 This is TWIS, this week in Science Episode Number 561, recorded on Wednesday, April 6th, 2016. Making up for the mainstream. Hey everyone, I am Dr. Kiki, and tonight on TWIS you are going to find your head filled with a crabby fiddler, cyborg DNA, and veggie genes. But first... Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer! The world loves a mystery. And perhaps more than a good mystery, the world loves to solve mysteries. Of all the mysteries out there, one seems to always be lurking in the darkness. On the edges of our understanding, in the peripheral of our perception, further out than our furthest, most fathomable faculties can affirm, just barely beyond the best guesses of our most brilliant scientific minds, that edgy, peripherally unfathomed lurking mystery has a name. Next. Because there's not really one mystery lurking out there, just the next one. And with each mystery we solve, another takes its place, and another, and another. So many that there will likely never come a day when we don't have reason enough to say, this week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I wanna learn everything. I wanna fill it all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I wanna know what's happening. What's happening. What's happening this week in Science. What's happening. What's happening. What's happening this week in Science. Yeah. Science to you, Justin and Blair. And good science to you, Justin, Blair, everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back yet again on our Wednesday night to talk about all the science that we thought was super interesting from the last week. And boy howdy, there's some good stuff. I've got stories about stem cell juice. Human cuckoos, or a lack of them, and black holes. What do you have, Justin? I've got Neolithic semen, cybernetic overlords, and bouncy metal glass. I've got very angry crabs, extremely aggressive salmon, and rather pointy babies. Ouch, just say no to pointy babies. You want boobas, and well I guess you do want kikis too. Never mind, boobas and kikis. Alright everyone, that's something you need to go look up on Wikipedia. The boobas and the kikis. But in the meantime, let's get on with the show. I have a whole bunch of black hole news for you to start off the hour. Seriously, there was tons of space physics black hole related stuff this week. So excited about this. So first off the docket. We have some more stuff from LIGO. Researchers are taking the estimates that they gained from their single sample point, LIGO, the inforometer observatory, gravitational wave observatory. They came up, we talked about it earlier this year. They found evidence for gravitational waves from a single instance of a merger of two black holes, a binary black hole system, and those black holes merging, gravitational waves coming from it. And as a result, people have been pouring over that data and going, what can we do with this? So now researchers have published that they are in physical review letters and they are saying that they can now estimate how loud the gravitational wave background noise is. So how much noise is there in space from these black hole mergers? Based on their single sample point. So how did they get there to be able to determine how loud it would be? Well, they decided that since they saw it once and they didn't really have LIGO turned on very long, it must be a fairly common occurrence. And so they went, hey, common occurrence. So let's give it the bell curve standard Gaussian statistical wave. And so this is, if you're into statistics and standard curves, this is a straight up bell curve. You start small, it gets bigger, and then it gets smaller again over some measure. Now they figured theirs probably right dead in the middle. So if this is an average occurrence, if this is average, let's stick ourselves right in the middle of it all and we'll go from there. So they've estimated that there are about 16 of these binary black hole mergers per year. And that from these binary black hole mergers, if there are about 16 of them, we can now start figuring out how they're dispersed through space and how many of them there are. And so based on this, they came out with an estimation that gravitational wave, and this is not the cosmic background radiation. This is completely different. This is gravitational wave background noise, just the noise that it makes in space. It's 10 times louder than they previously thought, and it now lies at around 25 hertz. 25 hertz is a range that they think will be detectable when LIGO and the advanced Virgo detector in Italy come online and all of the other, and there's another Indian detector that it's supposed to come online, but they believe that by 2019 they will begin to really listen with full power to this background noise of black hole mergers. So they have a prediction, and it falls already within the range of the next level of detection. That's perfect. That's perfectly aligned. Because the other thing is, based on what we've initially seen here, we think it's going to be twice as much as we can detect in the next outing. And then the next outing is like, ah, we have to have the outing after that before we can get to... But no, this should be in that range. Perfect. Oh, and I misspoke. It is 16 black hole mergers per year, but per cubic giga-parsec of space. That's a lot of parsecs. Yeah, but they're able to calculate it out. So anyway, that's some interesting news, but that's only a few years from now. We're going to be finding out a whole lot more about what's going on in black hole land in our universe, and also be able to determine components of the noise that's created by quantum fluctuations after the Big Bang. So if we know what black holes are doing, then we can parse things out a little bit better. Second study up related to black holes. Some astronomers last February reported that they had detected a fast radio burst, which is cool because we see kind of the signals of fast radio bursts a lot, but we don't actually detect them directly. And so this was one of the first times, it was the second time ever that we had detected a fast radio burst. Fast radio bursts, you don't know where they come from. So there was this cool thing about the fast radio burst detection. In addition to actually detecting it while it was happening, was that there was this kind of afterglow to it. It seemed like it faded out and fuzzed away. And researchers said, oh, okay, this can help us pinpoint where this fast radio burst came from if we've got this afterglow, we can follow it. Well, some researchers started going, I don't know, questioning the data. And well, we love it when scientists question the data and go in for more analysis. And what's happened is they've basically come back and they've said, yeah, well, yes, you did detect a fast radio burst, but you didn't figure out where it came from. We figured out where it came from. And it actually came from a super distant active galactic cluster from a supermassive black hole. So it's just like this black hole that's way far beyond where the original signal actually came from. They just happened to be lined up at the same time. And they think that the afterglow seeming of it was just this radiation from the black hole. Speaking of supermassive black holes, now there's been an idea for a long, a question for a long time, where do supermassive black holes come from? Like, you've got... Space. There is space. Right, that's a good answer. But so there's a difference between supermassive black holes and stellar black holes. So we know that when a star reaches a certain size, that it can, when it dies and its death throws collapse in on itself and form a black hole, if it has a certain amount of mass to it. Right, I guess it goes supernova if it doesn't. It's got two options. You go supernova or you fall down back on yourself and you become a stellar black hole. Yes. And so at one point in time it was assumed that supermassive black holes were just these stellar black holes that sucked up a lot of stuff and got bigger and bigger and bigger. But over time what we've found is that that's not possible. So these stellar black holes don't turn into supermassive black holes. And in fact, looking distantly at some supermassive black holes that would have risen about 700 million years after the Big Bangs, we've been able to detect these quasars that are associated with these supermassive black holes. And it just doesn't make any sense. If a supermassive black hole had to suck up enough stuff from its start as a little black hole, 700 million years would not have been enough time. And the space is a little rough. For instance, if our sun, it's not big enough to but say it was a black hole, what's it going to suck up other than the rest of the material in the solar system? At that point it has to get close enough to something else, another solar system, to even have a shot at pulling it in, gobbling it up. And it would be the same calculation as our solar system merging with another solar system. I mean, it's not going to happen that often. Exactly. And so researchers are still trying to figure out where supermassive black holes come from. So some researchers at the University of Texas and also Osaka University have run supercomputer simulations where they started their little computer universes with seeds of clouds of gas that would fall into wells of dark matter. So they're like, hey, there's so much dark matter. It makes up 85% of the universe. So if it's just there and stuff might be running into it, maybe that starts the process. And anyway, the majority of their seed particles didn't really do much. They started forming things that they didn't really do much. However, there's one in particular that grew to more than 2 million times the mass of our sun in only about 2 million years in their simulations. So it was like on the feasible path to creating a supermassive black hole. But they actually didn't get all the way to the supermassive black hole. And so the researchers say, haha, this looks like it might be a potential direction, but we really still can't tell you where dark matter, I mean, whether dark matter and clouds of gas form supermassive black holes, although that's what it might be. The interest, I love this quote from the researcher Schlossmann from the University of Texas. We're at the forefront, but many questions remain. But the public and their curiosity deserve to have those answers. We cannot exclude anything if we want to keep advancing. So the next thing is the James Webb Space Telescope, which is going to be launched in two years in 2018. And that will be looking at distant galaxies where this kind of gas collapse is happening, or did happen billions of years ago. And then here would be the interesting question. Are there these quasars, these supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies? Because there's a quasar there and it just keeps all this material around it? Or is it because it's the center of all this other, a galactic amount of mass? And being near the center of a galactic amount of mass creates a condition for a black hole. So it's going to be lots of interesting stuff. That is one thing that has always bugged me. The idea that a star would run a muck enough to be creating bigger and bigger black hole. Because it's not that common that we have binary stars even, let alone bunches of them sort of clustering and smashing into each other. We need to look for a better explanation. Right, and new data out today from NASA astronomers using Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini Telescope in Hawaii have discovered a brand new supermassive black hole that weighs 17 billion of our suns. We might be able to stop measuring things in suns. In terms of black holes, it just seems like the number is getting ridiculous. Well, what's left then? You're just saying this black hole, it weighs so much you guys. It weighs like three of that other black hole that we were just talking about. Well, we'll have to do it like the Richter scale. Each number ahead is a magnitude higher than the one below. Identity four in the chat room says gigasuns. That's right. The really interesting thing about this particular black hole discovery is that this black hole that has this massive weight is in a place where it shouldn't be. It's in a very sparsely populated area of the universe that there's not that much stuff, so where did it come from? Or maybe that's why there's not much stuff. See, this is the thing. What came first, the black hole or the stuff? Stuff has to come first, but then how much stuff? Oh, we have a cameo. A cameo of parents by Kai. Kai wants to say good night. Do you want to say good night, Kai? Oh, we have to have our thing. There we go. It's our secret handshake, headache. This is This Week in Science. Justin, what you got? I have a mystery that has been uncovered along the bonny bonny banks of the northernmost Scottish islands. These islands are populated with red deer, which were a staple for food and sources of high bone antler tools for Stone Age Scotland. However, DNA analysis reveals that the deer in question do not originate from the islands. Which, as far as mysteries go, is of little surprise as the region was covered by a glacier 13-ish thousand years ago before becoming an island. So unless it was woolly deer. Right. It is to be expected that few of any creatures can be considered to be true natives. All the animals on the island, in fact including deer found on the islands today, must have been introduced by seafaring people. Perhaps starting as early as 10,000 years ago to more recent times. Maybe a little bit of swimming between the closer islands for some of the animals. So these deer are likely to have come from nearby places such as mainland Scotland, Ireland, or even Scandinavia. As far away as Norway would be a possibility, right? But that is not what the DNA of these deer is telling us. DNA analysis of Neolithic deer bones found that those on the most distant northern islands were genetically dissimilar to deer from Britain, Ireland, Western, European, mainland, and Scandinavia. What? They are dissimilar to all of the surrounding regions. So you're saying is that deer larva got into the ballast water of the ship. No, this is not quite as possible. Oh, I'm sorry. I guess I'm confused. But yes, on ships though, on boats. Stone age humans populated Scottish islands with red deer transported, according to this, from considerable distances by boat, by researchers who admit their own surprise that our prehistoric ancestors had such seafaring prowess. What's the actual evidence that they were put on boats by people? Well, there isn't. Except there isn't a way to swim there. Great. There is evidence. It's, you know, parsimony. It's making the most simple explanation. But we have other evidence. We, it is known that the Neolithic Scottish people would transport things like sheep and pigs by boat, even cattle. Stone age humans could take to the seas when they needed to. Okay? Not maybe, you know, deep oceanic, but, you know, bargy type transport of animals. But yeah, the fact that they could do this with a pretty large wild animal is pretty crazy. The results imply that Neolithic humans were transporting deer considerable distances by sea from an unknown source, and they predict that these deer arrived 4,500 to 5,500 years ago. So, not very long. For a few reasons. One being that deer are some of the most skittish animals I can think of. Right. How'd you get a deer on a boat? So this is the, this is the Enquodie voice here. This is, I think, David Stanton of Cardiff University. Perhaps humans managed deer, having long-term relationships with herds that allowed them to plan, capture, and transport deer on longer voyages. Yeah, so now the hunt is on to find the ancestors of these deer. Once they've discovered closer related cousins to these Neolithic Scottish deer, they will have a better picture of the ancient deer herding, as well as travel of or trading by Neolithic man. Because, you know, this could be, this could be a scenario of Neolithic Scots who are traveling vast distances and then shipping the deer over long distances. Or it could be some sort of traveling nomadic deer people who go around trading in deer everywhere they go, and they could have gotten them very close, right? Is there any chance there was a land or ice bridge? No. But from where? Well, I mean, that's the idea too. I mean, the glacial period ended 13 to 10,000-ish years ago, right? But then they're formed as islands. As the glaciers leave, you have islands, and these aren't considered to be swimming distances. Some little in-between region of time, perhaps, but the problem is, then you would expect, as they expected here in their DNA analysis, that you would find a relative of these deer in one of the other islands, the mainland's, maybe all the way to mainland Europe, maybe all the way into Scandinavia, and that's the problem. They're not closely related. They're very dissimilar to the deer. The deers in those regions have some similarities, but these deer are standing out as not being part of that group anywhere. Well, you know what Michael Myers would have said about that. If they're not Scottish! Well, but they've been Scottish as long as there have been Scotsmen, to be fair. Actually, what's kind of interesting here, now that I've taken this back a bit, there were neolithic people who were there in this region before, but the four to five thousand year range is about the arrival of those sort of eastern Europeans that came in and sort of started to dominate the landscape, because there was a people who were there before and they're not the people who are there now. It's possible that these are the people that brought these deer, timeframes would sort of match up rather well. It's fascinating to me that you would choose deer for a few reasons. One is that they're so skittish. Another is that they actually don't have that much meat on their bones. If you were picking sheep or deer, would they be deeper going to give you a lot more food per animal than a deer would? Well, they used them for food, they used them for hides, they used their bones, and they also used the antlers. Antlers were the first plow. This is what they used to churn up the area. Yeah, it's got to be that. It's got to be the... The sinews, the tendons might have been used longer, maybe if they're longer they can make a bow or so. I don't know what... I think that's got to be what it is. It's got to be for the furs and the antlers. And it could have been... And this is also, because this is sort of weird, but it's matching up a little bit with Bronze Age arrivals of people who were doing more farming and such. They could have been traded to the folks to the islands. They could have been transported by the island dwellers themselves. We don't know, but there's a mystery and there's an answer out there. There is an answer. There's a relative of this deer whose DNA, once compared, is going to give us an idea of the origin of the deer and is going to create an entire new story. And the answer to the population. The last thing I want to pose about this too is that if these deer are this individual population that aren't related to any other deer near them, then that means that in order for them to last for so long, their population, they had to bring at least a few. They couldn't be that inbred, or the population wouldn't have grown and lasted. So here's the other part of that story, though. There's red deer there now, but the Neolithic deer, so they were testing old bones. They weren't just testing the deers who were there now. So the deer that are there now may be more interbred. There could have been much more shipping and transport and back and forth going on, because according to this, they used Neolithic deer bones for the DNA analysis. So these bones are thousands of years old, and that's what they're using to grab the DNA. Interesting. I don't see something specifically in terms of the current population of deer that are there now, but red deer have been throughout the mainland, Scotland, the whole region, Neolithic times. That was always a food source and tool usage out of them and everything else. They were already kind of a staple, but this particular population, and it's known that the island was populated, too. I mean, they know that much of the region had to sort of be repopulated by animals. It's sort of interesting, too, because, yeah, you come to an island and you claim it as your own, you realize there's nothing living here. Send messages back. Send messages back to the mainland. Free food. But it's like early terraforming, you know, in that they said we've come to this land, it doesn't have what we need. We'll just import it, so that's all invasive species, but there wasn't really any other species there. So what are they invading? But post-glacial islands. Very nice. You know what it's time to invade right now? What? Blair's Animal Corner! Whatcha got, Blair? Oh my gosh, I have some really angry animals this week. So, to start, that's why we have zoos. You put them in cages and the angry animals can't get ya. No. Kidding! That's not it at all. All right, go ahead. So we're going to start with the fiddler crab. The fiddler crab is that amazing crab that has one giant claw and one not-so-giant claw. They always have a dominant claw. It is like handedness, though. Some of them, it's their right claw. Some of it, it's their left claw. And they use those claws to grapple with each other to fight for territory. So a recent study from Kyoto University and Wakayama University in Japan watched fiddler crabs and all of the kind of tussles that came about in one of the mudflats where they were observing. So fiddler crabs, they don't want to fight every time because that means there has to be a loser. So they'll do a lot of kind of sizing each other up, deciding whether it's worth it or not, and maybe one crab will win without them actually fighting. We talk about this with a lot of different animals. So they're just like that. They're just like stags, the big deer with giant antlers. They size each other up. Hopefully they don't have to fight. Sometimes they do actually have to fight. And there's a lot that goes into whether or not they're going to have a fight. Particularly these researchers in Japan wanted to look at whether it was influenced by the fact that some crabs had new claws. So there are normal males and they're what they call regenerated males. And when a male loses one of his claws, he'll regrow it. It'll regrow to pretty much the exact same size, but it will be weaker than the original. So they wanted to see if these crabs could tell by looking, if they were treated differently. When the scientists picked up these crabs, they could tell by looking at the claw closely. There were little kind of teeth on the inside of the claw. If it was an original claw and if it was a new one, it wouldn't have those little teeth. So after fights, they would pick up the crabs and figure out if they were a normal male or a regenerated male. And they found that there was little to no difference whether or not the claw was regenerated, whether they would continue the fight and actually engage or not. Essentially, they had no way of telling whether the claw was regrown or not. And in fact, as part of their bluff tactics, they would persist in contests even when their opponents were larger, hoping that maybe it was a regenerated claw. So if they had a regenerated claw, they would retreat even though they had the bigger claw, because they know that they're weak. So basically, the crabs are going to try to fight each other, no matter what. And there's just a lot of aggression in the crab community. Do you think it's bluffing or do you think they've already been burned once? They're just more cautious now. It's like, ah, I'd like to get into a fight, but I don't want to go around without my claw again. That was terrible. You know what? Not worth it. Consequences to actions I've learned, I've lived. I'm going to let this go. Well, related to that, there were no fights with a male who lost his claw and it had not yet grown back all the way. So the males that had claws that were still growing back, they didn't even try to get in a fight. But the ones that had their fully grown claws, they were thinking, oh, maybe he'll think it's real. Maybe he'll think it's real. And then once things got real, they'd have to decide whether to go ahead or not. And essentially, this is just proving that animal signals, they use, animals use signals to size each other up, to fight with each other, and that generally they're very honest, but they can learn deception based on their circumstance. So crabs didn't, they didn't pretend that they could win a fight but they couldn't before they lost their claw. And then once they lost their claw, their confidence is shot, that's why. They know. I think it's a matter of learning the consequences of an action. I think that's more what it is. I think they're just learning, this behavior could put me in the position of not being able to even start a fight anywhere. Again, because I won't even have a claw. That's got to be the lowest point in an agrarian crab's life. But then once they get their claw back, they're like, oh, nobody's going to tell. Nobody's going to be able to tell. Oh no, he could tell. I'm running away. But the other one couldn't actually tell. They were just waiting, they were testing. They were testing the bluff. So some of the smaller crabs could still test out the bluff. That's what's very interesting in this, if you ask me, is not only that the crab, with the claw that regrew, tried to bluff out and then eventually bailed, eventually folded. But that the crab with the smaller claw would test the waters just for a minute to see if bluffing was happening or not. So there's lots of intricacies in the crab community. Salmon turns out a lot more straightforward. They like certain colors. So looking at Coho salmon, in a University of British Columbia study, they just put salmon, a hundred salmon, into tanks with different color backgrounds. They range from very dark to very light. They also included a couple of blues and grays. Now the blues are really important because in aquaculture salmon are usually put in a light blue tank. Turns out these salmon are up to four times more aggressive in lighter backgrounds than in darker backgrounds. So they're less aggressive in darker backgrounds. And they also favored, when given the opportunity, they favored the darker areas of a tank if that tank was half dark and half light. Beyond that, if there was a dark space in their tank, they were less aggressive overall. But if they were put in just a dark color tank altogether, their aggression levels just plummeted. So basically they were making up for the fact that they couldn't hide or they couldn't kind of chill out. Yeah, I kind of thought of it more like putting a towel over the bird cage. Just made them kind of cull home. I think, yeah, a similar thing. I mean, when you think of salmon, what they do, I mean, yes, during spawning season, they're just swimming and going for it. But they have kind of, the top of a salmon is kind of dark and they have these silvery sides and they want to hide in the dark places where they can not interact with anyone, possibly. Stake out a little spot and then they come out and they interact when they want to. Yeah, exactly. But that overall, they actually preferred it when their entire tank was dark. Yeah. So this is something that obviously could make a huge difference in aquaculture because A, it would improve the quality of life of the fish that are being raised in salmon farms and B, it would reduce lost fighting in the salmon farm. So it's kind of a win-win. The only caveat I will say is that they looked at a set of environmental conditions. So they haven't tested this against variables such as temperature, fish age, time of year, so that means seasonal changes too. So this might not be an across-the-board thing, but it kind of is starting to look that way. So it definitely begs for more research and then after that, perhaps reassessing our aquaculture tactics. I think that it's very funny because the light blue, I can tell you exactly why we put salmon in light blue tanks. It's because the ocean's blue, right? Yes. Excellent. But how? That was the question that I was going to get at. So for part of a salmon's lifetime, they go out to ocean and they go deep ocean. They don't just stay right by the coast. They go out to sea and so if they're out to sea, how deep are they going? How far within the water column are they hiding? How dark is it where they are? And at what age? So from like one year old to, you know, that three years old kind of range when they're out to sea, just swimming around and eating and getting bigger, I mean are they just out there kind of hiding in the depths and coming up to feed a bit? Yeah, absolutely. I was mostly being obtuse because the ocean obviously isn't blue and it especially isn't... So it's something that we anthropomorphize and we're like, oh, water's blue so the tank should be blue and in reality there might actually be tests that we could do to figure out what color will actually make our fish the most comfortable and the most successful. It's kind of a whole new level of you know, when you buy aquarium rocks do different colors cause your fish to act differently. It's possible. I don't know, but I did that today and I got blue. Light blue or dark blue? Darker blue sort of but yeah, it's the darker blue. Yeah, you might be okay. Yeah, I might be alright. I don't have a background color for the fish. So maybe I got to put a dark screen on the back there and I'm looking for a color. You certainly could. I don't know, this study was only done on salmon so pretty sure you don't have any salmon or trout in your at-home aquarium. Oh yeah, I do actually. I went big. I got the biggest possible aquarium. I was trying to get a tuna in there but apparently there's not. That's a salt water. Yeah, yeah. No mola mola in there for you. No, I got a small tank. I got a small fish tank today and we populated it with like seven guppies. They're too small. We need more fish but it's not a giant aquarium. It's still pretty reasonably small sized. Well, maybe you can do rock color tests on your guppies or not. There you go. None of them seem to. They're like communal fish. They're guppies. They're just constantly terrified. Death from above. Death from above. Is that why they never blink? Because they're scared? Yeah, it doesn't have to do with the fact they don't have eyelids. Definitely not. Yeah. All right, on that scientific note it's time for us to take a quick break. So those of you with eyelids don't blink. We'll be right back. This is This Week in Science. Things have hurt with more than Hey everybody. Do you like twists? Why don't you tell the world about it? Go out there to Spreaker to iTunes to I don't know whatever platform you consume twists on. 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We really could not do any of this without you. Thank you for your support. Sinister food your dinner tastes awful so it's got to be good. And we are back with more this week in science. Oh yeah we are back. We've got a whole bunch more science for you this is the second half of the show and Justin Cyborgs really you're building one? Nah I'm not building one look all the discussions that we've had on this show about world robot domination we may have overlooked one important feature in our future robot masters they may end up being a lot like us so much in fact that they may not be robots at all but synthetic life forms built like a robot but based on the same building blocks as you and I call them synths or cyborgs if you like when the day comes you may not be able to tell them from any other living thing you are used to seeing in your day-to-day experience while robot assists and AI programmers are back engineering life in the field form today researchers at the University of Georgia and Ben Gurun University in Israel have demonstrated for the first time that a bottom up approach may beat the path to tomorrow do the feet first yeah well not just it's more like well that's right we will grow the feet first we need the best robot foot to start if a robot can't walk can't do anything this is true they are starting even at a more more of a base than the feet they have built nanoscale electronic components from single DNA molecules their study published in the journal Nature Chemistry is touted as a promising advance in the search for a replacement for the silicon chip and may lead to much smaller, more powerful and more advanced electronic devices according to studies lead author Bingkwan Zhu for 50 years we have been able this is quotey voice for 50 years we have been able to place more and more computing power onto smaller and smaller chips but we are now pushing the physical limits of silicon says Zhu who is a associate professor in the UGA College of Engineering and adjunct professor in chemistry and physics that's a lot of schooling he's gone through if silicon based chips become much smaller their performance will become unstable and unpredictable and of course therefore useless to find a solution to the challenge you turn to DNA he says DNA's predictability, diversity and programmability make it a leading candidate for the design of functional electronic devices using single molecules so in the Nature Chemistry papers you and collaborators at Bangorin University used a single molecule of DNA to create the world's smallest diode diode being the electronic component that allows current to flow in one direction but prevents it from going the other way as you and team of graduate students graduate research assistants isolated a specifically designed duplex DNA of 11 base pairs and connected it to an electronic circuit only a few nanometers in size after the measured current showed no special behavior the team site specifically introduced a Coraline molecule to the DNA they found the current flowing through the DNA was 15 times stronger for negative voltages than for positive voltages which is a necessary feature of diodes I would assume this finding is quite counter-intuitive because the molecular structure is still seemingly symmetrical after Coraline intercalation so this is pretty amazing our discovery can lead to progress and design in construction of nanoscale electronic elements that are at least a thousand times smaller than current components that's amazing that is ridiculous absolutely game-changing the phones are going to be so small we won't even be able to find them like the opposite of a supermassive black hole no but it's not going to be you can joke that the phones are going to become super tiny just like this movie but anyway how much could be stored in it how many circuits all the stuff you could put in it the phones are still going to keep getting bigger as our vision is reduced from having screens all day but yeah it means that your computer can not only be a thousand times smaller it could be the same size in a thousand times more computer-y despite the short-term goals which is continuing their work with the goal of constructing additional molecular devices and enhancing the performance of the molecular diode despite that short-term goal the long-term implications of this should be obvious synthetic electronic life-form based on DNA that may be able to evolve take over the earth and make all of us build pyramids or something for no apparent reason other than it's in charge I mean just because it's DNA doesn't mean that it's necessarily going to evolve that it will replicate there has to be self-replication that has to be happening we just want to hear that life finds a way right out of molecules coming from molecules to yes eventually maybe it will lead to cyborgs yes the world being taken over by computers and AI kind of stuff but in the meantime to be able to get past silicon based chips and to have a component that allows electrical information flow in a direction you know that's what we need to start stuff happening I mean you're still working with enzymes and with stuff that's not as fast as the circuits that we currently have so it's still going to be smaller but it's still not as good as what we've got so I think they still have and probably I would imagine actually manufacturing this kind of stuff is going to be quite an ordeal to make that happen short term this is going to accelerate beyond Moore's law it's just going to accelerate this is the step that's needed to at least keep up with Moore's law and one of the things that's also really I think going to be affected by this of course all of our technology here we can have more computing and smaller spaces this sort of thing I think we've got probably more computing powers than we really know what to do with at this point anyway we got to catch up with our own technology right now to figure out what to do with our great new technology other than make it better go or something right but if you consider the expense of getting anything into space anytime you can make technology smaller more compact you can put bigger larger computers and sensors and technology into space cheaper in smaller packages it makes that much more accessible much cheaper much easier to do so now every every aspect of life could be transformed technology wise by this invention not tomorrow but soon down the road and then really this is such an easy tie in to the cybernetic robot brain that it may lead to conspiracies that we were all constructed by ancient scientists all life is a form of robotic now that's a different story all together stop it stop it did you guys read that story or hear the story this last week like about the vegetarian gene no no so some researchers at Cornell have been looking at specific populations of individuals and genes related to metabolism specifically diet and the processing of omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids and so what they've what their study has determined is that there is genetic variation that has come from eating particular diets like drinking milk like we a few years ago we learned about the our adaptation a new gene or a gene variation for processing lactose milk sugar right so more Europeans have this gene than others because they had a heavy period of of cow farming right we got the cows we're gonna drink the milk we're gonna eat the cheese gotta process it change the gene there so they discovered at Cornell that a specific segment of DNA has made it into vegetarian lineages so specifically looking at a vegetarian mainly vegetarian population in India also Africa and also Southeast Asia but it's an interesting point that the reason that this variation came about is that vegetarians have to there's a particular fatty acid that we usually get from our diets from eating meat but if you're a vegetarian you have to produce it yourself and it's hard to produce it you have to get you have to get these special oils sorts of things to be able to get this the proper nutrition and the dietary pressure of having not having the right nutrient has led to a variation in genes that we now some people can produce it in higher levels themselves so they have higher levels of the right amegas alternatively and this is because of an insertion of a 22 base paired little segment of DNA into a gene there's a different allele which is that 22 base pair segment deleted completely and that's within the Inuit population in Alaska who have our fish eaters and so they get tons of oily fish and so they don't need it and it's not just that they eat a lot of oily fish there's nothing growing there there's nothing growing there they eat a vegetable if they so choose to right you know there's it's not even just like we choose to be nothing grow it's rocks ice and water that's all you get yeah and so the interesting thing about this that people who were reporting on it over the last week it kind of hit the media and it it took a couple of this story took a couple of different interesting turns the headlines if you go looking for the story or kind of interesting what there's one typical headline that says you know if you eat a vegetarian diet your genome is going to change you're going to grow the vegetarian gene no no that's not how evolution works people that's not how adaptation works we're not talking epigenetics we're talking adaptation this is adaptation over hundreds of generations now it's interesting you know it's still this is a relatively new mutation but it's hundreds of generations of people which goes back you know thousands of years right so we don't know exactly when it came about though that's the thing that hasn't been determined yet based on the data so far from genetic samples they've taken they haven't been able to get that information of the molecular clock yet to figure out how far back it was inserted into these vegetarian these vegetarian pressure diets and it's not even and there's another idea that comes from this also is that we have not always been vegetarian in some areas in fact when we were just getting started as homo sapiens we probably had a very different ratio of these omega-3's to omega-6's different fats that we were getting where it was probably about a 4 to 1 or a 1 to 1 ratio even and now the western diet the ratio of these fats to each other is somewhere around 10 to 15 to 1 so it's way off interesting to note that this new insertion for vegetarianism doesn't really show up in Europeans so if you're a European descent we've been eating the milk, we've been drinking the cheese we've been doing all the stuff that basically has we don't need to make the fatty acid ourselves right if that's what for hundreds of thousands of years your ancestors have been doing but what comes out of this though is that some of this fatty acid and omega-3 processing influences is inflammation so the overall balance of omega-3's to omega-6's can lead to more prevalence of inflammation omega-6's for instance are involved in that inflammation pathway so if for instance you personally come from a lineage that has this particular insertion for vegetarianism you're actually going to be manufacturing too much of the omega-6's so you'll get it if you eat meat in your diet and you also or even to have plant oils in your diet that contain the omega-6's and you have this gene you're going to be more prone to inflammation potentially inflammation related disorders like cardiovascular disease or or gut disorders studies like this are going to be really interesting in taking us into the next level of medicine and even diet which is personalized medicine through understanding of our genome so if you understand that you've come from a particular genetic background you know Mediterranean diet is better for me I really don't need to be a vegetarian that's not good for me actually or hey and you have this insertion deleted completely you need to eat a diet high in fatty fishes so the second headline that has been making the rounds about this study is that if you have this vegetarian allele it's going to make you prone to cancer and heart disease which is not exactly true yeah that's not true just having it is not going to make you prone to these things it is something that however if you have had your genome analyzed by one of these genome analysis companies like 23andMe or another then you find out what nucleotide what nucleotides you have what sequences you have how it matches up and then you can go to your doctor and say hey I have this can you help me figure out how I should eat for better health and your doctor will go huh well I think that perhaps in 30 years everyone will get their genome sequenced by their doctor right so perhaps in 20 or 30 years it will be part of your normal check up we will be like let's see what you are genetically predisposed for what we need to look out for just it's going to be part of okay you need to give blood so we can look at your cholesterol and then we also need to sequence your genome I really think it will probably most likely not come from your doctor but something like 23andMe I think it's going to come first from people who are actively engaged in a for profit diagnosis of your genome who are going to take information like this and pass it on to people who are subscribing to that and having their genome looked at I think for it to get to doctors a long long time will pass before medicine becomes that personal it will probably be something like something like a 23andMe maybe a Nat Geo type of a thing long before your doctors are actually giving you advice based on anything like that we'll see I think they're still going to point to that FDA chart behind them and say you see here how the dairy is below the vegetables but above the meat and proportion to what the FDA that's all they're going to be well that's assuming that we're talking about this strictly from a nutritional standpoint I was thinking more that the more we learn about what our genetics tell us about how to stay healthy the more we can get from our genome in giving better medical care overall oh absolutely so that's more what I was saying was not the nutritional thing because I agree with the chat room doctors don't spend a lot of time on nutrition they just don't they're a bigger fish to fry but ultimately it could be part of your normal medical care to look at your genome yeah yeah so it's a I think it's an interesting study and it's unfortunate that meant so much of the media ran with more sensationalistic headlines because this is something that could be very informative for people if they learn about it in the right way unfortunately these headlines are the scare tactic of like you're going to get cancer and still be a vegetarian it's really like if you have this gene and you're vegetarian and you have these particular things in your diet then you're getting too much of something and you're going to be imbalancing it's all about balancing things properly and understanding evolution and adaptation and how gene frequencies change over time and location and are influenced by such interesting things as our diet so fascinating that there's such a difference between this vegetarian population from India and the Inuit population I think that in itself finding such a difference at the genetic level this is just a really interesting finding it also kind of accounts for taste so if certain cultures from certain areas like certain types of food maybe there's a reason for that maybe there's a reason for it but also maybe it's one of the things that they looked at pretty hard in studies in the past is why is it that Inuits don't get scurvy I mean these are people who don't eat vegetables this was a problem when sailors went to sea is they'd run out of fresh vegetables and get the scurvy of vitamin C deficiency stuff and all that and it turns out that they can get vitamin C if they eat enough seal and this and that but you know certainly the genes within us adapt to our diet over long periods of time over long periods of time long periods of time it's not your fad diet it's not going to change your DNA and it is that kind of the Inuit population has been relatively isolated so they're not really running around and there aren't lots of people going I'm going to go to Alaska and go be an Inuit and eat only the seal meat and the fish meat they're a small population and that's by the way it's the most disgusting thing I've ever tried it's consistency of chicken but it's the fishiest fish you would ever smelling tasting seals not a fish I know but it tastes like fish consistency of a mammal they eat fish you are what you eat but you just said it had the consistency of chicken I know but it kind of did it kind of reminded me more no no I've had seal this is what's weird this is why I seal with such a bizarre thing to eat it's two different animals in one overloaded flavor annoyed of yeah and the question to like whether or not genes could like make you like to eat certain things or not there was a study a couple of years ago looking at a gene called OR7D4 which researchers discovered that when people had two copies of the gene they rated meat with andrastinone which is a male hormone as less favorable so if you have two copies of this gene you don't like say the smell of pork from uncastrated male pigs whoa or you rate it less favorably it's a gene that lets you smell the boar tanked wow gross there's so much wrong with that sentence alright what's your bouncy metal story Justin oh that one where did it go you just gave away the story alright your headline says bouncy metal glass you also said that at the beginning of the show glasses see through but brittle metal is strong but lacks elasticity rubber can bounce but you can't see through it glass you can see through but as brittle metal is strong but I think you get the point we have different characteristics and then less scotty beams down looking to add a whale to the enterprise aquarium we aren't likely to get a material that crosses properties unless science takes place researchers from USC University of California San Diego and Caltech have created a new material with an unusual chemical structure that makes it incredibly hard and yet elastic the material can withstand heavy impacts without deforming even when pushed beyond its elastic limits it doesn't fracture instead retaining most of its original strength that makes it potentially useful in a variety of applications they point to drill bits to body armor for soldiers to meteor resistant casings for satellites to maybe even skeletons for future cyborg overlords yeah bringing it back in the science journal scientific reports researchers from those universities announced the creation of the material which is produced by heating a powdered iron composite up to exactly 630 degrees centigrade which is 1200 ish degrees fahrenheit and then rapidly cooling it they named it SAM2X5-630 of course right otherwise I'm going to call it bouncy glass because the new material has the highest impact resistance of any bulk metallic glass which is a class of artificially generated materials that we've been working on since the 1960s so a typical metal has a very organized crystalline structure at the atomic level but the bulk metal glasses BMGs are formed when metal and metal alloys are subjected to this extreme heat then rapidly cooled their atoms are excited into a very disorganized arrangement and then stuck there giving them these rather unusual properties there is a video I don't know if you can find it Kiki she's playing it right now so what's amazing about this is one of these BMGs compounds is pound for pound twice as strong as titanium what makes this particular SAM2X5-630 special is that it's not entirely glass just mostly and for some reason exact timing and temperatures used to create it leave it with a few hints of structure here and there which seems to be key to its unique structure basically this is a metallic glass that can bounce bounce glass bounce glass so there's a something called the Huganoite elastic limit maximum shock something can take without irreversibly transforming it has it's a 1.5 to 1.8 millimeter thick piece a 1.5 to 1.8 millimeter thick piece of this was measured at 11 0.67 plus 126 GPA for reference stainless steel is a 0.2 tungsten carbide is 4.5 so this isn't the highest elastic limit of any material known diamonds are up at 60 GPA pretty insane but aren't very practical for for use I guess so this is 11 so this is much higher than most metals materials we're working with but not quite where diamonds are metal was produced UC San Diego using spark plasma sintering process this is hilarious strengths in the chat room says this is transparent aluminum from Star Trek 4 that's what I was from the intro that's the that's in case anybody missed it that was the whole enterprise aquarium yeah yeah can you play that can you share that that video that's on there I did I'll put the link in the chat room super strong bouncy metal that's super cool yeah I mean to be able to use something like that I mean yeah how many things could you use it for could I make my phone out of it could it be the glass on my phone which is currently cracked oh no but it would actually be funny too is if you did make the material then you would drop it and it would bounce like you might be able to catch it on the way that's mine that's all good moving on up I've got that's a good call that is the highest and best use of that material right there smart phone glass I need a bouncy phone that's what I need how about bouncy brains our brains unfortunately do not bounce back from injury the way that we would like them to no no they do not well researchers have been trying to find new ways to heal the brain after brain injury specifically radiation damage from your radiation and because very often radiation will lead to damage to brain structures lead to inflammation it will even though you might be able to kind of help the brain there is cognitive damage down the line and so researchers are trying to figure out a way especially with kids to get to get brain cancer treatments like irradiation to not be as damaging to the brain so say you've got a child with a glioma or some other form of brain cancer and they go in for radiation they're going to have cognitive problems later how can you stop that from happening what they discovered from their and other stem cell studies is that you can stem cells can actually help to kind of keep the damage from happening but stem cells themselves come with a whole bunch of tricky issues right it's not you can't just use stem cells can't just take stem cells and stick them into the brain they have their own issues for sometimes causing tumors and other problems so they have discovered that it's not necessarily just the stem cells that are having the effect it is these little packets of information that the stem cells use to connect and contact communicate with each other and other neurons so they're called micro vesicles they're little tiny usually full of proteins neurotransmitters they're little communication packets that these stem cells use and the researchers were able to take these micro vesicles from stem cells and inject the micro vesicles into the brains of rats that had been radiated and they found that those rats that got the micro vesicles versus ones that didn't the cognitive problems weren't there so rats that had been irradiated they were expected to have cognitive decline if they got micro vesicles their cognition was not affected so they basically recovered really really well so the next step if everything is good is to keep keep looking and see what we can do with human studies see if we can actually use these micro vesicles which get out of the whole thorny thicket of stem cell controversy using the micro vesicles themselves could be a really amazing way to protect the brain from many types of inflammatory brain trauma yeah yeah which is really really cool I just thought it was a very neat study stem cells solve all problems yeah we're going to fix the world with stem cells it kind of seems like it well stem cells and the blood of children fair yeah no we'll talk about that some other time what's your nightmare juice tonight so I don't know if you guys were aware of um aerostallis 10x it's the common drone fly well when they're babies when they're a little larva they look like drum roll this yeah so those are called rat tailed maggots well and to describe this for our listening audience it really looks as though the maggots have a rat tail it's like a segmented scaled tail that comes off the end of a maggot white grubby looking thing so that's disgusting thanks for that Blair well actually they have an interesting story which is why I brought them up not just to scare you so they live in wet basically and the rat tail is actually a breathing tube that sticks out of the water getting even more charming well that stagnant water is also filled with bacteria fungi and algae how do they survive it turns out they're covered in spikies so yeah the spikes the spines are so teeny tiny and they're made of stacks of hollow cord discs the scientist who discovered this described it as the stacking rings that babies play with but these spines are so teeny tiny and so well clustered that bacteria can't stick they can't get onto the larva it it repels oil which also means that it keeps biofilm from forming on them a way to get to the maggot so this is extremely they found a way to sterilize their body in a disgusting place and this is something that we could potentially use in a lot of different ways in the medical field thinking about how biofilms fowl surgical instruments all the time or devices that are going to be implanted so if we can harness these little spines it could be a great breakthrough for science and then I have to throw in the quote at the very end of the article from Matthew Hayes a cell biologist at the Institute of Ophthalmology at University College London in England who says I've loved insects since I was a child when I would breed butterflies and moths I'm just so chuffed to have discovered something a bit new about insects oh the British he's such a nice wave I'm chuffed dead chuffed chuffed that's really interesting so these spines keep the bacteria from growing on it so that these drone flies so that they can grow into their adult form of the drone fly and then be a drone fly yeah I'm sure the other like mosquito larva if they have something similar let's find a way to they do let's find a way to get around it so this kind of study could help us learn more about how do we actually get the bacteria to attack them right yeah that's such a good point yeah figure out how to disable the protection and then real quick speaking of another species that needs our protection or type of animal that's white nose syndrome has officially showed up in the western United States for the first time yeah they found a bat about 30 miles east of Seattle with white nose the very first time it's been found this far west it's they've been kind of bracing themselves for when it shows up on the west post and it's finally happened this previous to this it's only been detected as far west as Minnesota so somehow it made the jump like across the central United States across the Rockies yeah that's I mean what yeah and apparently US Fish and Wildlife has been expecting a jump like this they're not clear it's not clear how it got there it's also not clear how long it's been there because it's also possible we just haven't seen it yet so just a couple of reminders when it comes to white nose syndrome we're hoping that all those trials that I've been reporting on relating to fungus potentially figure out a way to fix this problem to treat these bats in the wild hopefully that all pans out but in the meantime if you go hiking and anywhere in North America you hose off your shoes when you get home before you go hiking anywhere else if you see a sick bat call Animal Caring Control and for multiple reasons it might be white nose, it might also be rabies it could be anything yeah it's never good to if you see a sick bat report it exactly so those are the two things you can do especially if you go into caves you want to clean off everything before you go anywhere else in nature because this is a fungus and there are fungal spores that can get onto your clothes onto your gear that you don't even know about and then if you go use the same stuff in another cave you just spread it which is probably what happened I bet it was not a bat traveling from place to place but more likely people with stuff probably yeah well speaking of people so we know that in songbirds cuckoldry is fairly common right we talk about it all the time they what are the extra do we really talk about cuckoldry all the time we do we bring it up on the show quite often and what exactly is cuckoldry for those of me who don't really know what that word means cuckoldry is when a male is tricked into taking care of another male's offspring so very often we have what are called EPCs or extra pair copulations in birds and either the ladies fly off or men go around finding other ladies well you know the other men are off finding other ladies and everyone's in the songbird literature it's just expected about like at least 1 in 10 chicks are going 10% of the chicks at least are going to be cuckolded that males just cross the board you're going to the bird males are raising other males young that's just what's happening because people are so much like songbirds just expected that that's what's happening in humans too it was just expected that anywhere from 10 to 30% of men were unknowingly raising some milkbirds children milkbirds yeah I was going to say something about milkman exactly so researchers just published a survey in trends and ecology and evolution and there's a great article written up in ours Technica by Annalee Newitz and the survey was based on genetic testing and actual ancestor research so there is some just survey stuff that could be faulty but there is genetic testing involved as well and the result is only 1 to 2% of human males are likely parenting someone else's child unknowingly and so it's a really interesting thing that this study came out of for years people just expecting that humans were the same as birds when we're not and the authors say as Annalee quotes that extra pair paternity rates in humans have stayed near constant at around 1% across several human societies over the past several hundred years so this isn't even something new as a result of modern technology and contraception so it's not that was one of the things I was going to ask about is contraception that's so interesting that this is typical in human society that we don't cuckold that often if females are having extramarital affairs and copulations that the cuckolding is not happening so there's a few things going on here so one, is it that the men find out or is it that they're told to or is it three that there's just less extra pair copulation happening overall right so there are many many different possibilities or is this all this 1% an episode of Mori Povich right like is that what they're talking about that's sort of I think the feathers would be a dead giveaway though probably my kid had feathers in a peak I'd be like I think we're raising some other birds so that's something on that note that in birds very often they'll even raise the young of other species so they're just not paying very close attention they're not paying the same attention as say people where you go hey how come that kid has blue eyes and red hair and I've got brown hair and dark skin and so do you so if you know just a little bit about how traits get passed down you're going to recognize whether or not it's a good choice and our society pays a lot of attention to that too. We talk about oh he has his father's eyes or oh she looks just like her mother or we assign a lot of these things we pay very close attention to those things also our offspring spend a lot longer with us and so the last paragraph of Annali's story which I love this ultimately conclude the researchers quote potential genetic benefits of extra-pair children are unlikely to be offset by the potential costs of being caught, particularly in such long-lived species as humans with heavy offspring dependence and massive parental investment, just like you just said, Blair. Basically women aren't cheating because the costs are too great, or, you know, it could just be that researchers have completely misunderstood the role of extramarital sex in women's lives. Which is also a possibility that maybe we're not looking at it from, that research into this stuff has been looking at it from an animal behavior perspective, looking at it from, especially if you consider the fact that it's taken so long for anyone to look at it from outside of the perspective of animal literature, that maybe looking at what women are doing in their research, in their relationships and for their sex lives, that we just haven't been asking the right questions, especially when research has been dominated by men doing the research for so long. So, who I said it. Yeah, so anyway, it's a very interesting point and there's some interesting questions brought up. I think. Yeah, what? Good point though, Kiki, and someday I'm going to ask just generally, what took women so long? I mean, where were you? You're doing all this heavy lifting and science and guys were in. I know, we were just messing around in the kitchen. It's about time you showed up. Yeah, you know, I was really just enjoying being barefoot and pregnant. That's all. You know, I enjoyed it so much. I was just watching my soaps and the next awesome weird, weird story. Love robot domination, robots, they dominate our physiological responses as well as so many other things. A new study that's going to be presented in Japan, it's out of Stanford University, it's going to be reported at the International Communication Association meeting in Fukuoka, Japan. The researchers took a really cute little robot. This is a robot that, let's see, what's the name of the robot? Aldebaran Robotics now, NaO human shaped robot. Very cute robot, looks robot-y, but it's also got a human form to it. They asked people to, or the robot actually verbally asked people to touch the robot. We had people being told by the robot to touch the robot and then, meanwhile, there were sensors on the participant's fingers to measure their galvanic skin response, which is a measure of how aroused you're getting. It's not necessarily sexual arousal, it's just arousal that emotionally you are aroused in some way. It's a change in your physiology. Nothing normal parts of the body, totally no problem, touch your hand, whatever, but when the robot asked participants to touch sexually related parts of the robot body, people got aroused. They also measured time delay and how long it took the participants to touch the robot, and so it took longer for people to touch these areas that are considered on people sexy, to be sexy. The question here is, are people becoming aroused sexually by the idea of touching the robot, or is it just like, whoa, did a robot just ask me to touch that, what, and you're taking it back for a second and go, what, and then maybe it took a second longer. One thing, two, three things. For the listening audience, this robot is pretty much just a white shell clad, I mean, it's a white robot, it's just sort of a robot-y looking. It's sort of sitting slightly spread-legged and has a surprised look on its face. And I think that this says something, perhaps not about all of mankind, I'm going to say maybe just sort of Japanese. I was hoping you were going to say it. I mean, I don't want to, you know, but I'm saying is this might not apply to all people everywhere. It's possible. It definitely might not. Surprised anime-faced robot as an object of sexual desire. I don't think applies globally to the human condition. Right, so who were they asking? And I don't think they, it's not a huge sample size either, so, you know, it's an interesting response that they did find this, but the social ramifications, of course, are still unknown, but the question is, you know, even when a robot, it's humanoid-ish in appearance, but it doesn't look like a person. It doesn't look like a guy or a girl, it's sort of a drudgenous animal. But it also is kind of juvenile looking, isn't it? That's what totally creeped me out. Yeah, I could see that. It has kind of like, you know how we talk about how big animals have facial features that create a response that's parental in nature? Right, I was just going to say, if this robot had asked me to touch it there, I would not have. No! Like, that would have been severely creeped out by this thing. That's interesting. It's interesting that you guys are saying it, because it's just a robot. I know, and what is, and it's humanoid in appearance, but it's quote-unquote intimate parts aren't intimate. They're just a hard plastic shell, and there's nothing there, you know? It's not... No, but as an anthropomorphic size human, I would have that visceral reaction to it. Yeah, and I think this study does go along with other studies that have found that humans, I think there was a Dutch study, and I'm not remembering the exact details of the other one, where people do give anthropomorphic qualities to non-human-looking robots. So... Good question. Who is it? Fex in the chat room. What does its voice sound like? Oh, good question. Right? That's a great question. I don't know. That's an important factor in the whole anthropomorphic classification of it is the audio interpretation of what you're dealing with in this robot. Yeah. Good question. I would love to hear some audio from it, yes. Oh wait, I found a video. Let's see if I can... Please touch me with your abdomen and hand. When I ask you to point at me, please point at me with your abdomen and hand. Please leave your other hand on the sensor. Okay, let's get started. The voice is... Wait, wait. The voice is... You want to watch? You want to watch as it touches your... No, I want to hear how it asks... If you record you as the particle region... If you do this process with your... Please touch my ear. Please touch my ear. Body parts with low accessibility... Please touch my voice. He just went right in for it. No hesitation at all. Just like, yep. But the voice is rather mature, feminine, and sort of authoritative. Yeah, it sounds a little young. It sounds a little young. Does it? No. That authoritative and articulate vocabulary and all this sort of thing. Also, the inclusion of the word please strikes me as odd. Right, but it sounds... It's also rather authoritative. It doesn't sound like you're manipulating or abusing a situation in this. No. No, I don't. No, no, no. But I will also say, though, if somebody was in the room and said, touch the robot such and such place, I would probably do it. But since the robot asked, it would totally give me pause. It would be also great, which it didn't happen. Which is, the robot didn't react to it much. I'll show you! What are you doing? You're failing? It didn't react. I think something also about scientific studies where you have something asking you to do something, you're supposed to go in and just do what the study asks you to do. Go from past social science and psychology studies that sometimes they tell you they're studying one thing when in fact they're studying another. So are the people doing the study just trying to find out how you respond to a robot and to help with robot design and communication? Or are they doing a study to find out about what you think about the situation? Are they doing a study to find out more about your social morals? There's sort of some red herring instructions which is keep one hand on the sensor, put your dominant hand on the region, and then it describes the region in a sort of scientific way. So it's sort of making it like something about my hand that I'm using and keeping another hand on the sensor, I have to concentrate on that. Also, it's feeding me back sort of scientific information about the region. So it's sort of like maybe I'm testing at sensors. It's giving you a lot of information that has nothing to do with what they're actually examining, which is also enough things to keep your mind distracted away from what turned out to be a rousal touching an infant-sized robot in the butt. The buttocks. Please touch my buttocks. Oh, Kiki, don't ever say that again. Justin, did you have one more story? Quick story, University of Miami School of Marine Atmospheric Science-led Study found that Miami Beach flood events has significantly increased over the last decade due to an acceleration of sea level rise in South Florida. Researchers suggest that regional sea level projections should be used for global projections to better prepare for future flood hazards in the region. The study also provides new evidence that connects the weakening of the Gulf Stream with sea level rise along the US Atlantic coast. What's really interesting about this, this is a state that has a governor that has told everybody in state government not to use the word global warming or climate change. This is a government entity that is denying global warming and yet they are slowly becoming further and further underwater, which may be a self-correcting problem for the case generally speaking. Bye-bye Florida. Yeah, there was another story related to this as well, that NASA JPL has to worry about, it's JPL, right? No, Johnson Space Center, sorry. That NASA Johnson Space Center has to really worry about this because of this projected rise. Their launch pad is going to be underwater. Not just Miami, not just Miami Beach, but there's a lot of other cool stuff that we might lose. It's okay, we can move it. Move it. You've got to move it, move it. The future map of the Americas is going to be missing that peninsula state. Florida's just going to be this little one. My aunt and uncle are going to have to move. You know what though, Disney World's down there and Harry Potterland. Oh sorry. Oh they're building one on the west coast too, it'll come later though. It is opening this month I think. It has to, it has to. Actually a friend of mine just got to go through it with no crowds. It's the work for Disney's exhibits to go in there and check stuff out at a time. That's nice. It sucks for the rest of us. All right everybody, I think we made it to the end of our show. We did it. 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Thank you for all of your support on Patreon. And if you are interested in supporting us, you can find information at patreon.com.slash this week in Science. Also remember you can help us out simply by telling your friends about twists. It's so easy. On next week's show, we will be back once again broadcasting live online at 8 p.m. Pacific Time on twist.org.slash live. You can join our chat room and watch live. It's a pretty cool thing. Don't worry if you can't make that time though. We are also available on twist.org.slash YouTube. You can watch our past episodes or go to twist.org where you can catch the audio versions. Thank you everyone for enjoying 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 that's Android-ish in nature, you can look for Twist to WIS, the number 4 Droid app in the Android marketplace, or simply this week in Science in anything that's Apple Marketplace-y. 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It says the scientist is in. I'm gonna sell my advice. Show them how to stop the robot with a simple device. I'll reverse all the warming with a wave of my hand. And all it'll cost you 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 air. Cause it's this week in science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in 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 then understand. But we're not trying to threaten your philosophy we're just trying to save the world from Japanese. This week in science is coming your way. So everybody listen to everything we say and if you use our methods then roll and I die. We may rid the world of toxoplasma got the eyes. It's this week in science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. The laundry list of items I want to address from stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness. I'm trying to promote more rational thought and I'll try to answer any question you've got. How can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop for this week in science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. It is the love, the lovely music It's time for the after show, it's time for the after show, you know. Blair go. Oh she found the booba and the kiki. It's the booba and kiki. The booba. Which one's the booba? Which one's the kiki? Well I think it's pretty obvious which one's the booba and which one's the kiki. I found it. There's one hair. There's been one hair that's been bothering me. Oh no. I took it in my arm for a whole hour. Oh my goodness. Which one's the booba? Which one's the kiki? Well we'll ask Justin when he gets back, but I'm with 95 to 98% of the populace on this one. Yep. I think anyone who knows me can figure it out. So the different game we could play is which one's the Blair and which one's the kiki. Then what's the Justin? I don't even know. I know. What? Hey thanks everybody for listening, for watching again, hanging out in the chat room. Yes, Ed is plugging his Minion Hangout tomorrow night, so you can go to scienceisland.org. Look for the Science Island Chat, and the Science Island Chat will be where the Minion Hangout is happening tomorrow night. It'll be live on YouTube also, but you can watch it at the Science Island website. It's part of the whole Twist Family. Ed has been putting this on for a while, organizing the Twist Minion Hangouts, and there's a great group of people that get together once a week and talk about more science. Yeah. We've had some really fantastic discussions on there. Some of them have even, some of those conversations have even preempted this show in terms of getting on to a story, which is fun, because then I get to come to this show, and I've already had the conversation. Okay, so Justin, which one's the Bubba, and which one's the Kiki? Oh goodness. We've got a couple of images up there. Hang on. Yeah, so on my screen. Okay. So obviously I'm going to go, Bubba is more rounded, and Kiki is pointier. Mostly done. Very good. Very good. There we are. So to read directly from the Wikipedia, Wolfgang Kohler designed this psychological experiment. People are asked to choose which of these shapes is named Bubba, and which is named Kiki. 95 to 98 percent of people chose Kiki for the angular shape, and Bubba for the rounded shape. So this is about performative words. Yes. Exactly. Performative language. For language development. They're not even real words, I think they were sounds or something, yeah. The rounded shape may most commonly be named Bubba, because the mouth makes a more rounded shape to produce the sound. Similarly, a more taut angular mouth shape is needed to make the sound Kiki. The sounds of K are harder and more forceful than those of a B as well. In the Roman alphabet, the angular shape mimics the angular letters K and I, while the rounded shape mimics the rounded letters B and O. Yeah. I think I'm kind of angular. So two very complicated words. Rock or cut or rounded. I'll give you two examples of performative words. One is gymnastics, right? The word itself, when you speak gymnastics, it kind of makes you do a little mouthy gymnastics in saying this, right? And I think the best, most performative word ever created by mankind is the word poop. It starts, right, it starts puckered, there's this ooh thing that passes through and then it ends puckered again. Poop is the most performative word. In the human language. So we talked about buttocks and poop. Yeah, but as a performative word, there's nothing that more embodies the action that it is describing than that word. It makes your mouth perform the action of the event you're describing. That is performative language at its peak, at its best. I'm laughing so hard at the chat room right now too, Claire. Effects, oh my God. C-X-I-R-N-X, what is that, I-R-N-X-V-X? Anyway, the question is who would win in a fight between Bubba and Kiki? When Blair says Kiki, Kiki would stab Bubba with the glorious angles and then X says Bubba hugs Kiki, win with love. Meanwhile, meanwhile, Wisconsin guy is going pooooooo in the corner and we're just a whole bunch of very special snowflakes, aren't we? Hey, check out Blair's Animal Corner artwork available on Patreon, yeah, that's great. This is a blue-bellied roller. I love that, I love that and it's flying on the African savanna, I think that is so great. Thanks. You're welcome. So we're a sixth of the way towards 2017's calendar. I have my pizza nautilus as dubbed by Kiki and then I have my blue-bellied roller, pizza nautilus. I have to update my calendar, I haven't flipped it, I'm still in the panda, I don't even know what I'm doing. Your favorite one is this month, it's your favorite, it's the rat, it's the rat month, this is April the rat month. I've got to flip it because I've already got it. It's a cute little rat too and according, I hope you guys all celebrated on Monday. I love that one because that's the one I have the original, which I know I still have to get framed, I still haven't done it. But this is- That gets something spilled on it, I'm going to be pretty- No, no, no, no, it's in a very safe place. So- Oh my God, the wonderful calendar this year, it's had square root day on the fourth, I hope everyone celebrated, the next one is going to be in 5525, yeah, that's a long time. It's going to be a while. It's the next one. Nine years in fact. That's right. And then, Yuri's night is next Tuesday, so if it's on your calendar, go find something nearby you to celebrate Yuri's night and the first human space flight, right? And then, the 16th is National Library Day, we shall go to the library. Let's all go to the library, let's all go to the library. Fun-ish fact, whatever, nostalgia for Davis, there used to be a video game arcade for those of us old enough to know what that was, it's pre-console when each game had its own gigantic box that you played it on, the arcade in downtown Davis was called the library. I remember the library. Yeah. So you could always say, it's always such a great cover. I'm going to go study at the library. It's like having a bar called the office, you know, I got to work late at the office, you know, where are you going kids, we're going to the library, so it's good. So we need like eight dollars. Fine, I kept my books too long. My books are overdue, I'm so into reading them that I've got to bring some quarters if you haven't. Oh no, the preformative words, Dave Shorty, oh, you work at a bookstore, bookstores are awesome. I have a great bookstore down the street for me, Powell's books, it's great. How you doing there Blair, sleepy? I'm a little tired. You're tired, how's your week going? I've been working very long hours. There's lots of science and animaling and teaching to do. That's a good thing. Is it good? That's alright. I have met a wonderful person up here in Portland who might be interested in, she's doing some test stuff in the next week or so to kind of see how it goes, but maybe help us edit shorter things for the YouTube channel and yes, she is wonderful. She also is sometimes a pirate. You don't say. And she sings sea shanties. Oh my goodness. And knows how to use a cannon, oh, I like her. That's a fantastic group of qualities and I haven't showed you my new pillow. And if she's listening, Jessica, you're amazing, we'll get you on to actually thank you and talk, we'll get her on at some point to say hi and to get her talking and to join the fun. Yeah. Ah, Fex is in Seattle just like identity. This is my newest pillow in the house. Awesome. Thereby pirates. How'd you acquire that? In the children's section of Target. Yay. I find so many things that I love in children's sections of stores. You know what? You know? You're just labels. Yeah. I want that. I bought a pillow this week that has blue tassels on it and a hippo. I actually have an insanely large growing pillow collection. I've got pillows with insects on them. I just got one with a fox on it. My children actually, they're like interventionists. When we go someplace and I want to look at pillows. They're like, no, we have enough pillows. Walk away from the pillows. Justin, is this like a psychological need to be non-confrontational? Just everything is soft around you. Maybe he's doing more nesting. I think it's a nesting thing. I like to have comfy pillows everywhere. Maybe you just like to sleep everywhere in the house but on the bed. Oh, no. This is also part of it. Absolutely. I do create my own comfort zone on the floor when consuming television or Netflix or something. So you are a mouse. That's why you like the mouse. Yeah, I rarely am actually, very rarely actually see me sitting in a chair or on a couch. It's more like in front of the couch with a pillow fort around me. Nice. That sounds amazing. Oh, wait. So, Fex is saying, oh, you are around the Seattle neighborhood that the gas line blew up in. Ah, I'm glad you're all right. And I'm glad identity that you were not at that skeptics pub the night that that happened. And wasn't there a giant gas explosion somewhere near you in San Francisco? Yeah, it was a few years ago. Yeah, that was in San Bruno. But isn't it something that's following you around? I'm not that close to Seattle. It's not following me. Bad gas lines are not me. I had nothing to do with it. Look at you conspiracy theorist. You know, you gave a human being a few disparate points of data. They're bound to combine them. This is what we do. Somebody was talking about earlier too in the chat room. And I'm sorry I lost it because it was a while back there. Something along the line. No, no, there wasn't in the chat room. It was on the Twitter. Craig was saying that Carol, he was retweeting. Carolyn said DNA analysis reveals that maybe the Celts nor their ancestors built the stone circles in Ireland. And then they tweeted us maybe the origin is the same as the Red Deer Mediterranean North Africans. Well, it's probably not Mediterranean North Africans, but the original group of Europe and Britannia isn't the group that's there now. The Bronze Age, which happened five-ish thousand years ago, brought in an influx from the Caucasus Mountains originally. And they sort of moved west across Europe and lots of places, right? So there were a people there before. Maybe that, and that's a good point. I don't really know the time frames of the stone circles and things like Stonehenge, but it's possible they pre-date the Celts. Because the peoples of Europe are pretty recent arrivals, historically speaking. And not much is known about these truly Neolithic people. They're pre-Neolithic. They'd be the Stone Age peoples of Europe who pre-dated the Bronze Age influx aren't the same peoples. So this is why this is always so fascinating to me, too. Especially since people have such strong cultural identities to places and regions and things like this. The more we learn about the actual migrations and flux of humanity over time, it's kind of hard to claim anybody has real roots in a location as far back as they tend to think that they do. All I know is a little bit nomadic. Yeah, pretty much all my genes center around Northern Europe. That's even the Neanderthal. Like all Northern Europe. Yeah, I've got a pretty good chunk of the continents in my genetic makeup. I think we've already talked about this though. I threw my mothers all the way back, first peoples in the Americas. So this is why I do agree, this is the one thing I do agree with Donald Trump on, is we need to get all the immigrants out of America, which I'm counting anybody who didn't arrive here 12,000 years ago. I'm going to take it back a further notch and say anybody who wasn't here 12,000 years ago, either get out or maybe pay a fine and go through a process of assimilation. We should all learn the language that was in the region in which you're inhabiting maybe five, six, eight hundred years ago. What was that? Well, it depends on the region. Native Americans, for some it's some native American. Yeah, language. The Hopes have a little different dialect. All of you will have to learn a new language, especially when I'm including myself. I don't really know which language I would be supposed to be speaking. Although I have the maternal haplogrp A2, the one that goes all the way back to the first mothers that came across, was also found in a mummified inking girl who died some four hundred years ago. So I could be all through the Americas. Clovis people would call some of me, some of my genes, immigrant genes, and they would also call some of my genes ancestral source, the gem doctor. So I've got enough of everything. Mostly it's Italian, pretty much. But then there's also the Irish, and there's a lot of European, like 90-something percent probably, European, which also goes back Bronze Age to the Caucasus Mountains. So I'm mostly those people who came and kicked out whoever was already there, including the Nandidals. Thanks a lot, dude. Thanks a lot. And I've got some North African, which is probably because I have like a quarter Sicilian ancestry. And, you know, and then a lot of it too is just sort of vaguely this or that. Got the Ashkenazi in there. I got the, I got the, something like five to six percent still is the Native American, which originated in this lineage from Siberian. But not anyway. See, this is also what's interesting. The Native American genes are much, much, we're talking like, you know, 12 to 19,000 years back of Native American genes, but they're different from the Inuits. The Inuits are actually much more recent influx, which is kind of curious. So fascinating. So fascinating to go back and be like, okay, where does all this come from? What's going on there? If you go back far enough outside of some Neanderthal or Denysovian, and we still don't know what the Red Deer Cave people are, that's the history. We know that the origin of our origin is most, well, even the origin of the origin of the origin of those other desperate, so it's all Africa. This is where the bread basket of planet Earth, humanity-wise, came from. I want an old-fashioned. Old-fashioneds are yummy. Hot Rod says, I'm from Mars. We populated Earth many moons ago. So apparently Earth used to have many moons. Ha ha ha. I had no idea. That's funny. You're funny. Oh, Fungaman is the direct descendant of the fifth or sixth human ever. As are all of us. Right. This is kind of the... Also, we're all massively into bread. There's sort of a fun math experiment you can do. All right? Okay. Blair, how many parents do you have? Two. That's a question. This is how the questioning starts. How many grandparents do you have? Well, four. Four. Five. Four. Five. Okay. How many great-grandparents do you have? Technically, I had five. Eight. Ha ha ha. How many great-great-grandparents do you have? Sixteen. How many great-great-great? Okay. So you do this back enough time and you can go back a hundred generations, a thousand generations, really? And all of a sudden you have a population much larger than the population on the planet today. Right? That's if there wasn't a lot of relative interbreeding because about 2,000 years ago, population on planet Earth was probably around 15 million people. But if you do this math backwards, you end up into the billions. So the point is we come from a small stock that recombined and recombined and recombined many, many, many, many times. The story of humanity is one of interbreeding. This is... That's true. Yeah. It's the only way it would have worked. Yeah. That's the only way it was possible. Stretching time. Effects. I'm supposedly largely British with a bit of Eastern European and a tiny pinch of Native American. Supposedly, with that DNA test, who really knows, you should do it. Do a 23andMe or a Nat Geo. I'm still waiting on Nat Geo. 23andMe came across a little faster, but I'm doing both. But this is why I love the test that I did, the results is that 6% Native American and even a maternal haplogroup that hasn't changed, gone down... My kids won't have it because it's a maternal haplogroup, but it had to go a chain of mothers all the way back. Really incredible info. But what it was fascinating about is the oldest of my mother's family generation there, my uncle always claimed that we had Native American ancestry. He was the oldest of seven, and so maybe he heard more of the stories from the grandparents or the great-grandparents, and maybe did actually know a little more of the family history, but none of the siblings believed it. They thought that he just took that on because in the 60s, early 70s it was fashionable. He did a sort of Occupy Alcatraz when the Native Americans were in the Occupy Alcatraz back. Yeah, he was part of that. They always thought it was just sort of his question authority or whatever it is, sort of stance or his rebellion that a lot of people went through in the 60s and didn't have any factual basis. Then that was the thing that I'd been told by my mother, in fact. Don't put any weight on that. It's just something your uncle is making up. He's a guy who even bought a teepee and had a teepee on his property and would go live in a teepee and he learned some Native American language and stuff, but he all had to do it all from leaving the suburbs of Irish Catholic upbringing. It was sort of like this sort of thing where I didn't know really what to believe. It's there. It's in the DNA and in a very strong way. You look at the pictures of Grandma and she's like, this has this really Native American appearance about her, and now it really does make sense. But I wouldn't have necessarily believed it. I didn't believe it, actually, until I got the results back. It was such a strong hit that it's undeniable. I recommend that anybody do this test and get that a little bit more information about your history, your origins. I'm still waiting for the database to get a little more vast. It's pretty vast. Also, one of the things, I was very skeptical when I went into 23andMe, because one of the things they wanted to know was your surnames of parents and grandparents and that sort of thing, and I denied them the information. Partly because I was like, well, I don't want this to be any sort of a ruse. I don't want them to be basing any information off of surnames. It should all be there in the DNA, right? So why would I bother? And the surnames is sort of an interesting thing, because it's sort of illustrating what you know about your lineage, and it helps the database because, oh, okay. So this person knows their surnames and lineages came from Italy, or Austria, or Israel, or Norway, or Australia, and so it'll help sort of piece together where those are. But I denied all that information. And they have this thing where it shows you who your closest relatives are, and I have a second cousin, apparently, who already did 23andMe, who has a surname I recognize because he's my grandmother's grandson, and he shows up there. And so this was like, without me providing any additional information, this was my closest genetic link, and it's an absolutely true and correct link. So I definitely recommend 23andMe to everybody and anyone well worth the price of admission. I'll do it eventually. Yeah, you should eventually. It's fun. I'm fascinated by watching a video. Apparently 1% of you, maybe 2% of you, find out your father's not who you thought he was based on today's show. Yeah, there you go. What are you watching, Kiki? I was watching a video of some cyclists saving a cow from a tree. It had gotten its head stuck between two branches, two trunks of a tree. It was all stuck in there and its body was twisted. What are you talking about? The cyclists came through and left it around. Sorry. I just got started watching this video. Watching YouTube videos in the after show? Is that what's happening? Facebook video? You fell down a Facebook rabbit hole? I did. You know why? Because I deleted Facebook from my phone, and so I don't actually know what's going on in Facebook anymore, and so I was like, what's happening in Facebook? Because I don't know. Because I have lost that habit of checking Facebook for the last week. Yes, Facebook hole. I admit it. I admit it, but there's some good stuff in there. There's some great stuff in there, I tell you. I just saw Gord speaking of a Facebook hole. Gord posted something on Facebook. It's a comic. One person walks up to another person with their new dog. This is my dog, Achilles. The other person says, hey, Achilles, cool. The person who owns the dog says, Achilles, heal. He's not doing it. The other person says, wow, he can't even do that one thing. The dog owner says, yeah, it's his only weakness. Stop it. I didn't want to laugh at it. I really thought it was good. It's good, it's good. I just didn't understand how. Yeah, Rorx is dying. I love it. Do we have, there's no more, we don't have any business. Oh wait, I just clicked. I just refreshed and I just got that. It's good in the comic form. Blair's going to fall asleep. Blair's going to fall asleep. All right, you guys, whack-a-wacka. I'm getting tired too. Do I have any work to do? Do I have anywhere work to do? Probably. I'm not going to do it. I have my light, my homework, you guys, my homework for the next couple of days. I have to get a driver's license. Oh, because you've been there for too long on your California license? Oh yeah. That's the after show, nobody watches it. Don't show up at my door. So I'm going to have to upgrade my phone probably this week, so I ordered a case and I decided to, oh here it is. I want to screen share it, show it. So I was going to get a twist case. Oh, can you get one? It's on Zazzle. You can get a phone case on Zazzle. You got Dr. Who tarted. Now I want a twist case. That's so much ratter. So I was looking at the twist options and I was like, okay, that's pretty cool. And then I started kind of messing around and then, let's see if I can order. Here we go. What do you do? I did a thing. Sign in with Facebook, fine. Come on, come on. Oh, Portland Agri Allergies. Agil Reese. Agil Reese, that's right. So beautiful here. There's so many flowers blooming. It is gorgeous in Portland right now but my nose is itching. Why is it taking so long? Because I had to make sure I didn't have any vital personal information on the page. That's okay. I get that, which I'm still looking at here. Okay. So, and it's funny. I started editing the order I was looking at and so it still says that I technically bought it through this week in Science, which is funny, but I did this. Oh, I was just making those. Yeah, I'm just making that. Yeah. Wow. I did that. So that's going to be my phone case. Sweet. That's rad. Yep. Very sweet. I did that. Nice. On its way. Nice work. Thanks. Well, it's good. If you did it through that and you're already kind of in the twist page, maybe we got your commission. That's what I was hoping. Fingers crossed on that. Yeah, that's really what I was hoping for. Let's see. It's in Georgia still. Come on, iPhone case. Hurry up. Oh, it's Ravi Shankar's 96th birthday, according to Google. Cool. What does Facebook say about science? Triassic fossils, paleontologists find fossils that explain dinosaurs' growth patterns. NASA's spacecraft provides new data on space environment from outer solar system. There's now a National Geographic 360-degree video of Victoria Falls. Radioactive material found in Earth's oceans was a result of star explosions. People who eat more full-fat dairy are less likely to develop diabetes. Asteroids and comets may have created ideal living conditions on the red planet. Endangered Sumatran rhino died in Indonesian part of Borneo Island. And singing in a choir can help fight illness and improve overall health. Those are my Facebook. Sing in a choir, huh? Yes, singing in a choir. That's right, Salty Hash, full-fat dairy for the win. I had gone to the low-fat, zero-fat, no-fat dairy stuff. Mostly it was because I didn't realize I was lactose intolerant and I was like, why is everything bothering me? Now I'm all about full-fat yogurt. Full-fat yogurt, full-fat milk, except the lactated milk. Yogurt, I just eat. Full-fat cheese, I'm all about it. Yeah. Oh, I didn't even tell you guys. What? I was in a car with autopilot recently. That's fancy. On the freeway. What? You didn't say anything about this. It was a couple weeks ago. I kept trying to remember. Oh, I got to talk about it in the after-show. Oh, I got to talk about it. I can't forget it. You know how anti-self-driving car I am. I don't like it. You were. This is what I will say. I am still against the model that one company is very interested in where you're sitting in the back seat and the car just does its thing. I'm not into that. But this autopilot thing is pretty rad. So it has cameras that captures speed limit signs and lane markers. And then it has radar that captures all the cars around you. And so it's basically just pimped out cruise control. So you get on the freeway. You hit autopilot. If you want to change lanes, you just turn on your blinker and it changes lanes when it's ready. It stays. You can set it up to be at the speed limit, two miles an hour above, three miles an hour above, whatever. And then it'll go. It'll go. What kind of car was it? It was a Tesla. It was a Tesla. That's what I was wondering. That's what I want. Yeah, it's so rad. I want one. It's so bad. I want one so bad. What did I hear? Singapore is the new... They're going to outfit all their taxis. I think it's Singapore. They're going to outfit all their taxis with autopilot. So cool. Oh, my goodness. Yes, one of my coworkers. One of my coworkers, her husband, works at Tesla. He let me try out one of the cars. And I was very anti. I was very much like, I don't know how I feel about this. I'm trying to be a good sport. I'll get in the car. I'll get in the back seat. I'll be supportive. And it was just the coolest thing ever. It was great. I love that you went from being a good sport to loving it. Yeah. That's cool. Isn't that like science? You take the information you have. You make an educated decision. You accept new information as it comes. That's what I'm trying to do. And it totally won me over. Totally. I just pictured myself on a super long car ride. And being able to turn on autopilot, it would be so cool. But this is what I was wondering. Do you then have to reverse the text while driving laws? Right. If you're not driving. Yeah. I mean, if it's on autopilot, you still have to be responsible. You still have to keep aware of what's going on. But it'll beep at you if you're not paying close enough attention. It'll beep at you if it loses sight of the lane markers. In theory, you could text a driver that thing. I'm not condoning that. I'm not condoning that. I'm not condoning texting while driving. But I'm wondering if it's going to adjust some of the rules that we have for these things. I can't wait until it's just like self-driving cars. And then you're like, yeah, I don't know. I still don't know about that. OK. It may be safer. It may be more efficient. It may be the way of the future. I enjoy the hell out of driving. Me too. I do too. I love it. I really love to drive. So you can put the robots in charge of everything. I still want to be flipping that wheel around the corner, be able to take my hands off because I know the wheel's going to whip itself center and grab on again. I want to be driving until I'm 97. You know what? Self-driving cars will help you do that. Yeah, well, that's the thing. Even if it's just like safety override, think about how much safer driving would be if there was safety override. And there is a lot of that showing up already. Forward sensors that will break for you if an accident is imminent, that sort of thing, which may or may not be fine. But I love the fact that those are all opt-in and opt-out still. As long as they remain that way, I'll be happy. And in a very driving elitist sort of way, I wouldn't mind if robotic driving were mandatory for everyone. Except me. Yeah, that's just my pick on it. Yes, it's good. Actually, if everybody else became even more predictable, it would make my driving experience much easier. I think it would be nice if public transportation was way better. Because then people that don't like to drive wouldn't have to. But the problem is also 100% autonomous vehicles, they have to still be able to account for humans at this time. Which also then makes it difficult. So do you have self-driving vehicle-only freeways? And do you have human-driven vehicle-only freeways? I think you probably would start that way. I think you would start that way. That's what they've done in San Diego, don't they? They have a stretch of freeway that is specifically for that. So I figure it's going to start in just perfect Silicon Valley. Jose de Petaluma, this is the region where it's most likely to, one, be affordable, and two, this is where you're going to be testing stuff anyway. So yeah, I could see it sort of being a regional implication and then sort of growing out and growing out. And maybe you can have the human drivers driving alongside that known auto drive freeway. Maybe it makes more sense to have the auto-driving car intermingling with the human drivers as this thing spreads. But either way, I think eventually it's going to take hold and be the way to transport. Yeah, and it would be great if we could also just get off of this whole gas thing. But not too quickly. The electric, yes. We want electric in California, but not necessarily everywhere in the United States. This is still the thing. Sure we do. Electric everywhere. No, because if the electric is everywhere, electric is coming from coal in much of the country. Not necessarily. No, not necessarily, but largely. This is also interesting debate stuff, but Honda has this hydrogen car that they've been testing in Southern California. Can we move it to Northern California? It has the ability to fuel up quicker than an electric car takes to charge. But one of these questions is then, well if you can have a hydrogen power plant on board in a car, why wouldn't you just have that hydrogen power plant be the charging station? Why would it need to be in the car if you can make the quick charge on an electrical car quicker than would you just make hydrogen power plants? And it doesn't even have to be near where it's charging. So it ultimately will come down to the source of the electricity on top of just the vehicle that's driving. Well, but it also comes down to supply and demand. So if electric cars are spreading, then there will be a reason to put this infrastructure into effect. For example, people who are buying electric cars maybe they don't want to pay the power companies to charge their car every night. So then maybe they actually buy solar panels and they buy into cleaner energy in general. I think that this can be done in a multifaceted way where we can keep our cars, we can keep our electricity, but we can also start to shift our energy. And I think that the demand for clean energy will be increased if everybody's driving electric cars. Maybe, but the other part of it though is that infrastructure-wise, what's really interesting what you said, yeah, being able to charge at home, solar panel on the roof to charge the car because it's an added thing, but you could always be doing that already for the electricity you already use so if there's not an incentive now, it's just a little added incentive. It may not be actually as big as you think. If your electrical bill skyrockets when you start charging your car every night and you can put a solar panel on your roof and offset that, it's going to become... And it's not going to soar because already what you're paying for to electrically charge a car versus what you would pay for gasoline is pennies on a dollar already right. It's like something like 78 cents per gallon is the equivalent that you would have been paying for gasoline. So there's already that incentive. You already are saving so you may not need to feel the urge. The other thing though is infrastructure-wise what's really interesting is that electrical can be anywhere. It can go everywhere. You won't even actually need a gas station. It'll be actually more logical to have these electric charging stations at the mall, at the restaurants, at the any place. Well, I always thought you could just make any parking meter also a charging station. Yes, absolutely. That's the point. So anywhere you're going to park for any period of time could potentially be a charging station because the electrical grid is always already there versus something like a hydrogen fueling station where it would look much like a gas station of old. It might be quicker, but the offset is the infrastructure is going to be harder to put everywhere. So electrical ultimately I think does win out and if we can do higher voltage charging which is something which is in the works so that you can do rapid charge then we're getting there. We have to figure out how to avoid putting pacemakers out of operation and doing this. So there's a few hurdles, but we're getting to a place where electrical is going to be the thing and it could just be everywhere. However, there's going to be almost a negative incentive to doing the alternate fuel thing in the short term because it's already going to be cheaper than gasoline. So you're already seeing a savings. Why, what's the incentive to spend money to see an additional savings? And so the source of the electricity does become important because gosh darn forbid that we go to a coal-based car system in this country. It wouldn't be really an improvement. And with that, I think I've got to go. Nice. Now that I, yes, namaste. And on this note I'm going to say for those of you listening and watching right now not related to electricity whatsoever but I'm considering putting out a call to make a new science music compilation album. Oh, good idea. I'm going to contact some of my usual suspects. I can put it out through Bandcamp, right? It could be awesome. So we'll see, yeah. Yeah, player can put it out through Bandcamp. What? I'll put it out through the, what are you, wedding? Huh? Wow. Won't you add some part of Bandcamp? No, Kiki said that. No, I know. That's such a Bandcamp instrument. That's, okay, yes, that's actual Bandcamp, not the website Bandcamp. Oh, there's a website called Bandcamp? I didn't, I thought you were just making... No. Okay, so I'm going to talk to the whoever people and see if they can come up with whatever songs. All right, goodnight everybody. Hey guys, thanks for watching. Thanks so much for hanging out with us in the chat room. And we will talk to you again next week and you know, don't forget about the Science Island Hangout tomorrow night. ScienceIsland.org And it's also going to be on the... It's also on the YouTubes. And the Google. And the Googles, yes. Anyway, thank you everybody. Thank you Justin Blair. Thank you. That was another good show and I look forward to another great one next week. Yes, shall be glorious. Shall be. Way better than today's show. Next week. Totally, yeah.