind of a moment to take a step back and look at what happens in research when something is not replicable. And when something looks like there might be something confusing there. Remember, we talk all the time about peer review. And this is exactly what it's for is to make sure that nothing is released within a vacuum in the scientific community. Unless that's part of the experiment. Right. Absolutely. The one that I mentioned from the New England Journal of Medicine, actually after the issue was raised, they kind of did some reassessment and found that it didn't alter conclusions from the paper, which is pretty cool. So they were able to republish with some new edits, but the findings were the same, which is really interesting. So overall, we are seeing that retractions are on the rise. There are about 10 times as many corrections as retractions on the whole, but we are seeing more of both, but they are still on the whole rare. So in 2016, there were 2 million studies published and about 1,350 were retracted. So that's less than a tenth of a percent. But to put it in perspective, that was 1 million papers in the year 2000 with 36 retractions. That's not bad. It's definitely a lot more, but it's still not a lot. The reason that we think this is happening is not that scientists are getting sloppy or that more wrong studies are slipping through the cracks or anything like that. Actually, we think it's because more people are looking, and that's because of the Internet. So people are able to look very easily and very quickly for plagiarism, for manipulated images, for manipulated data, and things are more easily replicated if you have the information readily available on how the study was run. It's also available at your fingertips. You don't have to go to a library and look it up in a research journal. So this is something that's on the rise, but actually we think this is a good thing in science because there are more eyes on studies in general. In the second instance that I mentioned, there were about 11 cases raised in this food journal and 10 of the 11 cases were resolved. Five of those, the challenge was proved incorrect. The other five mostly had terminology errors and things like that that were easily corrected and republished. So an example of one of these things where in the New England Journal of Medicine was that they had a study where they were following people on the Mediterranean diet. And if more than one person in a household wanted to join the study, they would let them, like a spouse or a child. And that meant that their sample size was not random and that certain genetics were overrepresented. And so when they pulled the relatives out, the bottom line remained the same. And so they are now publishing both versions so they can show the family-based data and the not family-based data. So overall, a lot of these researchers looking at this, issuing corrections, these sorts of things, they're not upset, they're impressed with how quickly these things are being resolved and adjusted and how transparent it all is. The reason I brought this up though is that the internet has allowed us to kind of take a magnifying glass to a lot of these things, which is great. But the internet also allows us to think in sound bites. And so I could see how somebody would hear, oh, corrections and retractions on the rise in science and that could discredit science as a whole. But as we've talked about more time and time again on this show, that is what makes science so special and so important, is that it's adjustable to new information. And so this is science doing its job. This is a community coming forward with a study, one study with one sample size. Other people trying to replicate it or looking at the data themselves and growing and the scientific knowledge growing as a result. Yeah. And there's also scientific knowledge in that study where the baseline remained the same once they got rid of the same genetic. I mean, you're actually finding out that it might have something more to do with genetics than the actual diet. Like it's a combo of the two, right? So you even learn something through those mistakes. Absolutely. Yeah. As long as, but it's, yeah. And it was what the disclaimer was all about this week. There is a requirement of embracing getting it wrong over and over and over again in science and invention and pretty much any type of pursuit. You have to bunch before you get it right. Otherwise it would have already been done. Yeah. Yeah. And as people are mentioning in the chat room too, having all of that published online means very easy exporting of data and assessing of data. It also improves data sets in general because you can now engage the public in science. You can have citizen science. You can increase your data sets. So science can only get better as a result of connectivity, but I just want to make sure that everybody's kind of keeping their science hat on. And remembering that correction and addition and kind of asterisks are the way science works. It's really exciting actually. And then my other quick opening story, quick. My other quick story is about, you know, breathing. So breathing, it's something I like to do. That's a good thing. I enjoyed it too. Yeah. So a recent study from New Zealand, from the Forest Service, looked at 50,000 children in New Zealand, looked at asthma rates and looked at greenness of their habitats and non-native versus native plant ratios. What did they find? They found that greenness is correlated with lower rates of asthma. And they found that biodiversity is key to healthier breath. So greenness across a child's life helps protect them from asthma, 6% lower risk of developing the disease. Exposure to diverse natural vegetation across a child's life may also help protect them from disease associated with another 7% reduction in risk. And their expectation for this is because biodiversity increases microbial exposure, which promotes immune function. So this is part of the hygiene hypothesis. And they found no evidence that reduced air pollution was associated with a protective effect, only that this greenness and this biodiversity protected from asthma. Then they looked at non-native land cover types and found with exotic conifers, for example, a 4% higher risk of asthma. So their expectation there is that the non-natives crowd out native species, and also they are more likely to generate pollen depending on the area. So believing that the relationship between biodiversity and health is universal. Because of this hygiene hypothesis, this should be true in theory for countries around the world. So just to let you know as a little bit of context, about 8% of US children suffer from asthma in New Zealand, it's 15%. It's actually a lot more. So it's not a huge percentage of the population, but it's a very decent chunk. And so a 6% and then another 7% reduction in asthma cases could be a big, big deal. Yeah. Yeah, they're my stories. What do you got, Justin? I've got a story. If confirmed, the groundbreaking new hypothesis would explain the source of life on Earth in a way here to unfathom and rewrite the history of evolution. Well, maybe it could do this. It centers on a somewhat recent discovery of giant Pandora viruses. This is a strange family of viruses have giant genomes. Many genes that they have have no equivalent elsewhere in the known genome. And it turns out these Pandora viruses may be gene factories. So 2013 discovery of two giant viruses unlike anything seen before blurred the line between the viral and the cellular world. Pandora viruses are as big as bacteria. They contain genomes that are more complex than those found in some eukaryotic organisms. They're strange and for a shape and enormous atypical genome led scientists to wonder where did these come from? What are they doing with all this genetic information? And they're just a virus. So the same team has since isolated more members of some in France, Germany and Australia and they compared with the six now known giant viruses to each other. Despite having very similar shapes functions, these viruses only share half of their genes coding for proteins. Usually members of the same family have many, many more genes in common. So it's already weird that we've got six examples of these and they don't seem to have all as much in common as we would expect. Furthermore, the new members contain a large number of orphan genes. These are genes which encode proteins that have no equivalent in other living organisms, which was also the case for the previously discovered ones. The unexplained characteristic is at the heart of a debate here over the origin of viruses now. What most surprised researchers is that when the orphan genes differed from one Pandora virus to another, it was that it made it less likely that these were inherited. So you have otherwise similar like you would almost call this a species if you were talking about larger life forms. They don't like all these extra genes because they're not sharing them. It's not like they have an ancestor. This wasn't just sort of handed down and then dropped off. This is just completely different stuff showing up. So what's going on? Bioinformatic analysis showed that these orphan genes exhibit features very similar to those of non-coding regions of the Pandora virus genome. Findings indicate the only possible explanation for the gigantic size of the Pandora virus genomes. Their diversity in the large proportion of these orphan genes they contain, they are making them up as they go. Oh, I thought you were going to say they eat other genes. No, that's what they're saying. That would be a great explanation. This is a transfer. They've got this from somewhere else, but because we don't know everything that's out there, but we think they're just making up new genes. Not mutating existing genes with the GC here and the TA there instead. But this is just, let's write some code. So the idea is now that these Pandora viruses just were spitting out what turned into all of life. An experimental factory of stochastic gene creation, right, where they're like, yes, you extrapolate this across the infinite speculative horizon. And this may not just be the answer to some of life's evolution with throwing out things that encode for proteins that it's not even using. But it may be the establishment of genetic sequences themselves if the virus came before the bacteria. Interesting. How crazy is this? It's far out, man. It's pretty far out. I mean, it's interesting. It's intriguing. After all of the conversations that we've had of viruses, are they life or are they not life? Have they been here longer than us? Have they knew to actually have them be the origin of life is like the ultimate smack in the face of viruses are alive. And that's the thing too. We're looking for bacteria on Mars. We're not looking for viruses. This is a problem. Big mistake. This is a problem. You want to find, this is likely how this works. I'm just going to be this machinery that makes genes and throws. And then a couple of these genes get together and go, you know what? I think we can do something with this. I think this is going to be a good system. All of a sudden, we have something that's operating. Wow. So I look forward to more news on this. I'm wondering how one would go about trying to prove or disprove this theory. That would be tough. Yeah. Well, right now. But we have time, more analysis, more research. My time machine. That's what? Future, a forward-facing time machine. We go into the future moment by moment until we've got it. Well, or you could just go all the way back and go, there's nothing here but Pandora viruses. All right. So what's sort of interesting though is if you, and they don't even, like, I guess they're not even creating them in the same places. Like it also seems to be sort of like they don't have like set points within where they're adding genes. It's sort of like showing up in different places where they seem to be making this evolutionary, this evolutionary factory, experimental factory of genomics. Yeah. But yeah. So how would you go back? Okay. So there are viruses that are, you know, ancient viruses that are already implanted in our DNA. But yeah, you'd have to go way back in the tiny, whiny machine. Yeah. Yeah, that interplay could possibly take place. This is crazy. Every time we talk about the origin of life, I remember, you know, being a student in high school and them talking about the primordial soup and all of these things and saying, well, we think it probably works like this. We have some ideas. We were able to prove this in a lab, but not that. And in our lifetime, we might actually have an answer to how life began is insane. And I am so excited. Do you have any other stories to start the show? Oh, there's another one. So we talked about the origin of life on the planet. Let's talk about one of its potential ends. Call it what you like. Global warming, climate change, climate, we have skyrocketing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which is siphoning oxygen from oceans at an alarming rate. So fast and even scientists whose job it is to understand such processes aren't entirely sure of how severely the planet will respond. Instead of just giving up, though, they are looking to the planet's past to see if they can find some answers. And a study we've published this week in the journal Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, researchers from Florida State University delved into ancient Earth climate. And what they found within the data, de-oxygenated oceans that had disastrous effects on marine life at the time. Millions of years ago, there were skyrocketing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and it wasn't man-made. Back then it was naturally occurring, powerful volcanoes were erupting en masse. They were pumping Earth's atmosphere full of carbon dioxide and this subsequently over many, many millennia were draining the oceans of oxygen. And as a result, there was a mass extinction of marine organisms. This is a quotey voice. We want to understand how volcanism, which can be related to modern anthropogenic carbon dioxide release, manifests itself in ocean chemistry and extinction events. Said study co-author Jeremy Owens, assistant professor at FSU's Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science. Could this be a precursor to what we're seeing today with oxygen loss in our oceans? Could we experience something as catastrophic as this mass extinction event? So, for the study, they kind of focused on the Parisian Oceanic and Noxic event, which if you haven't heard of before, it's because it occurred in the early Jurassic period. It was before it was, yeah, we weren't here. We wanted to reconstruct early Jurassic ocean oxygen levels to better understand the mass extinction and the Parisian Oceanic and Noxic event. Said Theodore Tham, postdoctoral researcher who led the study. We used to think of ocean temperature and acidification as a one-two punch. But more recently, we've learned this third variable, oxygen change, is equally important. By analyzing the thalium isotope composition of ancient rocks from North American Europe, team found that ocean oxygen began to deplete well before the defined time interval traditionally ascribed to the Theracian Oceanic and Noxic event. So when they dialed it back, what did they see? Like what was the thing that was before this? What was the thing that precursor? It was massive volcanic activity and rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Yeah, oxygen is kind of important as we just discussed. So actually, I was reading another story that came out this week. I'll just give you the headline of it that higher ocean temperatures are associated with less nutrition content in seafood. So it's just a thing where when water gets warmer, it is less turbid. It carries less nutrients. It carries less oxygen. And when warmer water moves to places where there's usually cold water, animals have trouble finding the nutrients, oxygen, cold water that they're used to. And so as we kind of get these weird cold water currents moving around due to climate change, we're starting to see these effects. These are kind of our current precursors to what could happen if the overall temperature gets too high. Yeah. I like Thames quote here. If you're an oxygen consuming organism, you don't want to see major changes in marine oxygen levels. No, sure don't. You either adapt or you go extinct. Kind of those are the choices. I vote adapt. Yeah. And one of those adaptations is lowering our dependence on fossil fuels. Yeah. I was going to go with up till now, up till this story, I was going to attempt to genetically modify myself with gills. Oh, gills. Yeah, that'll do you no good without the oxygen. Yeah, there's the oxygen in the oceans. Yeah, it's fine. We can't even hide there. Yeah, you could try to get some anaerobic bacteria kind of symbiotically living inside of you and somehow helping you out that way. But that would be tough. That would be tough. That might be easier than growing gills, actually. We'll have to look into it. Do you know what time it is? Oh, I think you might. Let me just get this ready here. What time is it? Time for Blair's Animal Corner. Yes. With Blair. What you got, Blair? I have philandering birds. So birds don't get married, so it's difficult to philander. However, there's a lot of birds out there. I don't know what the word. Can I stop the show? Whole show right now. Oh, okay. I don't know what the word philandering means. A philanderer is someone who has extra marital relationships as casual encounters. That's a philanderer. So birds... I had no idea. Oh, yeah. That's a fun word, philanderer. So birds, a lot of birds are monogamous. Emperor Penguin is famous for monogamy. A lot of birds have this quote unquote monogamy where they pair bond, often for many seasons. But the animal kingdom is not all fairy tales. A lot of those monogamous relationships include quote unquote extra marital relationships. So looking at songbirds like sparrows, a team of researchers from Imperial College London wanted to see in a captive population of sparrows, the reason for a very odd phenomenon, which is that when birds have, when female birds have chicks as the result of an extra marital relationship. So she has a chick from not her quote unquote husband, we'll call him, right? It's almost always from older males. So this research is looking at why. Why is it that older male birds are the ones fathering kind of extra marital babies? So they wanted to see in this captive population of sparrows one of two possibilities. They kind of had two potential hypotheses. The first was that older males are better at wooing the females. So the male manipulation hypothesis. They're just more suave and more experienced. The other hypothesis is that females actually are looking for more from the older males. So they're going, oh, he's got it set up. I'm going to get some real good alimony from him. I don't know. Child support. Who knows? No, it's the females are soliciting the copulation from older males instead of from younger males. This is the female choice hypothesis. They observed more than 450 mating attempts. It's quite a research job, just okay. And found that older males did not try to make females cheat more often than younger males. So the mating attempts were even between older and younger males. Thus the male manipulation hypothesis out the window. Okay. They also found that the successful affairs were more often solicited by females. So that indicates that they are the ones who chose when and who they would cheat with to have the extra marital babies. Flanders and the male birds are the Flanders. In a way, yes, absolutely. And so the females are the ones appearing to make the decision. However, they are not choosing older males more often than younger males. So the female choice out the window. So they didn't observe males cheating more, older males cheating more than younger males. We didn't see older males being wooed by females more than younger males. But they did see older males fathering more offspring. What is happening here? The suggestion is. Experience. So it could be experience. The mechanics were better. Their hypothesis now actually is that it has to do with sperm competition. So they are suggesting that post-copulation mechanisms might be driving older male success. So it's not that the men are more experienced is that their sperm are. Wiser sperm. Wiser sperm, exactly. So female choice might still be a factor because it turns out that the female sparrows can actually store sperm for weeks. So they might be able to, as happens with cephalopods, for example, they might be able to, quote, unquote, decide which sperm goes to fertilization. But this is really hard to study. Right now, all they know is that mating attempts and who mates is not what decides it's something after mating decides that the older males have more babies. So this is most likely a biological effect, not a behavioral one. So the reason I bring this up is, like I said, we we've studied sperm competition and sperm selection in a lot of invertebrates, fruit flies, cephalopods. We've looked at this earthworms, but not a whole lot invertebrates, which is why this whole bird situation is very interesting. And I would love to see how far this goes. Is there sperm competition or sperm selection happening in other birds? Is it happening in mammals? Is it happening in humans? Can you imagine? Pretty cool. Yeah. Pretty cool. So anyway, that's the older men. It's not that they're more suave. It's that they're sperm. Their sperm is more suave. They're just their sperm are just better at feathering a nest. You know, they've got a little more hair on their chin, as it were, you know, moving on to a really interesting study about humans. And their interactions with animals and human health. Something that we we've talked a little bit about on the show, but is a constant area of research and concern is veterans who come back with PTSD and how to best treat them and improve their quality of life. And a new study from Purdue University College of Veterinary Medicine is looking at the bio behavioral effects of service dogs on veterans with PTSD. So in the past, there have been studies where they've they've looked at more anecdotal behavioral impacts of the of the service animals. And so this is something that relies a lot on self reporting. I feel less anxious after getting my dog, right? But this is something where they actually wanted to study a real physiological change. So they compared groups of veterans with PTSD who had service dogs to a group on the waitlist to receive a service dog. So their previous research that's a lot more self reporting based found that service dogs reduced clinical PTSD symptoms and improved quality of life overall. But again, this is mostly self reporting, right? And so they wanted to see if that actually translated to what was happening in their body. They looked at cortisol, which is a common way to check stress in in humans. It's a biomarker and they can study it noninvasively because you can just do a swab out of your mouth with saliva. They look particularly at cortisol awakening response. So you swab when you first wake up and then you swab 30 minutes later. They wanted to see if there was a spike in cortisol, which apparently is normal. So this is the cortisol awakening response. So you don't have it when you first wake up and then 30 minutes later you should have some cortisol running through your body. And this has been a good metric of chronic and acute stress. There's not as strong of a cortisol awakening response if you have chronic or acute stress. So non PTSD healthy adults had this normal level increase in cortisol. And they found that military veterans with a service dog in their home produced more cortisol in the mornings than those on the waitlist. And their pattern was much closer to the cortisol profile expected in healthy adults without PTSD than the ones on the waitlist. Having a service dog was also associated with less anger, less anxiety and better sleep. So the better sleep one is the one I was wondering about right there. So the idea that I've got of this is that it's not the stress that would be happening during sleep, the fitful sleep, burning cortisol. So it's not just that you don't have the spike. It's that you you're burning this all the time. So there's no place for it to spike. So sleeping better through the night. Drop off a little more. Yeah, absolutely. And so this is this is the first study of its type. So they have not been able to establish a direct correlation on an individual level. Longitudinally. Their idea is they now want to study veterans with and without service dogs over a period of time. So they'd want to study someone before the service dog after the service dog and then let's say they take the service dog away again and see what happens. Right. I know. So that's part of the thing which is why at the very end they say this is their big, you know, disclaimer at the very end is they did want to make sure that everyone knows that they are super grateful to the military veterans and their families who have participated in research. Obviously they've been through a lot already. So for them to help participate in research to help further people that come back with PTSD is a fantastic service that they are providing once again. And so they're super honored to collaborate with veterans and with the VA and they really want to see kind of the cause and effect of this because obviously they love to give everyone service dogs. But also there's a chance that they can figure out what the dog is doing. If there's somebody that can't or does not want a service dog, this is something that could potentially be treated chemically. You can find it in other ways. You could find other ways of treating this. So there's lots of implications from here. But on a super fundamental non-science level, it makes sense to me that if you give somebody, and this is something that they talk about with inmates as well, is that if you give somebody something else to take care of, sometimes that helps with a lot of other things. So it helps you kind of, it widens your sphere in a lot of ways, right? So that's just my kind of like hippie-dippy touchy-feely response to all of this, right? But it's really interesting to see that there is a physiological response to having the dogs around. Pretty neat. That is cool. Yeah. Oh, okay. If you've just tuned in, this is This Week in Science. We are about to go on a break, so please stay tuned, and we'll be back very soon with more. So, Twist Audience, did you know that Twist has merchandise that you might enjoy? You can go to twist.org to buy some of our swag. We have a link on our website that goes directly to the Zazzle Store. If you've enjoyed any of the calendars over the past couple of years, we have a lot of stuff in the Zazzle Store that has the images from our calendars on them. We have rompers, baby rompers, not adult rompers, maybe someday. We have mugs. We have bags. We have aprons. We have wrapping paper. We have stamps. We have so many amazing things. We even have a white polo shirt with the Twist logo embroidered on it. We actually had a request from a Twist listener come in who has to wear polo shirts to work. 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She says, I love dogs and I have a pack of dogs living with me and my kids. How appropriate to our last story. One of the wonderful things about science are all of the amazing types of medicine we have developed for our furry friends. There are vaccinations, pest control and more. Also the fact that dogs are one species and so different from one another in size, color, furriness, et cetera, it always blows my mind. I enjoy thinking about how they've been with us for so long as scientists discovered by looking at the genetic clock and how we've most likely influenced each other's lives. Taking my dogs to the vet means that I get to spend even more quality time with my canines. Smiley face. Thanks for your awesome show. I love what each of you brings and how you have unique voices and perspectives. Thank you Susan. Awesome. I love hearing about all of the human medicinal impacts, hearing about the animal medicinal impacts of science and then also just about how we've learned about how dogs have evolved alongside us and how that's a result of scientific research as well. Awesome. Thank you so much Susan. Remember, we need more of these. We want to read these every single week. We want to hear your story of how science has helped you. What has it done for you lately and every day? So please leave us a message on our Facebook page. That is the best way to get these to us. That's facebook.com. This week in science or email Dr. Kiki at Kirsten at thisweekinscience.com. And we do want to keep this going forever, but as long as we can get it going is great. Just keep sending those. And again, if you have friends that listen, kind of poke at them, get them to send theirs in as well. We want to hear from everybody. All right, Justin, you have more science for us? More science-y-ish stuff. Science-y? I wonder what God looks like. You know, I can't say that I have. Yeah, atheists, it's unlikely we've spent much thought on it. Yeah. But even atheists might have a placeholder image for what religious people might be holding in their minds. Oh, are you referring to the white man with the white beard in a white robe? You would think. So a team of psychologists at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, wanted to know the face of God. So they asked if they could see God, not directly. They talked to 511 self-reported Christians. Participants in the study saw hundreds of randomly varying face pairs and selected which face from each pair appeared more like how they imagined God to appear by combining all of the selected faces. Researchers could assemble a composite of the face of God that reflected how each person imagined God to appear. Their results apparently were surprising and revealing from Michelangelo to Monty Python. Illustrations of God nearly always show him as the old man with the white beard wearing a robe. Yeah. But researchers found many Christians saw God as much younger, more feminine, and less Caucasian than popular culture suggests. See, that was what I said, that white guy. Yeah, right? And in fact, people's perceptions of God tend to do really partly on their political affiliation. Liberals tended to see God as more feminine, younger, and with more loving-looking features than conservatives. Conservatives also saw God as more Caucasian and more, I guess, powerful-looking than liberals. Zeus. They saw Zeus. They saw Zeus. That's what I always say. That's when they worshiped and secretly worshiped Zeus all this time. Quotey voice of Joshua Conrad Jackson, no relation, studies lead author. These biases might have stemmed from the type of societies that liberals and conservatives want past research shows that conservatives are more motivated than liberals to live in a well-ordered society, when that would be best regulated by a powerful God. On the other hand, liberals are more motivated to live in a tolerant society, which would be better regulated by a loving God. People's perceptions also related to their own demographic characteristics. Younger people believed in younger-looking gods. People reported being more physically attractive, tended to believe in more physically attractive gods. So it sounds like people in general are seeing themselves in God, which I feel like speaks to a larger issue. Right. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, African-Americans, a little less of a Caucasian. Yeah. Yeah. People's tendencies to believe in a God that looks like them is consistent with egocentric bias. That is Professor Kurt Gray, a study senior author, psychology professor in the College of the Arts and Sciences at UNC Chapel Hill. People often project their beliefs and traits onto others, and our study shows that God's appearance is no different. People believe in a God who not only thinks like them, which is also a whole thing, right, but also looks like them. Interestingly, however, people did not in this study, 511 people studied, did not show egocentric biases on the basis of gender. Men and women believed equally in a masculine-looking God, at least the participants in where it was North Carolina. Well, if you cite the source text, they say he a lot. So that might have something to do with it, right? It could have a lot. Yeah, there's a lot of those that are he this. A lot of them. There's a lot of them. The grand majority of source texts, I would argue, use the male pronoun. The photo that came along with the study, and I don't know that that's like, this is, okay, yeah, it's a, there's a picture. If you want to see God's face, there's a picture out there that maybe we can link. Yeah, I'm going to try. Which is God's perceived face based on the aggregated responses of surveyed American Christians. And I don't know, maybe I'm, is that, looks a little like Val Kilmer. Yeah, so that's so funny because... Justin Trudeau, maybe. There we go. Who is this guy? The chat room said that he looked like Pete Holmes, which is so funny because Pete Holmes in his standup calls himself feminine Val Kilmer. Oh, nice. Perfect. Yeah. Oh, there you go. There it is. So there he is. Who knew? Hmm. He is smiling. He has quite a kind face. Yeah, so, but this is also interesting. Like, of course, like my immediate bias in analysis is seeing, now a sizeifying. Analyzing? And it is the fact that it took place in North Carolina. Uh-huh. Yeah, that's a closed sample to be sure. It's flyover country. Like it just is. The Carolinas wouldn't like you saying that. Right. Yeah. But like, I think, like if you took this same survey of Christians and through it in California. Or, or. You might get a lot more mother Gaia. Is that what you're getting at? Yeah. Yeah. You really, I think would see more. And again, this is also, you know, a specific religion which has the right substrate text of he this, he that, he this, he that. So we might stay kind of up. If you opened up the question to what, what does God look like? I think you'd get, you know, without having it be based on whether or not the respondents are Christian or not, I think you get a much different response. But I think the point is, uh, the study approved it. Nobody's seen this individual. That's true. No, there, there is disagreement on. Yes. At the very least this front. Yeah. So not surprised. Um, but I do think it's very interesting in telling that there's this representation. Alignment, right? Oh, yeah. It kind of, it kind of proves what the symbolism and point of this deity is to a lot of people and a lot of cultures is it's there. It's their representation. It's their authority. It's their advocate. Makes sense. And especially when representation doesn't exist in political authority. Sometimes people have to look elsewhere, but that's all right. That's a whole other story. No, I mean, you don't actually have to look further than all of the images of the blue-eyed sandy blonde hair to Jesus. Yes. That's a good point. But again. The number of the Bee Gees Jesus. Yes. In, in other, in other circles, he looks a little different. A lot of Jesus is out there just to name one of the things that people have taken liberty. I think actually in a way that I think that the Muslim religion did a really good job because it's also like Buddha's got like, there's a skinny Buddha. There's a fat Buddha. But then it's like the whole like, let's just never, let's just never agree on what Muhammad looks like. Yeah. You can't, you can't. He lives in here. Yeah. You can't even go there. It's fine. It must have come up. Like this must have come up. I don't think that's why. I think a long time ago there was some argument about this that caused all kinds. Okay. So that's like, they had to make a deal. Like, okay, we're only going to like represent with a word or a symbol because people were like making different drawings and they were conflicting and they were causing too much. Well, I also think it would be interesting to take this outside of the United States. Oh yeah. No, absolutely. That would be, I think, I think you're exactly right though is to look at, you're looking at a microcosm here to take it out into an area of the United States, then to take it out into the United States as a whole, but then to take it outside of the country would be a whole another situation would be pretty interesting. Although I think we can cover all the bases, maybe not, you know, maybe not a percentage, Giles' representation, but I bet you we can cover all of the, all of the bases in this country. We're pretty diverse. But people's perspectives are different having lived here than not having lived here because we are such a melting pot and there are all these other kind of ideas and it's, it would be different and I would be very interested to see. Yeah. So, you know what else I'd be interested to see? Through walls. MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have gotten closer to seeing through walls. Do I, this is just like, this is, is MIT full of all the kids in revenge of the nerds who are like trying to see into the showers of the girls locker room? Is that what this is? Is this all that they've been working on all this time? Their latest project, RFPose, uses artificial intelligence to teach wireless devices to sense people's postures and movement from the other side of a wall. They're using neural networks to analyze radio signals that bounce off of people's bodies and then the AI can create a stick figure that walks, stops, sits, moves, and moves its limbs around as the person performs those actions on the other side of the wall. Wow. So, their kind of reasoning for this new artificial intelligence is that that could be used to monitor diseases like Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis. It could provide a better understanding of disease progression. It could allow doctors to adjust medications. It could also help elderly people live more independently, I guess because you're spying on them, while providing the added security of monitoring for falls, injuries, and changes in activity patterns. So they're saying this could revolutionize healthcare. They're also saying that this could be used for new classes of video games where players can actually move around their house in search and, or it could be used in remote search and rescue missions. That sounds like the first thing. That sounds like the best one out of the three to be sure. They also posit that, quote, just like how cell phones and Wi-Fi routers have become essential parts of today's households, I believe that wireless technologies like these will help power the homes of our future, says one of the lead researchers from MIT. Now, to me, this sounds a little bit more like a spying device. Yeah. Also, it says, besides sensing movement, they could use this same AI and wireless signal kind of coupling to identify somebody 83% of the time out of a lineup of 100 individuals by looking at their face. Oh, what? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. So that's a lot that, well, that's a lot different. Wait, give me the numbers again. I'm sorry. The authors show that they could use wireless signals to accurately identify a person's face, 83% of the time out of a lineup of 100 individuals. So 83 of the 100 is what that means. Okay. Well, that's pretty darned good for a through-the-wall stick figure. Yeah. Is it their face though? That's amazing that it's the face. I would think it would be like, this person obviously has like the femurs like this. This is not through a wall, as I understand it. This is using the same software and the same network to then identify individuals. But this is, yeah, this is something that I think is really interesting and really amazing and it would be so cool if we could see people like what they're up to on the other side of walls in, I don't know, a hostage negotiation and stuff like that. But I also see situations where this could maybe be, it could fall into the wrong hands perhaps. It could be abused. This is kind of yikes. This is yikes territory for me personally. You know, world robot domination. But you just got to align your installation with tinfoil maybe. Yes, yes. Let me polish. Let me bring out my tinfoil hat. Here's artificial intelligence doing something that I think is without a doubt a good thing. And that is helping to identify, count and describe wild endangered animals. So this is a new use of motion sensor cameras and neural networks in order to automate animal identification. They found 99.3% of images were able to be identified and their accuracy rate was the same as humans, 96.6%. So this way they're able to in real time collect data and count individuals out in the wild. This helps them improve their ability to study and conserve wildlife species and ecosystems. And it also can tell you all sorts of other things. What they're doing, whether they're eating, sleeping, if they're babies, how many are in the screen, and they think that this actually could save more than eight years of human labeling for each three million images they collect. So this could way cut down on the amount of time from volunteers usually that help identify pictures from camera traps of endangered species. And that means that they can actually go do more hands-on things to help species. Yeah, pretty cool. So that's AI actually doing a helpful thing. Do you have any more stories, Justin? I barely got started. I got so many more stories. Give me more stories. Actually, I have one more story. Astronomers have been puzzling over the source of a peculiar specific type of faint microwave, light emanating from a number of regions of our very own Milky Way galaxy. They've been calling this Anomalous Microwave Emission, or AME. This light comes from energy released by some kind of spinning nanoparticle. Bits of matter so small, they divide detection by ordinary microscopes. So this is a quotey voice of Jane Greaves, an astronomer with Cardiff University in Wales. Though we know that some type of particle is responsible for this microwave light, its precise source has been a puzzle since it was first detected nearly 20 years ago. But now they may have the answer and they've published in Nature Astronomy. Until now, most likely culprit for this microwave emission was thought to be a class of organic molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, P-A-H-S, POS. So carbon-based molecules found throughout the interstellar space recognized by the distinct yet faint infrared light they admit, there must be, right? And so that's what it is, POS. Oh, wait! Maybe there's something else. Nanodiamonds, particularly hydrogenated nanodiamonds. What, tiny wet diamonds? These are tiny diamonds in the sky, out in space, bristling with hydrogen-bearing molecules on their surface, also naturally admit the infrared portion of the spectrum, but at a slightly different wavelength. Series of observations with the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope, West Virginia, and the Australia Telescope Company Array, has for the first time, honed in on three clear sources of AME light. And this is the first clear detection of anomalous microwave emission coming from protoplanetary disks, says David Freyer, co-author of the paper and astronomer with the Green Bank Observatory. The astronomers also note the infrared light coming from these systems' matches. Unique signature of? Will it be AME, or will it be POS? Will it be AME, or will it be POS? Which one is it? It's the tiny diamonds. Yeah. So, and they kind of like that this, this sort of, so, hey, this is, in a Sherlock Holmes-like method of eliminating all other causes, we can confidently say the best candidate capable of producing this microwave glow is the presence of nanodiamonds around newly formed stars. Based on their observations, the astronomers estimate that up to 1% to 2% of total carbon in these protoplanetary disks has gone into forming nanodiamonds. That's kind of a lot. Although a nanodiamond is like a 500,000th of like the period on a bit of newsprint. So, too small for a ring is what you're telling me. Well, actually quite appropriate for a ring, I would say. Yeah, space is full of diamonds and a moving microwave light. Well, diamonds are just carbon, so that makes sense. Oh, but there's more to this. Hang on, I forgot where I was. This detection has interesting implications for the study of cosmology and the search for evidence that our universe began with inflation immediately after the Big Bang, our universe grew at a pace that vastly outstripped the speed of light. A trace of that time of inflation, that period of inflation, should be seen in the peculiar polarization of the cosmic microwave background. Though the signature of polarization can't find it. So the work by Greaves and her colleagues offers some hope that it could be. This is good news for those who study polarization of the cosmic microwave background since the signal from the spinning nanodiamonds would be weakly polarized at best as Brian Mason, an astronomer at National Radio Astronomy Observatory and co-author of the paper. This means that astronomers can now make better models of the foreground microwave light from our galaxy, which always has to get removed to study the distant afterglow of the Big Bang. So the more we understand the local noise that is being generated, the more that we can identify it, quantify it, and then eliminate it from what we're seeing in the universe, the more we're likely to be able to discover the polarization of the background microwave radiation. So yeah, you might be able to do something pretty cool with that. Nice. Diamond's helping us figure out the universe. Yeah. I have one more story today and it's all about dads. This Sunday, at least in the United States is Father's Day and a study came out from BYU and Ball State this week looking at the role of fathers in families in the United States and how they have changed in recent years. They found that today's dads spend more time, provide more care, and are more loving towards their kids than ever before. Well, to be fair, it's because kids today much better than kids used to be. Kids used to be terrible, but kids today, they're awesome and that's why dads love you more. Well, according to science, most dads see themselves now as playing an equally important role in helping children as mothers do, which is not how poles used to be. At the same time, there is still a small group of dads. It does look like it's shrinking, but there is still a small group of dads who believe that they are to be breadwinners, disciplinarians, and nothing more. So that was definitely the old trope of what a dad was and that is slowly changing. Yeah, go ahead. So everything else has changed around this too. It's not just dad attitudes that have changed. It's societal attitudes all the way around. I caught my three children. I was there at their birth and I was the first to hold them. An older friend of mine remembers being in a hospital with a cigar. His wife went off with the nurses and doctors and he was literally sitting in a room with other expectant dads, all of whom were smoking, and there was one phone. And one of them would pick it up. Is it Mr. Johnson? Yeah, it's for you. Your child's been born. Okay, I'll come back. And then it was like, you're a dad. You should probably not touch your kid for the first couple of months because dads are dirty. You should just stay away. Wash your hands a lot if you have to handle the child, but it's best if you just stay away. The attitudes about and the understanding and everything else also evolve to allow dads, I think, to allow dads to participate more. Yes, absolutely. And this is part of what this study is about, is about the societal expectations of masculinity. They studied, they looked at correlations between these what are considered positive traits that more and more fathers are exhibiting alongside with masculine expectations of those families. So there was a correlation between fathers who exhibit what they call negative aspects of masculinity, more on that in a second, and fathers who are less involved with their children. So they count beneficial aspects of masculinity as things like being goal oriented, loyalty, things of that nature, but they also identified quote-unquote problematic aspects of masculinity. Things like aggression, detached relationships, not showing emotion, not asking for help, right? And so all of these quote-unquote negative aspects of masculinity hurts families according to this study, but they are lowering, which is the important thing, is that society is expecting less of those things from men and men are therefore expecting less of that from themselves. So this was data from around 2,200 fathers. This was nationwide. It was on fathers of children ages two through 18, and then they had them evaluate themselves to a variety of statements. So examples of statements like it is essential for the child's well-being that fathers spend time interacting and playing with their children. So agree, disagree. And men to express warm and tender affectionate feelings toward children. So then they could weigh these things to each other. The results from the responses showed that on average, fathers of younger children engaged with them several times a week. Fathers of older children engaged with their child between once and several times a week, but they also knew a lot about their child's activities. Fathers of younger and older children only sometimes engaged with their children. This is a change from previous studies. Fathers of younger children stated that war behaviors toward their child are very much like me, quote-unquote. Fathers of older children acted warm toward their child between often and always. This is also a change, right? And fathers of older children generally agreed that their child could turn to them for emotional support. And they also used the masculine norms while still being emotionally available and nurturing towards their children. So this trend is something that continues, but they don't see it growing. They actually see it, they see it being less of an influencer on fathers today. So over the past several decades, fatherhood ideals have continued to change, and there are new parental expectations and behaviors. Quote, as we teach boys and men to be more emotionally aware and cultivate emotional well-being, these men and boys will be able to become better fathers for their children as they will be able to provide for them not only through financial contributions, but by being emotionally and mentally present for their children and their well-being. Got to say, as a father, I'm not quite there yet. I mean, I'm more I'm still more of the like, look, I've been societally conditioned to be kind of unemotional and harsh to prepare you for a world of Spartan combat. And therefore, I'm going to tell you to spit on it, rub some dirt on it, and if you want to talk about it further, let's just karate fight instead. Can we do this? I know that's not true. I saw that picture of you pulling your daughter's science experiment in a wheelbarrow to school or not a wheelbarrow in a little like a radio fire wagon. The whole time, I'm telling her she's freaking out because she's loves school and is terrified because the wind is starting to come up and the the whole thing like the whatever the cloth around it, the tablecloth around it started to whip up like it might rip and so she's freaking out and like, toughen up, it's a science experiment. Just be glad that you can do science. But see, according to this study, the fact that doesn't for that activity is a shift in societal norms and expectations for the better. So there we go. So coming up to this Father's Day, maybe in the 1950s, if Father's Day even existed, I don't actually know. Do you know when Father's Day happened? Because I feel like Mother's Day happened first and then they were like, I guess we better give the guy something, but they weren't really doing much. And now they're actually, you know, this study is showing us that Father's Day is a super important day if you want to compare it to Mother's Day. Right? Because Father's are providing more and more emotional support. They're much more present in their children's lives. I think it's fantastic. Really exciting. What I'd be interested in seeing is where the consumer upticks purchases take place. You know, Mother's Day I'm picturing there might be a lot of flowers sold. There might be I don't know, boxes of candy so I don't know. I feel like Father's Day there's a big uptake in beer and ties and maybe socks. It's still not you know, it's different stuff. Okay, so some quick googling tells me, this is Wikipedia, so disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer right. 1908 was the first Mother's Day 1910 was the first Father's Day, so quickly thereafter it was celebrated by a single father or four, a single father of five or six children. So he had to be emotionally available and provide for his children no way around it. So Father's, Mother's Guardians thank you. And it, you know, our society shows that people are better equipped to be emotionally available and to provide and I think it's fantastic. Do you have any more stories Justin? I do but we're out of time. So we'll have to save them for next week. No. Well, we'll be there. This is normally the part in the show where we would thank our Patreon supporters. That is a managed list that Kiki has the password to. So instead we are going to say to all Patreon supporters, but especially the ones that have donated enough to be shouted to on the show, thank you so much for your support. If you're interested in supporting us and joining the group of people that are not being named this week you can find information at patreon.com slash this week in Science. Also remember that you can help us out just by telling your friends about us. On next week's show once again we will be broadcasting live at 8 p.m. Pacific time on twist.org slash live and Kiki will be back. And you can watch us live and join our chat room. Thank you to our chat room. Thank you to our YouTube chat room. I haven't been able to watch it closely since I'm juggling several other things at the moment but I will look at the comments in the YouTube when we're done here and I'll try to circle back around. Thank you for being here regardless. We appreciate you. Don't worry if you can't make it live though. You can always find our past episodes at youtube.com slash this week in Science or at twist.org. Oh, four. Thank you for joining the show. Twist is also available as a podcast. Just google this week in Science in your iTunes directory or if you have a mobile type device. You can look up twist the number four. Droid app in the Android marketplace or simply this week in Science and anything Apple market placey. 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So I'm setting up shop. Got my banner unfurled. It says the scientist is in. I'm going to sell my advice show them how to stop the robots with a simple device. I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand. And a little costume is a couple of grand. This week science is coming your way so everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientific method for all that it's worth. And I'll broadcast my opinion all over the Earth. Cause it's this week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. Science. Science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. That what I say may not represent your views but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science you may just get understand. That we're not trying to threaten your philosophy. We're just trying to save the world from jeopardy. This week in science is coming your way. 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And there we have it another wonderful show Justin can you do this disclaimer again because you cut out yeah I don't know if I got it in me I'm gonna have to try that one you're didn't get the middle I have to see I have to do all my pre-show warm-ups yeah I'll do I'll do the lead-in again so it's a Cl authorities The way he laid in Spain falls mainly on the plane okay I think I'm ready All right, I got like a rasp in my voice. I didn't have at the beginning Okay, I'm starting This is Twist this week in science episode number 675 recorded on Wednesday June 13th 2018. It's science Daddy. Oh Hello, everyone. I'm Blair Basderich and today we will fill your head with world robot domination Pandora's viral box and Landering birds, but first Disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer humans are the most accomplished life form on planet Earth Accomplishing amazing things is what they will be remembered for by whichever life form takes sentient center stage in the far-flung future The first thing to remember about anything you try to accomplish is that failure is imminent Failure the art of getting it wrong is how all good discovery is made Thomas Edison didn't just have a bright idea for a working light bulb He invented thousands of dimly lit bulbs that fizzled out right away until one day. He failed to get it wrong James Dyson didn't come up with a brilliant new vacuum cleaner on a whim He came up with over 5,000 prototypes over 15 years for vacuum cleaners that didn't suck at all until one day He failed to get it wrong and for every accomplishment that seems to show greatness brilliance or genius We must remember that this is the result of a tremendous embrace of failure and that any accomplishment casts a long shadow Only because of how late in the day we are seeing it Embracing failure learning from mistakes and pressing on isn't just the sort of thing that some great inventors do It's what we all celebrate together each time we tune into this weekend science Coming up next We're gonna do a whole show again Okay Anyway I got the yon out. I think yeah, you can usually start the show with that I Drink a lot of coffee in the afternoon today. I was like I got to keep the energy up Yeah, I did that too. I did that too, which I needed to I did I did like 12 hours of cell counts Oh my god, I was like so out of my mind. I had 10 teenagers at the zoo today Wow busy day at the zoo. I can't believe that many teenagers went to a zoo Well, it's no no, they were they were volunteering for me. So I was in charge of them So the teens require a little more energy Why is that? Because they sass and I sass back But the sassing back requires some some energy You got any fun afters to show stuff Justin No, actually unfortunately tonight. I gotta go. That's all right. I'm gonna go to bed But I think we did a good job. I think Kiki would be proud. Yeah of us Oh And we actually didn't talk at all about how the the NASA find so we've left. Oh, yeah, we left it for Kiki Because she's been she's been sort of our I can't believe we found green aliens and we didn't talk about it at all about the life that was found on Mars Martian happen. We don't know because Kiki isn't back yet And she's the one it goes all of the Your mailbox the news of alien lifeforms that have their own Subterranean cities Until next week, you'll have to wait. I have to wait with hangers. Don't Google it because that would ruin it. Oh Hot rod wanted to know why I'm using my phone for music. So here's the deal so I Have a soundboard But every time I've used it there have been complaints about the sound Because I think I need an extra Something because I can't hear the sound levels. I put out. Oh Gotcha. So I so that the sound levels So is it something in a pre-show that I would be able to tell or is it an audio that I'm not even hearing great That's a good question Because it right you should you should It's hard. So what every time I've used the soundboard Somebody has complained in the chat room that either we have different sounds or the music is almost indomitable Or the music is too loud and it's blowing out people's ears or you know, Justin's loud or just too quiet Oh, so when I do the soundboard, I Plug the soundboard into my computer and I can play sounds directly from my computer to the broadcast So it's supposed to be much better sound quality. The microphone that I use is Equally good So there's a monitor button when you when you're doing that and hit the monitor button. Yeah, you hear it Yes, so I can hear what I'm playing but apparently the levels are not accurate to how they broadcast So yes, the equalizer is what I would need to adjust there's equalizer Nobby's technical word There's Sliders and Navi's on the soundboard. There's too many to be honest, but There's way more than there this is like for like a DJ is what's on the hole. I could use a third of that Regardless There's all these these things that I could adjust on my end, but I have no way of knowing how it's affecting all of you So so that is why I have not used it lately. Is that every time I've gone to the extra 45 minutes of work to set it up. I'm wondering somebody complains I'm wondering I'm wondering if but people are complaining about the phone, too So I'm wondering if yeah, but the phone gets fixed in post wondering if we were in a state of Inviting on live onto the show and then just go like we didn't have the offline preamble time or we just weren't utilizing it like So I think the problem is that you hear me, but not you I Do not hear me, right? So that's the problem is that is that I can hear I can hear Everything but the levels that I'm not hearing are not true to what's going out Your voice in your head. I actually now that you say this now I can't tell if I'm hearing me through the headphones or if I'm But see this is the problem is that like you can't tell me if you and I are the same volume correct We're speaking correct. So that is the issue but I can tell if the music is Inordinately louder or if it's if it's what's that saturating like if it's going over like I'll be able to hear that stuff I'll be able to hear it in relation to you. What should what should be fine Yes, but so that's honestly the the thing is Kiki doesn't care too much about music levels and the music on the phone because she In post changes the music anyway for So Yes, I agree with you But She said she would rather do that than have one of us be louder than the other one So this setup makes it so we are equally loud and people can hear us and everything's fine Oh That is the that is the current issue if there's a way that I can figure out how to make all of us the same volume Then it's worth it to fix the music, but if I have to pick music versus voice volumes, I will pick voice volumes So that is why I'm currently on the setup But if there's something else that I need or there's a way that I could test all that before the show starts And I would be happy to do that Yes, I hot rod I agree with you except that I won't know what I'm doing So I need I think he wants me to put in some time playing with the soundboard I need somebody to come over and show me how to use it So so the real way that the soundboard is used is not by It would be in a soundproof booth The your microphone cord would go into a soundproof booth where somebody else would be working that board And they were hearing you and in relation to the music and in relation to me So like podcast studios, they have an engineer doing that. So we just need to hire a tech Yeah, I agree and all move to a studio Let's all move to a studio. Yeah, we'd have to move to the studio Because there's no way we could afford rent and a studio It would have to be living it would have to be where we live and the tech Would also have to be somebody that we kidnapped because No, no, no, you're forgetting something Kiki can offer credits Can offer what credits? What does that mean? I don't know what credit, you know college. Oh, really? Might as well kidnap somebody. It's the same price. Can't have somebody I tell you it's easier. No, no But I'm saying just you know people will work for free For credits. I just feel like somebody's more motivated if they've been kidnapped to work for free Just like I think they're more motivated if their grade depends on your evaluation. Oh, that could be a thing All right, I do have to I really do have to go. I'm gonna kidnap anybody that was I would like to offer credits but unfortunately I am not represented by a university so I cannot But that's all Kiki She'll figure it out And I'm with you Ed if the voices sound good That's the most important thing Kiki often splices in the music in the in post even when we have proper music because it sounds better that way No, that's why when she told me that I was like I'm gonna stick with the this this setup for right now So we'll see you know just you the live audience. You're the only ones losing So you'll just have to listen to the audio recording later This is actually just a odd thing when Kiki of all people isn't part of the show. Yeah, I know which like come on Kiki you're not allowed to have a life. No, she right. I know like we gave up our lives We could be married we could right like we could be we could be traveling the world with our high-fluting careers But we sacrificed everything everything to do this show. Yeah, and and and the doctor takes a day off You know, sometimes everybody needs a day when she got her day with Janelle Monae I'm still saying goodbye Bye. Oh say good. Say good night, Justin. Good night Justin. Say good night Blair. Good night Blair Say good night to her cuz she's watching the video later We should do that sometime watch the show good night Good night everybody. Thanks for watching