 Get ready to start the show. We are on air live according to the Hangout. I'm going to wait for everyone in the chat room to say they can see and hear us. Yes. Yes, in the chat room. You know you like robots. That's why we're happy tonight. We're going to talk about robots. It's going to be exciting. OK, we're live. Here we go. Ready to begin in 3, 2, this is TWIS, This Week in Science, episode number 665, recorded on Wednesday, April 4, 2018. Robots for people. Hey, everyone, I am Dr. Kiki. And tonight on the show, we are going to fill your heads with clouds, hot tubs, and robots, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Often people have radically precise but horribly inaccurate views of how to go about doing science. Yes, you can start with a question, form a hypothesis, test it rigorously, and at the end, wind up with a result. And right or wrong, you will have done something sciency. While starting with a question sounds right, and winding up with a result seems sound, you could just as easily start with the result. In search for questions, it may be the answer to. Or you could focus on the rigorous testing part, resolving variables, narrowing down a methodology to a set protocol, and then go looking for things to test it with. There is no one way, best way, only way to do science. We know that people have been doing science since long before science was the thing that people knew they were doing. Because at the core of all that is science is this simple statement, make an observation and follow it wherever it goes for as long as you can. That's it. Well, that and 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. Good science to you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin, Blair and everyone out there. Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to yet another episode of this week in science. We're back again to talk about all the science that we loved from this week that we thought was interesting. And we have an interview tonight. Robotics' doc, Dr. Ayanna Howard is here to join us. But on this week's show, I've got stories. Got stories about clouds in the sky, containing life, lots of baby black holes and bird vision. Justin, what do you have? I've got an interesting analysis on human graveyards of sorts. And, oh, an antibacterial enzyme. Sweet, we like things that are antibacterial, well, except for antibacterial soaps. Those aren't so good. Anyway, moving on from that, Blair, what's in the animal corner this evening? I have two amazing stories about astounding, astonishing, and also adorable animal adaptations. And so much alliteration as well. Amazing alliteration. It's true, absolutely. Okay, everyone, as we jump into the show, I would love to remind you that you can subscribe if you have not already done so, to the TWIST podcast. Everywhere good podcasts are found. iTunes, the Google Play podcast portal, Stitcher Speaker, tune in. You can also find us on Facebook and YouTube. Look for this week in science. And our website is twist.org. Now, I would love to introduce our guest for the evening. Dr. Ayanna Howard is a very busy woman who has many different roles in life. As an entrepreneur, she founded XyRobotics, which develops mobile therapy and educational products for children with differing needs. As a researcher, she's chair of the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech University, where she also holds a faculty appointment in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and she functions as the director of the Human Automation Systems Lab. Humans, we like good acronyms here. In both of these positions, she innovates in the area of technology development for intelligent agents that must interact with and in a human-centered world. She's also an educator, founding and directing a traineeship initiative in healthcare robotics and functioning as a lead investigator on the NSF undergraduate summer research program in robotics. So glad that you could join us here tonight on the show. Welcome, Dr. Howard. Thank you. I'm excited about this opportunity to have a conversation. I am too, and it's really, the timing is fantastic. A video came out about you this week on YouTube and through TechCrunch, I believe, is one of the places that I saw it released through Makers, and it was just a wonderful introduction. And I just wanna let people know out there, we're gonna have a much longer in-depth interview, but if you wanna see a nicely edited, beautiful piece, it was a great video. You must feel, it must be wonderful to see stuff like that going out into the world. It is, but actually, believe it or not, that interview was maybe four minutes. It took two hours, right? So it was full of conversations and interesting insights, and they were able to summarize it in this nugget that I was like, wow, that's amazing, who is that? Who is that person? That's me? No. Well, I think something that you brought up in that interview, and you've also brought up in other interviews is the influence that the Bionic Woman had on you as a young girl growing up, and as a woman of that generation as well, I watched the Bionic Woman too, and I just think, I thought she was super and awesome, but I played games, I remember pretending to be the Bionic Woman and fighting the $6 man because that's what I was calling it back then. For you, she was really influential. So can you talk a little bit about how she influenced you and beyond that program, what other influences were around you in that time of your life to influence you in the direction of engineering and robotics? Yeah, so this was around when I was in middle school, so an impressionable sixth grader, and so I was always into sci-fi, like science fiction, it was Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars, and so these were my favorite. But I was also into trying to figure out what I wanted to do in my life, because remember, middle school, even now, you have to define your entire life as a 12-year-old, right? We do it now, like, what do you want to be? And so I remember saying the Bionic Woman, and I even like Wonder Woman, but that just seemed too imaginary, right? But the Bionic Woman seemed real, like it was a real person, so I wanted to do that. I wanted to build a Bionic Woman. It was the perfect combination of, you know, someone who was like real, like a real person, and engineering and robotics and science fiction all in one. So that's what I wanted to do. I didn't want to be the Bionic Woman, but I definitely wanted to build her. You wanted to be one of the scientists making that technology possible. That's awesome. I did, although at first I wanted to be a doctor. So I don't know if you remember, because the doctors were the ones that were like the cute ones, right? And so, and they had engineers, but they were like in the back, like with the pocket protector. And, you know, at the time, I didn't see myself as that. Again, just what you see in the media. I did not see myself there. Yeah. I didn't change. Yeah, so do you think it's changed significantly? Do you think there are more figures in the media for young girls to look up to? I think so. It's not 100%, but you know, going from zero to one, if you do the math, right? So, I mean, there's a lot more. A lot more now. You can cut on the TV, you can look at the news, you can read the papers, you can see the magazines, and we can see now, visibly, a lot more characters in terms of woman scientists that are different and doing great things. And they always existed. We just didn't know about them. Yeah. I think we need, I think we need just represent, just more representations of real people doing real work. Like people talk a bit about, you know, oh, we need a new face of science. You know, we have Bill Nye or we've got Neil deGrasse Tyson, but how about more faces? Yes. Good representation. I agree. I agree. So, you tell us about how you ended up working at NASA. You did a degree, you didn't become a doctor. How did the not doctor and the engineer roboticist get started and then you drop at NASA? Yeah, so when I was in high school, when I started high school, I still wanted to go to medical school. So that's what I thought I was supposed to do. And I took a course called Biology and somehow it just didn't resonate with me for some reason. I think it's because of the cutting of the frog. So, you know, we're about the same age. You know, at that time that you actually had to like open up a frog and look at its guts and things like that. And worse than that, just the initial smell of that formaldehyde was like, this is the smell of science. I'm out. I can't do this. This is not fun. And so very quickly, I realized that, you know, part of the bionic woman was the bionics. And in order to do that at the time was, so it was engineering, but I actually thought it was called cybernetic because again, robotics didn't really exist. And so cybernetics was like a term that, you know, people were using in like the science fiction. So I was like, okay, I'm going to go major in cybernetics. Like I thought that was real, right? I'm going to do cybernetics. And then when I started applying to college, I realized that that didn't exist. And it was in someone's head in terms of imagination, but engineering did exist. So that's how I started in engineering, at least majoring in engineering. Oh, I love that that you actually were going for something, you had a more lofty goal that you've continued to follow, but you found the thing that was as close as you could get to what you wanted to do. Correct, correct, correct, correct. Yeah, so that's why I became an engineer at first, although I was a hybrid, I was robotics, which is computer science and science and engineering all wrapped into one, basically. So NASA, I worked as my first summer after my freshman year. In fact, I was a summer internship, not doing robotics at the time, was working on satellites and coding up for getting data from satellites to the scientists. I thought it was exciting. Yeah, it was. So I read that some of the work that you did while you were at NASA developed the early algorithms for the rovers that are the robots on Mars, that those autonomous vehicles that we've sent into space. So you had that impact, not just the satellites, but to other planets. Well, you know, I'm gonna say I don't know, right? So what I worked on was advanced algorithms. So looking at future Mars missions, like how do we make them more intelligent? But going from research to application is such a twisted path that who knows? Like my software, my coding is not on the rovers, right? I guarantee you that. You wouldn't want my code on anything that actually, right? But the thoughts and the things that I created, who knows? So you were research-based at NASA and not so much in the application side. Correct. So I was in the research arm. And so the way that NASA works at least APL, there's the research and there's the mission side, right? And so people go back and forth, but the research is about looking at the hard problems of things we've never done before. And then the mission side is taking that and actually making it into code that makes sense that you can put on a limited processor with limited memory that runs in fairly real time as Mars real time goes and things like that. At what point did you decide to move away from space robots and start doing research into robots that people interact with? So while I was there, I started. So one of the ways that I looked at thinking about intelligent rovers was to mimic how scientists do it, right? So I was interacting with scientists as the experts. And so we would have scientists basically remote control navigate off-road driving kind of things. And I would take that information and try to code it into rover language, into what the robot could do. So even then it was about robots and humans and humans as the expert. So I would almost say I was always concerned about the human as the center of anything we did with robotics, but specifically when I went to Georgia Tech, that's when I started getting more into, I would say robots in our lives, like in our public lives was when I came to Georgia Tech. So it actually seems like the cybernetics with that is like the human side of robotics. You've never lost that thread. It's always continued. Yeah. Yeah, so what did you get? You started working at Georgia Tech, the human interacting robots. And did you start initially just looking at these robots for use in healthcare? I mean, we see them now at hospitals, the robots that drive around and dispense pills and deliver medication and yeah. So when I came to Tech, the first thing I did was all I knew, I won't say all I knew, what I was comfortable with was like this science-driven robotics, so robots for scientists. So I started on that, but I realized that at Georgia Tech, I could do interesting things. Like we sent rovers to glaciers, right? So that's interesting stuff. We went to glaciers first time ever, deploy robots, grab science data. But I knew my robots at Georgia Tech would not go to Mars. They can go to the glaciers, but they weren't going to Mars. So I had to figure out what else I could do in order to really have an impact with robotics. And so I brushed off my thesis. So back in the day, I had a PhD and my thesis was computer vision, neural networks, and learning from human demonstrations for managing waste in hospitals. So that was the motivation for my thesis. Of course, it was just, it was a research project. It wasn't, it was more advanced than I realized. And so when I came to Tech, I was like, oh, let me brush off that thesis. Let's see if there's anything actually in there that's of any worth or value. So started looking at how do I do manipulation for people in different areas that evolve to manipulation in the home, that evolve to activities of daily living, which then evolve to therapy and education. So it's actually a very logical path. Yeah, when you look backwards at these paths, it's very logical. When you're going through it, you're like, I'm in the weeds. No, but it does sound like a fairly step-by-step progression. What are the, as you're building these robots for various uses interacting with people, what are the biggest challenges to making these robots usable? So I think the biggest, well, there's two, I would say major challenges. One is how do you make robots that work with a diverse set of people and in a diverse environment? So I wanna take a robot and I take it to a person, A's home, child A's home. That home is gonna be different than another home. That child is gonna be different than another child. The type of interactions you want are gonna be different. So how can I create a unified technology that is accessible to the diverse needs, diverse human needs as well as environments? How do you do that? That's actually really difficult. And so that's one of the main difficult things. And then the other is how do people respond to these robots, right? So my robot is only as good as a person's response in terms of their interaction. How do you ensure that people are engaged the entire time in the interaction? That's understanding people, which, I studied as an engineer, I didn't go to humans 101. It was not part of my curriculum. If you were designing a robot course of study, would you include a psychology lessons or a humans 101 type series of lessons? I would, either cognitive science or psychology. Yes, I definitely would. I think you could skip all of that and just have a robot that flatters people once in a while. Right? You are more attractive in 83.49% of people that I've met. You know, it's like, oh, that's pretty good. That's a high number. That sounds really nice. Thank you, robot. I keep that robot turned on and engaged all the time. Absolutely. See? See? That's right. So some of your recent papers, some of your papers have been on the idea of overtrust of robots also. So yeah, I love the kind of juxtaposition of these two things where part of it is, uncanny valley or other stuff. How do you get people to trust and work with the robots in the first place? You're a robot. You're not gonna squish my hand, that kind of stuff versus you're a robot. You can do everything. I trust you to do everything you're programmed to do. What are your perspectives on a, or your perspective on approaching those two very important problems? Yeah, so this is where it becomes tricky because in one instance, I want you to follow my robot. I want you to trust my robot, especially in certain scenarios, right? I want you to trust that my robot knows what it's doing. But I also want you to question it because I mean, unfortunately, like any technology is not perfect, right? So even if it's not perfect 1% of the time, well, we want you to kind of not follow the robot into like your death at that 1% of the time. That would be horrible. So how do we do that balance? It's very tricky. You have to understand human psychology. You have to understand when they accept it. Like for example, we find that most people when they view robots, they think of them depending on the scenario as an authority figure. So if I say this is a robot, think about it. If I say this is a robot that's for healthcare, right? Think about how many people trust their doctors, right? Like a doctor can say, yeah, you have cancer and you're gonna die in two days and most people will not go to find a second opinion. Very few, right? So we find people treat robots in the same way. Like if we say this is a healthcare robot, all of a sudden this robot is like this authority figure. So you have to program in some little uncertainty and caveats in a robot speech. I think this is what you're supposed to do. You might want to take that with water. Maybe not, it might be okay without. Just like a little less certainty, a little like, you know. Or building some human flaws. Give the robot, you know, some sort of anxiety. Or some indications of how certain. Yeah, or indications of how much certainty this robot is operating under. I agree. Although it has to be catered. So imagine you are in a emergency situation and a policeman comes and says, everyone leave this area, right? Versus, and you have no idea. You're just kind of like, oh, the policeman came. Now imagine if that policeman came. It's like, you know, I think that we might have an emergency. We're not 100% sure, but we got a call. I mean, people would be like, well, I'm just gonna stick on my computer or my phone, right? So again, it's tricky. So I think we did, we talked about a study on this show. I want to say it was maybe a whole year ago where there was, they had a robot that was leading people towards smoke and they followed it. Wait, that's my study. Is that yours? Yes. We talked about it on the show. Yeah, so like, and people did, right? They were just like, well, the robot must know the way out. It's an emergency box. What's the special? Yes, yes. Oh my gosh, now I really feel like I'm meeting a celebrity. I love that story. It was so fun. Yeah, it was actually shocking to us. Like, so every time we do a study, we set up hypothesis, like, you know, expected behavior and things that we think. And that one actually violated all of our hypothesis. Wow. Yeah. That's pretty silly. I don't understand. Especially when there's visual cues that you're going the wrong way to continue to follow this robot. Yeah, I was shocked as well. Yeah, and some of it, you know, a lot of times when you have these hypothesis and it's like, wait, hold it, the data doesn't support it, you start them looking at other similarities. As an example, there's been a lot of nightclub fires where people have died and, you know, and people like how there was like a whole exit in the back. Why did people like trample over each other? You know, it happens. I mean, there was enough instances where you're like, yeah, okay. If it happens in like regular life with humans, then yeah, we can kind of understand. Right. So some of it might just honestly be a herd mentality problem. Heard mentality, some of it is, we think it has to do some with reactions. Like if you're in a high stress reactive kind of scenario, you kind of just go with your guts versus maybe logically thinking about things. So then really it only takes, you know, maybe one or two people who really trust that the robot knows what they're doing and the rest are just going where the other people are going. Basically, yeah. These people seem confident and they're following the robots who seem confident. So it's double, double jeopardy confidence. I'll just trust that they know what they're doing. Yeah, we actually did another study where we figured out the ratio of how many people had to be confident and trusting for others to follow. And surprisingly, there's not that many. Like you don't have to have like even more than half of the folks like confident. Yeah. So in a world of increased automation and robotics is really growing, what are we gonna do? How are we gonna make sure that our robots are trustworthy and that people don't trust them too much and we maintain our humanity? How? Yeah, I mean, that's part of what we're trying to do as roboticists is try to figure this out and like try to figure it out before it's too late. I mean, that's what we're doing now. Some of it is like uncertainty, but you know, when should you be uncertain versus when you should be very confident? You know, I'm not certain about that, so I can't tell you. What other studies are you working on currently that you can talk about fun stuff that you're doing? So while we're also looking at trust with respect to specifically healthcare at one point, as an example, in therapy settings, especially, I mean, parents do it all the time. You'll say, oh, that's great, that's good, keep going. Knowing that you're barely passing this class, right? Because you wanna encourage. So if you think about it, should robots also do the same, right? Should they basically, and I won't say lie, but should they encourage people even if they know that maybe the individuals aren't quite doing correct information or doing the correct task, right? So this is more of an ethical thing. So we're looking at these kind of questions. What kind of ethics or what kind of thought pattern should robots have when they're interacting with people in order to, again, enable them to have better outcomes later on, especially in terms of therapy and education? Yeah, for therapy one, but for education, I can already see how this could potentially work. I have a seven-year-old son and we've used all sorts of educational apps on the iPad where he plays a game and learning about phonics or doing math and it's gamified. So you do a certain thing and you get a reward or there is a voice that comes out and says, you're doing great, keep going. And it's this voice that comes out of the computer at him and he wanted to keep going and he's on. So I can really see that, especially for these kinds of educational apps and for robots that have AI or algorithms that are involved in educational situations that knowing what to say when could be very important and influential. Very influential. And so the question is, is how much influence do you wanna have? How much influence should we provide robots in the different scenarios? So we're looking at that. I was like, how much? We're looking at that. Investigating, yeah. Yeah, and similarly with medical robots in terms of bedside manner, you don't necessarily wanna tell someone a hundred percent version of the truth and their likelihood that they're not gonna come out on top of a medical problem. Sometimes you need to kind of pad the truth a little bit to somebody who's sick. Right. And so the question is, when people do it or when doctors do it, we forgive them, right? But when robots do it. Yeah, I don't know. Doctors, people go, oh, he has a terrible bedside manner. He was awful, but he saved my life. Right, he saved my life. But also if you're told like your original example that you have cancer and you probably have two days to live, that's not the way you wanna hear that. Not to mention, prospects and hope and all these kind of mental effects do sway people's health. Exactly. Yeah, that's tough. It is tough. It is tough. So, okay, so I'll go along with that, but I've heard that there's efforts to make the legal system a little bit more automated. And that's sort of an interesting one. If you had a robot representing you. Oh yeah, a lawyer bought 5,000 for sure. Yeah, right. So then like justice becomes this really like, it becomes a really a technical conversation between two robots, where you just sort of like you go in and there's like, and the result is you win or you lose because of whatever it is. Like, they have a lot of time, right? Cause they can do it quicker. They could do it quicker, except so one of the other things we're looking at is bias though. So you could have these two robots that could defend and have, so you have the positives and the negatives, but guess what? We're teaching our robots our own human biases. So given that, even if you have two robots, guess who's going to jail? If I can afford a really good robot lawyer. Well, that's just my point. This is awesome, right? This is the thing though. Cause wouldn't there be like, maybe that's the problem. I'm assuming that everybody's robot lawyer is going to be like the same version. Yeah, I'm dealing with the 2011 model and you have the 2018 model. I actually had to push mine in, I had to wheel it in. Servos died a long time ago and yet this one's entertaining the jury with acrobatic acts before the trial. Oh gosh, yeah, we're gonna- Right, or I'll hack your lawyer bot. That'll be a whole other issue. Cause that's a whole other issue. Yeah, so what do you think about, the algorithms that these are, this is all gonna come down to these algorithms that learn either directly from humans, from scouring information that's given to them. That's like from the web, cat pictures all on Google. Or they're gonna learn about how to be human. I read a headline today that Google's newest artificial intelligence gets very aggressive when it's stressed out. I mean, do we want to add this kind of emotional effect to our artificial intelligences? Yeah, so I only think that we should, if it makes sense, right? So as an example, if I want my robot to be my shopper, right? To give me the best deal ever, you know. I want my robot to, you know, kind of, you know, raggle and, you know, maybe yell a little bit if it's the best deal for me. Maybe, you know, or maybe not. Maybe I wanna be the one that pays two times everyone else, but probably not. So there are certain scenarios where I do want my robot to have effect. Like my robot doctor, I kind of want to have a little bit of empathy so that it won't just come in and say, yeah, you got two days, right? So it can understand, oh, wait, hold it. Maybe this isn't good news. Maybe I should approach this a little bit differently. Maybe I should have a really good bedside manner with this case or with this patient. I feel like this, my doctor's gonna be too reluctant. Like, so what is it, doc? How come you have, what's the result? I really don't want to tell you. Wait, wait, wait, wait. It's really bad. No, no, no, it's okay. That's why I came, that's why I got the test done. Tell me, tell me what's going on, doc. No, this is too depressing. This is not why I became the doctor, but how bad is it? How bad is it, doc? Tell me straight. No, I can't, I can't. Go home, I will text you. Do you think this difference in affect would be, or is it important in designing robots for adults versus for kids? So believe it or not, we are definitely social beings. Even adults are social beings. The way that we bond, the way that we listen, the way that we go through life is typically we want others to have effect with us, right? It's the reason why we chit-chat with the person in the line behind us at the grocery store. Total strangers, because we as humans really want that socialization. And so I think robots, if the way we think about them, they are in our world, they will be part of our environment. I think that we will want them to be at least halfway social, which means that they have to have effect of some sort. Do the bots that you're designing for your company's iRobotics, do they have, I know you're designing for kids with special needs like autism, do they have different amounts of affect? Because with autism, they have responses to, they don't respond to emotion the same way that other kids do. So, but with robots, there's been enough studies to show that there's a difference between children's response to robots versus people. And even in our own studies, we've shown that you can have, and I won't say, but you can have a relationship. You can have turn-taking. You can have things like, I will look at your gaze and look at your robot face that you might not have with humans, but we can train and then it translates to people. And so that's another example of why your robot should have some aspect of socialization so that it can teach and transfer it to the kids. The robot babysitter when the parents aren't home can watch the kids and also teach them good manners. Well, you know, so I believe one of the things, if you notice that a lot of times there's this thing about, oh, kids aren't being social, they're always on, like texting or chatting or things like that. One, I think that we just totally don't model what kids are doing. They're very social, right? It's a different type of being social. But I think robots- What are we doing? That's texting and they're on the chat, right? They're like talking to each other constantly. They are, with emojis and yeah, and a whole new language. They are being very social and being emotional and showing all their drama and things like that. I think robots are another level of that interaction. Yeah. Where do you hope to see this field of interactive robots go? Like in your vision, your cybernetic vision of the future, you know, we probably will have the bionic woman, but in your vision, how integrated into society, what is your robotic future look like? So I think that they will be an integral part of enhancing our quality of life. So when you think about it, think about your smartphone, right? I mean, everyone has one. Even like five-year-olds will be like, oh yeah. Right, there it is. Now, okay, I'm going to age you. Think about 20 years ago, which is not that long ago, right? I think I might have had a pager, maybe. I mean, you know, like, and yet now I can't imagine, like, okay, I need to go find, I remember maps, like paper maps. Right, now it's like, I don't even look at the directions. Like where is it? Let me just put it into my, and there it is. I think robots are going to be the same kind of thing. It's like, if you think about, I don't have to think about, okay, I have to go figure out where am I going to park in the middle of downtown and where am I going to pay? It's like, oh no, no. I'm just going to call myself driving cars. I'm not even going to think about it and it'll go park itself, you know? I think that's what it's going to be. It's, we're going to. At first, I agree with you. At first. But what's going to happen is some programmer who is, is a part-time hobbyist programmer who has robots at home, but happens to be a labor activist. Okay. It's going to be like, you know, why is this, why, you know, all these robots are being treated unfairly in the world and it's going to throw in this little bit of code where robots are like, yeah, why are robots doing all the work? Are you noticing this too? Yeah, I am. Why is that? Humans are just lazy. They're not doing anything. They're not pitching in at all. Like, I mean, this is, and then there's this age where artificial intelligence decides that it wants to have that, that breathing into the environment, that, that, that choice making that its own interaction. That is going to be a really interesting time. Well, Justin, maybe it already happened and we're living in the matrix right now. And we don't even know it, right? Like, is it the red or the blue pill? Which one would you take? So, look, so I would say, so that move, so I love that movie because think about this, right? One, there's a symbiotic relationship. Without people, there would be no matrix, right? And with no matrix, there would be no people. So, I think even if like robots did take over or AI did take over, think about the matrix. Like, you were happy until you took the wrong pill. That's true. Everything was great and then you chose wrong. And that was your life. Do you see, I think your reference to maps and how we used to use paper maps and figure things out. And then there was a problem for a while with the various maps programs where people were following them just using their phones and not looking up and ending up on busy highways and, you know, not in the river, you know, not driving the wrong way on a street, yeah. Yeah, and so there was this period of time where it was very, people were over trusting. Yes. The technology for sure. And now we're with the autopilot on the Tesla, people again, taking their hands off the wheels. They're over trusting. Watching the movie. Yeah, people are again over trusting. Although I think naming it autopilot was it, that's a fundamental flaw. But do you think things are going to people, I guess, do you think it will even out again that the safety levels will be, people will trust less, trust but verify? No, I think the difference between like say the DPS and the maps is that we're more conscious of it. I won't necessarily say companies are more conscious of it, but I think we as technologists are more conscious of it because the effects could be so much more negative. Like if you think about a GPS, you still have a human that's making a decision. And yeah, they're over trusting so they're not making the right decision. Whereas if you think about autonomy, you've just taken the human out of the loop. So we're much more conscious of this fact that, yeah, we need to put in safeguards. I mean, I'm okay. Like one thing is like, you can't have your car automatically stopped, right? So that's probably not a good thing to do. But, you know, if you look at the data. The auto stopping is the best. Now that auto stopping on the freeway and stuff, no, that stuff works really well. Now it might not catch every human going across its path. Might get far as one off. But this is just because we're in the early stages. If you got into the first generation elevator, you were probably taking your life in your own hands, right? Like the first generation airplane, the first time somebody got, you know what? I think we can make a boat that goes under the water. That was probably didn't end well the first few times. That's all we're at. We're just at the first time. And I don't think we're gonna become increasingly suspicious of it, Kiki. I think we're gonna, it's just gonna get better. And it's gonna give us less reason to be suspicious. And it'll let us down less often. And it'll work better. And so we'll abandon all reservations about the technology eventually. We will. Do you agree, Dr. Howard? No, we will become more and more trusting. As the technology gets better, we will become more trusting, which again, we still need to put safeguards in. Because we're never gonna be 100%. Yeah. But we've got to keep the human. Remember that 99% you were talking about? If we get to that 99% right, Doctor, that's gonna be so much better than any doctor anybody's ever had. It is. It is. It is. It is. But even if you think about with the whole Tesla thing, I look at this and I think of, okay, we have a fatality, which is horrible, but how many folks died in that city and that day in a car accident, right? Like I'm sure it was more than one. And yet we don't hear about, I mean, that's like in our purview is it's like, oh, but that's life. I mean, people die all the time in car accidents, but not in an autonomous car. And I was like, oh my gosh. Yeah, but there might have been two autonomous cars in that town, which means 50% of the people driving that car that day died. I mean, we got to be careful with that. It's all the perspective. It was all the perspective. Oh my goodness. And I know that I don't wanna keep you up too late. So final question, I'd love to know if you have any advice for students who are currently in the process of thinking about entering the field of robotics and what advice do you have for the young ones? So one is, I think this whole area of AI and robotics, it's here to stay. It's just gonna get more and more important in terms of jobs and our lives of the future. So if you're interested now, keep going. It'll pay off 100%. But the other is, is really think about the impact you're gonna have on society when you do develop these new technologies in the future. Fantastic. That's always good. What do you want to do? What is the impact you want to have? Keep that in mind. Yeah. And I'm looking forward to the day that I find out about the bionic woman that you create. And we'll be looking out for the next interesting study out from your lab. This has just been wonderful getting to speak with you. You're a busy woman. So thank you so much for your time tonight. Thank you for having me. You're welcome. Thank you so much. Oh, and if anybody and is there any way for people to find you online, should they look for Xirobotics? We will put a link on our website. Are there any other websites that you could tell people to look for? Yeah, so xirobotics.com as well as humanslab.ece.gatech.edu. Perfect. And we will put those links on our website in our show notes to make it easy in case you don't happen to have a pen and a paper right now. Once again, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. This is great. Have a wonderful night. Thank you. Everyone out there, thank you so much for listening to us. We are done with the first half of our show, but we have much more to come. Science stories are up and lined up more this week in science coming. We're gonna take a short break. So everyone stay tuned. Everyone, yeah, yeah. Thank you so much for joining us on the show tonight. It's wonderful to have you here once again. And I would like to let you know about a few things. You know, this show, we keep doing it week after week for you and you keep coming back week after week. Thank you so much for that. Oh my goodness. You really keep this show going, not just by listening, but by actually helping to make the show happen. And there are a number of ways that you can do that. Do you know that? If you head over to twist.org, our website, you will be able to find all sorts of ways. Twist.org is the portal to all things twists. And so you'll be able to go there and find many ways that you can help twists. 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All right, everyone. It's pretty simple, easy ways. Help us out. You can either donate to help support twists or tell people about twists. You can also buy our merchandise. These are various ways that you can help twist, keep going week after week and support us bringing this show to you on an ongoing basis, you know? Seriously, it would be a lot harder to do this show if you weren't around. You, you help us do this every week. We really couldn't do it without you. Thank you for your support. And we are back with more of This Week in Science. Oh yeah, we've got more of this show to go. All of our stories are coming up about now. But first, we have this week in what has science done for me? What has it done for me? Oh, not me, not me are the person who has written in Bruce R. Cordell. Who is a science fiction author? That's pretty cool. Bruce Cordell writes in, Hey Kiki Justin and Blair, I have a meeting to write you about how science allows me and my co-workers to work at a geographically distributed company thanks to the science behind networks, video conferencing and crowdfunding platforms. But the word lately in this segment really became more relevant to me. About a month ago, I spent the weekend in an intensive care unit. I was treated for dual pulmonary embolisms. These are blood clots in both my lungs that were restricting blood to and from my heart. Surprise, not a good one either. No, apparently the clots were amazingly extensive. But by the mere fact that you're hearing this, you've correctly guessed that the treatment was successful. Yeah, that is the nice thing about this segment is that... Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert. Very seldom you were here and then I died. Yeah. So he goes on to say, I got TPA clot busting juice dripped into me via IV after only about an hour and a half of that, the clots were gone. I felt better lying in the ICU bed at 2 a.m. than I literally had in months. During that same period, my average heart rate came down from 80 to 90 beats per minute to the 50 to 60 beats per minute, it normally is. My really scary blood pressure dropped back down to its normal level, which is in the 120 over 80s. Apparently no lasting damage has been sustained to my heart. For now and for the next few months, I'll stay on a blood thinner just in case. Anyway, I feel like I often hear about the failures of Western medicine, but holy moly, what happened to me was science at its best. My life-threatening condition was so quickly handled. In fact, it almost seems like science fiction. In just one short weekend's treatment, I'm feeling on top of the world again. I'm amazed. And I hope all of you get to be just as amazed as me if something should ever go so wrong for you. All thanks to science. And thanks to this Week in Science for being awesome. Aw. Thank you. Thank you so much, Bruce. I'm really glad that you did finally write in. I am sorry that it's because the lately had to become so personally relevant, but you're right. I mean, sometimes it is pretty amazing how quickly the science, the medicine can work. And, you know, rather than- That basically sounds like a death sentence. Yeah. An hour and a half of applied science. Beep, beep, beep. Onto the next. Onto the next, yeah. So best wishes for your health moving into the future as well. We hope that you are around to listen to this Week in Science for a good time to come. And everyone, we need you to write in. Keep writing in, telling your stories. I want them all. I want you to let us know what science has done for you lately. What has it done? Leave us a message on our Facebook page if you're still doing the Facebook and you haven't, you know, dropped out of that social media platform or facebook.com slash thisweekinscience or you can email me at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com. That's K-I-R-S-T-E-N at thisweekinscience.com. I do want to fill this segment of the show with your emails, with your messages every single week. I do. Are we ready for some science now? More science? I'm so ready. So ready for the science. Who wants to go flying through the clouds? Let me get a jacket first. No, no, you're not gonna need a jacket because it's pretty hot in these clouds. Actually quite hot on pretty much on the limits of what would be possible for life to exist in and persist in because it's- So steaming hot clouds? No thanks. Steaming hot clouds with sulfuric acid. Ooh, double no thanks. Because these are not clouds on the planet earth that I am talking about. These are clouds on the planet Venus. You trickster, you tried to trick me. I did try to trick you. So according to a new review paper that puts forth a hypothesis, there is a possibility, this is the hypothesis, a possibility of life in them that are Venusian clouds. Can you believe it? I mean, we sent or the Russians sent a lander to Venus and it barely landed and lasted on the surface of the planet. I mean, the planet, it's hot. It's inhospitable. It used to have a lot of water, but something happened, a runaway greenhouse effect possibly that the water went, no more water on top of that planet. There's big thick clouds, that blanket is thick and hot. Well, you know what they say, some like it hot. And they do extremophiles like it hot for sure. And so some researchers from, let's see where are they from? They were from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. This is an international team of researchers though that were led by researcher Sanjay Limay from the W Madison Space Science and Engineering Center. And they lay out a very convincing argument that life could potentially exist in the clouds of Venus. And it is an idea that has kind of been put forward before but people hadn't really put all the evidence together in quite the way that these researchers have in this particular paper that was published online today in the journal Astrobiology. Sanjay goes on to say, Venus has had plenty of time to evolve life on its own. Noting that some models suggest Venus once had a habitable climate with liquid water on the surface, maybe for as long as two billion years, which is longer than water is thought to have been on the surface of Mars. And on earth, there's the possibility that microorganisms bacteria can live in the atmosphere. We know for a fact from air samples that we have found bacteria in the air in the sky, swept up in the sands of the Sahara Desert, into the air and the ocean on the currents over the Atlantic Ocean all the way to New York City. Yes, bacteria travel the globe here on currents of air. And so if the conditions in certain layers of clouds in the Venusian atmosphere are right and the currents are right so that the bacteria don't actually fall back to the surface of Venus and burn up, that maybe they could persist. And there is evidence that there are these reflective and the reflective and acidic, sulfuric acid acidic clouds of Venus, they have the clouds change in the way that they look. There are dark patches that have been seen in the clouds of Venus. Limay, he does research as a NASA participating scientist in the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Akatsuki missions to Venus. He talked with another of the co-authors, Gregor Slovik of Poland's University of Zielona Gora. And Slovik made him aware of bacteria on Earth with light absorbing properties that are similar to those of particles that have not been identified in that make up these unexplained dark patches in the skies of Venus. And so we only have spectroscopic data at this point but potentially if we could go and do a sample collection mission, send a craft. And there is talk of sending gliders to, within NASA and other agencies of sending big autonomous gliders to Venus to fly around in the atmosphere but they could potentially do sample the atmosphere of these dark spots and test whether or not there's life in them. Then the question is, do we dare go get some and bring it back here to study it? Or is that the start to a horror film? And for those of you, yeah, Ed from Connecticut is bringing up in the chat room for those of you who are into the expanse novels. We interviewed James S.A. Corey on the show the past summer, he says, Ed says, better watch out for the protomolecule on Venus. That's right. You know, part of in those novels, there is this molecule that's sent to Venus because there's no life on Venus, right? Oh, just send it to Venus because you're not gonna be messing anything up. Well, maybe there is life on Venus but not on it, on it. Not important life. Microbes are important. Microbes are important too. Microbes are vital to your life itself. Yes, no, I totally agree. But, you know, part of this exploration is going to, I think, have to include us taking the risk of bringing it back and the risk of us infecting it. The ecosystem. I mean, that's just the two-way street of eventually shaking hands with an A-lan. Right. Okay, you heard him leave it be. I don't think we would want to bring it back. I think we would leave it there. We just do have our robots, our gliding robots with the laboratory equipment on them that they can glide through the atmosphere, take in samples of the air and run molecular and chemical tests on them that would- And genetic. And genetic and let them know what they see there. Yes. And I don't- We don't have to bring it back. Right. But I bet our current genetic analysis abilities would work. You know, we've had that conversation so many times about what would life look like in the rest of the world? Would it be different in the face? One of the things that would be preserved, at least even if it was somehow different face pairs, which also seems unlikely. But I think for any form of life to exist anywhere in the universe, it's going to be a double helix. Maybe. And the reason is the strength of that structure and its environment. If you pull it at the ends, oh, it's still stuck together. If you pull it widthwise, oh, it's still stuck together. If you took a ladder, right, a regular ladder and bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep took out all the rungs. You'd have a pole fall. This way, the other pole fall that way. So any other structure is going to be based on the strength of that pairing where with the double helical design, the pairing can be weak. It can be doing other things. It doesn't have to be so strong. It's the double helical wrapped around itself structure that creates that foundation. So, yeah. Yeah, especially with the backbone on the outside. So the important genetic material is preserved on the inside and is less vulnerable to radiation and other assaults. And therefore, it can last and be preserved long enough to have a generational stability which would allow any form of evolution. So no matter what we ultimately find, it's probably going to be heard and darn similar. So Justin's making his predictions for 2025 early, it sounds like. And that is that the double helical structure will be found in the Venusian cloud bacteria that were discovered in 2023. There we go. I agree with Kiki. You can send it. You can just send it away. Yeah. We'll see. I just want a picture. I want a picture of the microscope's view of this bacteria or microbe or what. I can't wait to see it. I hope that they would include a camera. You know. They better have some kind of scanning, you know, laser scanner or X-ray scanner to be able to get structural information and take pictures, get images of that that could be sent back as well. Yeah. That would be. Oh, Blake, you're right. A triple helix would be even stronger. Just stacking on the helices. There we go. Moving on from Venus and the question of life in elsewhere in our solar system, let's move to the center of our galaxy. What lives at the center of our galaxy? Or what sucks at the center of our galaxy? Black hole? It's a big black hole. Right. A supermassive black hole named Sagittarius A. And now the idea of galactic formation is that, well, you maybe don't start out with that one giant supermassive black hole. You have, you know, old stars that were at the beginning of a particular galaxy, right? And those old stars, they collapse and form big black holes, but maybe those stars are moving around each other and start merging into each other and creating a bigger and bigger and bigger black hole. And so the idea of galactic formation is that there actually could be up to like 20,000 black holes spinning around, slowly getting accreted, getting sucked into that giant black hole and becoming one giant black hole. I know there's like some movie about this. There's gotta, somebody's gonna get the reference of the monster that just takes things in and makes them part of itself. Oh, wait, wait, no, the, yeah. Spirited away, is that what you're saying? Maybe spirited away, yeah. But moving on, this is not the spirited away black hole, but there's been no evidence because the black hole, you know, seriously, black holes don't emit visible light that we can see, right? They're the blackest black. No, no, no, just bear with me for a second. We don't really see them. We can test for them energetically, but they're easier to see if they're in a binary system where they were two stars and one of them collapsed into a black hole and the other one maybe turned into a neutron star that is getting sucked into the black hole and in the process of getting sucked into the black hole, there are lots of energetic rays, x-rays that are being released, but then we could see, right? And so we can't really find all of the solitary black holes out there, but we can find the x-ray signatures of these binary pairs. And so astrophysicists from Columbia University used data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory to look for high energy x-rays coming from about a parsec, 12 light years around our galaxy's black hole. And they found hundreds of these x-ray sources that they were looking for. And then they looked at the x-ray emissions for the ones closest to Sagittarius A, and they compared them against x-rays from further away and they found a lot of x-ray sources within about 3.3 light years of the galaxy's core had a high proportion at the highest energy wavelengths. And so current models of galactic evolution suggest that only one such source could be found close to Sagittarius A, but the team detected 12 according to their new paper that's published in Nature as of today. At least six of the x-ray sources, they are pretty sure are these x-ray binaries. And they think maybe all 12 of them that are, but for sure they know that six of them are. And they have been looking at these and they know that they're x-ray binaries because there's a surge in their energy level every five or 10 years, kind of like a pulsar. And so they can assume that there are these small mass black holes but the data that they have found solidifies the idea the hypothesis of galaxy formation and all these little, little mini black holes or smaller black holes kind of feeding into the giant black hole. And there is a lot more work to do to find more of them but they say based on their data if only six of the x-ray sources include a black hole that estimate that can be, they can calculate out to around 300 to 500 black holes orbiting within 3.3 light years of the galactic core. So it's not just one little black hole, big giant, I mean, big giant black hole. There's a family there. There's like a whole herd, right within a central parsec. And I really love the title of this nature article. I mean, this is science fiction geekery in, this is the, it's ultimate, a density cusp of quiescent x-ray binaries in the central parsec of the galaxy. I wanna hear data say that on Star Trek. That's sexy. Yeah, what is the collective noun for black holes? The collective noun. Yeah, you know, like a herd of elephants or a bloat of hippos. Isn't it a memory of elephants? What would it be for? A murder of crows. A murder of crows, a memory of elephants, a murder of crows. A parliament of owls. What is it for black holes? What is it for gravity? Because now we need that term. Yes, now we need that. Identity four says a dark of black holes. I will second that. By second that, I'll help nominate that term. A dark of black holes. You heard it here first. Those are my initial stories. Justin, what you got? Oh, good question. I should find out very quickly. Oh yes, it's a dog eat dog world. Which is a saying meant to convey or perhaps justify viciousness amongst humans as if that to say that viciousness is an absolutely necessary trait for survival in our modern times. People will say, it's a dog eat dog world. Why dogs are used in this analogy, you might ask? I don't know. Makes no sense. Dogs aren't actually known for eating each other. Describing the modern world as human eat, human would be more keeping with the analogy but also since we're not actually going around eating each other sort of the analogy kind of fails. So we are all gonna die. Okay. So far you're doing great medical robot. Thanks. Yeah, just so you know, we all die. You know, you're gonna die. I know you're gonna die. However, you probably don't like the idea of being eaten. Unlike most analogy cannibals, we humans do care for our dead in some way and we have for a really long time. And it's not just us but our elder cousin hominids as well. Early Neanderthal mortuary services laid their dead to rest in caves. And hominoleti was dragging, carrying, climbing and then dropping their dead into a complex of caves. These are early examples of hominid reverence for the dear departed. Doesn't sound like such a vicious world after all. Or was it? Uh-oh. International team of researchers have used a machine learning algorithm to assess whether the bone caches were placed there with reverence or not. And their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences group describes the factors that they fed into the algorithm to assess whether or not these were intentionally placed or had some other reason for there being huge deposits of bones. One is the site in Spain, which was a Neanderthal site considered one of the biggest treasure troves of fossils. Homo heidel and to Bergus. What's it? There's also that. And then also the, I think, was it the rising sun? I don't have it here. The something sun South African cave were hominoleti was found. So they took these two sites. They used spatial data about the burial sites, fossils and compared them to 14 other modern prehistoric accumulations of archaic human, modern human, non-human primate remains. They set up their algorithm to cluster the burial site bones into categories. And the categories they had were hominin burial site, undisturbed human corpses, scavenged human corpses and leopard consumed baboons. Poor baboons. So then they compared this to these two sites that have been tagged as human burial or human ritual collecting of the dead. And beep, bloop, tickety, tickety, tickety, boop, boop. Ding, machine learning algorithm suggests ancient hominin remains not part of ritualistic burial. So it doesn't completely rule it out, but it does illustrate that this is not a closed snare. What it did though, is it came up with the scavenged human corpses tag. Scavenged, huh? Scavenged. So the thing is that means that all of these could be the caves of some carnivores that dragged humans into numbers. It's a pantry. Yeah. And it's a common it into the deep, dark recesses of the cave to devour them later or devour them at their leisure or devour them in peace and without other competition. It could still mean that the bodies were dragged there and that nobody's protecting the dead people cave. Nobody's watching the front door and animals went in there. The mystery kind of deepens though, because in both of these sites there isn't your typical evidence of carnivore activity on the bones. There's not a bunch of nommarks. The bones are rather undamaged in that sense. Yet the bones fragments that are found are also a little bit strange in what's there. So there's a scarcity of axial bones. It's head and neck bones. And there's a scarcity of marrow filled rounded ends on the long bones. So you have competing, you have now competing sort of information that says the computer says the distribution looks like scavenged corpses. You have not the typical carnivore attack damage to these bones and you have an odd array of what's actually there. Also there's not tools found here. So it's lacking some, the home and the letting may not have had tools, but the Neanderthals did. But and if it was, even then maybe you would see, you've seen other Neanderthal burial sites where they did leave artifacts behind and those aren't seen there. So it's raising doubt, but also just questions. So the authors in the study say this finding does not falsify hypotheses of deliberate disposal, but does indicate that the data also support partially or completely non-anthropogenic formational histories. So sometimes you start with a question, sometimes you start with a result and have to work it backwards. And here you have folks, I think we're working in both directions. So I have a question. Would you still call it ritualistic burial if they were just trying to get the, dead stuff that could get them sick out of their house? So it's a good question and we don't have the answer for the question, which is why anthropologists go to their default. It was ritualistic. This is always. So it would definitely be a gray area. If they were just, if this was the kind of the trash cave for the dead bodies to keep bacteria away from you, that is a gray area, right? Because they're still deliberately moving and compiling corpses, but it's not a spiritual thing. No, it doesn't. And I don't think it was ever meant to indicate spiritual, but I think ritualistic in a sense that this is a cave, both caves are, have an abundant number of fossil corpses. So it's more like this is the thing. When somebody's dead, the ritual is, or like, you know, they're using ritual like you would use protocol or our process. That was more my question. Yeah, absolutely. You throw it in the cave, right? That was. That's the dead body cave. Yeah, and I'm gonna let you, like, again, we don't know exactly what that cave looked like six, 700,000 years ago, whenever they were dropping bodies in there, it could have been quite a bit different than it is today, but it's quite a treacherous amount of climbing and dropping down. And it's the kind of thing maybe a leopard would have been better at. I don't know. There is some sort of like, that's really a lot of effort being put into carrying a corpse somewhere just to let it be there, right? Yeah, but that's very interesting if there's not tooth marks on the bones, really. Right, so then that's why, so it's scavenged, which could mean deliberate, and then preyed upon, could be by rodents or whatever. So there's a lot more questions there. So that story that we have reported on has another layer to it that's gonna have to get looked at in the future. Very interesting. And then, what else do I got? I think that's something else there. There's another story. Oh, this is kind of fun. This is recent research from RMIT University in Australia. Their research has resulted in an artificial enzyme that uses light to kill bacteria. Sort of. The artificial enzyme, they say could be one day used to fight infections and keep high-risk public places like hospitals for your bacteria, such as E. Coli and staff. This is made from tiny nanorions, not nanorods, thousand times smaller than the thickness of human hair. The nanosymes, as they're calling them, use visible light to create reactive oxygen that rapidly breaks down and kills bacteria. This is Quoty Voice from the lead researcher, Professor Dipol Bansal. For a number of years, we have been attempting to develop artificial enzymes that can fight bacteria, while also offering opportunities to control bacterial infections using external triggers and stimuli. Now, we've finally cracked it. Our nanosymes are artificial enzymes that combine light with moisture to cause a biochemical reaction that produces hydroxyl radicals and breaks down bacteria. We have shown that when shined upon with a flash of white light, the activity of our nanosymes increased by over 20 times, forming holes in bacterial cells and killing them efficiently. So. Efficiently. I like it specifically as efficiently. Yeah, and that picture makes it look like there's a lot of dead bacteria there. So what's really interesting about this is they also are working on, they have a powder version of this that they are working into paint or working into ceramics so you could paint the walls of a hospital, say, with this. And if you turn on the lights, the walls become antibacterial. Oh, that's rad. That is awesome. And this is, we talk a lot about like, oh, antibacterials have these downstream negative effects. I don't know that we're going to find a bacterium that comes resistant to a hydroxide. That's kind of, that's not something that you could just, you know, okay. So, okay, so we've got these tiny things, hence the nano part of this, right? But they're enzymes, these are, but they're not naturally occurring. They're artificial enzymes. They're not naturally occurring enzymes. And my question though, I mean, you put it in paint, but what happens if you have wet hands and you touch the paint? I mean, do you get it on your hands and then all your skin cells are liced? Get holes in them and suddenly your cells are breaking down because you come and contact it. What if it's aerosolized and you breathe it in? Does it put holes in your lung cells? I mean, A little hydroxyl radicals never hurt anyone. Well, no, wait, that's really not true. I mean, it's breaking down the bacterial wall. If it's putting holes in the bacterial wall, I mean, this is all cells have these cell walls, right? Yeah. Membranes, it's not a wall, plants have cell walls, but you have membranes. You have these lipid bilayer membranes that keep other stuff out. And if this enzyme breaks that down, how do I wanna know that it is safe? For peoples. It is. And for dogs. I don't know. Just as it says it is, so it must be true. It might not be. So I'm probably wrong. Well, it's one of these things, though, too, that everything can kill you if it has the wrong dilution, right? Yeah. Right, right, right. If they've got it mixed down to where you can put it into a powder in the paint and there's enough paint there to stick to the wall, chances are it's low enough. Well, chances. Anyway, this thing right now, who works in the lab? But the next plan is to take it out of the lab and start doing more real-world sort of applications to see if they can, yeah. They're talking about, like, you could make self-sanitizing toilet bowls by incorporating this into the ceramics, right? Just never sit on the seat. Yeah. The splashback could really wreak havoc on your colon. It would be in the ceramics. It's in the surfaces, right? So anything to adhere to and grow on that surface would be affected, but anything not in direct contact with the bowl, which would only happen if you fell in and even then it would probably be killing some of your bacteria on your skin. Yeah, I just wonder if this enzyme, because it doesn't sound like, you know, with it being a hydroxyl group and, you know, that it's not specifically going after bacteria, it's going after, as Dick Tell in the chat room put it, organic matter. And so I would love to know if they could make it more specific to what it would address, or if the applications, like you're talking about, if they could be, if they could work in a better way, like for painting. I'm not actually convinced. I only have the rough sketch of this thing. Yeah, that's an interesting idea. I'm not convinced it's actually an enzyme. Well, just put holes in the back there. So there are, we've talked on the show about how dragonfly wings, for example, have a very particular pilliated structure that breaks apart bacteria when it rests on their wing. And this is something that they have toyed with making a structural kind of a textural change in surfaces, particularly in hospitals to make bacteria unable to live on it because it's broken apart by the structure. So I don't know, maybe there's options that don't actually have the potential to kill other organic matter that might be a better way. Or maybe the combination of the two. Who knows? Yeah, absolutely. Divide and conquer. I mean, I hear through the grapevine that, what is it, the nightmare germ, the nightmare bug is on the loose in the United States. What does that mean? Is that a bacteria that gives you nightmares? No, it's a bacteria that is completely resistant to all known antibiotics. So yes, it's a bacteria that gives you nightmares. It'll give you a nightmare now. There we go. Yep, there we go. And on that note, we will move away from the bacteria, I think, I don't know, because it's time for Blair's Animal Corner. I like this part of the show. It's with Blair. Buy a pet, build a pet, no pet at all. Want to hear about a animal? She's your girl. Except for giant pandas as well. Say that I'm your girl. Jocopla. Well, I know you're used to me bringing all of the nightmare juice, so you're just talking about nightmares. But today, I actually have a super adorable Blair's Animal Corner. Aw, is it too soon to say, huh? No, I expect more. There will be many and all. So first, there's breaking news out of Monterey Bay Aquarium that I just had to share. And it is about sea turtles. Now, ladies and gentlemen of the Twist family, I am so excited to tell you that sea turtles just got cuter. No way. Yes. Speaking of cute, this was a study run actually by a sea otter specialist. She's Jessica Fuji is part of the Monterey Bay Aquarium sea otter research team. And she has been studying ecomorphology, the intersection of evolution, behavior, and body form. And she has expertise in sea otter foraging and tool use behavior. And so she started examining all sorts of other sea animals, how they forage, if they use certain body parts in their foraging and how this has evolved through evolutionary time. Why is this important to her? Well, it's because at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, they raise baby sea otters. And they need to be able to figure out how to teach them to be good sea otters to release them back into the wild. So they do this with puppets, they do it with surrogate mothers that live at the aquarium full time. There's all these sorts of things that they can do. Well, in her study of foraging and tool use in the animal kingdom in the ocean, she found that sea turtles have developed frontal, they don't have a developed frontal cortex, independent articulating digits or social learning as far as they know, but they have caught them licking their fingers just like a kid who has had a delicious piece of chocolate cake, perhaps. But so they actually use their flippers to forage. So they did a very extensive research of crowdsourced photos and videos. They found green sea turtles holding jellies while they ate them. They found a loggerhead sea turtle rolling a scallop on the sea floor with their flippers. They found a hawksbill turtle pushing against a reef for leverage to rip an anemone loose with their flippers. So they found flippers used for a huge variety of foraging tasks in sea turtles, holding, bracing, corraling, all these sorts of things. This is something we have not seen before and we did not anticipate because that's not why they have flippers. They have flippers for propulsion, that's it. And they're actually, they can be kind of clumsy with them, but it turns out, here we go, they use their flippers to eat. Hold on to food while they eat it. So this is important for a bunch of reasons. Obviously it can help teach us about the evolution of these behaviors. For example, most likely convergent, right? So if sea turtles did it and sea otters do it, that is a convergent evolutionary trait. That is not something we would expect has because sea otters and sea lions do it, that there is a common ancestor that learned how to hold things while eating. So there's now we know, most likely, this is a more kind of multiple appearance in the fossil record. This also means that potentially this is something that they don't need to spend so much extensive time teaching the baby sea otters to do if it's something that is easily learned and shows up easily in a species. So also obviously doesn't take an extensive frontal cortex or a lot of social learning because sea turtles don't do those things. So yeah, those babies are on their own. It better not be learned, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, they never meet their parents. So yeah, so sea turtles use their flippers to eat. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, give me my jellyfish. Oh, no, no, no, no. And next, do you know about Japanese macaques? Yes, you see the pictures of the, what is it, the Nagano Monkey Park? Yeah, not so. Those are the hot tub ones. Yeah, the macaques that are the hot tub. Yeah, there's always beautiful pictures of them in the snow and they're sitting in the warm hot tub. They're living better than I am. Yes, absolutely. So the Japanese macaques are also known as snow monkeys. They are the only group of monkeys known to take hot spring baths. This is first deserves in 1963 when a young female was seen in an outdoor hot spring which actually belonged to a nearby hotel. Other monkeys started copying that behavior and for hygienic purposes, the park eventually built a monkey hot spring just for them so that they weren't competing with humans for the hot spring, which you don't want to get bitten by a macaque. That is not a good thing. They have lots of transmissible diseases and all these sorts of things. So stay away from macaques. But by 2003, one in every three females in this group of Japanese macaques bathed regularly in winter. So this recent study from Kyoto University in Japan wanted to scientifically validate the benefits of this behavior. Why are they taking their hot tubs? Why are they doing it? So their their original kind of guess was that it was just because they lived in the snow and it was a really good place to heat up. It's a place to get warm, yeah. Yeah, so it was all along this idea of behavioral flexibility, trying something new to help counter cold climate stress and that this would have a direct implication for reproduction and survival. So they're going to counter that you get in the warm water and that's really nice. But then you're covered in cold wet fur, which is not very true. Well, so in the study, they studied 12 adult females during the spring birth season from April to June and the winter mating season from October to December. They counted how much time the monkeys spent in the hot springs and they saw who bathed the most. They also this is very important collected fecal samples during the times of extreme cold and they were looking at the concentration of fecal glucocorticoid metabolite in the stool. This is because thermoregulatory stress and the management of body temperature is known to influence concentrations of glucocorticoids. So basically they're measuring temperature related stress in the poop. So they've go ahead. I'm just laughing at the the proxy temperature related stress from poop. Poop is a great source of hormone data. I know. And it's easy to collect. You don't have to. You don't have to tranquilize any animals and take blood anybody for it. I know nobody's going to fight you for that poop unless. Yeah. Trying to take other bodily fluids from an animal raises stress, which now you've ruined your hormone research. So poop is perfect because you're not affecting it. Yeah, absolutely. So they found shocking female snow monkeys use the hot spring more in winter than in spring, especially during colder weeks. So it does look like they're doing it to keep warm. They found that dominant females benefited from their status and spent longer times in the hot tub. But they were also involved in more aggressive conflicts. So they had a higher energy expenditure than subordinate females in order to stay in the tub. But taking a spa did indeed reduce stress hormone levels. So high social status has a trade off between the cost of the hiring position fighting to remain on top and the benefits from being on top, including hot tub access. So they would like to now do further investigation using serum or saliva samples to see short term and long term changes in stress levels in relation to the hot tubs. But I mean, it's science here. There's a stress reducing effect of this hot tub in the Japanese macaques. And most likely it's due to not having to work as hard to stay warm. It's due to a raised body temperature, but hey, maybe it's just chilling out. Everybody loves a hot tub. Yeah, although I got this vision of staying at the hotel. And after a night of a few too many sake shots, I decided to take the take the hot tub in the spring that they've got on the list of amenities at the place only it took the wrong path. And they found a little further. And by the time I realized I'm in a hot tub with two dozen macaques, too late to move. I just got to stay there. And you stayed there. I know if they don't mess with me. Yeah, this is your stress hormones. All the charts. This immediately makes me think, though, of like all of the mobster movies that I've ever seen where it's like, you know, the Russian mob guy in the either or the or the Italian mob guy or the Japanese mob guy. You know, all these, you know, action films and they're having their conversations in the sauna. Or in the hot tub, you know, I mean, it's because and they and so it's the mob guys there at the higher, you know, higher, higher archer levels, higher social levels, you know, talking to the lower downs. They're relaxing, getting their hot tub sauna on the banya, you know, you know why it is, it's so they know no one's packing heat because they're naked. Can't wear a wire if you're half naked and half naked and humid. You hope. Yeah, that's a full friend and those olden times. If you were sweating, you'd be sparking at the same time. That's why they did it. Well, maybe those mob bosses would have died of heart attack much sooner if they hadn't had their hot tub time to kind of reduce the stress. Reduce that stress level. Yeah. All right. This is making me rethink use of the hot tub and the spa. But, you know what? Water, water, water. I really don't really think I need to check out. What? Venus? No, we talked about that. No, the space graveyard. Ew. What? The Pacific Ocean. It's a really big ocean. It takes up a large proportion. One of our bigger oceans. It's one of our bigger oceans, very large ocean, right? We have lots of oceans. Great water-covered planet. Well, this weekend, we had talked on previous shows about the Chinese Space Station Tiangong-1 crashing to a fiery death. And the question was where it would land. Well, it landed in the space graveyard-ish. It is, it landed in, it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere at 8.16 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday night, which I guess is 16, zero o'clock, 16 minutes at UTC on Monday morning. And it ended up in over the Southern Pacific Ocean when it re-entered northwest of the island of Tahiti. It's. Yeah, but it came to its final resting place. Oh, no, no, its final resting place is in the Southern Pacific Ocean northwest of Tahiti. They're not going to take it out. They're just going to let that trash float. And it's just if it landed there, it's just it's in there. No, go get it. Go get it. Nobody's going to get it. We got all these warnings about how toxic it was. It was going to be like, don't go anywhere near. It's going to be emitting all these toxic chemicals. And I'm just going to let it be. It's out in the ocean. Like it's a specific garbage patch right now. Well, no, because it probably sank. It's a normal reef right now. It wasn't made of plastic. So it broke up. It broke up over this base in the ocean. And the reason it's called the the space graveyard is that there are lots of objects in space along these general orbital paths. And many of them land kind of in this area in in the Pacific Ocean. The Pacific Ocean is a big graveyard for lots of things that have re-entered and crashed to earth, crashed back to me really sad. So much garbage on the most likely, though, it's just some little pieces. It probably most of it is little tiny pieces, not much left. Yes. Nobody even probably saw it. Maybe somebody on a ship shot saw it, but yes. Yeah. Meanwhile, there's a plastic trash heap the size of France floating around somewhere. So like really keep everything relative. We've got to keep it all. We have to keep it all relative, exactly. But yes, for everyone's information, the Tiangang-1 space station did indeed re-enter the Earth's atmosphere and it is no longer orbiting out of control. Yay. It's in. It's done and it didn't hit anybody in the head. Yeah, we're moving the points of that for space debris. Yeah. And this story was sent to me by Kevin Kintura on Facebook. And I and we've talked a lot about magneto reception in birds. And there's this question of how do birds sense magnetic fields? Right. We know they can sense polarized. Right. How do they how do they home? How do they navigate? How do they how do they migrate all these these activities that birds do? How do they do it when they're so directional? Well, we know that they can use some star and sun compass. Techniques, they use polarized light, but the magnetic field also influences the directions that birds choose to orient. And researchers did think that there were these cells in the birds' beaks that had iron in them that would be receptive to the Earth's magnetic field. But more recently, scientists have been thinking that it's proteins in birds' eyes. And I think, Blair, you've reported on this a couple of times in the last year or so. But in two papers in the last couple of months, most recent one looking at zebra finches. It was published March 28 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. They looked at these. They looked for cryptochrome proteins in the eyes. These are light sensing, light sensitive proteins that are found in the retina of the eye. And they ended up looking at a few of these cryptochromes. Cryptochrome one, cryptochrome two and cryptochrome four. And they determined that, while cryptochrome one and two follow circadian patterns, that cryptochrome four remains constant day or night. And so if you are going to be a pattern that helps to orient a bird to a magnetic field, potentially for birds that fly at night, you want it to be a protein that doesn't change with the day or the night. Or maybe that if it does change, it becomes more active at night. But that's not what cryptochrome one and cryptochrome do at night. They become less prominent at night when it's dark. Cryptochrome four is now the big target that researchers are singling out. And the researchers, other researchers, this one guy, Henrik Murtzin, who worked on a study that came out in January on Robbins, he says we have quite a lot of evidence, but still cryptochrome four is not proven. And so we're still looking for a bit more definitive evidence and to determine whether birds that do not have cryptochrome four if they still are able to magneto orient. If they still, if you don't, if you can take away that cryptochrome four, does it affect their ability to navigate or not? And so those are questions that may be asked in the future. Yeah. So anyway, getting honing in on what is responsible for birds, magnetic field reception. And there are some really interesting pictures that are available online of this idea of how birds would see magnetic fields. And the images kind of suggest that if you if the birds during the day were viewing the sky with light sensitive proteins interacting with a magnetic field, that maybe they would perceive the sky as like shades of light and dark bands that dark bands or light bands would represent the the orientation of the magnetic fields and that they would that they would see a difference in light intensity. But it will it would be something that would actually be a visual cue. And so you have to kind of imagine birds would be seeing something kind of interesting, potentially in 5D. Yeah, very interesting. All right, Justin left right before your study here. Disclamer, disclaimer, disclaimer. I have a very correlative study. So, you know, that's my big disclaimer here. I don't know how much stock we should take this. But this is an interesting study looking at a correlation between smokers and non smokers and diet. It was a study from Fairfield University in Connecticut and Yale University. They looked at 5,293 U.S. adults and found that smokers consumed around 200 more calories a day, despite eating significantly smaller portions of food than non smokers or former smokers. People who have never smoked consumed about 1.79 calories per gram of food. Daily smokers consumed 2.02 kilocalories per gram and non daily smokers consumed 1.89 kilocalories per gram. The researchers also found that former smokers consumed more calories per gram of food than those who had never smoked, but that the former smokers dietary energy density was still significantly lower than current smokers. So any amount of cigarette consumption could be associated with poorer diet quality. But overall, daily smokers, their diet was not as healthy that also included less fruit and vegetables, which means their intake of vitamin C was likely to be lower. So which is unfortunate because as I understand the nicotine intake or the tobacco intake actually taxes vitamin C in the body. So it's like a double whammy. Absolutely. Yeah. So then the question becomes, does smoking, who, you know, they say that it's an appetite suppressant, right? So does smoking make you eat less volume, but not as well? Don't do people that smoke, are they just more predisposed to eat less healthy or are people bad choices or do people that eat less healthy, are they more predisposed to smoke? There's a million. Now, now here's a caveat. Here's a caveat, because this is kind of interesting study because one of the things that they talk about is tobacco use as a what is it? A deterrent appetite suppressant. Yeah. That's what I'm looking for. An appetite suppressant. So you would think that they're eating less and in a way they're eating less portions. Well, you think they would eat less often, which this isn't addressing. But yeah, so that's the thing. They're eating less. They're eating less food, but they are eating about 200 calories more a day. Right. And what's interesting about this, too, is the dietary data used in the study was based on participants recalling what they ate in the in a 24 hour period. And nicotine has been tied to increased memory ability. They've even used nicotine patches. So you're saying people who smoke remembered everything they ate and the people who didn't smoke forgot about the ding dong they ate. And that's the correlative. The correlative message is that people who smoke have better memories. They they they prescribe and use people who have early onset also early stage Alzheimer's, they will give them a nicotine patch. And I think it improves memory. Somehow there's a correlation somewhere in there as well. So I think that's what this is. Well, there is also this whole other item, though, where. Sugar and fat have been proven time and time again to be addictive. So there's also this other question of if you have this one addiction, are you likely to have another addiction? And so it's there's your brains, you know, the brain could be predisposed to latch on to certain reward centers in a particular way. And that could also predispose you to eat less healthy food. Yeah, all of that's possible. But I really think it does come down to smokers have better memories. And that's why they're self-reported. Well, all right, it's a correlative study, so we can't say anything definitively anyway, but I just wanted to throw it out there. I found it very interesting. But it is counterintuitive. It is counterintuitive. Because that whole then then the idea that, you know, a you know, losing weight by smoking or if somebody wants to quit smoking, but they're afraid of gaining weight. Yeah, according to this study, you definitely will be eating less No, according to this study, if you are are used to eating high calorie food and you stop smoking, you will eat more high calorie food. So you're more likely. Yeah, so this is something they talked about in the study as well. I was trying to get too deep into it because we're trying to. But but what they were trying to say was was that if you are. So if it's correlated in the way that smokers just generally eat more eat, so the former smokers or the smokers that are not daily smokers still ate more kilocalories per gram. So this is this idea of if you if you quit smoking and smoking is appetite suppressant and you keep eating the same kind of food, but you're eating it more now because you're not smoking, you will gain weight fast. So if we know this, that's kind of the the medical implication to this is that if we know this going into it and you you are a doctor and you are trying to get your patient to quit smoking, it's this idea of a two-pronged approach of changing diet at the same time as trying to get them to quit smoking. And if they won't quit smoking, at least try to get them to change their diet so that they will have better health overall. Yeah, tell them to eat an orange. Yeah, broccoli and an orange. It's good for you. Everyone, I hope that you enjoyed the show tonight. We have had so much fun. What a great interview tonight with some some fun stories, too. I really enjoyed the show tonight. I hope I got a lot of feedback from the chat room that this was the best interview that we've done ever or in a really long time. Sort of combination of those two. Yeah, some of our previous guests might be listening. Yeah, no, nobody listens. They only they only listen when they've got a book to push. That's it. Then they don't. I think that comment did come from a previous interview. That's fun, which is fun. Yes, once we catch them, we don't let them go. But I would love to say thank you to all of you who listen to the show tonight. For those of you who watch the show over on YouTube. Thanks for joining in the chat room over there. Over on Facebook. Thank you for watching tonight and for chatting over there. Wonderful. See your comments and our chat room. Hey, oh, how you doing there? Chat room, you've been very active tonight. Thank you for all of your comments. I do try and keep an eye on them. I know I can't keep up with them all, but I do peek in occasionally and I enjoy seeing what you have to say and try. I do try to incorporate them into comments and questions whenever possible. I would also like to say thank you to Fada for his help on social media and the show notes over on the YouTube descriptions and to Identity 4 for recording the show and to Brandon for helping out over to to simulcast us over to Facebook. I'd also like to thank our Patreon sponsors. Thank you to Paul Disney, Jibarton Lattimore, Richard Onimus, Ken Hayes, Harrison Prather, Charlene Henry, Joshua Fury, Andy Groh, Steve DeBell, Alex Wilson, Tony Steele, Ed Dyer, Craig Landon, John Ratnaswamy, Mark Masaros, Matthew Litwin, Jason Roberts, Bill Kay, Bob Calderd, TimeJubber319, Kyle Washington, Eric Knapp, Richard Bryan-Condren, Sarah Chavis, Jacqueline Boyster, Jack Richard Porter, RTM, Rick Ramis Paul, John DeKee, Jason Olds, Brian Carrington, Christopher Dreyer, Lisa Suzuki, Jim Drapode, Greg Riley, Sean Lam, Ben Rothig, Steve Lessman, Kurt Larson, Robert Aston, Rudy Garcia, Marjorie, Gary S. 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Or if you have a mobile type device, you can search Twist, the number four droid app in the Android marketplace, or simply this week in science and anything Apple Marketplace. For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes will be available on our website. That's at www.twist.org where you can also make comments and start conversations with the host and other listeners. Or you can contact us directly, email Kirsten at kirsten at this week in science.com, Justin at twistminion at gmail.com or Blair at Blair Baz at twist.org. Just be sure to put twist T-W-I-S in the subject line or your email will be filtered into oblivion. You can also hit us up on the Twitter. We are at Twist Science at Dr. Kiki, at Jackson Fly and at Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback. If there's a topic you'd like us to cover, address a suggestion for an interview, please let us know. We'll be back here next week, and we hope you'll join us again for some more great science news. And if you have learned anything from the show, please remember, it's all in your head. Science, this week in science, this week in science. This week in science, it's the end of the world. So I'm setting up a shop, got my banner unfurled. 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 global warming with a wave of my hands. 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. It's this week in science, this week in science. This week in science, science, science. This week in science, this week in science. This week in science, science, science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. That what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan. 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That's the way the science goes. We finished an episode. That was a science turducken. What was that? Just fit of the giggles? Yeah, I started doing slightly funny, funny voices. It was like one slightly funny voice. And then there were more slightly funny voices than Justin with more slightly funny voices. And you lost it. It was a game of chicken that I lost. I think I lost it. I think I was the one who was breaking up. That was funny. What was that voice? Only one I could produce. Laughing. For some of it. My goodness. Oh, boy, I'm losing it. Yon has life, everyone. It's a thing. Is he? It was all sorts of science. I heard today was International Rat Day. It was indeed. Oh, my gosh. A couple of my friends texted me today and said, Happy International Rat Day. I was like, thanks. They went, yeah, I know because I because I bought your calendar. I was like, that is great. That is the greatest. Like, not only did people, multiple people wish me a happy international rat day. But it's also they thanked me for my calendar. They supported twist. So cool. Yeah. Yeah, science. Lots of science. I've had like I've had like an artistic break where I don't I don't know what to do for this next year. But I think I have an idea. So I'm going to try some stuff this weekend. We'll see. It's kind of coming up with the ideas to be creative. I know, but I keep trying. I'm going. This is so experimenting. I can't go back to like, you know, it's like what I've done before. I have to try something new. Yeah, it's like iteration. I actually did an art science piece. I after after a couple of weeks of working with a cell counting machine. And in doing what is it? What's the thing called? Chemo something there at the microscope and doing cell counts. I made a painting that basically looks like what you see when you do cell counts on purpose or like. I thought it was like all you could see with cells. That's what happened. Like you close I close my eyes at night and I'm seeing this grid with cells in it. Right. So I made a painting for it and then I was going to put it up at the job and they're like, oh, turns out they're having a lot of the scientists and people working at the lab are. Also have made some art and they're going to have like a a in-house art gallery showing sort of science oriented. So it's like it turned out into this thing. So I'm like, cool. Yeah, that's awesome. But I can't show it to you because it's they took it and it's somewhere at the facility. Oh, but then when are they doing the show? I don't know. I have no idea. They just stole my art on the back. We're just going to take your art. That's nice. Thanks a lot. K bye. Yeah, it wasn't quite. Yeah, it's like it's going to show up at something somewhere with like, OK, fine. But I gave a piece of my art to an art show once and I never saw it again. Really? Yeah, it happens sometimes. That's not OK. Bleak, it couldn't have been a spoiler to you that we're all going to die. Your your name in the chat room is Bleak. Come on. It's occurred to you. What? Yes. When are we going to tell Justin about photography? Says Bleak. I don't like photography. No, because because OK. So photography is awesome. Photography is great. I have a Panavision shirt somewhere in this house. I like I like lots of photography together, strung along to make the movie. But all of the paintings that I've I've been working on in the past couple of years have a little bit of a three dimensional aspect. Oh, yeah, I know. I could have photographed it. And I will eventually when I see it again. Oh, but I have. Oh, I could I could share what I'm talking about. But OK, so one thing I've noticed, though, is a lot of art that I've gone out and seen seems to be like this mixed media of incorporating photography images interlaid onto a canvas, which is like you've printed something in front of the photograph you took and you incorporate into things, which is interesting and cool and all that. But but when when we're in this world of digital art, the one thing that digital art isn't is multi dimensional. Yeah. Well, that's I would love to sculpt things for the calendar, but unless I can also find a photographer that could take excellent pictures of my sculptures. Yeah. And Tater in the chat room, I do not know if there is a way to get my get Justin to speak into the microphone more often. He does. He he doesn't like speaking into the microphone. He likes speaking off to the side of the microphone. This is. It's hard. This is an owl. That is an owl. It's a nice owl. I like it. It's got depth. Now the owl is talking into the mic, but Justin's not. It's nubbly. And it's kind of an interesting that owl is the owl of Athena. There was a time at which that owl was the most minted coin on the planet. Where? Yeah, Grace. Did you make that checks out? Love that. That's cool, Justin. I can start. You can. I know you had an art van or it was like an art van. Yeah, I had a van that was dedicated because the apartment was too small to do art in. So I had a van that it was like a cargo van that's only purpose was so that I could go out there and and make paintings in it. Did it run? Yeah, it did. I would not have wanted to take it on the freeway or go anywhere far without triple A's phone number like, you know, at the ready. But yeah, it served its purpose. It was pretty cool for a while. It was a good van down by the river. I live in an art van by the museum. That's right. Oh, consider moving away from San Francisco. I don't think I don't think Blair's going to do that. Oh, I no longer live in San Francisco. The Bay Area. I mean, Justin's never going to leave Davis much as I've tried. I the only thing holding me back is is is you the minions. I would in a heartbeat leave Davis for a more rural stretch of California, but they don't have the internets in a lot of places, which is the annoying thing. I would much rather be at some rural little shack of a farmhouse with an acre or two of you had that for a while. I had that a few times, but that's when I still had the radio station to go to or studio to go to. Like we always had some other thing. I never had to rely on rural interwebs, which is basically worse than dial up. You're actually your download is fine. You can get the satellite, which will download you at decent speeds, but you upload over a copper phone line. And that's it. So that's a limiting factor of why I've never left. The phone line hot rod says we can't come to Canada. We're not allowed anymore. Oh, building a wall, huh? They're building a building a military barrier. Well, I almost brought a story this week. I might bring it next week because it kind of just dropped about they did an ecological impact survey on the wall. Oh, I think I saw that. Uh huh. Yeah. So I might talk about it next week. Yeah, we should we should get the EPA on that right away. Hey, there is. Yeah, they're totally on our side on that one. There is a science communication job for the EPA. Oh, good. What could go wrong? What amazing job security? I'm telling you about science, but not really, because nobody's going to actually let you communicate. You can just the requirement is that you have apps, actually, no science background. Yeah, and you could be fired at any time for no reason. Although, although one of the perks, even though the job pays seven forty eight an hour, something like that, seven dollars and forty eight since now. You actually have unlimited use of a private jet, which is weird. Oh, you can buy a thirty one thousand dollar desk for your office. Oh, yeah, absolutely. You have an unlimited. You have you have for the what does it be the MasterCard black car? Oh, yeah. Right. From the EPA. That's right. Yeah, this would be a research triangle job. Socks and spell socks wrong. Very well done. Dick, though, you weren't Davis a couple months ago. Hit me up. You missed it. Yeah, I'll post this. I tweeted this link. If anybody does want to get a job working for the EPA, there's a job posting. Awesome. That's right. Communication specialist at the EPA. I don't know this EPA. I really would. Let me. Can I apply and wait for the next EPA? Well, can I can I can I defer like in college? No, I think you'd be. I think you would be fantastic at this job. You could you could do both at the same time. You could both. Toe the director's line on anything and at the same time be communicating why that's a bad idea. You know, for too long, it would hurt. It would hurt. But you are right. Are you with a breathable air? Right. I don't. I was waiting. I don't it's not going to be breathable much longer because they're rolling back all the automobile regulations. Except well, actually, yeah, the tough one is they're trying to tell California that we can't. Right. And I'm I'm sure Jerry Brown has two select words for them on that. Exactly. And we can only say one of them. We can't say them on the air. Say the second one, which is you. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. So I hope Jerry Brown stays firm. I feel like he will. He's pretty good at that so far, staying staying true to what he thinks we should be doing. Yeah, despite what the federal government says. I mean, that's what that's what states rights is about. Yeah, it's right. Actually. No, stop, stop, stop. So so this is the problem with states rights. It's the same problem with gerrymandering, which is that whoever has the national power thinks states rights is really overblown. Yeah, and it's flip flops constantly. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Most ridiculous argument. Nobody says we made states rights when their party is controlling the national agenda because, you know, it's actually a lot easier to get the other states to comply with what we want. If we just say it's a federal thing, it won't matter. What will matter, though, is is that in in California. We sell more cars here than anybody else does. We have the economy of a nation. Yeah, it's a fifth rate, sixth or eighth nation. I don't know. It's still a nation. It's still comparable to other nations. So like we're bigger than France. It is definitely California with our two senators. Right. It's kind of. We've got some stuff going on. That's definitely one of them. But the other thing actually that happened recently in terms of California that was kind of cool was that I think I talked about this on the show. Months ago, but the next generation science standards has been a state by state adoption anyway. So we adopted it. California adopted it pretty, pretty early in terms of things. I think they were, you know, in the top in the first 10 states to adopt it, they did a full adoption. Other states kind of blacked out all of the mentions of climate change and evolution and did all this other terrible stuff to it before they adopted it, blah, blah. But so part of this is you have to change your evaluation because, you know, plant cycles and photosynthesis used to be a second grade standard. And now it's a first grade standard. So you don't want to test for that in the wrong grade. And so you have to change your standard, your tests. But then there are these federal test science tests that you're supposed to give to students. And so California is now trying to fully implement in elementary schools with the new science standards. And the federal government is making them, they want them to double test their children. They want them to do the new NGSS tests for their students. But they also want them to do the multi-day federal science test that is based on the old standards as well. And California went, nah. So we'll see how that all shakes out. But that was pretty cool. Yeah. Awesome. I was contacted by a science communicator fellow. And he works at the Vanderbilt Center for Science Outreach. Cool. And they're thinking of trying to get a hashtag going to get STEM professionals to share stories and thoughts about the K-12 teachers who've got them on their career paths. And so they're thinking of using hashtag STEM possible. Like teachers make the impossible STEM possible. So what do you guys think? I think STEM, STEM possible could be good. But I don't I mean, does it really to dream? I mean, does it really get at the STEM possible dream? Yeah. Does it get at what they're trying to do? Yeah. I think so. Yeah. You know what I was thinking about when we were talking to our guest earlier? I think that if I was a younger student today, like if I was 15 today, let's say, I think I'd end up as an engineer. Because I loved science, but didn't think I was very good at it. I did not know what I wanted to do for a living yet when I was 15 years old. And I knew that I was really, really, really, really good at math. And I didn't want to be a math major. I didn't I didn't want to do just math. Like people kept telling me, like, oh, go into accounting. You'll you'll be rich, you'll be successful. Like, you're perfect for this, you're good at math. And I was like, oh, that's not what I want, though. And I feel like if I had had someone to talk to about my possibilities or even like what engineering was like, I think I had friends who later went in and majored in engineering and I had no idea what it meant still when I was in college to be in engineering. I was just like, oh, is that like machines? What is that? I don't know. But yeah, it's engine. But yeah, I think that if I if I knew. What it seems like more young people know now about the sciences and about, you know, finding what you're good at and the combinations of your of what you like and all this stuff. I yeah, I think I would have ended up an engineer. It's pretty interesting. And now I'm like, so I'm worlds away from that now. But it's very it's very interesting. I mean, I I really had no. I was thinking about being an English major and like being a teacher. I had no idea. Yeah, because also I knew I loved animals and I and nobody told me that maybe that means you should do science. It was just oh, you like animals, you should be a vet end of story. Like, oh, I don't want to be a big teller saying chemical engineering. Oh, yeah. Absolutely chemical engineering, you know what I would have been? Also an engineer. However, I would be. Well, actually, but it's kind of like it's newer than when I would have been. No, it's we're saying if you're 15 now. Oh, 15 now, I want to be a protein engineer. There you go. That's very cool, which would be a it's a it's a chemical engineering or molecular engineering major. Yeah, no, it's actually going to be a little bit more intense. It's actually I'm a geneticist. First and foremost, then you want to be a synthetic biologist. Exactly. But but that's what a protein engineer is now, right? Genetic engineer. Yeah. And and and the idea would be to start with the protein. And then you like design the protein that you want to do whatever it is you want it to do and interact with the world. However, you want it to interact and then figure out how to program that with the, you know, genetic programming. Maybe send it off to the. Here, program this, like be able to speak protein. Well, that would be I just I wish someone had explained. Somebody had like sat down with me and explained what all of the sciences were and what that really meant and what your day to day would look like and what the process of becoming those things look like. But then for other for other jobs, too, you know, like because once it became clear that to be a teacher, you know, you have to be you have to get a credential, you have to do this student teaching like all this kind of other stuff really made me think about whether it was something I really wanted to do. And I went, no, that's not no. But then, you know, I also took internships working with kids and figured out that I really like reaching many students for short times then reaching a select group of students for for nine months at a time. So, you know, different people prefer the other the kind of the longitudinal touch, but I prefer the the, you know, the, the, the short term. So there's a, I just wish I knew more. How's the tape? OK, you are a ninth grade science teacher. And it's the kids first day at high school. And you're their science teacher. How do you introduce the class? What's your introduction? Um, what kind of science? Exactly. It's ninth grade science class. It doesn't happen in ninth grade. Ninth grade is a is a particular science. It is. So what kind of science is it? So I don't know. So I actually worked out my I actually worked out mine because if it was physics, I would I would I would probably do some crazy experiment or if it was chemistry, I would do a magic trick that was actually a chemical reaction or if it was biology, I don't know. So here's mine. I probably here's my put out taxidermied items on the on the tables. Last. My name is. Mr. Jackson. Written on the board. What this class is going to consist of is your ability to memorize large data and write it down later. Fifty percent of your grade is going to be based on this diagram and your ability to remember it. Ten minutes from now, when I ask you to write down all the 95 components as they are listed here, the test begins now. If you do not have the ability to do this, you have failed the class. Go. OK, I know that's all what everybody was expecting from a science class when you walked in here. That's not what we're going to do. What we're going to do is experiment and have fun. And hopefully by the end of this course, your mind is actually blown. That's how I would do it. I would give them exactly all of their fears about what science class means in the first five minutes and then obliterate it and continue to obliterate it through the rest of the course. Well, it's just so for me, one of the main stopping points for me in in in pursuing science for a long time was that I thought that I wasn't good at it. And I. I didn't think you were good at it. Is it because you didn't want to be good at it? No, it was I honestly thought that I that I am when girls are trying to be pretty and not smart. So no, this was when I was in high school. And this was when I was in a extremely competitive grade competitive environment and getting B's in science when I got A's in math meant I was a failure at science. And so there was this expectation of like, OK, this isn't the thing you're best at. So forget it. Instead of this idea of this is something that doesn't come easily to you. Maybe that's something you should spend more time with. Or maybe it's because it's something that you'll grow to understand better. Or maybe you can pick a career in something that's not your best subject and that's OK. And maybe you can be interested in something that you're not great at. There's this whole weird kind of set of expectations that that looking back now are just so. Wrong. Can I can I bring up a subject here in the after after show? Uh huh. We've had a lot of talk and I kind of was alliterating to it there for a second about. That period of high school and and girls wanting to be pretty versus smart. Uh huh. Guys have the same conflict. We don't want to be considered the guy with the pocket protector. Right. We all want to be the athletic quarterback. I'll start right. So like those same influences pull people away from science. I guess and sort of defining in the self-definition of what's cool and what's not cool and is science cool or is it not cool. And I've argued in the past that the reason that when you get by the time you get to high school the reason more people based on the study you said when I think Kiki maybe brought it up that that infants like. Yeah. Here's Kiki's right. Infants are maybe the past infant pre-school first grade second grade. They will be like a little bit more men characterized as as scientists but lots of women characters and then maybe docs. Right. And by the time you get to high school it's like 80 percent it's men. But my argument was at the time well it's because historically the you know you've got Einstein and bore and all these these Newton you go later it's it's always men even though there's only one person who's going I think the Nobel Prize for Science twice and that was a woman but it was the same woman is like they kept giving it to her because they couldn't figure out anybody found one will give her all the awards. Well just keep giving it to her because she's the only woman who's part of. But here's what I here's the thing that I would challenge you to. I don't I don't think I like the correlation of high school and hormones and pretty versus smart and what because it happens to guys athletic or whatever machismo versus smarter and all that kind of nonsense. I think I think you can look at media and history but it's it's the historical record when we learn about science it's a whole bunch of men like we don't go draw a picture of a general and come up with a woman because we're talking about history. We'll talk about people who rule the nation and you're going to end up with men. What does a doctor look like you're going to end up with. But here's the question. What is it that I think is at the core of all of this and you guys might both disagree with me. What does a priest look like. So so part of their men and nuns are women. OK, right. But also, Justin, you're talking about science in particular. But I think if you're what about if you said draw a smart person. Right. Then you could end up with anything. But yeah, which is kind of the core of what I had been talking about on the show was saying it's not you have to pick science or pretty. You have to pick smarter pretty. Those are not the same. That's that's that's good. But here's my point. My my I think my point is that the misogyny that we're talking about that we see in the sciences isn't just in the sciences. It's it's been throughout society. And my argument here is the one thing that I would throw out there into this argument, which is tough, is that a big supporter of misogyny, not just currently, but throughout time, has been religion. And the end as we get into a more and more modern age of the current day and time, religion is less an influential part of any of our lives. And as it becomes less an important part of our lives, misogyny becomes less and an educational driver. Because regardless of what you're learning in in your high school or through your media, there is another form of education that's taking place. It's hard to relate to this as the California. But there's a large part of education that's taking place, which is religious, which is heavily misogynistic and doesn't matter almost what religion you're talking about. So that that study where people were defining men more as scientists or increasing the number of women who they would define as scientists. One thing I would like to see is a geographical representation of that data to see if Bible Belt was having anywhere near the right. Like, if you're in a community, how does it spread? How does it actually spread out? Yeah, because what we found is throughout any culture, any society, throughout time, the more you empower the women, the more you have this this growth in the sciences and the protection of family and make good decisions based on help and progress. Well, remember Project Drawdown? We talked about when you combine them, empowering women is actually the most impactful thing you can do to fix climate change. Or actually, probably anything. Yeah. Right. The idea that we would want, we would choose to run the race one legged has never made sense. But but one of the, you know, one of the things that continually shows up in that, I think, is religion. And it's one thing that we we we've left out of that conversation. And, you know, it hasn't always been historically like that, except for under certain religions. You know, we we we talk quite a bit about how astonishing it is that there would be a, you know, a Viking warrior leader who was a female. Well, that was a society that didn't say you had to be male to be the leader of people going into battle. So anyway, throwing that out there for the next time that subject comes up is we should also look at geographical. Yeah. That and also the answer to the question, not just why is it that today we don't have the quality of the sexes represented in the sciences? But what is the reason that the history books are heavily male? And that and I would I would argue my argument then, if we have this future conversation is the reason when you open up the history books and find men in charge of everything was rooted in the religion of the day. Well, but it's also it's a function of the fact. And we talked about this with academia, too. It's a function of the fact that when a woman is pregnant for nine months, it kind of affects her impact that she can have. So before birth control and you're pregnant pretty much constantly in your adult life, it's pretty difficult to become a conqueror or a politician or have much of a career at all. So I think that that that is this extra element that if you're trying to look backwards to a time before you could have a life outside of the home as a woman, you're going to be pretty hard pressed to find a representation. And so I think that it's kind of this idea. People talk about it in terms of racial identity all the time that just because there hasn't been representation doesn't mean that, you know, showing representation now is not representative of the past. It's like you have to kind of you have to fix the feedback loop at some point, right? And so I think I think there's a there's a there's a lot to be kind of noticed and to be to be cognizant of when we're having this conversation that I think you brought up some really important points. But I think at the core of that is making sure that the current generation has has an identity in all careers and all paths and can see themselves and has representation in those spaces. How do we make that happen? Well, I think it's already happening. I mean, look at the look at the young innovators fair that we went to. Right. Like I think we interviewed and and in represented in the high school science clubs and everything. There were there was a lot of it. I just did I just interviewed about 80 team volunteers for this summer, potential team volunteers and a huge number of the girls that I interviewed were in some sort of coding club, which was so cool. Like everybody's coding now, because this is the world that we live in. But it does mean when that is now the status quo, things become accessible that we're not before. But that shouldn't be what makes it accessible, that now coding is going to be a baseline expectation for students. That shouldn't be the reason that this is accessible now. Right. Like because then there will be the next level that still is only for some people. Well, well, yeah. But again, I think I think that a lot of that I think a lot of that has fallen away as people have become less religious. And and and there definitely will be people who will disagree with me. Well, and I will also point to that story that that we talked about. I think it was last year where more attractive males were were scored smarter, but more attractive females were scored less smart. And all they did was show them pictures. I think it was pictures of people in lab coats and they said that this is going to be your doctor. And, you know, what is your confidence level on how smart do you think this person is? And the more attractive the woman, their confidence in their doctor went down and their their perception of intelligence went down. But the more attractive the man, the more confident and the more intelligent he was scored. So the other the other way to read that, though, is. The less attractive you are, the more people assume your intelligence. Yes, that's correct. Which means what you have to pick. Well, but that's also true with the men, then, right? Smart. No, because men, it's all or nothing. That's the thing for the men. Smart or nothing. No, no, no. For the men, then what it means is the less societally attractive you are, the stupider people will assume you are. That's no better off. That's no better off. No, it's not. No, it's it's it's. But it's still something that you have to be aware of. It's like it has nothing to do with, like, but that's an equal scale. That means if you're like not an attractive male, people won't evaluate your opinion. So then then that makes men need to be more beauty and manicuring. And like, I've got to wear a really nice suit or do something. Maybe I should, like, get an eye lift or just have you ever been told either of these phrases? Are you ready? Oh, he's also smart. Have you ever heard that? Have you ever heard that? No, have you ever heard that every day? Oh, and he's beautiful, too. Yes. Yes. This is this is the story of my life. Absolutely. You just nailed it. I had no idea it could be that funny, artistic, handsome. And there's the intelligence to back it up. That's unfair. It's like that's like the story of my life. So while you guys are debating these very important situations, I'm just I'm watching my getting later and I've been watching my let's see if I can. Einstein. Oh, what was that? I'll show you what happened to Einstein. Oh, it was the cat. It was the cat. This is what I was watching over here while you guys are debating this. I got a role. I got a role. OK, so just remember why you used to wear those glasses before you needed them. Exactly. Smart. But that's my point. That's my point. I was too beautiful to be smart. I totally agree with you. I get it. Don't don't hate me because I'm beautiful. Yeah. Whether it's a gendered issue or not, it's still an issue that people shouldn't have to pick. I really, really enjoyed. And also, also, whenever you refer to your days in high school and what it was then, you assume that it applies now. And I think that for a lot of the high schools in the United States, things have changed. Yeah. Regardless of who you are or where you're at. Like, we were like, oh, there's like, I've got a phone number. I can. That's how we made pause back in the. Well, kids are still very superficial, Justin. I hate to tell you that, but they are very superficial. I can only speak for the town in which I live and was raised. I see the young people and oh, gosh, these these Parkland kids are a prime example of it. We. We oldie type people before. OK, one of the stupid. This is quick, one of the stupid, amazing things that this whole interweb and this information explosion has done. Is it's been able to connect people with the fact that however they are at their high school or in their world or what their interests are, that they're not the only one. That they're actually part of a community of people who they have never met, people who are watching this show or connected to a community of people who are interested in science that they never would have known existed if the interweb interweb and the live streaming and all these things. So one of the kids, they have access to information where if somebody says. You're you're you're four eyes. You wear glasses and like stupid science. They can go and yes. So it is like a lot of really drunk people. Well, Justin, they I work with them and I work with teens. I work with over 100 of them every year. And they are nasty and they call each other names. And I show refuge to a lot of people who act like they don't care about things and they don't want to know things. And I break through that exterior throughout the course of a year. So I get to the point where they're excited to talk to somebody about the kangaroos at the zoo, but they don't act like they want to at first because it's not cool. So it's still there. There is still a huge stigma against being smart and being excited about things. And not so much smart, but being excited about things. Yeah, this is a huge thing that I work on. It's my it's a big part of my life's work is trying to poke through this idea that it's not cool to research or talk about things in a nerdy or geeky way. It's becoming less stigmatized. You're able to be a nerd about things, but it's still called being a nerd about things because you're not allowed to just like stuff and know about it because you can't be like, oh, my gosh. And you talk about something that you like so much like black holes. They're amazing and you get into it. You get excited and your hands move around and you can tell people about them. You got to go. Yeah, black holes, whatever. I mean, they're OK. Yeah, a lot of mass. So this is the part of the conversation where I admit that I am in the bubble of a town that is based on, you know, the highest per capita PhDs. Yeah, you're you're in a town of academia, but you also don't have. Do you have any teenagers yet? They're not quite teenagers yet, right? And actually. In this town, that means that they are more mature and scientifically older than me, like the way my teenagers are way older than me, you know, they were already. Yeah, it's just barely possible. Say good night, Blair. Night, Blair. Say good night, Justin. Justin. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. Thank you so much for watching. And we will be back next week as we always are. And I hope that you will join us. There's another big day on the calendar coming up this weekend. My calendars are over there. So check your calendars to find out what big days are happening this weekend. Twist calendar. Just check your blairs, animal corner calendar. Send us your colored in images. Let us know what they look like. I haven't had me in a while. That's such a good point. Tweet them at me. Tweet us your colored in images. I promise to retweet. Yeah, I want to know what you're doing with the coloring, your creativity on top of blairs, which would be fantastic. And I hope everyone has a wonderful science filled week. We'll find all the science we can in the meantime and bring it back next week for discussion and more.