 Make sure that this isn't going to start playing on me all the time. Go wait for the heads up from the chat room. Are we on? Are we ready to go? Getting the heads up from the chat room to know that we're good to start. We are live. So starting the show in three, two, three, two, one, this is twist. This week in science episode number 714 recorded on March 27, 2019. What is the end? Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on this week in science, we are going to fill your heads with new brain cells, lizard scuba and space. But first disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. This program is not for the weak of mind, the bereft of imagination or the willfully ignorant. If you consider yourself to be amongst any of those groups, you probably are not as they never would be so self-aware as to think so. If you are the adventuring sort, an adventure here awaits. As we go exploring into the unknown, following and intrepid footsteps of scientists the world over and occasionally wandering off the path into the wilds of speculation and unknowns yet unknown. There are a few destinations where we have not dared to delve into, but subjects from astronomy to zoology, why the number of knowledge navigations we have neglected to navigate, number in the, well actually it's a really big number still, there's more to know that can fit in a human skull. And on every extra scolular adventure, we venture together here on this week in science, coming up next! I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough I wanna learn every little up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek I wanna know what's happening What's happening What's happening this week in science What's happening What's happening What's happening this week in science Yeah, science to you Kiki and Blair And the good science to you too Justin, Blair, and everyone out there Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science We're back again to fill your heads with everything that we wanna talk about this week So much, so much happened this week So we had to pick and choose the best parts So here it comes everyone, I have new stories about brain cells and exercise And we have an interview tonight with the wonderful Dr. Katie Mack in a few moments Justin, what did you bring? I've got a ridiculous NASA warning and why evolution favors the niche-less as well as if time, uh, cancer trees I hope we have time That sound I wanna hear about cancer trees Is that a tree that grows cancer or a tree that cures cancer? See, we gotta find out I'll have to add, I'll make sure this story makes it by the end Blair, what's in the animal corner tonight? Oh my goodness, I have the underwater lizards you were discussing before I have huge dinosaurs and I have something about birdie motherhood Oh, I love bird moms and dads They're all, they're all This is about the moms They're all so, they're all so tweet Aww Okay, well before we jump into the show I would love to remind everyone that if you have not done so yet you can subscribe to the This Week in Science podcast on YouTube You can like our Facebook page and you can find us all places that good podcasts are found Pandora, Spotify, Spreaker, TuneIn, Stitcher or just at twist.org You can find lots of information there And if you are in Portland, Oregon next Wednesday, April 3 you can meet us, join us at the theater We will be live at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland, Oregon next Wednesday broadcasting live So those of you from out of town won't miss the show We'll still be on air for you But ready, you can check our website for information Okay, it's time to jump into our interview I'm looking forward to this Our guest tonight is Dr. Katie Mack Katie Mack is a theoretical astrophysicist She studies the universe from beginning to end Focusing on a number of questions on topics like dark matter gravitational, I mean, galaxy formation cosmic strings and much more She's working on a book right now that's due out in 2020 calling it the end of everything I mean, then it's all over It's 2020, the end of everything Boom! And she recently published a study with Robert McNeese on micro black holes Dr. Mack, welcome to the show Thanks, it's good to be here It's wonderful to have you on tonight to get a chance to talk with you about the end, I mean So instead of starting at the beginning like we tend to do in our interviews I'd love to start at the end and find out, yeah how you got interested in the end of the universe So as a cosmologist I studied the early universe for a long time and all these big questions about how everything fits together where it all came from how it all works and as you do I went to a bunch of conferences and I heard a bunch of talks and at some point I started hearing people talking about vacuum decay which is this weird end of the universe scenario where basically the whole universe could be destroyed by this bubble of quantum death that just expands out and swallows everything and I can get into that more later But it was a really fun talk and I didn't know anything about vacuum decay until I heard about this and then I started reading up on it and it was kind of really interesting so I started working it into my public talks and I thought I really need to know more about this so I started researching other ways for the universe to end and one thing led to another and then suddenly I was writing a book so I've been really deep into this question of how it's all going to end and all these interesting ways for that to happen so vacuum decay is one of them there's things having to do with dark energy there's sort of even more exotic scenarios so in my book I go through five different possibilities and just talk about what it would be like to be in a universe that was ending in that way what you would see if you could observe it at that time and how we know how we know what's likely to happen and study that as astrophysicists and cosmologists and in experimental physics and all that how do we get clues about what's actually going to happen at the end this reminds me of a time I went to the doctor and took a test and got a positive result and I said oh so I'm not going to die and my doctor was like oh no you're going to die this is not going to kill you but you're going to die yeah that's the thing about the end of the universe there's no scenario where we just kind of keep on going and everything's fine forever that's not one of the options as far as I can tell so it's going to happen it's just probably not soon but are there competing time scales? yes so the most likely scenario is called the heat death it's also sometimes known as the big freeze and what happens there the universe is currently expanding and so it just keeps expanding and it's getting faster and faster because of something weird called dark energy that we don't really understand and as it expands faster and faster everything's just getting farther apart from everything else individual galaxies stay together but they become farther and farther away from other galaxies and then that means that you don't get new stars forming and eventually the stars we have will die and everything will kind of fade away and over time you end up with the universe that's just more and more empty and dark and cold looking up seeing those stars yeah yeah yeah as awful as that sounds that's our best option right that's our longest longevity option so that's the the gentlest most peaceful way to go and the kinds of time scales for that you get into numbers that don't make any sense anymore you know 10 to the 1000 kind of years just big big numbers depending on sort of how you define really the end in that case but there are other scenarios where you know sometimes you can have dark energy goes a little bit gets a little bit too strong and starts to pull things apart that are already stuck together like galaxies and planets and things and that's called that's called phantom dark energy if that happens and then that leads to a scenario called the big rip where the whole universe is just ripped apart I don't like that one and that one would be would be kind of dramatic because you kind of would see it coming but that one is like the very earliest it would be like in 120 billion years or something like that so there's still quite a lot of time and probably that's not going to happen like there are sort of theoretical reasons why it's not favorable and then there's like the big crunch which is very unlikely because that would require dark energy to kind of turn around and collapse the universe again so that's probably not going to happen that would be a fun one that would also be we would see it coming, yeah galaxies we're going to get close to the Andromeda galaxy in 4 billion years so if you're into that the Andromeda galaxy is already coming for us and that's going to be kind of cool when that happens but then if it were big crunch then all the other galaxies would be coming for us too and that would be kind of scary and then there's vacuum decay and vacuum decay is this one where basically so you've heard of like the Higgs field maybe so there's the Higgs boson which is this thing that was discovered at CERN and everybody there's this idea that the Higgs boson or the Higgs field have something to do with how particles got mass in the early universe so the Higgs field is just this field this sort of energy field that pervades all of space and the way that like the value it has the amount of energy in the Higgs field tells you something about sort of how physics fits together the masses of the particles and the charges of the particles and all that kind of thing it all kind of hinges on what the Higgs field is doing and so right now we think the Higgs field is pretty stable like it's not going to change drastically at a moment's notice but there's a chance that it could and if it did that could lead to something called vacuum decay which is where the state of the universe changes very quickly and what would happen is that there'd be this sort of quantum transition that would happen in one point in space where the Higgs field would suddenly take a different value and when that happened it would create this bubble that expands outward from that point and this bubble inside of it is this different kind of space where particles don't stick together anymore where the Higgs field is too strong and bad things are happening so you can't live inside that new space it's called a true vacuum and so this bubble is expanding outward and it has like this sort of very high energy bubble wall that would incinerate everything that it touches and then it expands at the speed of light so you can't see it coming and you can't get away and then it just destroys the whole universe and then the universe collapses so that's called vacuum decay and when I first heard about that I thought that was a really cool idea the cool thing about vacuum decay the really cool thing though is that what happened before the Big Bang type of a scenario? well it's a different kind of thing so the kind of space that you get inside the true vacuum is a kind of space that is sort of just gravitationally unstable inherently and so it kind of immediately collapses on itself so I don't I mean it's not exactly like I mean it's like a big crunch but everything's already destroyed anyway so it's just kind of adding insult injury at that point but anyway the cool thing about vacuum decay is that based on what we know about the particles of nature as we've measured them with things like the Large Hadron Collider all these big experiments it looks like vacuum decay is like actually very possible according to our understanding of the physics of nature now we know that there are things that we don't understand about particle physics and it's very possible that one of those things saves us from vacuum decay and makes it not possible but if we just take the standard model of particle physics as given then vacuum decay is inevitable eventually but that eventually is a very very very long time from now so much much longer than the current age of the universe you know trillions of trillions trillions of years probably but the thing is it's a probabilistic thing right so it's like it's a quantum transition so it's just probabilities and that means that technically it could happen at any moment I mean that's very unlikely it's very unlikely but technically technically it could happen right now but it would be fine you know you wouldn't see it coming you wouldn't feel it it just destroys it nobody's going to miss you everything's destroyed you know it's just it's just done so like you don't even notice and this will be one of the good reasons to live your best life live your best life everyone everyone's yelling at Katie at once I know but at the speed of light it could already have happened somewhere in our universe and propagating and it's just going to take a really long time before it reaches us yeah yeah it could be it could be at Saturn right now and it'll just be a couple hours we don't know my question is at the end of that what's left nothing I mean that's that's a it's a very clean like but where does it go what do you mean there's nothing I mean it collapses it collapses on itself gravitationally I don't know it sort of becomes like the whole universe like compresses in some way in this weird different kind of space so this is an interesting part of the question thinking about these various ends to the universe can thinking about that and studying that tell us about the beginning of the universe yeah yeah well in both ways really like so if we if we really understand how the universe began and the conditions in the early universe then we have them will have a better understanding of what could happen toward the end so for example if we really understood the very early universe we would learn more about the Higgs field and then we would know if it really has this instability or not and then we would know if it's really gonna you know gonna collapse or you know gonna decay if we understood the early universe better we'd understand quantum gravity so we'd understand how gravity and quantum mechanics fit together and that would tell us something about you know the Higgs field and and this possibility if we understood if we understand better how dark energy has been changing over time then that'll tell us more about whether or not we're destined for heat death or this big rip idea or something like that and then there are other ideas that involve like higher dimensions of space and like collisions between universes sort of and we can learn about those by understanding more about the early universe and if we figure something out whether or not we're heading for that that can tell us about the sort of structure of space on the whole so all of these questions are really linked and the very early universe and the end of the universe are very much connected in the sense that both of them involve kind of I don't know more like a more complete picture of physics and so if we get a better understanding of how all of the different parts of theoretical physics fit together that'll tell us both about the end and about the beginning and each of them can tell us about the other What's your favorite end? Oh vacuum decay for sure yeah because it's a bubble of quantum death it can happen at any moment like how can that not be a cool idea I'm a little bit sick so I'm getting over excited that's your excuse you can stick to it so thinking about different ways that it can end even from the beginning you mentioned extra dimensions and this can kind of take us into a conversation about black holes and this recent paper of yours looking at micro black holes and I know CERN the large Hadron Collider was a lot of people were like it's going to create these little tiny black holes and we're all going to die we didn't we didn't it's all totally fine can you talk to us a bit about what the micro black holes are and what we're looking at so before I get into that too much the large Hadron Collider cannot hurt us so just to be very clear the main reason to say that is what the large Hadron Collider is doing is colliding protons together at very high energies so then we do that in the colliders so we can see the debris that comes out so we can understand how particles work but the universe is doing that all the time so out in the cosmos there are particles colliding at much higher energies than what the Large Hadron Collider can do so even if particle collisions were somehow dangerous there would have been billions and billions of them already happening all over the universe and if something was going to hurt us it would have already done so long before we started smashing our little rocks together so I just want to make that clear because I will talk about some scary stuff in a minute so the idea behind making little black holes in particle colliders is tied in with this idea of extra dimensions so basically there's this idea that the three dimensions of space that we experience are not the entirety of space but there's maybe one or more dimensions like spatial dimensions that are out there that exist beyond the three dimensions of space so just like if you had a flat sheet of paper that's a two dimensional surface but you can go above or below that and that gives you 3D our space might be similar where we have three spatial dimensions and then there's time and then there might be another spatial dimension that is perpendicular to all of our dimensions which is very hard to imagine but if there is another dimension or several consequences of that is that it makes it easier to make little black holes with particle collisions and that's a little complicated to get into but basically it just means that when you smash a whole lot of energy together into a really small space if you have higher dimensions of space that collision, that energy being smushed together is more likely to make a little black hole and those little black holes what we expect them to do is just evaporate immediately so by this process called hawking evaporation all black holes lose a little bit of mass if you leave them sitting alone by themselves and small black holes will evaporate very very quickly and the other thing about these little black holes that you expect in particle colliders is that when they're created, they're created from these particles smashing together and there's always some momentum left over so probably they're going to be zooming out of the collider as soon as they're created so there's no reason to worry about them sitting around and like pulling in matter because they disappear very quickly and they move very fast but the hope has been that the Large Chantron Collider might be able to make some of these little black holes to show us that extra dimensions exist, that would be a cool thing if they do exist and because we'd be creating these things in a collider we'd be able to see some signature of these black holes being created so the work that I've been doing sort of relies on that point and then a couple of other key issues so one of them has to do with vacuum decay where it's been suggested in a couple of papers by other authors that if you have a little black hole and you let it evaporate then as it's evaporating it can cause vacuum decay so so again we don't need to worry about this isn't that the thing that we don't want to right yes but we don't need to worry about it with particle colliders because again whatever the LHC can do space already did it so the issue then is if collisions between particles make black holes and black holes cause vacuum decay then any time a collision happened even out in the universe somewhere that would have caused vacuum decay and so the fact that we're here means that we haven't had particle collisions in space that made black holes so that makes sense which is ridiculous because that must have happened right so what it means is that you can't there's a range of like extra dimension theories that don't work because we should have had black holes being created with particle collisions and that should have caused vacuum decay we shouldn't be we shouldn't be here today to be talking about this right which means that one of these things has to not be right either vacuum decay is impossible or we don't have those extra dimensions maybe not in the climate where haven't we created these mini micro black holes before in a lab scenario no I mean we made weird little analogs so you can do things with fluids and materials that kind of look like black holes in certain ways but we've never made an actual black hole it's actually really hard to do that cause you need just so much energy in such a small space so if we had extra dimensions of a certain size then particle colliders would be able to do it just barely what we've seen by not making them in particle colliders is that it puts a limit on the size that extra dimensions can be so basically it says that extra dimensions if they exist at all have to be very very compact that's kind of like saying like going back to that piece of paper analogy like so a sheet of paper isn't strictly two dimensional it's three dimensional it's just the third dimension is quite small so our universe might be like that it might be four spatial dimensions but the fourth spatial dimension is like less than a millimeter in size so you could go another direction aside from the three that we know about but you could only go like less than a millimeter and then you'd end up back where you started so those are the kind of limits we get from not having made black holes in laboratories that you can only like the extra dimensions have to be really really little and so what our paper did was it looked at the possibility of collisions of particles in the universe making little black holes and then therefore destroying the universe and that puts a limit also on the size of extra dimensions a different kind of limit at a different length scale but a new one you know so it's a new kind of way of putting constraints on these higher dimensional theories which is interesting and I mentioned to you before the show we interviewed Daniel Holtz excuse me from the University of Chicago a few months back and he and his other researchers had written a paper using gravitational wave from the data from neutron stars to put limits on extra dimensions in space and it was it sounds like it's a similar limitation in that their results were like well these gravitational waves suggest that there are not these bigger extra dimensions like it's not like things continue to get bigger and we're just missing it but there may be little tiny extra dimensions but they have to be in this super compact space the Hilbert space is that what that's called? no Hilbert space is like a mathematical kind of a mathematical space with a certain properties but this but the space that we're talking about here is just space with spaceful dimensions doesn't really have a name per se but yeah so the paper about the gravitational waves I was just looking at it and they can they can constrain theories with extra dimensions that are something like 100 kilometers or bigger so they're looking at a different kind of scenario than what we're looking at so our constraints are for things like extra dimensions much smaller than the size of an atom wow so very little very small very compact extra dimensions but in a range that it's hard to reach with other sorts of experiments so it's what would it mean I mean when thinking about extra dimensions I mean it's this people who are familiar with this stuff you think of extra dimensions and it's like you imagine kind of an emcee-esher-esque kind of kind of space where everything turns in on itself but I I'm familiar with the string theory and the idea that there are these strings that are all wrapped up at the core of everything is that kind of the extra dimensional stuff you're talking about or how can you actualize these spaces so in this case we're looking at different kinds of spaces where you could have either one extra dimension or several extra dimensions so if there's just one extra dimension then it has to be smaller than like a tenth of a millimeter or something like that or within a certain range we've ruled out it's more extra dimensions than they're sort of constrained to be even smaller because of both our paper and then other experiments and basically it's like so you have to somehow sort of wrap the dimension around itself so we look at dimensions that are compactified like sort of curled up in a sort of donut shape like a torus that's just one way of sort of curling these things up but the basic idea is that you would have some kind of situation where if you try and go out into that dimension for a little ways you'll come back and wrap around yourself with string theory so a lot of the models of string theory have several extra dimensions and they're wrapped up in sort of much more complex kind of spaces something called a Klauby-Yau manifold which is a sort of very very complicated geometric shape that you can squish up your dimensions into so stuff like that happens in some of these higher dimensional theories the more dimensions you have the more complicated that can get because they can kind of be wrapped up with each other but we were looking specifically at pretty simple kind of compactifications just to put sort of the most generic limits yeah there are lots of ways you can kind of curl these things up and generally speaking they do have to be small because we do have constraints on them in other ways and mostly these constraints come from the fact that in all these theories gravity can travel between the dimensions but nothing else can and so if you have the dimensions really big then a lot of gravity leaks out into these extra dimensions and the gravity just looks a lot weaker than it would otherwise and so by measuring gravity on different scales you can get an idea of how much gravity might be leaking out into these other extra dimensions Space it's a sieve for gravity yeah it's kind of a neat idea I mean the idea comes from the fact that gravity is by far the weakest of the forces of nature so you know because every time you lift a coffee cup you're overcoming the entirety of the gravitational pull of the earth on that coffee cup and you do that very easily with the chemical sort of you know motions in your hands and stuff I like to think that means we're all very strong yeah we are very strong yeah we're held together by the strong force the electromagnetism and all that and those are just much stronger forces than gravity so people have been trying to figure out how to reconcile that because in theory all these forces should somehow come from the same thing in the very, very early universe so there's sort of been a time when all of the forces were aspects of the same thing that's called the theory of everything and we don't know how to do that you need quantum gravity to do that but one of the things that people have suggested as a way to kind of bring gravity into the picture is to say it's not that it's super weak it's that it's actually really strong it's just it just looks weak to us because a lot of it's leaking out into these other dimensions so that's one way people have suggested to try to solve this problem of the fact that all the other forces are so much stronger than gravity that's interesting there's a question from the chat room wondering if there is our higher dimensions would we be able to see them no so so electromagnetic stuff can't get out of our spatial dimensions only gravity can so we wouldn't be able to see them but we could potentially like feel gravitational signals from them if there was something separated from us by a higher dimension of space and there was like a gravitational like a black hole orbiting another black hole in this other space then it could make gravitational waves and we might be able to pick those up potentially so you're back this way too yeah yeah exactly so if there's stuff in the in some other space like for example one one idea about the sort of layout of the universe is that we're living in one three dimensional space is called a brain world b r a n e like membrane so like we're living in one brain and then there's another three dimensional brain and and they're like separated by this higher dimensional gap and and if there's stuff on the other brain that's you know creating gravitational waves then those waves could travel across the gap and and we could detect them here so that's the thing that potentially could happen so here's the weird question what if the other brain is empty and all our we got all this gravity leaking into it how do you have a universe with lots of gravity no nothing else I mean we would have basically no way of knowing what's going on over there because it's you know it would be separated from us even if it's only like a less than a millimeter way because maybe this other dimension is very very small we still would only be able to detect it if we could feel its gravity and so if there's nothing there then we have no idea what's going on so I'm interested as a theoretical astrophysicist there's a lot of time spent with equations and data and computers and biologists from the field you know have these stories from the field and so I'm wondering if there are any stories that come up in your experience in the field that are things that you read that are you know things that you look back on and you go wow that really happened or I mean it's tough when you're a theorist because you're mostly like writing stuff down and coding and talking to people and that doesn't always make for great stories I mean I've had some really interesting conversations in weird places with other physicists so like I picked up a 14,000 foot mountain in Colorado and talked to a bunch of people about dark matter on the way up and that was kind of cool but you know mostly I mean mostly we just kind of talk about stuff and so I do have stories from when I did when I dabbled in experiment because when I was younger in my in my youth I worked on a neutrino detector called Super-Kamiokande it's a neutrino detector in Japan and so I was involved in the experimental stuff with that and I got to go inside the neutrino detector which is under a mountain it's like a kilometer under a mountain in Japan and it's this 40 meter tall tank of really really pure water and the inside is lined with photomultiplier tubes which are basically light bulbs in reverse they take photons in and turn them into electrons and current anyway so the interior of this tank this giant cylindrical tank is covered in these things that look like light bulbs but like giant light bulbs and it's filled with ultrapure water and when it gets upgraded people go around in little rubber boats and like fix all the machines and I got to go into the little rubber boat and go around fixing bits of the detector which was really really cool and I got to work shifts of the detector which meant sitting in this control room under a mountain in a zinc mine for eight hours and everyone and it was an active zinc mine so every once in a while you'd be sitting there and somebody would come in in a hard hat and yell something in Japanese and then the room would start to shake a few minutes later it turned out they were doing blasting so that was fun so I have some stories from those days when I was doing experiment but in terms of theory I guess the cool stuff was like I spent some time around Stephen Hawking when I was in Cambridge and that was always a fun thing. He came to my talk once which was very scary especially because he sort of heckled but he didn't it wasn't intentional it was like sorry he had this thing he talks through this computer and the way that the computer could tell that he was choosing words to select to say was that it had a little sensor that would look at his cheek and he would like sort of move his cheek and that would select things because he couldn't move his hands very well at that point and so so I gave this seminar once and it was a lunch seminar and I was up there speaking and every once in a while I would hear like no or yes or I don't know or I don't think so or something like that from the audience and I had no idea what he was saying I thought maybe he was commenting on my talk but you couldn't ask him to elaborate because it took like two minutes for him to make a sentence at that point because of the way that the computer worked and so at the end of the talk I asked somebody what was going on and they said apparently this little cheek sensor thing it malfunctions when he's eating oh no it was a lunch seminar and so it was just going through the most commonly chosen phrases like yes and no and I don't know and I don't think so and just shouting them out oh no you're like it's a good thing you didn't adjust what you were doing based on that because it would totally change what can you do I had to just kind of keep going but like they could have warned me they did not it was probably some time around April Fool's no I don't know I think that's so fun I mean it's really what I was thinking about it before this interview tonight that so many of our great science communicators Stephen Hawking Tyson Michio Kaku, Brian Green you know and I'd love to see more female astrophysicist science communicators but I wonder if there is something about theoretical astrophysics that lends itself to communication and talking about the universe did you always were you always a communicator or did what you do on Twitter and your blog and like all the work that you do did that come along with your career development so I was always a writer when I was younger so I always liked writing stories and making stuff up and things like that so I think it came out of that the need to talk about things all the time and to talk about things that I'm excited about so once I started discovering astrophysics I would get really excited about I have to tell people so I think that all the science communication stuff just comes from like I have to tell people all this cool stuff but I do think that astrophysics and maybe theory in particular are especially fascinating to people because you get these big concepts that are mind bending I was drawn into it by thinking about things like warped space time and black holes and all of that weird cool stuff like the big bang and people like those kind of weird mind bending ideas and as long as you don't mind the sort of frustration of not being able to visualize everything or these really abstract concepts it can be really fun to go into those spaces and to kind of imagine stuff that's just so far outside of your experience and so far outside of the way you think about the universe most of the time so I do think there's something sort of uniquely kind of weird and cool about that and that sort of stuff happens in other fields too there are things that are really appealing about all sorts of fields and I'm sure there are things that are just equally gripping about every part of science but I think for me the sort of weird brain bending stuff and the big questions like where did we come from, where are we going how do we fit into this universe those are really fun to tackle as an astrophysicist and I think that people are always curious about those things it's exploring itself, yeah, absolutely what are the big questions that you are moving forward on currently in your research well I'm still interested in all these end of universe ideas so like how do we find out what's going to happen and you know what are the things that can give us clues I'm also really interested in the question of dark matter and what dark matter is so dark matter is some kind of invisible stuff that envelops the galaxy and holds the stars in as they're rotating around and seems to be the sort of framework upon which all of the structure in the universe is built all galaxies seem to have a lot of dark matter at least almost all large galaxies there a couple might have only a little bit and you know clusters of galaxies are full of dark matter it's this stuff that's most of the matter in the universe like 80 or 85% of the matter in the universe is totally invisible stuff and we don't know what it's made of and so I'm working on figuring out different ways to try and understand what the dark matter is and you know thinking about how new telescopes and new kinds of observations could tell us that and what the dark matter might have been doing in the early universe and how we're going to sort of figure that out and that's an interesting question to me because it gets at like what the universe is made of fundamentally and also because dark matter is something that doesn't fit into our sort of standard picture of particle physics and so it's got to be something new and that might tell us something about you know how to fit gravity into this whole picture you know how to how to fit particle physics and general relativity together so it's an exciting place to work yeah I think that's something I keep waiting for the information to come in on this question of you know really how does gravity fit into this picture and we keep I keep hearing about all these studies the experimental side of things that just they keep supporting the standard model of physics yeah we have general relativity both of them have passed every test we've thrown at them every test and so the question of like all this exotic physics that people are so excited about because it would allow a lot of other ideas to come in it's just like well not see it yet but yeah yeah I mean you know I think it's one of these things where what we're seeing is that there are these phenomena that don't fit into the standard model or general relativity so or you know either one of the two right so dark matter is not something that fits into the standard model particle physics dark energy isn't either we're pretty sure that those things are out there they're doing things to the universe and the question is in order to figure out what they are made of we're going to have to extend particle physics beyond what we can currently do in a lab and generally speaking that means going to higher energies because generally speaking as you get to higher energies you tweak physics like the laws of physics change as you go to higher energies and so we get closer to what we think the universe was at the beginning and if in that case that like we're pretty sure that everything fit together somehow in the beginning and so if we can get closer to those energies we can get closer to the time when everything fit together and then we have a better feeling for how it all fits together and so that's the general strategy that we have and it's the same with gravity stuff you know we're pretty sure that general relativity Einstein's theory of gravity has to break down in the most extreme situations so like the centers of black holes or you know in these extremely strong gravity environments or in the very beginning of the universe and so the more we can test really strong gravity or gravity at very very small scales the more we can understand how gravity has to change to adapt you know to whatever the ultimate theory of gravity is and so that's another place where we're trying to really push those boundaries so many boundaries to be pushed a couple more questions as a woman in astrophysics what advice would you give to young female potential astrophysicists women who are interested in this field anything in particular I mean I have a whole list of advice for aspiring astrophysicists on my webpage so I would definitely say you know look at that I think that that the only advice I can really give I mean my advice in general would be for for society as a whole to you know stop putting barriers in the way of women who want to get into physics because women already do want to get into physics and are already there and it's you know there's just a lot of stuff people have to go through when they're not in the dominant demographic in any sort of field so most of my advice would be for everybody else but if you are a woman in physics or astrophysics I guess my advice would be that you know there are a lot of nasty messages out there and they're based in science and and as as society progresses we're going to really try and break down those barriers so that's all I can say there I think awesome I think that's good and you mentioned your blog and so that's my last question where can people find you online so people can find me mostly on my webpage which is astrokady.com and on twitter where I'm at astrokady there's links to a bunch of stuff on either of those I have an instagram page that I'm really trying to update more often and that's not astrokady that's academic nomad because the astrokady handle was taken which is terribly upsetting so you can look at those places but basically astrokady.com has links to a whole bunch of other stuff if you're interested my blog and stuff are linked there and I'm sure when your book comes out that's where people can find out yeah and there's actually there is a page on my webpage that is prominently linked from the homepage where you can you can sign up for a mailing list that will send you an email when the book is ready for pre-order and it won't send you anything else it'll just be like here's where to make sure that you'll find out about the book awesome thank you so much for joining us tonight thanks it's been fun yeah it's been really great and I am really looking forward to reading your book and finding all much more information about these various ways that everything's gonna end before you can ask one crackpot question sure what is the difference between the universe expanding and time changing because time space is like the same thing so would and it would that be time speeding up or slowing down I can't figure out if light's red shifting but what would be so time and space are connected in the sense that as you move through space differently it changes how you move through time but the way that the universe expand is expanding the best way to think about the way the universe is expanding is to what's happening is just that it's getting less dense so like the spaces between things is getting bigger and so the volume is getting larger so the density is going down at least the density of matter and radiation how is that affecting time because isn't it I mean so time time is the density is going down over time so time is not like you can't and by messing with time you're not going to change so we're not space itself it's not expanding we're adding more space between space but we're not adding more time yeah is there not the same thing they're just connected in terms of how we move through them so our universe is gaining space but not time I mean our universe is getting older but yeah it's gaining space before we got the extra space oh I can't that's so much and as I get older I wish I had more time but anyway once again thank you so much for joining us it's been just a pleasure getting to speak with you and find out about your work have a wonderful night thanks you too good night good night alright everybody we are going to move on to the second half of our show we're going to take a quick break and as we head out I want to remind you you can find more information about Dr. Mack at AstroKaty.com she's AstroKaty on Twitter and I hope you're looking forward to that book like I am without me further to do a do let's take a break we'll be back with brains and lizard scuba and what's going on with NASA thank you so much for joining us for this episode of This Week in Science if you love this episode and you want to hear or see more like it consider becoming a patron a supporter in multiple ways of This Week in Science first off everyone if you are interested in coming to see This Week in Science live in person in Portland Oregon you can do it that's right This Week in Science will be at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland Oregon next Wednesday April 3rd at 7pm doors at 6pm tickets are $15 there is a student discount and I really would enjoy seeing you we are going to be joined by local geeky science music wonders the pdx broadsides we're going to be talking about hearing we're going to be talking about science we're going to be having a lot of fun and we hope to see you at the theater can't make it to the theater but you want to 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support and and we're back to this week in science yeah we're back in it's time for what has science done for me lately well this what has science done for me lately comes from David Eckerd David Eckerd writes in to say could not sleep at all on Sunday night, Monday morning back itched 5 30 a.m. went online to see if I could make an appointment I did with my regular doctors their website said he had a 9 30 a.m. opening the amount of technology behind that simple transaction from my computer the router the modem hundreds or more miles of infrastructure their server the appointment database it's connection to the public web securely I hope and all the myriad of protocols needed to do that I'd list some but that's way too much alphabet soup right now but it is huge and uses most if not all seven of the OSI OSI layers model I don't know went to the doctor took the time to ask if the itching on the back of my skull was related as I assumed it was no he uses a $64 word that I can't remember said my follicles are infected I walked out there with a pill prescription for the itch I'm not going to turn into a contortionist to apply apply cream to my back I didn't even have to ask him as he figured that out immediately I also got another pill and this weird shampoo for the scalp all less than five hours or so of deciding to see him even five years ago I probably would have had to spend an hour or two on the phone trying to get an appointment or just go to the expensive emergency room when it works technology is great science drives technology which drives science which drives technology with drives in the lab I work for I mostly write Excel macros for them and pick up samples to get up to get out of the house nearly every major machine is a robot of some sort and have been for decades the GC machine self-inject all the samples clean the needles etc the robot themselves GC is gas chromatography and the only time you ever hear that is when someone is explaining what GC means the cop shows to not have that right in our lab they have all the names they all have names humans reference a name far better and faster than GC 14 are not as pristine looking at whatever a more accurate line in the lab itself would be yeah we ran your sample over there on Argo pointing to obviously used with a robot on top whose arms are moving occasionally without the robots there you'd need three times the people have 20 times the mistakes and the mistakes humans are not consistent and run three shifts a day to do what we do now all the tech does science and science is what leads directly to that tech being created we have at least a half a dozen of these going all the time in our Durham office but we print to a PDF file these days not a dot matrix printer so much technology David that was a letter full of technology and I think this is one of those examples where you know technology is getting to this point where we take it for granted right we still get upset if our internet ping is too slow my gosh I can't play my video game fast enough with the other people on the internet so having spent the last couple of days basically watching robots do what would have taken me a month of days to do I can absolutely appreciate that story yeah all of it so appreciated David thank you for writing in and thank you for sharing all this appreciation of the technology in your life and yeah the technology, the science, the technology science is the endeavor the technology is the application if you have a story have a sonnet have a song have a send it have something you need to send related to what science has done for you lately send me an email KirstenKIRSTEN or you can leave us a message on our facebook page that's facebook.com this week in science pretty easy alright are we ready for science yes thirsty for science so thirsty for science okay so I have talked about neurogenesis in the adult human brain many times on this show and I'm going to do it again that's what's going to happen I love science because it's like this studies does this and then another study replicates it and oh we have an idea that something works a certain way and then oh another study comes out and says no that doesn't work that way and so everyone goes it doesn't work that way and then another study comes out and says it does we go back and forth and back and forth and really what's happening is that limits and constraints are being put on our understanding so that we can narrow down what we do understand until we find what really works and how things really work and this has been going ongoing in human neurogenesis for a couple of decades now other mammals we have found neurogenesis in the brains of mice rats other mammals neurogenesis is the birth of new neurons and now when I started college I'm not going to say how long ago now but when I started college the idea was you were born with as many brain cells in your brain as you were ever going to have and that they just died from there I remember being told that don't drink alcohol because you'll kill brain cells and you can't get them back can't get them back, nope this is also the theory of fat cells too if you have set number of fat cells and they just get bigger smaller also not true so this is the question of the human the new brain cells are they born or are they not because while I was in grad school researchers came up with evidence that oh indeed new nerve cells were being born in the hippocampus of the brain around an area called the dentate gyrus now this is an area close to the center of your brain these ventricles where there's blood flow coming through and there's a lot of fluid and so it would be a place where there's interaction with a lot of potential factors from the rest of the body that could influence whether or not neurons are being born or not and so that evidence has been replicated and then this last year another study came out that said no absolutely not no neurogenesis in the adult human brain and it was like whoa okay and it was a very convincing study even given previous evidence very convincing however we have a new study which I'm very excited about because I like the idea of new nerve cells being born in my brain a new a new paper published in nature medicine suggests that maybe neurogenesis occur in humans throughout life so the researchers in this particular study did a they looked at the tissue preservation process and what they determined is that different methods of preserving brain tissue may have different effects on what we're able to see and what neurons and what cells actually get preserved or don't so the researchers in Spain tested a number of methods from 58 newly deceased people on preserving their brain tissue and they found that different methods led to different conclusions about neurogenesis and new neurons being born in the adult and aging brain according to their study the brain tissue has to be preserved very very quickly after death within a few hours after death and only a limited number specific chemicals can be used to preserve the tissue or the proteins that we use to identify new cells get destroyed during that apoptotic death process these things deteriorate and get destroyed and so other researchers they suggest may have completely missed evidence of baby neurons because the proteins were dead because the brains they got were preserved too late after death and so again 58 newly deceased people and that's a lot for their methodology researchers are saying now this is Rusty Gage who is a very well respected researcher in this area he says methodologically it sets the bar for future studies from this from my view this puts to rest that one blip that occurred which was from a previous nature paper run by a researcher named Alvarez Bula Gage says this paper in a very nice way systematically evaluates all the issues that we feel are very important so one blip I merely thought like you know the part of the problem is getting a fresh brain because you'll get the boop boop okay take the brain wait wait wait okay don't take it yet you know I feel like there's there's a amount of time when you're still trying to perhaps resuscitate or holding out hope that might not facilitate getting too fresh of a brain that's a tough one yeah and you know if you donate your brain to science you donate your body to science what science I mean there's a lot of science that can be done and so if the people there are people who collect these brains we have you know we've read what has science done for me lately from someone who takes these brains and gets them to researchers that's what they do how do they know how specifically to preserve that tissue so that it's going to research it's gonna yeah is it the way that it's frozen is it how what are they supposed to do and so how do we how do we create a better system for brain research moving forward so that we can answer questions like this we need to synthesize what kind of deaths occur at each hospital around the United States and set up laboratories inside the hospitals so all you have to do is run down the hall we do need techniques that don't rely on deceased brains right like the mini brain stuff and how do you get an old mini brain I mean then we have to get it we were talking about that last week this might be possible might be possible well moving on from the potential of neurogenesis I'm gonna keep going on the idea that yes new neurons are being born in my brain all the time while there is new research out from Australia and Germany working together they published in stem cell reports within the last week looking at neurogenesis in the mouse brain so not the human brain but we all know exercise does a body good these researchers found that there is a slight beneficial effect to neurogenesis in the mouse brain from blood platelets so we all you've heard of a blood platelet right the platelets are the clotting factor right they go in you get a cut and the platelets rush in they stack all together and they get sticky they don't rush it they crawl in they crawl in but the platelets are very important for stopping stopping the blood flow but they also play a very important role in our immune function and also potentially in creating factors a metabolic factors proteins micro RNAs other things that can send instructions to different areas of the body that they travel through and platelet numbers up regulate as a as a reaction to exercise and it is also through this study shown that one of the or at least one factor that the platelets produce was highly correlated with neurogenesis in the mouse brain so there's increased blood flow carrying the blood and the platelets to these areas of the body like the brain this could be one part of answering the question of how exercise not just as a body but also the brain good we are not meant to be a species we are not it's just it's very it's very clear to me that morning just this is a totally unrelated thing but just in the way that my body works mornings that I do not exercise I need three cups of coffee mornings I exercise I need zero to one and it is this very clear relationship your body works better when it's moving so this is I have a theory that we are at peak human intelligence now because even if you exercise after work but sit at the desk all that you're not getting anywhere near what humans once went through and I used to just shock it up to blood flow to the brain and the pump of blood that was getting forced to the brain by us running all the time but now knowing that that the blood flow which probably might even have to do it because it is based on the blood formation and the bones but then it's also how much of this blood is transversing the body but then it's also the nervous system which we now know is in control of sending out these repair messages to organs and the rest of it yeah this is peak human intelligence people we're in the information age based on a brain that was running in a body that was running like 24-7 and now it's just all downhill from here no we're not going downhill instead of sitting standing desks we need running desks they've got those they've got bicycle desks they've got treadmill desks they have all these things they yes I want a bicycle desk that sounds like fun just don't trip and fall while you're reading well and then somebody comes around the corner of your cubicle to hand you the latest memo and you're just dripping in sweat and they're like I'll come back later I'm working very hard at running a marathon yeah but anyhow the recent research suggests there's a lot going on and the next step will be to find out whether or not the this mouse research with the platelets and the factors that they have identified if it applies to people because we do know that there are exercise induced health benefits in humans but we don't know the factors that control that and so this will give them a direction to look neurogenesis baby I'm all for it let's get it Justin what do you bring oh my gosh I have a story here oh yes this is the the ridiculous NASA warning Mike Pence who is currently the vice president I believe of the United States of America believes that he is smarter than the leadership of NASA I propose perhaps he is not but to illustrate I will give you the words of Mike Pence who yesterday called for landing astronauts on the south pole of the moon within five years Pence has stated that NASA needs to achieve that goal by any means necessary although didn't explain of course what any of those means might be speaking at a meeting of the national space council in Huntsville, Alabama he said that NASA rockets and lunar landers will be replaced by private craft if required which thanks to cuts to NASA's launch programs by the current administration means he wants private craft to take us to the moon it's a quotey voice here it's time to redouble our effort which we haven't doubled for a while but we should if he wants to redouble it it can happen but it will not happen unless we increase the pace which is true currently the earliest possible landing on the moon by NASA isn't projected to be ready until about 2028 Pence then warned NASA NASA can't put an astronaut on the moon by 2024 quote we need to change the organization not the mission space agency must transform into a leaner more countable and more agile organization and must adopt an all hands on deck approach he said now to break that down a little bit leaner means working with a smaller budget accountable means following directions of people who have no experience in aerospace technology which in practice will be to stop studying and communicating on global warming which I think is ultimately the goal here and and by more agile at first I was like what do you mean NASA needs to be more agile they have all sorts of different types of programs going on but according to Wikipedia this refers to the ability of a business system to rapidly respond to change by adapting its initial stable configuration in other words focus on something other than monitoring it's basically just another way of saying do what I told you except we want you to not monitor the earth focus on the moon take all the money go to the moon why the moon why because it's not global warming just don't look at the earth don't look at the earth that's all it is why are we going to the south pole of the moon so first of all this is Jonathan McDowell Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics at Cambridge I will be astonished if this happens noting that the lunar lander still needs to be one designed and then built and then tested if it's going to work the thing they designed and built and all within that is that is a hard challenge on a five year time scale even without political budget in the fighty stuff so yikes hmm but why the south pole of the moon what are they supposed to be doing there I think what they're looking at this administration is looking at China has recently built a lander on the moon the far side of the moon we've got India going to the moon these are we've got everybody's sending missions to the moon and we've been to the moon we've landed on it but we haven't been back since the 60s so how do we maintain our dominance in that field how do we keep other countries still supposed to be international space how do we keep other countries from really having it but why so the vice president has instructed NASA this is great this guy with absolutely no experience at all has instructed NASA to aim to land on the moon south pole presumably I'm guessing because it's closer we'll get there quicker it's the best place to put the space lasers because can't we just share the moon why do we have to you know this moon is your moon this moon is my moon no can't we just all hold hands quoting voice the exploration of the heavens in this still new century will go forward with or without the United States but Americans don't do second place Americans lead we will yes we will lead the world and boldly going where we have been before I think the interesting aspect to this too is that the budget that Trump proposed would take away funding for the space launch shuttle the SLS which would be the big mega rocket that could get us really to the moon that could get us to Mars this is the rocket that can give us that potential boost into space again and that would reduce the funding for that and would require us to contract with commercial space programs which is not necessarily a bad thing but it's limiting I don't understand how this agileness is supposed to happen the ability is to he's threatening and this is not a new thing this is also something Senator Ted Cruz has done in the past which is try to refocus the entire mission of NASA away from part of it's mission statement which is observation monitoring protection of the earth the satellites looking back is the thing that they want to take out of the budget completely they want to stop earth monitoring the other part of this is how do you limit the budget of things like the SLS so that we're going to have a space force with no way to get up there how do you limit that but then say we want private industry to create the rock what pays for this I mean that's a different budget why didn't you just give that budget to NASA if you're making the thing leaner why weren't you giving it to them so the whole thing is the idea of putting dollars into corporate hands and the focus of NASA to a less politically driven less focused but the moon is awesome I want us to go to the moon that's what we've been talking about for years five years is a bit soon though well it's not no it's not it's not soon it's just not funded and it's been the thing that they keep cutting so how do you pretend that this is your goal when you do everything the opposite of and again this has been it's hand wavy money shaky well it's also five years is when Pence will still be the vice president if there is a re-election I'm sure that's the reason why because he wants it to happen before he leaves office if he's the one saying this he's saying it because Trump told him to say it sure but it's about getting the credit to leave office that seems why it's this very strict five year timeline so that's part of it that's how he gets I think that's more like how Pence gets Trump on board for it to be like you could have responsibility for this but the reality of it is this has been a GOP push not for exploration of space or the moon or anything else but and it's all in there in that language that he used in narrowing the mission of NASA to something like a moon landing from all of the other important exploration scientific work that NASA does which in my opinion massively outweighs dropping an astronaut on the moon yeah understanding our planet and the science that NASA does stop with the telescopes and the probes stop with the earth monitoring and understanding the global warming and how climate change let's put an ex-fighter pilot on the moon well before we do that perhaps we should spend some money on getting some more female space suits but anyway anyway I thought that was an onion story as we move forward this is this week in science oh my gosh it's time for Blair's Animal Corner do you ever hear your significant other taking care of the kids yelling help me out you're killing me here maybe well it turns out it's true females live longer when they have help raising offspring it's true it's true it's true raising offspring this is from University of Sheffield they were looking at the Seychelles Warbler they found that females who had assistance from other helpers notably female helpers benefited from a longer healthier lifespan they looked at the specific benefits of having relatives help in raising offspring because they did find an increase in survival in those individuals and they wanted to see exactly what was going on they showed that as parents age they decline in their ability to care for offspring but having helpers compensates for that effects which allows parents to continue to reproduce so they were able to not only survive but reproduce for additional seasons as a result of receiving that help so this also helps us answer the question of why some animals assist others instead of raising their own young and it could be because there is a greater benefit of having a proven parent survive and have more offspring so this was looking at cooperatives breeding systems which happened all over the animal kingdom of course we've talked about it a bunch of times and from invertebrates all the way up to vertebrates and humans of course we have our own version of cooperative breeding systems and that's just simply described as a situation where offspring are cared for not only by parents but also by other adult members of the group and the scientific name for these other members are quote helpers these helpers are often but not always grown up offspring from previous years so this is where it gets interesting is that a lot of the time they are related to the individual in question and they looked at 15 years of data on the breeding patterns of Seychelles warblers living around the small island of Cousin in the Seychelles and they found they looked at how quickly individuals chances of dying increased as they grow older but they also this is why this particular study caught my eye they also looked at the length of the birds telomeres to measure their condition so we know of course what telomeres do basically when you run out you're dead so it's those nice shoelace caps that are keeping your genetic codes from just fraying and straggling all over the place and falling apart and killing you so telomeres essential to longevity what's interesting is that in this particular species the Seychelles warbler the helpers the majority of them are female and they assist with providing food for the chicks but also I thought was very interesting incubating the eggs so the parents don't have to do as much work the older dominant females really benefited from having specifically female helpers they lost less of their telomeres and they were less likely to die in each measured season so there was a clear response not only in the result of survival rates but actually in this tested telomere length what's also interesting is that you only needed one female helper to show the effect of delayed aging just one was enough to make a huge impact on that individual so this is interesting for a bunch of reasons it makes sense help raising the kids is going to take less of a toll on an individual's body but it also shows a great clear reason for those helpers to do what they're doing and like I said before it's investing in a proven breeder that carries your own DNA with them and those babies if they are somehow related to you it's helping them out it's not just helping the babies themselves which we've talked about a bunch on the show but it's about helping that mother so that she can reproduce some more the following year I want to know if there have been any telomere studies between single moms human versus married with a partner not just a partner who's working but one that actually actively helps that's what I was going to say if this is true because there's people who maybe are single parents but have huge amounts of help from their parents or friends or family but there's also this question of if there's a female male link like in the birds are female helpers more beneficial than male helpers but then also on top of that this question of having somebody else helping with the offspring might mean different things to different families and it might be very you could actually directly say you're not helping me here Steven he's like I am helping you and then you go and you get your telomeres tested and you're like he's not helping me I told you just look at these telomeres they're just all over the place my telomeres are stretching every day it's just a lot oh Steven you think maybe that was the problem all along you showed up with your telomeres not my fault now you're blaming me for them you sound like your father Steven pre-pregnancy telomere baseline needed yes I think it is very interesting and the idea that the helpers are aiding not just with the survival of the offspring but also with the survival of the mom the parent it's a really cool link and it seems it's one of those things I feel like every few weeks I bring something to the show where I go this might sound obvious but this is a new finding and it just clicked in my brain this is one of those situations of course helping with the baby's survival is also helping with the mother's survival of course if there's someone else sitting on the eggs incubating then the mother can go out and get food for herself she's not just sitting there the mother can take some time she can also not be on high alert to predators at all moments because she's mobile which is the big problem reduce stress levels isn't that already the language that we use like if you were to get help raising a kid they don't go oh well I'm going to go help Blair's kid today I'm going to go help Blair out today am I watching that's I think more likely the language that would be used anyway with humans maybe not with animals which is where this is a little bit different as you think about how sometimes you think about an animal's function in the world and you think about a species function it's to propagate DNA it's to further the genes and so being a parent and being a mother specifically in a lot of the animal kingdom is your reason for being is to allow that DNA package to grow up and succeed so the thing was though I was raised largely by a single mom who had a community of women who were not related and they weren't raising to help me they were all pitching in to help her and so I think in a way that maybe more how I the selfish gene I get the idea and I get why it's beneficial as a strategy but I think at least in humans we are our friendships are bonds between people a lot of times go deeper are less genetic you might have nothing to do with your own family but have a group of friends you would help to know when we are more we are social species and the thing here is we're looking at these species of birds that maybe they fly around in flocks but we don't look at them as social species we don't look at them as we do primates really true for something and we do know that there are some groups of birds there are some species of woodpeckers there are some scrub jays the eastern scrub jays the florida scrub jays that have this kind of setup where the young stay with the parents and help to raise the question is it's got to be genetic it's got to be this survival value but we don't otherwise look at most of these bird species as necessarily social especially during the breeding season we look at them as kind of every bird out for themselves very territorial so that study like this can actually potentially start to shift the way that we think about the social structures of other animals like birds and I think what you're saying is right Justin then maybe we're not looking at it correctly in the bird world absolutely but I also think there is this extra step which is that kind of well done moment but is also an aha moment of you might think that you're helping susan over there who's a single mom with her baby she's stressed out you don't realize you're lengthening susan's life potentially right which is this extra step this huge toll that stress takes on on any body that we're only starting to explore in science that keeps coming back around I feel like it keeps coming back around stress the killer stress shortens your life when you are the caregiver of an aging adult who's your life why stress well let's get rid of all that stress we have to bring back western cultures a little bit weird because we are like I gotta be independent I got no no I don't got this I need help let's build a community come on let's help each other out here people don't you wanna go for a nice luxurious swim after that very stressful conversation I do get me to the beach well if you were a water anole you might be able to scuba dive without a tank this is a study from Birmingham University State University of New York and this is looking at this Costa Rican lizard species the water anole they can breathe underwater without gills for long periods of time to escape from predators the record right now is 16 minutes how do they do it it would appear that they form an underwater respiration system that is a recycled air bubble clinging to the top of the anoles head that's fantastic it's just amazing how was it discovered Lindsay Swirk Swirk good last name very fun Lindsay Swirk assistant research professor of biological sciences documented this water anole because she was studying them and they tend to quote-unquote disappear to a predator's eye and she put some camera traps out she noticed they were submerged for a really really long time so she decided to kind of look further she also noticed in analysis that lizard stomachs had insects that are found underwater in them so they're underwater for a while it's not just to hide from predators they're eating while they're down there what the heck are they doing she wanted to put an underwater camera under the water to watch what happened when the anoles jumped under and it was down there for a couple of days saw that they appeared to be rebreathing an air bubble on top of their head so it would kind of go back in and out and in and out right above their nose it's really fascinating I used to do stuff like this in a swimming pool with like balloons you know you try and rebreath from a bag or a balloon inside in the pool to see how much how long you can go but of course there's that buildup of carbon dioxide that occurs after a while so there's some combination of things happening she hypothesizes that there is something going on with extracting oxygen from the bubble but she also thinks that the bubbles might play a role in allowing them to get rid of carbon dioxide she suspects there are additional air pockets around the anoles head and throat and so the inhalation and exhalation of the air bubble allow for some trading of this air to go through this air pocket system so that they can swap air from the initial bit over the nose with some other areas for new air so they have like multiple air tanks that's really cool so she says I suspect that there might be morphological adaptations namely the shape of the top of the anoles head which allow a large bubble of air to cling to it easily so there's something going on just with the shape of their head that allows for this bubble to happen but there's something else going on that would allow them to have this specific way of breathing where they could recirculate air in this bubble and also in these other areas now 16 minutes isn't the longest time in the world it would feel very long to us since most of us can only hold our breath for only like 2 to 3 minutes but in the animal world there's definitely crazier records out there and a lot of that is because when we breathe in air we don't take all of the oxygen out right away and we do not use all of the oxygen in our blood every pump so there's additional opportunity to recirculate air and blood throughout the body which is how there are animals like elephant seals that can hold their breath for an hour just absolutely insane but there's something else going on here I absolutely love it usually I love to come up with some fun kind of implication from amazing animal adaptations that are discovered but this is just the coolest and I got nothing else to say about it it's just amazing the lizard with a rebreather for those of you listening on the podcast you can't see please please please go to the show notes click on the link there's a video of this bubble appearing and disappearing over their nostrils it is just fascinating I love it do you have any more stories we'll go to the quick stories at the end of the show I have a couple yeah yeah do you want me to finish up the animal corner with my giant t-rex yeah get it great a fossil site in Canada yielded the heaviest t-rex specimen ever found estimated at 19,500 pounds that is heavier than elephants it is a 65% complete skeleton which is pretty good it's not one of the situations where there's a dinosaur with like a finger bone and they're like we figured out what it is so it's 65% complete what I think is really interesting about it is that it was discovered in 1991 they have nicknamed this t-rex Scotty he is named after the fact that at the end of the field season when they discovered this amazing t-rex skeleton all they had on hand to celebrate was a bottle of Scotch but it actually took them 20 years basically to uncover the remains they were really stuck in hard rock they were really hard to extract so only now have they freed the bones enough to decide this thing is enormous and they think it was 28 years old which is extremely old for t-rexes in our recorded history he had a broken and healed rib he had a massive growth of bone between two teeth that's a sign of infection he had broken tailbones looked like it was from another Tyrannosaurus bite so not only did he live a long life he lived a very eventful life go Scotty Scotty sometimes I mean elephants live for a long time and those are some of the largest animals on land and it's just hard to imagine that these giant dinosaurs wouldn't have lived for decades I mean they're investing so much energy into growth but maybe it was just so hard to keep themselves fed or I don't know we're supposed to be scavengers though right t-rexes yeah yeah it seems it seems just interesting to me that 28 was a young age I don't know maybe it's because they just hadn't come up with medical technology yet yeah that's right they just they really yeah maybe that's it maybe they were really hard too maybe there was a lot of fierce t-rex competition and they just really they were constantly fighting over resources and rotting a meat and space and they just they beat each other up I always heard it because it was because they smoked heavily oh that was it emphysema got them real reason the dinosaurs went extinct but how did they with those tiny arms how'd they get the cigarette out of their mouth the t-rex the t-rex smoked a pipe that's why you could hold the pipe a very long one they smoked a hookah that's what they smoked oh my goodness continuing on with our quick science stories what causes hallucinations this is a story I have several answers to this I've talked about this a few times on the show and most recently there was a study that came out that suggested that looked at lsd and the and the brain and suggested aspects of how the human brain processes information to come up with the hallucinations that we see but the most recent study was interesting published in the journal cell reports the researchers looked at mice they gave hallucinogens called doi for iodo-2-5 diamaxi dimethoxy phenyl isopropylamine and it really affects how the mice are able to visually see and perceive the world and then they looked at the little mouse brains under fmri and other brain activity and they found that the hallucinogen opposite of what previous studies have suggested is that the brain is filtering all the incoming information sensory information from the world and that hallucinogens potentially take the filters off this study found that this hallucinogen in mice shut down the information into the visual cortex but there was different there were different areas of the brain communicating with the visual cortex the normal and so what they hypothesize from their findings is that the brain gets the hallucinogens shut down sensory information coming into the visual cortex but then the brain tries to process that information and overestimates what's actually there thus creating jumping to conclusions thus creating the hallucinations that's interesting but I feel like as someone who perhaps doesn't know it seems like in terms of what you see in movies and pop culture about these sorts of hallucinations they're often very unusual things that you're seeing weird color combinations all this kind of stuff I wonder why your brain would choose to do that it would make more sense for your brain to pick something familiar to jump to as a conclusion well the idea is that our perception is a combination of the sensory information that comes from outside the brain and the activity within the brain on its own so for instance your dreams while you sleep come from all internal sources and dreams are pretty weird to start with but they're from all internal sources of information so our normal perception is a balance between sensory and internal and when you change what's coming from the sensory side of things like with a hallucinogen in this particular case that could set the balance off and change the way things are perceived and so the lack of information then gets overestimated by some areas of the brain and so and don't believe the burden of hallucinogenics that you've seen in movies don't necessarily believe everything just because they're like how do we show this? well let's make a bunch of weird colors merge into each other that's not the movie and then my last story for the night I've talked before on the show about the lamb bag the lamb bag is a synthetic womb that is being created by researchers the idea is that potentially when babies are born prematurely that we could have a safe support environment for them to help them finish their gestation term so that if the mother's gestational environment fails for whatever reason miscommunication between the placenta and the mother and the child that we could potentially have a technological solution and they've been studying this using sheep and the last time we talked about it researchers had said that they had taken late term sheep which would have been equivalent to very late term human babies and it was successful this lamb bag was successful in supporting the babies the most recent research on this in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology was able to support the equivalent of a human fetus at 24 weeks gestation which is very premature so they're pushing the envelope on this technology and getting it to a point where we may be able to support extremely preterm infants that are born at the very edge of what is currently viable which is 21 to 24 weeks gestation so I guess my question would be do you think we can get this to a point where who needs moms no no no no I more mean it's dangerous and preterm babies can often survive as is so not every time but it happens so doing something like this with a human baby can be pretty dangerous would this get to the point where you could try it with a preterm baby that was so early that it's chances of survival were basically nil so there would be very little to lose in attempting it I mean that's their hope eventually I mean they're starting with sheep and eventually they'll move to I would imagine they would move to a primate species at some point before moving to human babies that's gonna be the next step but I mean this kind of medical support it would be a nurturing environment more nurturing than what we currently use for these extremely preterm babies and so when you have a baby that's born at 21 to 24 weeks the health prognosis for those children is not great for a very long time and there are often health issues that lead into adult life and if you could offer a week or two of this kind of support it could potentially allow enough continued development to occur in a supportive environment or a more supportive environment that would ameliorate some of those problems so it'll move forward this is the e-therapy project it's really exciting Justin what do you have oh um so I've often talked about the show how when somebody says something is more evolved than something else everything is as evolved as anything else my take on it all life appears to have had a common origin which means evolutionary chronology regardless of diversification or complexity at heart the same age from the starting gate is any other life but there is of course a more nuanced vision of evolution than my own that does look at recently emerged or more recently emerged speciation like humans as young when compared to more archetypal morphologies such as species of fish for instance so we have incredible diversity of species as do birds and insects and actually mammals in general we're pretty darn diverse well humans when you get down to a set species there's only been maybe a dozen species of humans on the planet there could be more researchers trying to explain why the tree of life is so unbalanced of agreed on a few explanations the species ability to change color size, how it interacts with its environment all influence how quickly it can form a new species compared to other organisms which then means you have that ability but it's also then time itself you know the longer you've had a chance to do this the sort of more opportunities you would have found new research in the proceeds of the National Academy of Sciences shows the passage of time has a surprising and consistent impact on evolutionary diversity and might favor young species Cody voice here a panel is one of the researchers if groups of species were simply reaching equilibrium and slowing down over time we'd expect more consistent pattern of slowing within every group that we look at but the results aren't showing that when the researchers looked at individual groups rates of diversification vary dramatically but they did find the macro level is a strong pattern of faster growth of diversity in younger groups of species Cody voice this really throws a wrench into how we interpret life how we interpret how life diversified on earth evolutionary biologists have tended to look at particular features that have helped particular groups of animals diversify or not far less explored Cody voice again and potentially more interesting question is why despite all the complexity involved in the evolution of new species that process looks so similar across the tree of life so it was sort of interesting that it was like what made this made me think of was the being I don't know kind of a one-sided we're only comparing one side of this so any creature undergoing evolutionary change is then opened up to new challenges in their environment and potential benefits so brightly colored red mice may have evolved many many times but they're easier to be seen from above and get plucked out of the evolutionary tree pretty quickly so you don't get to see that diversification of a species taking place from the bright red mouse on whereas if the adaptation is really beneficial then you see that species and it's something sort of interesting in that once an adaption takes place if you have overcome the challenges that might come with your adaptation you're likely being rewarded by a niche that nobody else has filled properly or you might be finding an advantage in that niche that was existing before and so then you'll be able to grow and diversely then start expanding different ways of exploiting that niche within the environment so I think we only get to see the winners in that young speciation group and I think that might be sort of why it seems weighted as quicker evolution but it's the interesting question too of these younger groups of organisms that kind of have more diversification and so there are more of them for evolution to act on and so you know maybe the question is you know humans should be, should we be worried there's you know basically we're it for our species right for our little wing of the tree of life and where's it going to go we're not young anymore so yeah well what I think about we're like the youngest we're one of the infants on the block Kiki we're calling it the youngest more recently merged not the starting point of the we've been around for all the since like I'm talking about like since Australopithecus and like we've been around for a while that's a recent species that's a recent so with the recent species having more evolutionary pressure and creating more quote-unquote fast evolution it makes perfect sense because there's less niche there's less space to move into so it's less forgiving when the first sea animals were happening it was just a big open ocean with nothing going on so all these weird jelly fishy things and all these other things survived for a while and eventually died out but it took a lot of time because there's all this space when animals first came on to land they went gangbusters all over the place all these different kinds but now there's such these itty bitty teeny tiny niches of nocturnal in this particular tree at this particular height eating this particular seed that fight for where you belong that you can only work in this world at this point we're so full that there you can only work if you are very good at one very specific thing where there is room for you or if you're better at it than what's there now so the evolutionary pressure is way stronger than it used to be good points Blair you got one more what's a cancer tree yeah so birds get it bees get it even occasionally podcast hosts and popular trees get it cancer which while ranking really highly on the things that suck category can also be really really interesting scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have uncovered genetic overlap between genes and popular trees that control colise formation and several human cancers these are conserved genes of about eight types of cancer in humans that are associated with the this is chronic myeloid leukemia breast cancer stomach cancer and others that genes have been conserved and we split from plants a really long time ago long time ago yeah but finding this this these genes that have been that are the same genes involved in cancers that do tumor formation are involved in tumor formation are involved in the popular trees so basically they think they could come up with drugs that could inhibit associated enzymes that are present in doing the work in this in these formations and even block genetic pathways that trigger tumors to form in the first place so yeah studying popular trees could lead to some cancer cures and therapies well quick reminder you share 60% of your DNA with a banana so quick reminder thank you because I eat a lot of you know us in plants it might feel like a lot of time has passed but a lot of genetics are conserved oh yeah so thank you and that brings us to the end of our show thank you for joining us for another episode of this week in science I would like to remind everyone Portland show Portland Oregon next Wednesday April 3rd Alberta Rose Theater we have an announcement on our website with a link to where you can purchase tickets shout outs thank you to Fada for helping to promote the Portland show he's been doing some great work fliering and letting people know and he also helps on social media and with our youtube show notes I'd like to thank Identity 4 for helping to record the show Gord McLeod and Ben Rothig thank you for making our chat room at twist.org slash live a nice place to be and now I would also like to thank our patreon sponsors thank you to Identity 4 nope thank you to who am I thinking first thank you to I'm going to the bottom of the list today EO Byron Lee Kevin Perichan Marqueson flow Matt Sutter Aaron Luthin flying out Christopher Rappin Brendon Brendon Minnish Greg Brins Greg Briggs Robert Gary S 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Thank you for all of your support on Patreon and if any of you are interested in supporting us through Patreon you can find information at twist.org Next week we will be live an hour earlier than usual our showtime will start at 7pm Pacific we will be live from Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland, Oregon and we will be joined by hearing researcher, neuroscientist Allison Coffin and the PDX Broadsides for some live music accompaniment we do hope that you will join us for next week's show. We will be broadcasting live online at twist.org slash live so don't worry if you can't be there in person it will be on the internet and that means it will be a podcast and will be available at our YouTube website. 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We're at the end of our show. Not the end of the universe. We're not in a bubble quantum death. Nope. Not right now. Nope. We're here on the internet talking to each other. And identity four, it's okay. We will record the episode there. So you don't need to worry about it. You just need to get your butt in a seat in Portland so that we can meet you in person. It will be great. I look forward to that. I look forward to all sorts of meeting people. I have, I think I've put myself under a ton of stress for next week because I invited all my friends and I've been annoying them to make them come. So it'll be good. Lots of good-hearted friends in the audience. You doing Blair. Just smiling. Just smiling. You need to get your gnocchi people to come. Yeah, they're coming. I'm pretty sure. I have a call with them tomorrow. Thanks, noodles. I've been working on trying to keep the interviews coming for the show. You know, I think we're all putting a lot of good energy into the show this year. It's very good. I am thinking good things. Happy thoughts about our show. I am. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. I appreciate that compliment. I still have more questions about this whole adding space without time. Thank you for asking those questions later. I know I missed the opportunity again but here's the crux of it. Why would it be so uniform? Because if things that are really, really, really far away, billion-year-away galaxy that we see, billion-light-year-away, wouldn't it have started closer? Wouldn't that light started deading our way? Like it would have been closer to us. So the shifting would be the same thing, but it would take longer to get here. I'm still stuck on the if the entire universe was destroyed, there'd just be nothing. Where'd it go? Right? Yes. It can't be nothing. Yeah. There's so much something. It depends on what you define as something. I guess. Is this the whole idea of dark matter, right? Is that it's the opposite of normal matter? I'm not opposite. It's anti-matter. Oh, anti-matter. It doesn't reflect light. We just can't see or give off light. Is it anti-matter then that creates just a nothingness when the universe collapses in on itself? No. I mean, there would have to be enough anti-matter. Yeah, there would have to be enough anti-matter to... Well, there'd be no matter to interact with. The anti-matter still existed. That's insane. Where's all this matter going? That's my whole question. It's like when the universe... Matter can be turned into energy. Right. Which can be broken down into... So that's the heat death, I guess. That makes sense. But for the other ones, I'm like, where'd it go? But I think that's part of it also is that there's still... We've talked with a bunch of these astrophysicists and the cosmologists. And it says there are still missing pieces. There are in the model of... The standard model seems to be working okay, but for our theories as they stand, there are either missing particles or missing forces that we haven't explained yet. So that's... And if we explain them, maybe that will help to answer your questions at some point. So magic. Got it. Yes. That's a robot is asking an interesting question in the chat room. So you mentioned dreams being purely from internal input earlier about my subjective experiences, say others or otherwise. Things like songs and pain have intruded into my dreams. I know this since I've woken up to the end of the song or the pain. But those are... We don't live internally. We have things that we bring in from the outside world. So you have experienced pain externally or in the waking conscious life. You've heard these songs. You've heard elements that can make up a song. You could invent a song even while dreaming. But you're working off of things that have been downloaded from your experiences in your conscious waking world itself. Or, I mean, like in this particular situation, I mean, you're looking at... You're in REM sleep. REM sleep. And it's a lighter phase of sleep. And that shifts in itself. And so you can even dream and have those dreams, not have anything to do with any sensory information around you at all. Or because you're in this lighter phase of sleep that is potentially more aware of your... Where your brain is taking potentially more information in from the outside world, it can be influenced by external sources. And so there is... There can be... I mean, it's like, you know, you hear a door slam or something that's a sound that wakes you up, right? That it's because your brain is on alert. Your brain is allowing some things in. But when you're thinking... When you're not thinking about these dreams that do contain information from the outside world, it's like what Justin said. It's this stuff that's been downloaded. And it's internal. And it's your brain... There's this idea that your brain is replaying events, emotions, circumstances from the day in kind of metaphorical way to help categorize it and help with storage of information. And then in a way it's a lot like... You were describing how the hallucinogen works by inferring things. I recall having a dream where I had a house that only had the back wall to the house. Didn't have like the other side of the house was just open to nature. I don't even think it had a roof. And I was sitting in this house and there was birds flying in and out of the house because there's no wall on one side. And I thought, wow, this is a really cool house. I love this house. And when I woke up, the birds outside my window were very loud. And so they had... And my brain had inferred that if I can hear all of these birds, my room must be missing one of the walls and it must be outdoors because otherwise how could all these birds be flying around my house? So it took outside information that was real, inferred what that would have to mean and created the scenario for that to exist in the dream state. My favorite dream inference that I ever experienced was when I had just gotten my dog. I was in high school and my dad had taken her out into the backyard and I guess she had gotten skunked right in the face. And she ran into the house and jumped onto my bed. And I started dreaming about garlic bread. And the garlic smell just started getting stronger and stronger and stronger in my dream. And I was like, this is some really strong garlic bread. And eventually it started like hurting my face. And then I woke up and my dog was like hiding on my bed, having just been skunked. Wow. So there we go. Skunky garlic bread. Garlic bread. That's not parsley on your bread. Oh, no. All these people are going to sleep. All these East Coast people, everyone's like, good night. Yeah, we're losing one of the coasts. Should we talk about next week? Good night, yeah. But we should talk about next week. How many stories? Two each? It's an hour show. One each? It's a 90 minute show, but there will be a... So, yeah. We're going to have an interview and there's going to be a 15 minute music interlude. So a half hour interlude. So 45 minutes to a half hour of stories. So one to two stories. Two stories, Max. But what I also find that we've done in the past, when we're live, we don't... I know we play off the audience a lot more and move more quickly through our discussion of things when we are live. So we can take that into consideration as well. And maybe, you know, instead of talking about one story for 10 minutes, we can think about... So bring two. Yeah. But maybe only tease one at the beginning of the show. Bring four, but only if there are things that you can get through quickly. Right. Exactly. It's sort of like all quick segment. I kind of get it, yeah. Okay. Yeah. So next week I want to... It'll be fast paced. We'll talk about stuff. We'll play off each other. You know, the interview, I was thinking that at the end, depending on the timing and how much time we have left, that we could also allow a couple of audience questions or something like that. And then the show. And Ali was talking about, like we could do a little fun audience participation kind of. Oh, yeah. Shoot. I'm still supposed to do that. Yeah. What deadline was today? Yes, deadline. I need trivia questions. By when? By the 30th, right? No, I think it was like Monday. Oh, no. Claire, do you have... Do we have the trivia questions that we came up with for Philadelphia? Yeah. Yeah. I think I can definitely find those. So can I... Okay. I'll work on them tomorrow. We could also... Yeah. We could also do, you know, just a couple of questions. I'm going to come up with a couple of questions from recent shows. Yeah. So people who have... Yeah. So people who have watched twists might know how to answer the question. I think there's... I mean, this is for the listening audience right now. I think there should be a question about the transient anus. Yeah. Should the answer be the word anus? Yeah. Anus! I'll take anus for 400, Bob. Yeah. There we go. What is a transient anus? Oh, my God. That story cracks me up. It's so good. No, it's so good. It's so good. Transient. I mean, we could... We could ask what... I mean, really, the hard question would be the species of animal that has the transient anus. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's true. Maybe. Yeah. I like orifice, but I think it... It might give it away, but people would probably say, it's probably... It has more than one place where it has a mouth. That's probably all it is. That's got to be ears that can show up in different places. That's got to be a nose. It breathes different places. That's going to be what... They're not going to go... Straight through. Anyway. Okay. Do you need me to bring my laptop? Yes. Bring your laptop. Yeah. We should have connectivity up on stage. I am going to find out from the broad sides whether or not they will be able to actually play our intro song. Oh, that's fun. Yeah. And also your Animal Corner song. Yeah. So we may have them doing live versions. Oh, I love that. I sent them MP3s of the songs. Oh, wow. They're going to practice and they'll let me know whether or not they can perform them live. Yeah, I love that. I haven't been teasing that to everybody because I don't know whether they'll be able to or not, but it would be really cool. And so in that case, we may not have to cue the music ourselves, which would be nice. But we should. What I'd like to do is... We're going to be up on... It's a nice-sized stage and there'll be a big screen behind us. And it would be nice to have like a slideshow of images that we can, you know, knowing the order of stories. Yeah. Going to put things up behind us so that people can visualize things. Absolutely. Yeah. And we can put the chat room back there too. And put the chat room. Yeah. Yeah. That's easy. Put the twist logo, put images from the stories and the chat room. And I think, yeah. So having your laptop to do that would be great. And then I'll have my laptop for checking up on things. Hopefully it'll be fine. Is there any reason for me to bring any of my original artwork? Yeah. They will give us a merch table. And if you want to sell your original artwork... Do we have a price? Because it's a Patreon thing. You can bring some. How many... But we have... It is a Patreon thing. But it could also... You could sell a few if you wanted. Yeah. So we should decide kind of what the... What would make sense so that we're not... So the Patreon option is still the better option. I think would make sense. But let me know. And I'll bring a couple if you think it's a good idea. Yeah. Not a lot. Like two or three or something like that. And I'm going to bring a couple of calendars and we'll charge a lower rate because it's April. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then I've got some t-shirts. And so I'll bring some t-shirts to sell. Yeah. So we'll have a merch table. We'll share it with the broad sides and we can sell some things. Anyway. Yeah. I don't know how to do that. I have to bring change. Unless you just want to use like square. You probably have time to get a square. I have an account. Yeah. I could just get... I just need to get one of those little thingies. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I could do that. There's probably enough time to ship a square to you and then you don't have to have any change with you. Credit cards only. Identity four wants the Kiwi bird painting. You got it. You could bring it and hand it to him. Okay. You want that identity four? You want that? I think you are due for another item. Okay. I'll bring the Kiwi and I'll bring a couple others. Yeah. Oh, neat. Is there anything else? Yeah. So I'm going to... Tomorrow I'm going to start really like nailing down the run sheet because I'm going to share it with the producer and also the broad sides so that they know when things are going to happen, like what stories are coming when and kind of the cues to be working off of just so they have access to that ahead of time. Identity four. I said, yay. Good. Okay. And that, yeah. So I think it would be great if we could have, I mean, I know you guys are traveling Wednesday. So it would be awesome to get stories in the rundown before Wednesday. So we know what we're looking at. For sure. On Monday or Tuesday. Yep. Unless of course, you know, something, you know, we can always swap things out. If it's like this story just came up and, oh my God, we need to talk about it. And I'm totally cool with doing that. But I think we should have everything in otherwise Monday or Tuesday. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Your Justin's like, uh-huh. Just pretend, pretend it's Wednesday on Monday. Yeah, we get to the moon in five years. No problem, Kiki. I'm on it. No problem. Just on Monday. I'll handle my effort. Wednesday. All hands on deck. Yeah. You can do it on Wednesday. We'll be sorting it out on the plane. No, no, no, no, no, no. You get good wifi on the plane. No, no. Not on the ramshackle of a plane I'd be flying in on. Yeah. When's our Australian tour? New Zealand, Australia. I'd love to do that. That would be amazing. Would be the coolest. It would be so good. I'd love it. Yeah. So that'll work. What has science done for me lately? I was thinking that we could put, we could do two things. Kai has been asking to be a part of the show. He's like, mommy, can I be on stage? Nice. So I don't know exactly what he wants to do being on stage. But I'm like, you could do what has science done for me lately. We could get Kai to tell everybody. Perfect. But which would be pretty cute. I think. We could get, or we could do a little, little quick segment to get Kai to tell us something about science or something. The other. Have the, the fire breathing audio. I do. It hasn't worked in a long time though. I'd have to spend some time putting it together to make sure it works. Nothing cuter than a young person. Playing with fire. Yeah. And the other idea is to give, like buy a bunch of three by five cards and get people to write down what science has done for them lately. And then we'll read people's answers from the audience. I like that idea. It should be kind of good. Yeah. And that'll be a little bit of audience interaction. Kind of thing. Yeah. I think we're good. Do you guys, you guys are going to get on planes next week. Yeah. I'm getting on a plane on Friday morning. And then I'm getting on a plane on Monday to come back home. And then I'm getting on a plane on Wednesday. Hey busy lady. Oh, yeah. I gotta figure out some stuff, but, uh, I always forget I don't live at an airport. Oh, you don't. Get to the airport. You're flying out of Sacramento, right? Yeah. Yes. I think. So I'll see you there. I sent it to you. I think. Just like a lift. I got to figure out when I got to figure out like, what time the plane is, what airline, just like all these details. I'll find out when I get to the airport. Yeah. Well, I, uh, I'm very excited. I got TSA pre-check. I haven't used it yet. And then we're going to start and get to use it on Friday. I'm very excited. Just so you know, just, you know, the, there has been a huge spike in the number of people that have that. Yeah. And the plane is actually long. Yeah. Yeah. Pre-check now than it is. Okay. It's true. No, it's not. Yeah. They've got like six aisles of windy ropes. You have to go through just to pass it. Whereas now to the part where you have to take off your shoes, just breeze right through. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I know that's not true. No, I'm stoked. I'm really excited. I know. I'm excited. I'm glad you did it. I'm excited. I'm glad you both are coming. I'm excited to see you. Yes. In person. We haven't done that in a long time. I think it was a, was it the entomology conference? Yeah. So it's been like a year and a half. No. No. The San Francisco one. Yes. That was still over a year. That was like a year and two months. We should make sure and apply for that again this year. Yeah. So. Oh, I need a, yeah. Portland people if you're there. I need somewhere to party on Thursday. Cause apparently Blair and Kiki are going to be too busy to hang out with me. Just during the day. I've grown up professionally stuff to do. Just during the day. Just during the day. I just need a drinking buddy or buddies for Thursday. Starting about noon. That's going to be great. You're going to be starting about noon. I'm going to be like, I got to get up and get to the conference at like. Actually my big goal is the hopefully it's still there. The Powell bookstore. Oh yeah. I've never been. I want to go there. And Justin, why don't you and I go on Friday before flight? Oh no. That's too early. Yeah. I'll be. What about on Wednesday before Kiki's? We won't have time. We'll be busy preparing. You'll be all, you'll be all nerves and jitter checking your laptop and your bag and making sure you have everything. What? I'll be. How? Looking for my stories. Trying to put them together in time for the show. Did you see it? I'll put a placeholder. I'll put a placeholder in. I can put a placeholder in right now for the stories I'm going to bring. But the actual stories I bring will probably be between the time the plane lands and the show starts. Identity four says he's going to be around until 3pm on Thursday. Perfect. Yeah. Awesome. Let's go get drunk at a bookstore. I mean, you might have to get somewhere before noon because he's leaving at three. Oh, I see. This is the thing. I was actually. Drunk at a bookstore. You could probably do that in Portland. I do believe they have a pub. At least if it's not in the bookstore, it might be attached. I don't know. I haven't been there for a long time. This is frustrating because I feel like I'm still not going to get to experience Portland at all. You planned your trip so tightly packed full of things to do that you won't get to see the city. So next time, next time, Kiki, I'm making, I'm staying through the weekend next time. Better. I know. I had no choice. There's 250 teens coming to the zoo that Saturday and I'm in charge of the event. Wow. So it was either have a quick turnaround or don't come. So I picked the quick turnaround. Well done. Turn it around. Turn it around. Oh, I'm going to be all excited next Wednesday night and want to stay up late. And then I'm going to have to get up early in the morning. Yeah. Wednesday is going to be so long. This is going to be rough. I know, especially because I have to teach a, I have to teach a 90 minute workshop in the morning. Not even like it's in the afternoon. I can start my day and kind of like struggle through. No. Morning. Damn. I barely get my son to school by 8 a.m. Like this is going to be rough. We can do it. I'm going to be so excited. We'll make it happen. I've been working for this for a year. It's all good. You know what they say? You can sleep when you're dead. Also, screw your telomeres. What says that? People that die. Oh, is the live show at the same time and same day? Hot Rod. Same day next Wednesday, but an hour earlier. 7 p.m. Pacific time. Remember when we used to be at 7 30? We do. But we always started at 8. Wait, what? I don't remember this actually. At first like four years I was on the show. At 7 30? That's a weird time. Yeah. I don't remember that at all. So there was half of the time I was in Israel. It was 5 30 a.m. And then the other half it was 4 30 a.m. And then when I was. Time change though. Yeah, because of the time change in Israel, it was out of sync with America. And then when I was traveling, I did it in the worst one was when I was in London, I did the show at 2 30. I think it was 2 30 in the morning. Yeah. Right. How dumb. Oh, you are so much younger than Blair. Also like I was staying with my friends family. And I like snuck down to their living room. I did a show at 2 30. I don't know if I'd have the gall to do that now to be like thank you for taking me in. I'm going to do this. For 2 hours. In the middle of the night in your home. Got to do it. It's never sleeps people. Oh my God. I can't believe it. I loved young Blair. Too bad she's dead. Oh my God. She's not she's in there somewhere hiding. Oh my God. She's not she's in there somewhere hiding. I mean I feel like I always had old Blair inside. Old Blair's like stay down. Now the outside just has to be inside. Stay down young Blair. Don't get up. Don't do podcasts in the middle of the night. No. My goodness. There was that one time. I went out. And then left the bar. Came home. Did the podcast. And then went back out to the bar. I remember that. I do believe I've pulled that scenario a few times. Maybe not the bar. I don't really go to bars. Well in Israel they don't close. Justin there have been many times where you're like. I got to go. I got to see you later. Yeah. It's 10 o'clock. I got to go. I got to be. I got to do the thing I got to do. I always thought you were going to bed. No. No. No. No. Younger Justin used to like do the show and then go out. Oh my God. But I also would get off. I used to get off work like right before the show for a long time too. Yeah. And so I would get here do the show and then I would start my then I'd actually be off work. Go out. Yeah. All those nights coming in from the car dealership. I ate in the morning. I just like first cup of coffee and. That's pretty cool. That's neat. Then you have like your whole day ahead of you. Yeah. But then after, you know, that's the thing though. It's like once you've done twist the rest of the day. It's just not. It's all downhill from there. Yeah. It's much better looking forward to doing the show. I was listening to a comic on a podcast as well. And they were talking about how they really like doing corporate gigs because you do a show at like three p.m. And then you're done. And then you have like your whole night ahead of you. But when you do nightclub shows, you're like amped. You can't go to sleep. You like want to go out. You want to go get something to eat. And so like even after this, I go. I get ready for bed and I get in my bed, but I don't. I can't go to sleep right away. But like if you've been sitting on your, on your couch watching TV or reading, then your brain waves are like sleep. It's much easier. I've fallen asleep during the show before. Yeah. Well, haven't we all? That was the 21 hour. 21 hours. I get in broadcast. Yeah. Yes. I can't believe I never fell asleep when I was. Podcasting from bed. When it was the wee hours in the morning and never fell asleep. I feel like I must have gotten close. No. Well, No, you were just delirious. That's all. Yeah. I really don't remember any of those. Like any of them. I do know there was one where, um, we finished the show. We finished the show. I do know there was one where, um, We finished and Kiki signed off and Justin, you stayed on and my roommate got up and we ended up the three of us talking. Like I pulled out my headphones and I was using the external speakers on my laptop and you and I, and my roommate ended up talking for like three additional hours. Yeah. Cause we had breakfast plans and I looked at it. I was like, oh, it's nine 30. We got to go. Oh my goodness. I do remember that, but. Yeah. And I remember people thinking that I was podcasting from jail whenever I did it from my bed with the stone behind me. Well, yeah, that's where I've been. Uh, been incarcerated here for a while. Yeah. Um, I guess that's about it. And then as hot rod said in the chat room, worst thing would be someone getting up in their underwear to visit the fridge that actually did happen in Israel because none of my roommates believed that like this was a real thing. And, uh, and I think specifically the boys that lived upstairs in my suite thought that it was audio only. And so they walked down in their underwear and like poured themselves cereal in the background. I think more than once. And I had to be like, the family show. They're like, oh, I'm here doing a show. They just thought you were just up staring at your laptop screen at odd hours in the morning. Yeah. Who knows? God. So many shows. So many memories. So many not memories. I know. Well, that's earlier. Ed was said like, oh, you made a joke about that such and such time. I was like, that's funny. Good for me. I don't remember. I did. What? Oh my God. I want to find it. Um, yeah. He was like, oh, it's like that joke you made. Like that was pretty good. They're just, that's good. I knew it. Google was using the webcam. That's awesome. All right. It's a good time. It's bedtime now. So we can actually go. Put some memories. Into our brains. Consolidate some information there. And. Come back in a week. In Portland. It's very exciting. It's going to be so fun. It is bedtime, everyone. In that case, you should say good night. Good night, players. Say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Good night. Good night, everyone. Thank you for joining us again for another. Wonderful episode. So much good stuff. I'll see you next week. Cannot wait. I'm going to try to breathe during the next week. And keep my. Excitement. Moderated. I will moderate it. Good night, everyone. Dana Pearson. Good night over on the YouTube chat room. Good night to our chat room. Good night all. Have a wonderful science week. We will be back. Next Wednesday, 7pm Pacific time. Because of the live show. We will see you then.