 This is TWIS, This Week in Science, episode number 587, recorded on Wednesday, October 5th, 2016. Gratitude for teachers. Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki and we're here with another episode of This Week in Science to fill your heads with eruptions, prizes, and electricity. But first... Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. It may be too late to reverse the trend. The trend that has been tending to be trending is that of sending discourse to its death. The great human tradition of talking about things. That thing that began to be recorded with the Greeks that culminated in the founding of a free nation-ish. That which can be made stronger and better with knowledge in the time of the greatest access to knowledge and all of human history. Our ability to talk about issues and ideas and compare them to reality has never been better. Yet in some of the most important arenas, it is being dumbed down. Worse, it is almost being ignored entirely in the media today. And since the following hour of programming contains scientific news, we now fear that our show may not be suitable for adult audiences. At least not for much longer. For the tendency and tendency of dumbing down the public discourses so overwhelmingly powerful that at this point, it may be truly too late to prevent the actual and unavoidable decline of civilization worldwide. So on my signal, we all run for the hills. Ready? Or perhaps this is an opportunity, a chance to do the casually correct thing. To simply talk about the world as it is, not as someone wants you to believe it to be. And if there's still functioning minds out there who might like to join us, what better way for them to find out that we're here and send a signal to them that all hope is not yet lost by putting on yet another episode of This Week in Science. Coming up next... I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough I wanna learn everything all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek I wanna know what's happening What's happening What's happening This Week in Science What's happening What's happening What's happening This Week in Science Good science to you Kiki and Blair. And the good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back and filled with so much science activity this week. It was very exciting. We have lots of science news. I've got some stories about Nobel winners a pew pew pew survey and we've got an interview with not one but two volcanologists. This is pretty exciting, not one but two. That's right. And we're gonna be talking about predicting eruptions. Justin, what do you have for us? I've got a biotic breakthrough an ancient warrior's junk and a bad prediction that's proving true but not for the reasons it was predicted in the first place but the result is matching up really well which is interesting. Nice. And Blair, what do you have? Oh, I have bees that like sugar bees that also like sugar and sharks that swim funny. No, I didn't know there were funny swimming sharks. All right, we'll find out more about that later thanks to the animal corner and Blair but it is time to dive into our show and we're gonna hit it right off the top with volcanoes. We are speaking tonight with Dr. Tobias Fisher. He's a professor of volcanology at the University of New Mexico and also Dr. Martin D'Amour who is an assistant professor at the University of Costa Rica. Both of them are working with the Deep Carbon Observatory on the Deep Carbon Observatory Deep Carbon Digassing International Initiative. That's the DCO Decade Initiative and it's bringing together scientists from all over the world to better understand the off-gassing. We all know volcanoes, they erupt and they spew and there's stuff that comes out of them and we don't really understand it as well as we'd like so maybe it can help us predict. So gentlemen, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us. Thank you very much. Thank you for having us. It's just fabulous to have you here. Right, when we were talking before the show I was like, Blair, we're gonna be talking about volcanoes and she said, I don't really know that much about volcanoes. So this is our perfect show. Right. This is our perfect opportunity. So I guess to get started from the very human-centric perspective when we think of volcanoes we think about eruptions and we think about those big eruptions that really impact human health, human safety and even possibly survivability. And so I'd love to know how good we are currently at predicting eruptions. I can get started on that. Yeah. So predicting eruptions is much easier than predicting earthquakes because you at least know where the volcano is and if you look at the history of the volcano what it has done in the past you can at least kind of have a guess of what the volcano might be doing in the future but to really say, hey, it's gonna erupt in the next few weeks or in the next year and give a precise date that's really, really difficult. We have done that. The U.S. Geological Survey has done that. For example, for Pinatubo the eruption in the early 90s was really well predicted and a lot of lives have been saved and that was a huge eruption. So that was a big success for volcanology. A massive success I would say. It's a time that you're able to predict something and get people out of an area ahead of time that's going to be incredibly beneficial but what do we know about what steps lead up to an actual eruption? I live up here in Portland, Oregon. I look right across the river whenever I drive over some of the bridges here over the Willamette and I can see Mount St. Helens which had a nice eruption in the 1980s and I've heard that its dome is starting to fill up again and it's starting to expand. What are the steps before an eruption actually occurs? Well, one big important part is that you have to have magma at depths that is somehow moving up towards the surface. So when that happens then usually you can expect an eruption to happen at some point in time. So one of the things you might want to track is that movement of magma. I'm trying to figure out how fast it might move how easily it might move to the surface and whether it will be releasing gases on the way up and that's the first step and then another step would be that magma is getting really close to the surface we're seeing lots of earthquakes happening and then maybe the eruption is going to happen but it doesn't always follow in this sequence so there can be stoppage there can be quieting down of the activity maybe the earthquakes stop maybe then they start again. So Martin can talk more about examples in Costa Rica where they have been observing the eruptions of Torialva to give more concrete examples. Yeah, you know, every volcano is different so there are some general things that you'd expect some general signals that you'd expect with as Tobias was talking about a magma body moving towards the surface like you might expect the volcano to inflate as magma gets intruded and gases to come out, more gas than normal but every volcano has its own behavior so in order to actually predict an eruption you have to understand that particular volcano the other tricky thing is that very big eruptions are generally caused by large bodies of magma but small eruptions are a lot more difficult to predict because the signals associated with that magma that's coming up aren't nearly as easy to detect so what we're seeing now is that as populations grow and populations come into contact more with volcanoes even smaller eruptions can have a big impact on people and that's what we're seeing at Torialva for example where just over the last few weeks we've had a series of very small eruptions but all of the ash that's erupted goes directly into the capital city of Costa Rica and so that has an enormous impact on people their lives and the economy these small eruptions are more difficult to predict than large eruptions and that's sort of a challenge that we're facing at the moment and so what are you currently measuring in Costa Rica? you were up on the volcano just today yeah I actually woke up at 4.30 this morning to go up to the volcano yeah it was a long day so up until yesterday we'd had four days of continuous ash emission and so today in the field I was downloading data from our gas instrument one of our gas measuring stations and collecting ash samples and so we look at these ash samples to try to figure out how the eruptions are revolving with time but we also have a seismic network where we're looking at the earthquakes the small seismic tremors that are produced by the volcanic system and we also have a system of a network of GPS that measures very precisely whether the volcano is inflating or deflating and what have you learned so far? have any of the results come back trying to kind of painting a picture of predictable activity? well it's been a very interesting process because in this particular case to Rialbo Volcano hasn't had a big eruption since 1865 and so we don't have a good baseline of data of many eruptive periods so in 2014 was the first real eruptive period and since then we've had four or five eruptive periods and each time we're learning more about this volcano and we've noticed some patterns particularly in the degassing most importantly in the composition of the gases that's coming out of the volcano where we see a spike in carbon dioxide before these eruptive periods and the eruptive periods might go on for a month or two months we also see inflation of the volcano which further suggests that there's magma being intruded and that's what's driving the eruptions and Tobias can you tell us a little bit more you mentioned that this Torialba is just one of the volcanoes that's being monitored in the network can you tell us a bit about the actual decade initiative and what you're hoping, what you're trying to do with it? yeah so the decade initiative was started really in 2011 when we had a meeting, a workshop in Kamchatka one of the places where there's a lot of volcanic activity and many volcanic gas geochemists came together and we were talking and we were discussing things and there were people from the deep carbon observatory at that meeting that went out to the field with us and looked at what we were doing in the field collecting these samples making all these measurements with all these instruments and the guys from the deep carbon observatory were really interested in this whole process of trying to understand how much gas is coming out of these volcanoes because you're thinking of a volcano mostly producing magma and eruptions but continuously there's gas coming out of these volcanoes and that gas is mostly water vapor but it's also sulfur and it's carbon and so they got really interested in those processes and we were talking about maybe we can instrument a number of volcanoes in the world to better quantify the gases coming out of these volcanoes continuously rather than going to one place making a measurement and then going back the next year making another measurement and so on maybe we can instrument as many volcanoes as possible to actually figure out how much of these gases are coming out at many different volcanoes in the world and so we discussed and we set out to do that and we picked a few volcanoes and over the past few years we have just been expanding that network and collaborating with a lot of people all over the world in the observatories like Martin in Costa Rica and others in Indonesia and in New Zealand and in Colombia and we have now instrumented nine volcanoes and we're learning a lot about not only the composition of the gas that comes out but also about the amount of gas that is emitted and that helps us understand precursors to eruptions like in the case of Turialba and Poas and Masaya and Iarica where we have this nice continuous record that shows changes before eruptions but in a bigger picture we're also trying to quantify more accurately how much carbon dioxide is emitted from volcanoes globally Yeah, because that's something that is not entirely well known we know that volcanoes are a massive influence on atmospheric carbon dioxide and there's a general number with plus minus estimates for our IPCC estimates but at the same time this is not actually known we know that when there are large eruptions there's a large amount of carbon dioxide that's added to the atmosphere So are you finding any, have you found anything so far? How long has this initiative been underway and where are you in the process? Well, we started instrumenting in 2012 so we're about four years in or so and the more we measure the more we can constrain that flux number so every time we make more measurements it seems like that number of the carbon emissions goes up because we know more about the emissions we make measurements on volcanoes that haven't been measured before and also what people have thought usually is that during eruptions the contribution is relatively large but it's really a spike it's one short-lived spike of emission it seems like over time the passive gassing of all these little volcanoes that aren't erupting is actually a big contribution Of course we need to remember that anthropogenic production of carbon dioxide is much, much larger than all the volcanoes together as far as we can tell based on our current data That's a big thing to say I don't know if the number in my head is current but it would be 1-2% of what the man-made output is it's beyond a minor player it's almost hidden in the noise of the plus and minus of the data but this is wild I've just googled up and yahoo newsed up because perhaps I don't live next to a volcano it's not a pressing thought it doesn't make the news around here much but this is like Iceland's volcano rumbles is she ready to blow magma buildup, an active Japanese volcano it's all over the world people who are living near volcanoes are paying close attention so that's actually directly related to what I wanted to ask we were just talking at the beginning before we started the show about how I don't know a lot about volcanoes but how did both of you end up in volcanology how did you get there? I think you should go first Tobias well you know I studied geology in Germany at this university in Freiburg and we had a field trip that was led by a volcanologist and his name was Jörg Keller and he took us out into the field and he showed us this rock deposit that was all pumice and it was about 30 meters thick and we were standing there and looking at it and then he said this deposit formed in about 10 minutes and I was just blown away because if you think about geologic processes they're really really slow you can't really see anything happening and he said well this happened in 10 minutes so I was very intrigued by that and then I came to the US as an exchange student to study got to know my advisor and he studied volcanic gas emissions and volcanic eruptions and so I was immediately interested in doing that and so I asked him if I could study with him and he said yes and so you know I did that's great that's fantastic and my story is that I was at university and wondering what to do and that's university setting not knowing if I wanted to go into arts or science or anything and I went on a spring break trip to an island in the Caribbean called Mansarat and this is a small island with a big volcano on it Sufria Hills volcano and this volcano reawakened in the 90s and totally destroyed the capital city of Plymouth and we went on this field trip to this so similar to Sufria is also in the field and we just saw the absolute destruction that this volcano had wrought upon this capital city and just the impact that that volcano had on people's lives there was so impressive that I don't know that was the starting point for me but after that I had an opportunity to study a volcano in Argentina and have a look back since then that's so great and I'm looking right now I'm going to share a few of these pictures with our audience some pictures that have come from the deep carbon observatory but this one particular image is of Tobias sampling gases from a sulfur caked fumarole on Poa's volcano in Costa Rica and this is one of the volcanoes in the gas monitoring network and it's just such an impressive picture because you're wearing a bright yellow work suit with a yellow hard hat a gas mask you're sticking some kind of a straw-like device into a hole from which gases are steaming and everything is bright yellow all the rocks look like yellow sponge can you just give me some sense of what it's like to be that person in that extreme environment we talk a lot about extremophiles do you feel like one when you're sampling those gases? yeah you really feel like wow this is kind of crazy because it's so dynamic and you hear the gas coming out of that fumarole usually you hear a very strong sound sometimes like a jet engine it's really roaring at times and sometimes it's even hard to stick that titanium tube made out of titanium because it can withstand the heat into that fumarole and you're just like okay I'm here I need to collect the sample and I got to do a good job because I don't want to mess up the sample but at the same time I want to stay alive I don't want to get burned I don't want to suffocate in the gas I don't want to crack through the sulfur to something that I don't know what is even below there all of these things are going through your head at the same time but I got to collect that sample in order to understand what's going on with this volcano so you do it you focus on just that and then you fully concentrate and then you collect that sample and it's the greatest thing because essentially you're taking something that would have just gone out into the air and vanished forever and you've captured that in your sample bottle and then you take that back to the lab and in the lab it's the same thing like I can't mess up this analysis because I can't go back there so there's a lot of value in that little bottle that you have and you feel really kind of special about having collected that thing and then we get a lot of information from that that helps us understand the volcanoes and once you're sampling all these gases like you said you don't want to suffocate so can you tell us about we've got sulfur dioxide you've got carbon dioxide what are the gases that you're sticking yourself into the middle of? well most of it is water vapor 90% is water vapor but you know water vapor is steam it's hot it can be like 300 degree hot that picture there that's Galilei walking that has 350 degree hot fumaroles so you have water you have carbon dioxide you have sulfur dioxide you have hydrochloric acid gas you have hydrofluoric acid gas you have other noble gases you have some nitrogen you have methane you have carbon monoxide you have hydrogen you have all these trace metals and gold, silver all of these things come out of the volcano in that gas phase and you can study all of that you can study different aspects of that and someone in the chat room earlier asked whether or not volcanoes have fingerprints that whether you can specifically identify based on the gas ratios a particular volcano or the particular stage yet that a volcano is in I'm going to let Martin answer that I was hoping you were going to answer that that's quite a difficult question actually different volcanoes their gas signature and their chemistry is largely determined by their location their setting what kind of tectonic setting they're on a volcano on a subduction zone or one that's at a hot spot or in a rift a place where plates are pulling apart or where plates are coming together for example those kinds of volcanoes have very distinct geochemical signatures but for example if you're looking at two volcanoes that are right next to each other they might have very similar geochemical signatures so there's this location aspect to their signature and then there's also the time aspect where these things change with time so what we're looking for when we are trying to predict a volcanic eruption for example is trying to tell where in their cycle the volcano is and so we're also trying to fingerprint that aspect of volcanic activity so you have these two things going on all at the same time the location and where they are in their cycle and you have to consider both of them when you're looking at data from any volcano right so you might be able to tell what type of setting it's in but maybe not which specific one it is yeah you kind of have to understand both in order to come to a conclusion about the processes that are driving eruptions and now we've talked a bit about the carbon aspect of the ratio and carbon does increase or does the carbon portion does it increase as we get closer to an eruption and is that some specific parameter that we can tune in on considering stations upon volcanoes around the world as we move into the future that go beep beep beep and let us know when something is hitting a threshold you know if it was that simple then we would know exactly what is going to happen but every volcano again has its own behaviour and so over the last few years we've seen volcanoes and they're almost right next to each other they're within 100 km of each other and at the one volcano we see the carbon to sulfur ratio that's what we're mostly monitoring is the ratio of carbon to sulfur and the gases we see the carbon to sulfur ratio go up before eruptions and at the other volcano we see the carbon to sulfur ratio go down before eruptions so it's quite difficult and you have to really consider every volcano as kind of its own personality almost and really get to know that volcano and how it behaves in order to then try to say something about what it's going to do in the future but then as soon as you think that you do know what it's going to do then its behaviour changes completely and you realise I need to start again and step back and everything that I thought I did know I don't know that's a great question that's a great thing what kind of data are you missing that you think would be the most helpful what type of an instrument if you could just invent it however impractical it might be right now would you create to be able to get maybe to help you do that a crystal bowl I don't know I think these ratios they are rooted in physical processes so that's kind of where we start so if you imagine a magma sitting at depth and it has gases dissolved in it and as that magma moves up then the gas that's the least soluble with pressure is going to come out first and that's usually carbon dioxide and so if you see an increase in the carbon dioxide emission then that could imply that magma is moving up so now something else can happen as that carbon dioxide and that sulfur moves up to the surface and maybe you have a hydrothermal system or a lake that will interact with these magmatic gases and will influence their ratios again because what you're sampling is just at the surface so when the gas travels from below towards the surface and it might encounter a hydrothermal system and that hydrothermal system might take away some of that sulfur but let the carbon go through but if you have a huge slug of magmatic gas coming up it might not care about this little lake up there and just blast through it so then you might see an increase of the sulfur to carbon ratio rather than the carbon to sulfur ratio before an eruption so all these observations that Martin is making are rooted in these physical processes but they're complex and if we want to really understand like if we want to have a super instrument I think one, there is not a silver bullet but I think what we need to be patient with and learn over time is that we need to have long-term observations with gas data with geophysical data tell us about earthquakes well is the magma actually moving volcano deforming all these different aspects come together and if we can synthesize that data and have experts that understand small parts of it and some people that understand most of it then maybe we can make progress and I know it's going to be different different places but how far down are we talking about this magma being I mean I guess it can be closer to the surface further down but how far up like for the two volcanoes that you're studying how far down is it that it would work its way up from so you know at Torielba for example you know just based on the gas compositions and gas solubilities in magma we can we can come up with a degassing model that explains the gas compositions that we see at the surface and when we do that we see that there are basically two different sources of gases two different sources of magmatic gas we see that there's one deep source which is at about 10 kilometers depth and there's another source of the gas which is at about 4 kilometers depth and so because my audience isn't completely familiar with kilometers 10 kilometers is about equal to 10,000 meters so that's correct but you know what Tobias was talking about I think is very important which is that we need to be looking at not just a kind of silver bullet magic instrument that looks at some key piece of data but that we integrate different types of data and that's where we can really tell where we can come up with a good picture of a volcano because just looking at the gases you can come up with a few different ideas of why those gas compositions might be changing but when you integrate those data with other geophysical data like inflation or deflation or seismic data then you can rule out a couple of those other possibilities and come up with hopefully a unique solution so for all of this is an overarching goal to understand more of the carbon cycle on our planet to understand how where the carbon deep within the earth how it's coming out where it's going in the atmosphere that aspect of the cycle or is it to predict earthquakes or not earthquakes eruptions someday Tobias well we are predicting eruptions that I mean forecast is maybe a better word but at Poas Volcano I think it's very convincing that the gas changes a few days before an eruption are very clear and the observatory is using that data to say hey let's close the park and then the eruption happens and then as I understand it the gas ratios go back down and they open the park look at the volcano hey very nice and then it changes again so for some places it works right and I think that's pretty convincing for others we still need to learn a lot more we need to instrument more but yeah wouldn't it be nice if we could forecast such eruptions and save some lives although that does take some of the fun out of visiting a volcano no I think it puts the fun right back in there it could erupt at any moment unbeknownst to it with no ability to protect that's the visiting a little bit more thrilling right that's why I'm living in the Pacific Northwest Justin you know the ring of thrill time every day right yeah I mean to comment on that you know actually having data that shows changes with eruptive activity is one thing but to be able to actually predict eruptions is quite a lot more difficult because there are a lot of human factors that come into it so we might have all of the data that we need but we still need to for example convince authorities that this data is showing something you know important and so there's a big part of this that comes down to communication and that's often times when there are large volcanic disasters it's because of poor communication or poor organization so you know the data is one thing the sciences is one thing we really need those data and the understanding in order to know what a volcano might do in the near future but organization protocols and that whole human side is also a big factor you have to convince the mayor the governor or whoever it is in charge that there's a very good reason to shut down the parade that you had scheduled that day or maybe put yourself on high alert and ready the boats get off the island or whatever it is at a moment you know and then nothing might happen and so then how do you get the level of preparedness the next time and if you're ignored the next time that's when it's definitely going to erupt because now nobody's paying attention that is a very key point and this is something that we're dealing with with Torielba volcano at the moment is that all of the eruptions that we've had so far are in the grand scheme of things really really small eruptions but every time that we see these precursors we think there's a big one finally here comes the big eruption but we have to be very careful in what we say because the economic consequences for example are large if you are suggesting that there's going to be a big eruption and then everybody should evacuate and abandon their properties abandon their farms the consequences are quite big and if you say the wrong thing and it doesn't happen then the next time you don't have the credibility to kind of give the same level of warning they say well the last time you said that but it didn't happen so you have to be very very careful in these things and it's definitely it definitely goes well beyond science absolutely Gaius, I know moving forward with the decade initiative you're reading off of a press release that you're looking at trying to triple the number of monitored earthquakes by 2019 do you think that's a reachable goal? well you know when we started in 2012 I think there were only two volcanoes in the world that were monitored continuously maybe margin correctly but I think there were only two volcanoes that were monitored with gas continuous gas monitoring instrumentation and both of them were in Italy right and so now we have added 9 to that and at the same time more other entities have started putting these instruments out there are a couple more that the Italians have put out Santorini and Hecla and Reunion for example in addition to Edna and Stromboli the USGS is now putting a lot of these instruments out the Cascades has an instrument Alaska has one and so we are getting to more more of these instruments that are being used at volcanoes so overall I think we're probably about at 15 or so including all of them and I think we can I hope we can get to 20 you know by the time we are done with the Decade Initiative so the Decade Initiative is great because we're doing all this but it's also showing other scientists that these are useful data and so they're kind of thinking about putting those same types of instruments on volcanoes so it's kind of perpetuating itself and if we can get different countries putting, monitoring stations, devices, systems in place and connecting to the database then that's going to add to accuracy for everyone so exactly that would be just fabulous I have many many more questions but you have already stayed much longer than I said this interview would last in my email and so I thank you very much Dr. Demour and also Tobias Fischer thank you so much for joining us today and giving us this information about the Decade Initiative and the Deep Carbon Observatory and Volcanoes in general we've learned so much good thank you so much for having us thank you yeah thanks for having us yeah thanks for stopping by yeah we have Tobias who left a dinner party and his guests have probably left and Martin who was on a volcano today just stop stopping by this is what happens on twist for any more information about this Deep Carbon Observatory and what they are doing you can go to deepcarbon.net and we will also have links in our show notes to interesting volcanology and I'm not saying volcanology like Star Trek Vulcans it's Volcano B-O-L Volcanology yes I just have to clarify that even though this is a science based program it must be clarified we will have all the links in the show notes and so I urge you to go there and continue exploration of Volcanoes eruptions that does it for the first half of this week in science please stay tuned for the second half we will be full with lots of science news stories we've got a lot coming up Blair's Animal Corner and the Nobel Prizes and pew pew pew among other stories so just a few moments we'll be back with more this week in science thanks guys thank you and so if you both want to stick around for a little longer you're more than welcome to but if you also want to hang up and head back to your lives this would be a great time to do it if you want to check out so thanks again it was really great having you on yeah thanks again yeah thank you guys wonderful meeting you both take care bye Martin see you next balloon fiesta alright everybody you know what I'm going to tell you about right now our Baltimore live show that's right this week in science is going to be live in Baltimore Maryland on November 4th sometime between 1-4pm at the Maryland STEM Festival opening ceremonies that's right we're taking part in the Maryland STEM Festival opening ceremonies it's going to be so much fun we have a jam 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really could not do this without you drive to the bookstore and blindly start trusting the miracles and cures all laid down in black ink never even bothering to stop and think real power that I do believe is the dollars and cents all these authors receive if miracle wonders were held in their looks precious time and try selling their books or sits and waits for your publishing if one has real power who needs real power and we are back with more this week in science what you got Kiki I have some stories that was a switcheroo how about we started out with some awards you know we love the awards last week was all about the egg no bells the funny science that people have done for various reasons is pretty humorous stuff this is the more serious science this is the science that has impacted human progress this is the science that has impacted our ability to understand this universe we live in in a very profound manner these are the no bell prizes that have been announced this week in Landau Switzerland so the no bell prize in physics was announced on a topic that on a topic that is topological oh yes and so I will quote here for theoretical discoveries of topological phase and topological phases of matter now topology in mathematics is the study of step-wise progressions so things that shift in a very step-by-step manner and in this way David Thules F. Duncan M. Haldane and J. Michael Kosterlitz have been awarded the no bell prize in physics for their work in that it helps us understand the phase transitions of matter much better especially those phase transitions related to semiconductor physics to magnetics and to things that don't usually affect us on a daily basis but that are going to affect our technology technological capabilities moving forward and our understanding of how the magnetic moments of atoms how the spins line up when bits of matter go from one type of matter say a liquid to a solid from a liquid to a crystal they change and that exact moment of the phase transition is something that is very important to understand because there's no kind of halfway about it it's a liquid and then it's a solid it's a phase transition and it's a step-wise process so it's all sorts of interesting stuff the no bell prize in chemistry and now this is one that I love is for the design and synthesis of molecular machines and this was awarded to Jean-Pierre Sauvage Sir Jay Fraser, Stoddart and Bernard L. Feringa for their work in creating tiny artificial muscles minuscule motors they've made molecular machines and these molecules have controlled or controllable movements that if you add energy to a system can actually perform a task and so these kinds of molecules exist say in the flagella of you know of a single-celled organism but we have never designed them until now so now we have these Nobel laureates who have taken the steps toward creating this machines Jean-Pierre Sauvage in 1983 succeeded in linking two ring-shaped molecules together to form a chain which he called a catanane and they were linked by a mechanical bond and so the next step was taken in 91 when Stoddart developed a rotaxane which he threaded a molecular ring onto a molecular axle and demonstrated that the ring was able to move along that axle yeah and then Feringa developed an actual molecular motor in which he got a rotor blade this is not a steel rotor blade this is molecules this is a molecule a rotor blade to spin continuously 10,000 times in the same direction spinning spinning spinning creating the world's smallest fan yeah and with molecular motors he is the smallest fan exactly he's rotated a glass cylinder that is thousands of times larger than the motor and he also designed a nano car because when we all go honey-eye shrunk kids that you know we all want that and then the final award was given in physiology for discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy you know what autophagy is no self-eating and this is actually a very important cellular process in which people bite the cuticles on their fingers no it's not anything about biting your cuticles or eating your hair or a snake eating its own tail no the oral address is not involved well I mean I guess technically autophagy self-eating Steve Everett in the chat room calls it recycling technically so it's this concept is a process in which cells break down molecules degrade them and use the parts again Steve Everett's right, recycle them for use again and again and again and so in the 90s Yoshinori Osumi used baker's yeast to identify genes essential for this process of autophagy and then he elucidated the underlying mechanisms for this process in yeast and he showed that humans have similar but a little bit more sophisticated machinery so he showed that this was degradation as a very common and important process and so those are the Nobel Prize Awards in Science I didn't get one this year you didn't get one and neither did women again oh again? I'm just gonna throw that out there free I wonder how many women had women working in their lab it's yeah right it's possible I do not know probably many of them had women working in their labs and so yes anywho come on boys club actually a lot of these awards we are talking about for some of these it was the 70s, the 80s, the 90s it takes a while for these things to get to this point yeah and we're talking about crisper Jennifer Doudna and Charpentier are women who are probably gonna be on the short list Nobel Prize at some point for crisper we just don't know when that's gonna end up happening but there are women around the world yeah this is sort of you know you look at what was it Title IX is that what it was called with the athletics and it wasn't an immediate impact but now you look at women dominating and the Olympics which you would not have seen if it wasn't for Title IX which again was back in the 70s sometimes so these policies aren't supposed well they would like to but they aren't going to have immediate impacts as we have changed our society big picture the trend will be going in the right direction yeah so I think that as we you know complain about oh the Nobel Prizes are not going to women often enough yet we're still looking at very I guess elemental or very basic discoveries that underlie things that happened decades ago and and hopefully we will see like Justin said as the processes in universities changed and more women became instrumental and also ran their own labs and became first authors on paper hopefully we will be seeing a shift in the proportions as the decades move forward absolutely the slow wave we must we must just ride this we shall have the Nobel oh yeah many many times many many many women not me personally but you know you never know it's not too late Blair that's right that's true alright Justin tell me how I'm being protected right now by antibiotics they are awesome millions of lives and quite possibly the number one reason for the reduction mortality rates since their discovery and they are dangerous as the microbes used them against us slowly and methodically adapting and evolving to make the antibiotic that we created to defeat them obsolete and because these antibiotics they're rather indiscriminate killers if you've ever taken a decent dose of you've probably felt it throughout your digestive system since you have to eat all that yogurt yeah you got to pick up the yogurt or the cottage cheese or something because these microbes are not they kill microbes that are not threatening but beneficial and even crucial to the healthy function of a human gut so they hurt us while they help us even and even that trade-off has a clock winding down to which end we will someday be at the mercy of every sort of malicious microbe that means to do a sin all over again it'll be like the dark ages I've got the vapers which one it doesn't matter there's nothing that can treat it unless unless we find a way to defend ourselves and while there are many looking for new ways some clever scientists look for other other ways that wasn't so much new but was the way the immune system has been already doing it for many millions of years beneficial microorganisms with the potential to deliver the benefits of antibiotics without killing off beneficial microorganisms and destroying that system that was is really designed to be part of our immune system right a pair of papers recently published in science and science immunology by researchers at the Rockefeller University is looking into this direction they discovered that an enzyme produced by a common intestinal microbe can protect the guts of worms and mice from bad bacteria the researchers set out to investigate the probiotic potential of the microbe enterococcus facium in the roundworm C. elegans as well as mice although enterococcus facium has long been used as a probiotic in livestock how it works wasn't really clear they knew that there's beneficial outcome so they continued to do it but they didn't really understand why it worked and it turns out you can't just apply this to humans you can't just start putting this in humans according to Kavita Rangan the first author of the science paper E. facium readily acquires antibiotic resistance in hospital settings and can lead to dangerous infections in people who already have a compromised immune system yet series of experiments Rangan and her colleagues demonstrated her colleagues demonstrated that when fed E. facium the worm was better able to resist the harmful effects of infection by salmonella and intestinal pathogen that in mammals invades a thin layer of the epithelial cells lining up the guts so it goes in there it invades and then you get disease salmonella was still able to colonize the intestine says Rangan but it didn't cause the same tissue damage to the worms it didn't kill them but why what's more they also discovered that a particular enzyme called SAGE A or I'm going to call it SAGA which is created in abundance by E. facium was sufficient to protect both worm and mice from salmonella they showed that SAGA worked in magic and mice even when produced by a different microbe an entire inoculus bug that is commonly used as probiotic for human intestinal diseases which naturally inhabits environments ranging from sauerkraut maybe this is one of those probiotic things everyone talks about eating foods that are beneficial to the bacteria in your gut some sauerkraut plantarum is the microbe that was also able to create the enzyme SAGA the series of complementary experience other colleagues from other universities also showed that E. facium protected mice and salmonella additionally they demonstrated that E. facium prevented the pathogen from passing through the epithelium and invading other organs such as the liver those experiments proved that E. facium did not protect the mice by attacking salmonella or by changing the balance of other microbes in the gut it didn't do those sorts of things that we usually look at right it doesn't kill the bacteria and it doesn't deplete the microbiota either it just prevents them from causing disease again though it's sort of like with the livestock it goes in it works we kind of know what sort of the particulars but we still don't know how it works but she explains it does this this is the drill down by stimulating the production of specialized proteins that prevent pathogens from coming into contact with the epithelial layer in the first place proteins that are generated by the epithelial cells themselves so you have a microbe that creates an enzyme protein that then allows the body to use those proteins to protect itself because there's a symbiotic relationship built in over multi-millions of years of evolution between gut microbiota and the human cat Saga by itself was sufficient to protect the mice from the ravages of salmonella more striking the what was it the lactobacillus planetarium was also creating saga that protected mice against C. difficile which is the C. difficile is a it's a very tricky one because it can hide from most antibiotics because it goes into this sort of like eggy shell stage in which you can kill off a bunch of it but there's these sort of little eggs that are going to re-hatch and you're going to get reinfection that takes place it sickens about a half a million people in the United States each year and it kills almost 30,000 of us every year so if this can be and it's one that is on the high alert because it is becoming more and more immune to the antibiotics that we use it's one of those if you've got so they pull out the biggest, baddest, meanest antibiotic that we've got on the books which also tends to wipe out the rest of your gut immunity system so if we can use if we can somehow now utilize a natural gut microbiota element then maybe help it a little maybe find a way to enhance its ability to do what it already does and then we can have stumbled upon a true probiotic that can be also an antibiotic at the same time I love it I think the more that we can use how the bacteria interact among themselves how microbes interact with each other to our benefit that's just it's going to help maybe a layer of this it's not in what I read I mean if you can somehow just generate the enzyme and introduce the enzyme will that be enough to create more of these proteins that allow the gut to do what it needs to do or is it to just create the proteins I mean I don't know which part of this chain of events that we're witnessing we actually want to utilize to interact with to get this result but it's very promising it's incredibly promising you know this is a story last week or a week before about some young woman who's also come up with an idea of using like little spiky synthetic molecules to destroy bacteria and everybody on Facebook was really excited about it and I just remembered looking at it and going it's just another thing an idea that somebody has in a lab that they have to actually test it and they have to determine that it's going to they have to go through all the proving ground they have to show that they can manufacture it at scales large enough for us to use in public health applications and I just felt myself getting so pessimistic about it but for some reason I am more optimistic about this one well I know I'm more optimistic about it because it's founded in nature it's we are ourselves in an arms race with with with disease and in particular with bacteria and I'm not surprised to hear that within our own bodies there is a microscopic arms race going on that we could tap into without making super bugs in the process and here's an important aspect of that too and I love that point because in that arms race there are there's two ways that we can gain an advantage one is that that pathogen that can overcome our bodies natural defenses kills the host and therefore doesn't spread so when the sea deficit or whatever bacterium is microbiota is out there or pathogen that's out there it should kill off the host and do so in a way that it doesn't spread and we are much better about not allowing the diseases of the dead to spread to the living so that's one way of gaining advantage the other is you defeat it but you defeat it within that body within that system so that the possibility of a mutation or an evolution or adaptation by that pathogen also doesn't get to leave and this is the more preferable version which is we defeat it within the body using the body's natural defenses and that way prevent it from spreading as well which is a happier outcome than just letting all the people with the disease die right I like we like happy outcomes here we really do alright let's see should we move towards Blair's Animal Corner I have some amazing stories about bees I love bees what do you think smart not so smart well adapted I think being a bee would require a level of a good level of intelligence and organization a little bit more perhaps than like I think I'd be really stressed if I was a bee because it's all this like okay wait what did the buzz to the left mean there's a little shake of the thing that's the giving directions part where they've been they don't have to worry about that bees are like OCD I got that and I'm going to repeat that and I'm going to do it 15 times before I leave again bees have a lot going on related to memory and sensation which we talk a lot about on the show but today I want to talk about something much more complex than that Queen Mary University of London in UK actually did a study with bees to teach them how to pull a string to get a sugar water reward let me explain that again so they had artificial flowers with sugar water in them they put these flowers under plexiglass and they trained bumble bees to pull the strings to access this sugar water now that my amazement with this is two fold one you can train bees two you can train bees to pull a string to get sugar water so I did kind of deeper to find out what the methodology of this was because I was fascinated how do you train a bee so they presented individual bees with three blue artificial flowers with a string attached to each flower under the plexiglass they learned to associate the reward with artificial flowers in a flight arena so not as part of this plexiglass situation prior to string pulling training but before they were trained none of the bees from any of the colonies in which individuals were tested could solve the string pulling task in a first five minute attempt so they were naive to the string task but attracted the artificial flowers they tried to reach the reward from the top of the table but couldn't figure out to pull the string so then they were able to I'm just trying to imagine how strong the bees have to be to pull a string and it's string is probably thread it's probably thread right it's small it's thread but these are bees with the little tiny legs but they're also as strong as they need to right so they trained 23 of 40 individuals through a stepwise training procedure so they had four steps with incremental difficulty the flowers the strings are placed at more distant positions under the transparent table so first they just reached right in and grabbed the reward then it was placed farther in they had to kind of pull it out a little bit and then they pulled it out more and more on average the successful training took about 309 plus or minus 18 minutes so if you do the math that's about 5 hours they gained access to the reward in the final step which required them to grasp the string of four legs and or mannables pulled it in closer and so after this they were trained successfully to pull the string to get the reward now that's not the end of this study that's just the beginning this is stage 1 after this they took these individuals that were trained to pull a string to get the reward and they put them in with bees that had never had this training to see what happened and they found that bees watching bees that had never had this watching a bee that was trained how to pull the string and get the reward were able to learn how to do it and that the new skill would continue to spread through kind of telephone even after the original trained bee had died so this is social learning in bees of a trained behavior that's fascinating does this indicate that because of say like the waggle dance and the way that they the way that they teach each other the location of nectar of flowers of food sources that they do this already in such a way that maybe it would I guess their brain, their ganglion their neural ganglia is set up for this kind of learning I think social learning already to observe other individuals to be able to get a food reward any animal that lives in a colony is going to be predisposed to more social thinking and observation based learning on top of that any species that communicates information other than just show and tell are probably going to be better wired for a show and tell type situation one would assume but it is fascinating that they maintained this kind of social learning after the individual trained animals passed you are talking slower because you are trying really hard not to anthropomorphize this probably I'm also just perplexed here isn't it okay to say that a bee brain can learn yes absolutely absolutely we are going to get even more anthropomorphic with bees in a second I think part of part of the we should not worry about the vernacular too much of anthropomorphizing them as thinking learning and communicating even to go so far as to see that bees can talk to each other and it might not be the talking that we would consider talking but that is only because we don't speak bee right if we spoke bees and suddenly thrown into bee world we would really need to learn how to talk bee to figure out what is going on where is everybody going what are we doing today and what do you do with this string and I think it is okay because part of a lot of what humans do is already there in nature it is not so much that we created or invented the ability to communicate as human beings it is there in the animal kingdom already just perhaps taking it to a next level and that is exactly what the main author of the study mentions as well is that in this view a single task that actually requires a big brain has not yet been discovered and indeed there is more and more evidence both from experiments on small brain insects and computational neuroscience that small circuits can deal with exceptionally complex challenges and that is Lars Chitka from Queen Mary University of London UK so it is definitely this means that bees have the ability to learn by observation it means they have problem solving skills that maybe we did not realize at first the main reason that I found this so fascinating is that when I was first learning about corvids and how smart they are you always talk about this one study about a piece of rope to get a treat and that other birds can't figure out this particular challenge with a rope but the corvids can and this reminded me of that so much that you can test so much about an animals problem solving skills just by a piece of rope with a treat at the end and speaking of treats treats so bees as we were just talking about they love their sugar sugar water is their jam and the recent study indicates that potentially that sugar is giving those bees a lot of great things in particular something that potentially has to do with emotion here's the sticky anthropomorphization you were talking about Justin so sticky haha so again from university or from London from Clint Perry at the University of London they had bees that were given a 60% sucrose reward and they watched the state of the bee afterwards they found a positive effective state in the bees they flew faster to a cylinder that potentially had a treat than bees that had never had a reward before which they indicate something to do with optimism they were more likely to fly I know but if they had never had sugar water they flew slowly to each place that had water if they had had sugar water they flew lickety-split to the next place where there might be sugar water so they say that this means they're more optimistic about ambiguous situations or maybe they just really wanted some sugar to be motivated yes the quote sugar-buzzed bees also appeared to recover faster from a scare they caught them briefly and released them to mimic as if they were attacked by a predator spider the bees that had not indulged in the sweet treat recovered much slower from the scare I was well getting eaten by a spider sweet food increases what they consider to be potentially positive emotions and improves negative mood in these bees these are the things that they found in humans in previous studies in crying and grimacing newborns in response to a verse of stimuli with the sugar so they're suggesting that this sucrose solution has a positive emotion like state in bees as a result and so it's possible that makes the world go round I've solved many a problem with a well-timed cookie yeah so the possibility of insect consciousness is now the topic of exciting new theories and vigorous debate because it's possible that they have these emotion like states in response to sugar my question is do they get sugar crashes because I get those pretty terribly yeah well I mean that's a really great question and one which science and why aren't there why isn't there a bee diabetes epidemic at this point diabetes and on that note I'm going to keep moving forward in the stories Justin what you got please move along oh it's me again I thought we were moving along and it turns out I got to bring a story okay archaeologists the world over have been looking for the same thing no it isn't the lost ark or the temple of doom no it isn't an extinct hominid giant race that used to have megalithic societies before us or even ancient aliens no it isn't even the sunken city of atlantis or evidence of modern day time travelers who got stuck backwards in time and yet managed to somehow car vaguely wrist watch or airplane looking hieroglyphics into a wall but failed to sign it JB from Chicago go bears which would have been really interesting and a sign that perhaps there were backward time travelers well any of these would be really mind blowing discoveries what archaeologists really seek is nothing short of these they seek a discovery of a lifetime an intact time capsule undisturbed by nature's forces or looters luck and at the University of Cincinnati researchers made just such a discovery near a pylos an ancient city on the southwest coast of Greece what they uncovered there was the tone of a bronze age affluent mysian 3,500 years ago it was and it was filled with well they actually the discovery was about a year ago but the doom is 3,500 years old and it's filled with this particular array of precious jewelry weapons riches artifacts many many of them as well as the well preserved remains of what is believed to have been a very powerful mysian warrior or priest in his early to mid 30s there's like they found like 2,000 plus objects in this this is let's see they were it's sherry stalker and jack davis this is a husband and wife team of archaeologists who led the discovery made the discovery and they're actually going to reveal the findings that they're calling the griffin warrior tomorrow so thursday october 6th for those of you not playing at home at the american school of classical studies in Athens Greece so there's going to be an unveiling ceremony I'm not sure how soon we get start to get pictures of these artifacts but I'm really excited because it seems like they've got okay so the cache of archaeological goodies include 2,000 objects or a raid on and around the body including four solid gold rings silver cups precious stone beads fine tooth ivory combs and intricately built sword amongst many other weapons yeah this is a so the skeleton is dubbed griffin warrior for the discovery and ivory plaque adorned with a griffin some mythical beast body of a lion head and wings of an eagle a significant number of the artifacts found in the warrior's grave were made by the Minoans who don't live where the Mycinians live they live across the water on the island of Crete and at one point they were sort of a high point of affluence and culture in fact a lot of their findings kind of like these four rings that they found and very much like these four rings people through the years have doubted their authenticity because the engravings are so fine they're so tiny and so fine in these gold rings like others that they've found that it was thought to be impossible to have been created in the Bronze Age right so this is the artifacts that they found are almost entirely from the Minoans who were on the island of Crete which is southeast of Pylos but not connected culturally to the Mycinians so this is they're also you know timing this is when the Mycinians were sort of becoming a more dominant force in raiding looting and pillaging the Minoans so this is right at the sort of high point of power shift in the region and the Mycinians sort of become what we know today as the Greeks so this is a sort of prehistoric Greek and this is also sort of the age in which the myths of Greek mythology were really starting to become formative this is the eras back to which Homer was referring when he's telling his tales of the sort of prehistory of the Greeks this is what he's talking about this sort of age right here and what's very interesting about this the Stocker and Davis the married researchers are also sort of pointing out that you know it's more than just a cache of loot and they refer specifically it's not like Blackbeard's loot of a Spanish galleon or something of this nature that this is being grown it's actually showing the affinity for the culture of the Minoans or sort of an accepting of or a partaking because these are Minoan artifacts that are being held close and in sort of a proper context around the grave of this priest or warrior Mycinian so it's showing in a way a snapshot of a transfer of culture from one group to another that then becomes the bedrock of the mythology of the Greeks going forward it's a very fascinating find I can't wait to look sort of deeper into and see more of these artifacts as they become available there's one ring I think that's what she had up there one ring that they've had on exhibit for about a year since they first found it that they're going to start to bring and if it sounds familiar the Minoans is also the source of the Minotaur mythology and the society had a large affinity in their culture for the bull as well as a sort of elaborate maze of the architecture leading up to the the palace I guess where that was getting raided there's the maze and the bull imagery that later shows up in Greek mythology as the Minotaur so it's all very rooted in this and it's also very interesting too on other levels because a lot of this what became the Greek culture their foundation of it then led to what is sort of the foundation of much of modern western society so getting at the origins and the roots of how the the pre-Greek mythologies and society structures started it's really fascinating I think it's amazing I mean we have so many examples throughout history of one culture kind of being absorbed or the cultural stories as one culture takes over getting taken in to that to the new society and it's neat to actually put like physical objects behind this hypothesis now we can actually show that this happened and also because you know this is also somewhat of a unique find because Mycenaean burials were a lot of the time sort of group burials like you would have a kind of like an area where you bury all the family and so you would have all of their collective belongings sort of showing up in there and it was very difficult to say well where was this person's status versus that person's status and who did this bit of treasure or artifact belong to here you have one individual with a pretty decent cache of objects that you can directly attribute to that individual and so it makes back engineering how that individual of some power and esteem you would assume was nostalgic towards or had an affinity towards specific objects it's also a nice plain capsule that way in that it's more of a you can sort of connect it to the individual who was buried where that's usually very difficult in those that they found plus in contrast to a I believe it was maybe it was a Mayan dig site or something in South America that I was reading about recently where they dug the trenches and they were starting meticulous work of getting ready to do their dig and they come back to the site the next day and it's been sort of brutally dug up and they don't know what's been taken what was found what was taken but it's sort of ruined both their ability to date things by layer plus whatever artifacts you know so the looting of archeological sites these you know throughout history has been continuing constant pressure on archeologists to find something and here we have his site with 2000 plus objects and a largely intact specimen or skeleton that was there fantastic site almost pretty much unheard of in the modern era in fact the Greek historical society of Greece or whatever it was called says this is the greatest find in the last 65 years in Greece which is it's really saying something yeah bread basket of history right yeah I've got a story Pew Pew Pew Pew Research Center has another survey 1500 United States adults they say it's a nationally representative sample that was conducted between May 10th and June 6th 2016 so it's very recent in date and it covered but the politics of climate and I'm really going to say that the results are not surprising and they pretty much are the same that results have always been for these kinds of holes you hope that there was some shift or improvement yeah not so much I mean the the main results suggest that trust in climate scientists is incredibly low among conservative republicans higher among liberal democrats things related to climate science are basically split along party lines however there is a general trust by everyone science and scientists it's just when you get into this specific hot button issue which we have discussed many times before that politics and the the political mind tends to change the way that people look at or answer particular questions so questions asking whether climate scientists should have a major role in policy decisions conservative republicans say 48% of conservative republicans say yes this is true whereas 80% of liberal democrats think this is true leading to an average of 67 only 67 only about two thirds of US adults think that climate science scientists people who work in climate science and are experts in this topic should have a major role in policy decisions there's a little bit of a reasoning behind that too because there was a shift with the republicans at least with Mitt Romney where he was one of these who wasn't going to say science is wrong but they changed the argument against or at least he changed it for some segment of the republican party too yes climate change is taking place it's man made but why would we shut down our economy completely it'd be too harmful to our economy to take it on we need to eat and to have a heat and to do these things so it's too bad but we're not going to be able to take those steps without crippling our economy so let's not take them so there could be at least as begrudgingly as it has been there could be more and more belief reluctantly acceptance of climate change science on the right politically but still not a desire to do anything about it so that's going to be that disconnect there well I think it's important to remember too that the certain politicians might believe in it but decided it's not important to talk about but then that trickles down into a disconnect where the people who want to hear those conversations of it not being important interpret it as it not happening but it's also the last time I interrupted sorry it'll be quite a bit also as we will progress with climate change it's going to affect people who live coastily or populations that affect coastly affect everywhere well you got your Florida's near-tax system the whole south but the point is larger population density areas are going to be affected by this now if you're in a rural state which is a lot of what the right controls politically and ideologically those changes are going to affect there too but it's less people and it can be mitigated with words when you're in large Monsuni, Droughty, Monsuni population density centers the political views are going to change quicker so it's not going to be immediate but climate change is it's like it's science it's going to prove itself yeah so but it's it is interesting many in the United States expect negative effects and life changes due to climate change however when we talk about whether scientists understand climate scientists themselves understand whether climate change is occurring 18% of conservative Republicans agree with that statement versus 68% of liberal Democrats when they're asked whether climate scientists understand the best ways to address climate change 8% of conservative Republicans agree in only 36% of liberal Democrats so even you know liberal Democrats are saying well you know climate scientists might understand what's going on but they don't they don't think climate scientists necessarily have a handle on how to fix it either yeah and then when we talk about the causes of climate change the climate scientists can be trusted a lot to give full and accurate information on causes of climate change 15% of conservative Republicans agree with that statement versus 70% of liberal Democrats so again we're talking about the trust of the source of information and then when when it's drilled down into discovering the influence climate scientists research findings are influenced by a blank most of the time best available scientific evidence 9% Republican conservative Republicans 55% of liberal Democrats concern for the best interest of the public that's 7% of conservative Republicans 41% liberal Democrats scientists desire to advance their careers 16% Republican 57% liberal Democrat what? a lot of people think that I'm actually surprised that Republicans weren't like 100% that's all they're about only 60% so like 84% believe that they don't want to advance their careers and then it continues or they didn't really answer the questions so for that only 20% of moderate Republicans answered that question in that manner it's interesting though so the science only 11% of conservative Republicans agree that conservative scientists research findings are influenced by the scientists own political leanings and the majority was 23% agreed that it was influenced by the researchers desire to help their industries which I think is interesting these are the two organizations that created a reality show instead of a political ideology debate system you know what I can't I won't curse but I feel like I should curse in the direction things are very polarized that's it things are incredibly polarized and it's unfortunate too because political parties could be and should be utilized as fantastic transfers of information because the news media isn't going to do it and it's they're not doing that they're and it's just both sides equally equally guilty the GOP put out an announcement of how well their candidate had done in the vice presidential debate several hours before the debate took place right now I heard about this both sides are locked into whatever it is they're going to say regardless of what goes on around them so they're useless absolutely useless in terms of information transfer yeah alright let's keep moving on this show is moving on so let's keep this science rolling tell me about conveyor belts they keep rolling on did I do a story on that I don't know if I actually have a you put it in the rundown I must have it let's see oh yes we were talking about the Atlantic conveyor belt I thought you were talking about like Henry Ford creating the work no this is the ocean circulation responsible for England's mild climate appears to be slowing down we've talked about this before in the show how London is far north is Juno Alaska but thanks to the Atlantic conveyor of heat from the tropics remains nice in Englandy instead of being frozen which most of its year the effect has consequences for the climates of eastern North America and western Europe however unlike theories of long-term climate change these recent trends are not connected with the melting of the Arctic sea ice in the buildup of freshwater near the pole now instead they seem to be connected the shifts in the southern end of the planet according to recent University of Washington study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters so the slowdown is actually happening very gradually but it seems to be happening like predicted according to Katherine Kelly oceanographer at University of Washington's applied physics laboratory this was the prediction you would sort of have this freshwater melt off from the North Pole Arctic cap and all that freshwater would be desalinizing the northern Atlantic and also creating a little making it a little bit colder and that would slow down the conveyor belt and so you would have freezing temperatures kind of starting to show up in London and New York and that's not what's happening although the conveyor belt is slowing down nonetheless it's sort of interesting and it makes me want to kind of go back and figure out how they came up with their prediction so what the study looked at from satellites and ocean sensors off Miami in fact what's known as the Atlantic overturning circulation for more than a decade and it shows definite slowdown since 2004 looking at other observations determining cause researchers ruled out what had been the prime suspect massive melting and freshening in North Atlantic and that would also stop water from sinking put the brakes on the overturning circulation it appears Cody voice that this 10-year slowdown is not related to salinity Kelly said despite more ice melt surface water in the Arctic is getting saltier and denser because there's less precipitation the rain isn't coming down as much that means a slowdown cannot possibly be due to salinity it's just backwards the North Atlantic has been getting saltier instead the authors saw a surprising connection with the current around the southern tip of South Africa which is known as the Agulis current warm Indian ocean water flows south along the African coast and around the continent tip toward the Atlantic but then makes a sharp turn back to join the stormy southern circumbola current warm water that escapes into the Atlantic around the Cape of South Africa is this Agulis leakage new research shows the amount of leakage changes the kind of heat transported northward by the overturning circulation the slowdown of the Gulf Stream and brought our overturning circulation for whatever reason would bring less warm water to the eastern North America, western Europe any effects it says are actually being overwhelmed by the overall warming due to global warming so the prediction that the conveyor belt was going to slow down is tracking the amount that they said it would slow down but for a completely completely different reason taking place on a completely different end of the globe so it's kind of, this is sort of interesting because this makes me wonder how they came up with that prediction in the first place and it sort of I wonder if it was if you look at past many ice ages and the like that affected northern Europe and you know that the conveyor belt changed and you try to figure out how that changed you're back engineering it and they came up with a way in which that could have happened perhaps and maybe that model that they created could work if it took place that way but because, but they got the rate right it's just they got the cause wrong they got the cause wrong and the fact like you said that overall heat transfer because everything is heating up generally that's overwhelming portions of the model as well correct correct so London may stay Londony not really balmy at all silver lining or not frozen because that could have been the thing under a glacier without that conveyor belt functioning so yeah so we might want to zap the conveyor belt to keep it working maybe but would you zap your brain with electricity that depends don't I already do that not coffee maybe no so I've talked about this before on the show T DCS transcranial direct current stimulation basically it is a therapy in which you take a cathode and an anode and you stick them to different places on your head and then you run low level current into your brain the idea is that by putting the cathode and the anode in different locations basically it's going to be sending an electrical current into your brain to pinpoint a particular region of your brain and induce magnetic current in the neurons that would allow them to induce action potentials or specifically it's an electric current that just zaps your neurons and gets them working but nobody has ever really done a study to see exactly how it works there are people doing DIY T DCS at home they've got these little stimulation devices that they buy online and they zap in their heads to improve their memory or zapping their heads to improve their alertness instead of drinking coffee but nobody knows how this method works and so some researchers Danny Wang and his team professor of neurology at the USC Mark & Mary Stevens neuro imaging and informatics institute developed an MRI method so magnetic magnetic resonance imaging method where they looked at or looked for magnetic fields induced by T DCS currents and could visualize them in living human brains so they published their study in scientific reports this week and what they showed is that this some researchers have suggested different different current levels to actually be able to get it to work so there's been a debate about whether 1 to 2 milliamps is sufficient and this can actually 1 to 2 milliamps can actually create a tingling sensation in your skin so it's a question of whether that's enough to actually travel through the skin through the skull deep into your brain a New York University researcher tested this once on a cadaver and said they didn't measure any current in the brain when they used 1 to 2 milliamps and suggested that 4 milliamps is required and that is potentially depending on the stun gun could be the equivalent of a stun gun discharge right so do you really want to be using 4 milliamps on your brain to stimulate neurons to fire and so where do I get out of it surprise yeah so basically they validated they validated this methodology they first used a phantom so they found the current path and they induced magnetic fields and they knew exactly what they were and then they and then they used a human calf so a bunch of muscle a calf muscle and then they repeated it on 12 volunteers putting them in the MRI to be able to see 20-30 minutes in the scanner under TDCS stimulation they found that the current entered the body and the brain so there is a current being that is eliciting magnetic fields within the brain and so what Wang says the researcher who's in charge he's saying that TDCS necessarily you don't want to apply so much stimulation that you cause neurons to fire what it's doing is creating a magnetic environment from the current that makes it more or less likely for neurons to fire more or less right depending on the neurons and depending yeah it depends on the area of the brain it depends on the neurons themselves yeah so basically now we have a verified technique which can potentially start doing something and now we can start determining more exactly what the TDCS is doing in specific areas of the brain when it is applied yeah so anyway first study that's actually saying oh look the electrical current does go into the brain oh good job people there you go we did it right when I electrocute myself it hurts my brain conky in the chat room I once attached a DCL to the top and bottom of my braces pro tip don't ever do that but salty love your experimental nature I do the curiosity that drove you it's like I just gotta see what would happen I just gotta try yeah yeah yeah yeah gotta try sometimes you gotta try things but yeah don't try that uh Blair you got a story yeah hammerhead swim funny yeah what they bought the big heads and yeah so they look funny they also swim funny um Dr. Yuki Watanabe associate professor at the National Institute of Polar Research in Japan and his international colleagues found that great hammerhead sharks Spirna Mokaran swim on their sides at roll angles of approximately 60 degrees so 90 degrees would be completely sideways so it's not quite that but these sharks they were fitted with electronic tags and they found that they alternated between rolling to the left and to the right and every 5 to 10 minutes but they didn't know why so they built a morphologically accurate model of a hammerhead shark and conducted a series of fluid dynamic experiments as you do they found that when the sharks rolled they had their very long dorsal fins which are the fins on their back produced lift forces like airplane wings so by going to the side they avoided sinking and they were able to continue swimming at minimum energy expenditure so the hammerheads have this unique way of swimming to reduce the energetic costs of swimming it's not because they have a hard time seeing because their eyes are so really far apart no there are lots of other interesting ideas about hammerheads you know being sensitive to really super sensitive to magnetic fields and using those magnetic fields and their navigation to be able to go from seamount to seamount so it's neat to know that they're also developing this that they have also developed this energy efficient swimming style it's all about the cost benefits what are we going to do? identity 4 in the chat room points out Blair I bet the hammerhead shark thinks you look funny probably does probably does let's see someone let's see Fada wanted me to give a quick run down on the Blue Origin story this week so everyone talks about SpaceX but Jeff Bezos company Blue Origin is also launching rockets and has basically been telling everybody that they expected their new shepherd rocket to blow up it was going through an in-flight launch escape test and then it didn't blow up it landed that's a showman that's a hype man it landed just fine our rocket is definitely going to blow up and the most spectacular explosion much better than the SpaceX explosion it'll be bigger, more firebally and then everybody watched it and was like it just worked it just worked they separated the crew capsule from the new shepherd booster at 16,000 feet and this is a critical test to be sure that the capsule would be safe for humans because one of the next steps is to put people on these reusable rockets right the crew capsule made the separation and the booster landed and so did the capsule the parachutes were great everything was perfect so good job Blue Origin thanks for surprising everybody apparently themselves although I don't believe it for a second I think that was brilliant marketing that's what I think that was right, that's the showman marketing that's right additionally my final story has to do with telomeres we do love the telomere stories give me all the telomeres do you think that either of you experienced a lot of stress as children well I was a younger sibling and my older brother played football so you can guess perhaps yes I was a child of danger and adventure but I wouldn't put stress in there any trouble with the police before 18 repeating a school grade parental use of drugs or alcohol or physical abuse yeah all of this and that's why I say I was stress free and it was all in stride according to a study published in the national academy of sciences in which 4,598 people age 50 and older took part in the University of Michigan's health and retirement study these individuals filled out multiple questionnaires on potentially impactful childhood and adulthood adversities and they were either catarized categorized as financial or social traumatic events basically so the adversities I listed were childhood adversities, adult adversities included the death of a close family member being the victim of a physical attack, firing a weapon in combat and a job layoff so first off I'm going to before I get to the results of this survey of adults is that these are self reported answers to questionnaires which we know self reported results are faulty because people have terrible memories and they also like to remember things a particular way so also I can tell you right off the bat before you even get to the results if they just made it one questionnaire I wouldn't find but multiple questionnaires would have caused me to be stressed cursing under my breath like why couldn't they have just done this in one shot why are they I have to keep getting other forms and filling this and it's a different system now it's a one to five instead of ABC like why did they do this to me anyhow basically if you had stress when you were a child it is going to affect the odds of having short telomeres after age 50 so and it's limited to social and or traumatic but not financial incidents because what do kids care about money but it is adverse events during childhood are associated with an 11% increased odds of decreasing the ends of your telomeres after age 50 whereas any lifetime adversity like overall your whole life is associated with decreasing their length by 6% the odds of having shorter telomeres increased by 6% so I'm just wondering I mean they're talking about talking to these people in adulthood getting to them to self report and I think there's some issues with this study I hope they go forward to look into issues such as by the time you're 50 or 60 you've probably at some point maybe in your 30s or 40s started to try to live a better life maybe than you did when you were in your 20s maybe you're looking mortality in the face and you're going to yoga more days a week maybe you're eating better stop drinking we don't know what the effect is of actually changing your behaviors as you get older and maybe this is a correlate to dwelling on past stresses and having shorter telomeres the longer your telomeres you're like yeah that was fine well I would think there's also a sweet spot in this that if you don't have any stressors that's not necessarily a good thing either at least in the animal world we see this that if an animal doesn't have any stressors then they're less fit for future stressors when they're older so I would think there has to be some sort of bell curve here because if you're not getting stressors that also means you might not be in as good of physical shape or there's lots of other things involved if you're given everything that you ever need I know this is something that we deal with animals and captivity a lot is you can't have everything come to the animal perfectly all the time it's not good for you either so a lack of stress is also stressful a lack of stress is also stressful exactly so there has to be kind of a sweet spot in this I would think so end note is stress affects your telomeres maybe stress in childhood affects your telomeres more than stress when you're an adult we don't know for sure but this study indicates that's a possibility lack of or shorter telomeres could affect your longevity but you know maybe just lay off the french fries and have a salad every once in a while wait what did we already determined your life oh that's right burning down anyway so it's all predetermined and you know what live for today people live for today tomorrow may not come even if you've got the long term telomeres and the genetics could go 120 years I'm going to put my brain in a robot so there hit that bus and have your brain point to a robot plus plus plus they're getting to the point where they think maybe the human longevity thing is kind of already at its maximum I can't there's a story I saw but didn't bring but there was some talk from the age researcher people which is also a good sign that we're about to have a really big breakthrough in the next decade or so that's going to make human life like the average be 250 years because every time anybody ever in science has ever said we're at the limit of anything this is it done break on through break on through the other side we just go right through I'm going full crying it's going to be great full crying awesome all right you guys we have reached the end of another show just like Justin's working on reaching the ends of his telomeres oh my goodness and it's time for me to say thank you to our patreon sponsors my favorite people these are by far my favorite people thank you to Chris Clark Paul Disney, G Burton Lattimore, Dave Frydel, John Ratnaswamy Richard Onimus, Byron Lee, EO Jared Lysette, Ulysses Adkins, Kevin Parachan Andy Keith Corsell, Jake Jones Eric Schwalb, Bob Calder, Mark Mazaros Ed Dyer, trainer 84 Eric Leila Marshall-Clark, Charlene Hadry Don Kamarachka, Larry Garcia Randy Mazuka, Tony Steele Steve DeBell, Haroon Surang, Melissa Moseley Alex Wilson, Jason Schneiderman Rudy Garcia, Greg Guthman, Dave Naver Jason Dozier, Matthew Litwin Eric 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show, once again we're going to be broadcasting live online at 8 p.m. Pacific Time and we will also have an interview with someone from the Maryland library system who will be talking about the importance of libraries in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics also helping us to ramp up for our live show in Baltimore So you can join us on twist.org slash live You can watch and also join the chat room live. Don't worry about it next week You can find all of our past episodes at twist.org slash youtube or twist.org Thank you for enjoying the show! Twist is also available as a podcast Just google this week in science anywhere in your iTunes directory Or if you have a mobile type device you can look for twist number 4 droid app in the android marketplace or simply this week in science in anything apple market placey Justin, what's a podcast? For more information on anything you've heard here today show notes will be available on our website that's at www.twist.org What's that website? www.twist.org One more time? www.twist.org where you can also make comments and start conversations with the hosts and other listeners Or you can contact us directly Justin at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com Justin at twistminion or Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org Just be sure to put twist D-W-I-S somewhere in your subject line or your email maybe spam you can also hit us up on the twitter where we are at twistscience at Dr. Kiki at Jackson Fly and at Blair's Menagerie We love your feedback to cover a dress a suggestion for an interview a haiku that comes to you in the night please let us know We'll be back here next week and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news And if you have learned anything from the show remember It's all in your head This week in science This week in science It's the end of the world So I'm setting 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This week in science This week in science Science I've got a laundry list of items I want to address from stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness I'm trying to promote more rational thought and I'll try to answer any question you've got Cause I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one hour a week This week in science is coming your way You better just listen to what we say and if you learn anything from the words that we've said then please just remember it's all in your head Cause it's this week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science People once thought the sun exerted some evil to escape one has real before i tried i was trying i was trying what were you trying i was trying to find a song that i thought i had in there molecular motors i thought it was in there hidden somewhere and i couldn't find it couldn't find it but this is the after show we're back with more this weekend science and yes i have this giant giant virus book who gave you that the mail and it's a forward by carl zimmer but this is an amazing book and i can't wait to speak with the author um maryland russnik russin russink maryland russink virus an illustrated guide to 101 incredible microbes oh look this one's a good one zika you want to see zika this is zika there's the zika structure ah zika and then that's what it looks like look at those little purply dots there's the zika the zika the zika that infects adult brain cells did you hear that bit of news what's that again yeah most recent news is that uh they have determined zika infection not only um infects adult uh fluid body fluids and it sticks around like in semen and men for like six months it also infects adult brain cells and so we know that it causes developmental problems in infants developing babies leading to microcephaly and death but we don't know about any effects on adults but it's getting it's getting into the brain and it's staying there boo that's that's not good no that's one of that's that's one of the things that i reserve my carol kane boo boo what's happening anyway i think she could be a fun virus interview maybe i guess in november all viruses i was showing like a bug like a glitch like a computer virus or are we talking i'm gonna try a pretty book that's gorgeous is that Ebola on the cover yes that's gorgeous that's beautiful isn't it pretty i don't want one all right i want an Ebola it's so pretty Ebola you're so pretty yeah you're so pretty deadly yeah so let's see what we have here's rotavirus cause of the common cold oh that's pretty fancy sinus sinus cold it actually looks like a bunch of snowflakes which is kind of fun sars related corona virus oh it looks very corona like the corona the sun i wonder if that's how it was named maybe oh look here chicken pox and shingles virus varicella zoster it looks like eggs it does look like eggs it's so cute so history oh here's west nile that looks like piracy that looks like west nile mosquito yeah i was showing zika here's zika zika looks like i think my kid made a zika virus in school the other day in our class very different and let's see yeah it's good anyway this one's a pretty one void inclusion body virus pretty yeah hey thanks you guys who's heading out good night you guys who are heading out thanks for joining us tonight you know a lot of you know a lot of these these images these are stained and false color and all that kind of stuff are pretty yeah but so you know so is our view of like galaxies when we see those sort of galactic gas marine it's all this look at this that looks like an insect and tarot back maybe isn't that a virus it is a and tarot bacteria phage so this attacks bacteria wow it's a virus bacteria it looks like no viruses slated does that mean it makes an insect or or is it not in second i can never tell what an insect versus a bug is a bug is a kind of insect but an insect is a specific no bugs are so faceless phage no bugs in general no really see the way around yep insects are everything with six legs and three body segments and then um bugs are a specific family of insects i think it's hexa i don't remember i thought it was like some fly and some down or something like that right no here let's see i can find it true bugs hemiptera are true bugs hemiptera those are the ones with wastes right hemiptera true bugs order of insects comprising some 50 to 80 000 species cicadas aphids plant hoppers leaf hoppers and shield bugs this is foot and mouth virus causes a brief day or two very high fever sores on them on the mouth region discomfort in children passes very quickly you never get it again that's what you get for licking cows what you get for being a kid and crawling on the ground oh that's what you get it's what you get you're welcome fata i'm glad i got the blue origin story and i just wanted to make it yeah that's hoof and mouth i'm sorry a little different a little different so um blare are you going to be crying for halloween no but that's a good idea see this is what happens every halloween it's like it's october and i don't have a costume no i figured out my costume i want to be a pirate finally figured it out awesome i haven't figured out yet i don't have a costume okay what am i gonna do right now i feel like blare i feel like blare just goes to her closet and goes which costume this year well what i did this year was which wig this year and then i picked a costume around the wig and i'm more like okay i need to get a white sheet and cut out eye holes because it's what's gonna happen because that's what always happens i never yeah land this i almost did a rerun but i decided not to this year uh i'm not telling you fata you have to wait do we have a halloween show twist a wean twist a wean is going to be it's on the calendar it's the 26th okay the wednesday before halloween um and then wednesday the second i was thinking maybe we don't have to do because we're gonna do we're gonna leave on our trip on the third i thought the third was wednesday am i wrong bless you nope yep you're wrong oh yeah you'd be wrong by day because it's 31 days and if the 26th how do months work well but you guys so i was thinking we're gonna do a full show on friday the fourth but it's gonna be full of a bunch of interviews so we could potentially do a short show on wednesday or just show up and talk to people for a little bit thank you fata don't do the white sheet with holes that looks too much like uh something else oh yeah thank you i'll find i'll find an alternative okay so so you're saying so are we gonna do a partial show on the second or we're not gonna do a show at all that's what i was wondering what yeah let's do both i say well i was i was gonna ask you if we should be traveling on the evening of the second in which case no no why oh wait okay i get it so be a show on the second and a fourth or something like this no i think we should just postpone the show till the till the we're there apart yeah i mean okay it would behoove me to already be ready on that wednesday yes and find my oh gosh i'm also that's what i'm worried about too is like depleting the good stories or there's a little of that and there's also a little of you know if we do have the extra days to prepare we could be that more seeming like we're prepared every time we do right right yes i would vote no show um if you want to meet up for a teaser we could do that yeah let's do that we could just tune in the three of us for like 10 minutes be like let's go through the rundown uh-huh we could do that seems like a good idea that'd be fun okay all right yeah better off like we should do twist every night um yeah ben you want to pay for that well no no well hang on not been alone but at some point we we really do need to get a hold of some uh either public broadcasting money or some private entrepreneurial like we need to get a sugar mama or daddy of some sort to sponsor the show to the point where why are you laughing this is really like how these things have to get put into place so we can have like a studio and a writing staff and a writing staff um actually actually i wouldn't want a writing staff what i would actually want is a story collection staff uh and a production staff but folks that would not not more for the technical aspect get get the mics in the same levels get the lighting right can create a nice a nice set for us and also you know i think that there is and i've discovered this through having done this show for a long time um there are brilliant people in our audience there are wonderful people that we've brought on board as interns uh who add a lot of insight and content to the show whatever are you talking about so uh ali you know um and so and so and so i i do feel like our show uh as as wonderfully brilliant as i think the two of you are and i think i could be made better with more insight and perspective from people who aren't me uh so yeah i think uh i think a writing or and story analysis crew uh would make the show even better sure well you keep thinking about that well yeah so so um bezos right let's call bezos uh i got him on gone rapid dial or um that's like not even a thing anymore speed dial speed dial or musk you know like like there's gotta be there's gotta be like who wants to who wants to have their name associated with a sciencey show there's gotta be somebody who's like you know what science communication needs to be a thing that keeps happening a little bit of money actually and actually i will i will gladly go work for tesla as one of your salespeople our salespeople trainers and and and take it to that next level you know like we can we can all help each other here we all got skills that we could uh entertain each other but but really like to ben's point it would be fantastic to do the show every night i and i and i don't think that i'm over promising to say that we could probably do the amount of content that we do weekly on a daily basis because because within every week there is a selection process that takes place where i'm like okay i found the four or five that i'm gonna roll with right and there's a whole bunch i would love to have delved into or think about and and researched a little or or or are brought to you there's a lot of stories i wish each week i could have brought there's a fantastic story where this week which we didn't cover about how they discovered uh the creating the himalayas also lost about 50 of the mass of a continent that went into that making mostly by sinking it and and how they've also discovered through actually would have been perfect story for our guests uh analysis of magma in different places of the world show shows that uh the mantle can get dropped down into the mantle and absorbed again which is something that didn't think would happen that that it's that that which is uh continents this is not a permanent situation it could disappear it can get dropped down it can get devoured it can pop back up again like there's there's more dynamics into things like that i mean that's a that's an interesting story that would have been fun to have delved into and sussed out a little bit better um yeah you know there's one that there's illuminating molecules this is this time it's uh there's they're doing this at you see davis right now but this is university of vermont dartmouth college a new way that some molecules make their own luminescent glow uh and it happens to be a strange bright green light that they produce and in certain situations they can see even more of this lightness is one of these things that can be used as a marker uh for sort of biomedical analysis of what's going on where in a body without having a harmful radiation or anything so there's like all these different amazing stories like let me i'm just gonna kind of go through some i'm looking at i'm just gonna kind of generally swath through oh there's been all kinds of dinosaur stuff uh one is they've been finding what we call what do we call it that's the co what's it the evolution where you see the same morphology showing up in different places there's all kinds of this that they've discovered in and reptiles that looks like very much like things that we see either later or earlier in dinosaurs but developed completely on its own uh on its own path so so we find that convergent evolution it's like a form of convergent evolution yeah where these were these traits show up multiple times before the dinosaurs after the dinosaurs during the dinosaurs during you know modern day existence of being on the planet yeah there's there's a lot of stories that we could would should have and could be covering yes ed from connecticut we do have minion hang out every thursday night which i could go to i think if we could have uh blaren and and kiki could have thursday nights off and we could just do that again if it didn't seem like i i was working every thursday night until nearly midnight uh i i could be part of that too bill gates has a foundation but they they they're just you laser focused on killing the skill which is fine it's a good thing it's a good cause i'm all for it i totally support it uh but yeah they don't return phone calls or you know so nice identity for i'm just gonna go ahead and screen share so okay you guys you guys i gotta talk play wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait but i just posted something amazing we need to talk i mean uh i okay aha that's funny that's fantastic crying bass and i have uh if you've noticed my my mic is bad nice work uh i'm not actually sniffling it's just feedback from the mic oh is it yeah uh huh yes let's talk plane tickets plane tickets so i took the third off so i can fly out pretty early on the third why did you take the third off the third yes we did the third because it's thursday yes okay good because the show's on friday in the middle of the day okay so the question is do we pay a little bit more have a direct flight that just gets you there um no wait yes is that the only one that's available answer is yes or pay a little bit less and have a stop okay so we're talking about winter e-ish time so this this extra stop could be much more dangerous than where would the stop be yeah that's the question yeah it depends i found um one flight that has a stop in atlanta another one that has a stop in detroit okay i'd say the atlanta one might be a go but there's another one yeah detroit's tricky where there's gonna be yeah detroit gosh knows yeah well just the weather wise we're talking about wintery times and polar vortex in the area that's true all right so the atlanta flight leaves earlier in the morning what is the msp miniapolis that's going to be similar northern how long's the layover in atlanta it's only an hour which is why it's pretty tight it's tight yeah it lands supposedly the plane land at three thirty six p.m and then you're supposed to get on another put another flight at four twenty one p.m yeah that's a good direct how much more are we talking haha fat is like i'm out of here night but i don't blame you at all yeah logistics well so the issue is i wanted oh no not friday november fourth i want the third silly silly third and i want to return on the sixth okay let's see if that makes it any better actually i should probably not interject and put into this discussion i'm a bad itinerary traveler planner person i think i might only make things worse you just follow me you're fine as long as i'm traveling with blare i feel like i'll be okay otherwise i need a direct flight and if it could parachute me into my hotel room this is right no no don't you worry we'll go there non stop flights so funny i can only find um one flight on united but it's that's direct question it's like it's like an overnight flight that's all i'm seeing are you looking for flights that what what's your destination airport baltimore bwi so they're the i flew into washington dulles last time and that was like a 40 minute drive i think from baltimore yeah it's a bit of a drive it's a bit of a drive but it might be easier or cheaper it even accounting for like a lift or something or a shuttle it might be cheaper just to fly into washington dulles it's the unaccompanied minor service oh no no blare's there yeah maybe is there an option for like washington dc area yeah it's dulles is the i think that's like the only other one that's reasonably close you can you can look for nearby airports you finish the stream recording in the morning all right identity it was a long one tonight i know long show thank you identity yeah justin does need the unaccompanied minor service winter um winter so i get it audios well maybe we can let everybody go and do our our flight planning off the air let's say goodnight to everybody so goodnight minions love you much see you next week yeah thank you so much for joining us super excited to do more next week don't hang up just stop broadcast kiki