 You always got things in the way I gotta tell the chat room. We are starting That's adorable. We are here the turtle Tortoise Sorry, thank you Turtle I mean you're not entirely wrong all tortoises are turtles. So Just slightly more specific. Yeah, I really need to figure out a better set Up for my camera. It's right in front of everything Looking around Leaning to the side We are live. So let's start this show in three two This is Twist this week in science episode number 708 recorded on Wednesday February 13th 2019 Do you love the science? Hey everyone, I am dr. Kiki and tonight on this week in science We are going to fill your heads with ancient light loser love and a walk on the beach, but first disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer Adventure according to Wikipedia and adventure is an exciting experience that is typically a bold sometimes risky undertaking Adventures may be activities with some potential for physical danger such as traveling exploring skydiving mountain climbing scuba diving river rafting or participating in extreme sports And while risking life in limb may seem adventurous to some there is another form of adventure that requires less limblessness science Every question posed every experiment run a every data set Examined is an adventure into the unknown an adventure into unexplored territory in Intellectual skydive into a world we often learn we just barely know and while getting to know the world We live on there are understatement many more places beyond our world that we have yet to explore So if adventure is something you love pack your bags get ready to take on anything that comes your way here on This week in science coming up next What's happened this week in science Good And a good science to you too Justin Blair and everyone out there welcome to another episode of This week in science. We are back with all sorts of science great stories. It's almost Valentine's Day This is our our show about love Right and so it's an ode to science. Do you love it? We love all things sciencey and hope that you will find a love for them on tonight's show I have stories about the end of the world Oh Lost loves on Mars and and an interview to discuss a few giant physics experiments and the sting of defeat What do you have for us Justin? Oh, what would Valentine's Day be for Justin without a meandering meanderthal and a even earlier Potential Life discovery on earth And when I say that's big understatement even earlier much earlier Taking it way back Love started a long time ago Blair animal corner. What's in it? Well, you said science is for lovers It turns out love is for losers I I'm not cynical there's real science there and I have birth control It's all in your head Okay, don't take that advice Yeah As we jump into the show everyone I would love to remind you that if you have not subscribed yet You can do so all places that good podcasts are found check us out on Spotify Pandora stitcher spreeker Apple Google, you know tune in all the places You can also find us on YouTube and Facebook search for this Weakened science or just visit twist TWS dot Org, but now it is time for Our interview I would love to introduce you to our guest tonight Dr. Brian Keating is a professor of physics at the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences in the Department of Physics at the University of California San Diego where he head leads the axe Center for Experimental Cosmology He's also associate director of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination I want to go hang out there He authored losing the Nobel Prize a story of cosmology ambition and the perils of science's highest honor in 2016 He was named director of the Simons Observatory in Northern Chile which win when it's completed in 2022 is going to be the world's highest altitude and most sensitive instrument Ever designed to study the origins of the universe. Welcome to the show Dr. Keating It's a thrill to be on long-time Watcher first-time guest. I Found that really thrilling personally when you were like, I've listened to you for a decade. I went. Oh my goodness This is exciting Go back to Leo Laporte days. Yeah watching you guys long time Well, I'm glad that our science has been a guest in your scientific life And now let's turn the tables and I want to hear about you. So can you give us a little insight into Your journey and how you came as it's Valentine's Day So how you came to love and study Astrophysics and cosmology Yeah, I fell in love pretty early on as a as a adolescent preteen growing up outside New York City and One night Awakened during the night by a very bright light whose origin. I could not really discern and next to it When I peered out and recognized moving the sleep from my eyes. It was the moon But next to it the moon was joined by this very bright light and you know, I thought for a second Maybe it's you know, United Airlines flight 1632 coming in for but it wasn't it was staying stationary for almost an hour on end And this is 1986. So this is 14 years pre google So it wasn't like I could go back and you know, look it up and Bing it as the kids are want to do But instead I had to wait until sunday So it's probably Tuesday night and I had to wait almost a whole week until the new york times Came around with its cosmos section And it had within it a description of the positions of the moon and the the various naked eye planets and constellations That one could see from new york And I realized that the object that must have been neck to the moon when I saw it earlier in the week was the planet jupiter And I felt like I had made the discovery of a lifetime that no one else had ever seen the planet jupiter You know besides me although I realized that probably was in the case since they had a whole diagram about it And then I resolved to get uh to get a telescope To actually look through a telescope to see what I would see with a telescope So I put in an application to the national science foundation. No, I I applied to a another three-letter Organization that funds many budding scientists the mom foundation my mother She she provided the the research grant my first research grant. I always credit her in all my papers And because of that I obtained a tiny little refracting telescope Which I later learned was basically exactly the size of galleo galleys telescope of 1610 400 years almost earlier than I was beat me to the punch scoop me if you might believe And I saw the exact same things as he saw and again I had that same rush of discovery of feeling like gosh I'm the first person who's ever seen a crater on the moon or Or a moon of jupiter And that was just so thrilling to me I started to think about what it would be like to actually, you know, make new discoveries of my own that were truly new And so that really, you know set me on the path of wanting to be a scholar I realized that was merely my first bit of scientific research, you know, kind of yeah Absolutely, you actually did discover jupiter in this. I mean because nobody told you look here, right? You'll see a thing And and we're going to tell you what that is. You made the observation Free from all of this so just a little bit of timing in terms of being first was off But still no, that's a fantastic story Yeah, it was it was you know looking back on it and you know having a deep connection with What would later happen in my life where I created a type of refracting telescope Which is a telescope that uses lenses not mirrors most people are familiar with Giant telescopes like the Hubble or the Keck telescopes or here in california mount palomar mount wilson But um in the past a much more cheaper and more effective where the you know spy glasses like a pirate might You know sport And so we we ended up designing and building a telescope that was a refractor but not to see visible light to see microwave invisible Heat like emanation from the big bang and I only later in life realized that You know galleo would probably be pretty proud and he would probably understand exactly what we did Because the device are so simple and so powerful and that's what I love about astronomy I mean it's we're in a loving mood. It's valentine's eve, right? What I love most about astronomy is that it's completely a politics free zone I mean pretty much. I mean I have politics in my department, you know meetings which can go on for hours and be You know incredibly violent but But um, you know they say about faculty meetings are so intense because the stakes are so low The the you know the constellations the universe. It's not political. There's no republican constellation or you know democratic moon It's basically free of that unlike almost every branch of science and certainly in politics I love that politics free aspect of especially in these crazy Yeah And you have and and in these experiments that you're working on now. There is massive international collaboration I mean you are working with scientists from around the world to make discoveries that will affect human understanding That's really the best part of it. I mean I have students now from thailand I've had students from uganda to you know, literally at any, you know point during the year I'll have students on or colleagues on every continent on earth And because of the massive need nowadays when we run the as you mentioned the simons observatory Which will be one of the world's highest altitude observatories when it's complete We have 257 people working on it Currently on six continents because an article is basically shut down for most scientists now It's just amazing. You know these people range from 18 to 80 And and I get to to to learn so much from them every day It's just a phenomenal way to spend a spend a lifetime And that is something that everyone in the world kind of has in common is the view from here, right? Yeah, I mean we're born with two refracting telescopes on our heads, you know, just and you got an extra pair of lenses up there But you know, we have these two telescopes our eyeballs and instead of coupling them to our retinas We couple these microwave lenses to microwave detectors, which oh by the way, they operate near absolute zero You know almost zero degrees above Above zero absolute zero So this is just you know mind bending technology that we get to use And by the way, we get to study the possibility That we may not live in the only universe that exists That's Okay, so okay, we're gonna have to roll through some things to get to that Okay Okay, so you're talking about these microwave detectors and from graduate school forward You were involved in something called the bicep experiment and this is part of the The telescope this microwave telescope that you helped to create For the bicep two Detector yes, and that was in south amer and not south in in antarctica. Yeah the south pole The south pole so you talk about it needing to be cold you talk about it Was it located in the south pole because it's cold there or because it's partially on the opposite side of the earth from where these These waves. Yeah, I had I had some creditors chasing me. So I want to get on the opposite side. No, I mean, I would love to stay I love, you know, my Would love it if I stayed in california, but no, we went to the south pole because it's essentially one of the driest Deserts on earth the the temperature can be so cold that snow cannot really precipitate out It really just crystallizes and falls out of the atmosphere more or less And so now the reason that we go there Is it's just the same reason that you wouldn't build an optical telescope in the middle of las vegas anymore You know, there are telescopes near big cities, but those are historical nowadays new telescopes are built in remote parts of chile Or hawaii the canary islands, etc And why is that because what they're looking for is optical light visible light which occupies the narrow sliver What's called the electromagnetic spectrum? What we're looking for is a thermal emanation from the fireball That was was the result of the formation of the earliest elements in the universe And that heat signature has cooled off from, you know, toasty near infinite temperature To a more balmy three degrees above absolute zero. So just a a whisker above 270 degrees below zero Celsius And this temperature comes to us in all directions. It's called the cosmic microwave background radiation discovered in 1965 by pensius and wilson in new jersey I'm a new yorker. So I like to say that was the best thing that ever came out of new jersey, but Don't don't hold me to that The the discovery result of them winning a Nobel prize 13 years later And it's been called one of the most important discoveries of all time in any branch of science That's because it really indicated for the first time evidence physical evidence in the form of tangible testable data That that proved in some sense or motivated in some sense That the universe began in this hot dense state made famous years later on the television show of the same name And I love that. I love the fact that they go on to win the Nobel prize But we're cleaning pigeon poop off of there That's because they thought they were maybe getting interfered with but like this is like the this is how you get a Nobel prize You also have to at some point clear out pigeon poo. Yeah That's right. Yeah Uh, they're trying as all good scientists would to suspect themselves of making an error or blunder and when they You know pointed the telescope at new york city for example to see if that was the source of this hissing glow of microwaves coming in all directions They could not eliminate it even by looking away from new york city So I like to say, you know that they then tried to find if other dirtbags besides new yorkers were causing the signal And they looked at these pigeons and they actually had to end up killing the pigeons And so I would have liked to have been on the nsf budget team, you know that approved the shotgun, you know for these What exactly are they doing in their jersey? So the cosmic microwave background Radiation you're looking at it But what is it telling you like what are you what information are you trying to glean from it? And how on earth could that tell us whether or not we're in our own? Yeah, so, um, you know, there's a csi You know programs that that show these investigators and they come to a crime scene There's a dead body there what they don't usually show you is that what they do first and the medical examiners They bring a thermometer and they measure the temperature of the deceased as they call it And when they measure the temperature of the deceased They are really measuring how much time has elapsed since that deceased body was ceased I don't know it was alive and that living Uh body is that 90 that is of ceased. Yes Uh the uh the human body 98.6 degrees normally and by comparing that temperature to the ambient temperature in the room And knowing that the human body is mostly water with other substances Who have a well-defined cooling curve and what's called a heat capacity? How much they cool off and can store energy versus time? They can calculate very accurately When the last time that body was producing energy until later comes to an equilibrium in the room So by measuring the temperature of things you can determine how much time has elapsed since they were in a given state In the case of the universe by measuring the current temperature of photons That come to us in all directions not from a star or planet or you know somewhere else in the in the universe That's identified as an object If you look away from all objects in the universe you get this immense amount of light that's coming to us And these these photons encode with them how much time has elapsed since they were produced in this case They were produced when hydrogen was formed and that took place about half a million years after the big bang And so half a million years after the big bang the universe stopped being hot enough to have hydrogen not be formed And so hydrogen got formed So it's exactly like measuring the temperature of a dead body in order to extrapolate how much time has elapsed But furthermore Just as you could do some sorts of extra experiments Let's say you knew you didn't know the human body was composed of water But you knew very accurately how it's been cooling off You could learn about the composition of the human body From how how its current properties are compared to snapshots in the past So depending on how you look at it you can learn about the the composition of the universe The past history of the universe or maybe even make a prediction What's going to happen in the future and that's sort of intertwined all three of those Are intertwined with what we do nowadays with telescopes like bicep bicep 2 and now the simons observatory And what you're looking at in it's going to tell you we we know that there was This inflationary period when after the big bang everything inflated and got really big and it was this really hot period Right and then it cooled down, but since then we've had Expansion and we can measure all of this expansion that's going on, but it's the inflation That's this vague Kind of okay, we've got these photons and the photons were formed. What happened right before then right exactly So nation out of it. Yeah, so exactly So what if you if you think back in history what happened for millennia is that people thought the universe was infinite Even einstein basically thought the universe was static and eternal and that was as late as 100 years ago this year basically And it wasn't until there was evidence from Hubble and others That showed that galaxies are in motion and so you can't assume And they're all receding from us by the way and that led to an inescapable conclusion that the universe in the future Will be bigger more diffuse more dilute But also concomitantly that in the past it was much more compact and small and dense That hot dense state came to be known as the big bang Which really slaughtered the competing model which had prevailed for millennia Which was the steady state universe that the universe had existed for all time And everybody believed that and thought it was basically ludicrous to assume the universe sprang into existence with the big bang Nowadays we take it for granted, but you're right Then what scientists do and and it's frustrating to non-scientists. They always say like All right, you just told me about some big discovery Now you're telling me there's a problem with that big discovery and there's something we don't understand about it Then you make some patch and band aid and then that has a problem But that's really the fun of being a scientist. You get to like Prove people wrong all the time and and no one's above being proven wrong. That's the best part about there's no Authority so astute that that he or she cannot be taken down in the throne So what happens now is that there's a controversy every bit as As heated as the debate between the pro big bang people and the pro steady state people 50 or 100 years ago, and it's really you you made you made a statement kiki that the you know that the we know that the universe inflated Um, but actually we don't know the universe experience. What's called cosmic inflation And we it's it's as it says if we are sort of back in this period where we don't know If there was a big bang or whether the universe not that it was static We know the universe could not have been static But there are just as many you know very eminent theoretical and experimental physicists who believe the universe might be cyclic In other words, there might be big bangs and big crunches and collapses and expansions That themselves last perhaps for an infinite amount of time and we're just the latest in one cosmic Epicycle this is taken very seriously and it's actually the main thrust if I have to characterize what I do It's to try to parse and determine how did the universe really begin what happened 15 minutes before the big bang Was there another universe that collapsed and then exploded into our inflation? You know inflating universe or was our universe the first of a kind and had never existed and never will exist again Those are the really whirling boiling controversies that cosmologists find themselves in to the extent that you can you know say how controversial what we do is But I think that there is pretty decent like argument though that we every time we've ever thought that something is The unique the one the only It's been proven wrong. Like this is the only planet. No There's a there's another solar system. Oh, there's two solar systems. Well, actually There's a lot more than two solar systems. Oh, there's two galaxies now. Yes, we've discovered that there's two guys Well, actually there's billions of galaxies So it would you know for the progression from where we came from and just our understanding It would sort of be now intuitive to assume that there are other universes out there Exactly exactly and that's this, you know, Justin that you're getting at is this new Relatively new kid on the block which is called the multiverse or the theory of the multiverse which pauses exactly as you say You know kind of extending Copernicus From saying how utterly insignificant and and and ordinary our solar system is now extending that to knowing that there's You know a hundred billion stars in our galaxy There's perhaps a hundred billion galaxies in our observable universe And each one of those could have a hundred billion stars and each one of those could have a thousand planets or planet decimals And so if you keep extrapolating to this you get you know many many billions upon billions upon millions Of star star systems planetary systems rather that could possibly exist And so then the next the next syllogism step is to say well Why not call the universe just one island in what's called the multiverse? And uh things got even more interesting when about a decade or two decades ago People started to realize that it's called string theory Has a deep connection To this notion that there could be not only different universes But different laws in different universes So so it could be that in fact every one of the different possible universes could have different laws of nature And in that case it could explain Why we find ourselves living in a universe that's compatible with us finding ourselves in a universe which is So that's called the enthropic principle Right and this is a great deep very abiding mystery That is you know to me the most exciting thing that that one could could potentially study because it unites The very smallest things that may exist and most ubiquitous things that might exist with the very largest things which may be unique or may not be and so looking Looking around i mean we Barely understand the it's barely scratched the surface in our own universe, right? So how do you start looking into these? these hypotheses these ideas about multiverses and The big bang versus the big crunch versus this repeatedly psychically half. How do you look into that? Yeah, so what I think you know was sort of a niche that I wanted to fill is that you know Most of the books that are written about cosmology about physics at its smallest levels They're written by you know theoretical astrophysicists through reticle cosmologists lisa randall brian green steven hawking late great steven hawking and many others and And they're very you know kind of few treatments from the standpoint of people that do what I do Which is to build instrumentation to really go after and try to prove those people wrong You know you couldn't you couldn't write a book about You know about you know a distant time warps and wormholes and things like that And you may never be proven wrong, you know in your lifetime or maybe in you know 50 lifetimes But you know, there's only so many times you can you know Make an experimental mistake or or do something completely wrong and and wrong-headed And still be able to you know be a professional gainfully employed astronomy So in my case and and I always find interesting, you know, it's like You have all these incredible things like lisa randall as a book You know warp passages about extra dimensions and and i'm like, you know, and she's a friend of mine I love her her writing and i'm like at least you can't really put a wormhole on your cover of your jacket of your book But you can put dust on the cover of your jacket and that's what I did You know with my book, you know, there's dust There's a dust jacket and that's because dust is really this ubiquitous substance And what we do in our in our work nowadays is we're not really day to day looking and Philosophizing about you know extra dimensions and brains and multiverses We're really trying to build the most sensitive instrumentation to prove those hypotheses wrong So there's a misconception that what we do is we go out there and try and prove that inflation happened And prove that this theory or that theory is correct In reality, most of what we're doing is trying to what's called falsify or prove wrong any number of competing hypotheses Until what's your left with is really the only you know in the sherlock home sense the only Inescapable conclusion left and that one has a high probability of confidence in being correct so Isn't there though still though? I think part of it is that theorists have for Well, of course the successful ones. They're right the ones. This is this is ignoring all of the misses. Okay But but a lot of the hits have come long before we had the ability or technology to To attempt to falsify them and have them Maintain so and I get that I'm missing. I'm you know, we don't talk a lot about those misses but is there is there uh, is there territory for new discovery Within experimentation that has not been conceived of and and is there an example of that? Yeah, I think you know in the book I really distinguish between what's called a serendipitous discovery a discovery that you don't expect Versus one like that you like the large hadron collider when it discovered the Higgs boson There's a very good reason to expect the Higgs boson would exist Not only that it would exist but it would have certain properties mass cross-section all these other things and And then an instrument was built to discover it on the other hand As we were discussing earlier, pensius and wilson didn't build a telescope to catch the heat left over from the big bang And so it's a very different type of discovery and and I claim those latter Serendipitous discoveries are more pure because you're not trying to confirm a hypothesis There's always a danger when you have a theory of what's called confirmation bias And people like to think that we scientists are immune from prejudice and fallacies and and and you know All takes is you know coming to a faculty meeting and and as I said before Seeing that that that's nowhere near the case For for real scientists and that we have the exact same prejudices biases And and predispositions as any other human being has because we're human beings and and that's always the thing that terrifies me of the an opening statement of a research paper is we went out to look for this and we found it There's always a little bit of a like well you started looking for that. So yeah, did did uh Did some sort of confirmation bias leak into What you selected as your result? Yeah So I really feel like there's you know kind of big rewards that can come about from You know really what's called really basic a pure research not replied where you're you know Building a bigger accelerator and of a known character And and right now in this this week in science You know people are debating the merits of building You know 20 billion euro experiment to smash atoms at higher and higher energies In that case there's really not a clear goal for such an instrument. You know, there's no natural You know a target or or threshold to cross it's kind of bigger is better And people have argued that you know why that's good or why that's bad But um, but I think you know, yeah pure discovery it is it is pretty rare And and it's a magical magical thing to be a part of but I don't want to denigrate in any way the kind of science that I'm doing Which is really clearly specifically going out in our case Either to you know to disprove a theory in this case inflation and show that the universe was maybe proceeded by infinite cycles of You know kind of maybe perhaps infinite cycles or in in in the past But also it could be that we along the way are discovering new things about The composition of the universe what it's made of the particles fields forces And dynamics and so what I love to do as a scientist is do something really high risk And extremely high reward, which in this case is like disproving the existence of inflation or you know Or proving in some sense motivating that the universe had a cycle before it maybe one day the infinite And but I also like to do kind of pick the low hanging fruit Which is to understand what the universe is actually made up of what particles and fields and forces make it tick And that way you will always be able to publish The low hanging fruit for the funding So back to your book you talk in your book about your experience with the bicep two experiment and this massive Experiment with a massive finding that we reported on this show that was later Found to not really be And so I'd love to Get you to explain what happened to our audience so If inflation took place Most theoretical cosmologists and experimental cosmologists Expect that what would have come along for the ride or what are called gravitational waves? So you reported on LIGO's discovery of gravitational waves Which were produced from the Inspiral a collision of two Rapidly rotating black holes each one about 30 times the mass of the sun Colliding about 1.4 billion light years away from the earth That was the LIGO discovery that ended up resulting in them winning a Nobel prize We can talk about that later if you like but the The the fact that you should keep in mind is that when you have matter In motion and in a in an accelerating fashion like these two black holes It produces gravitational waves So the ingredients for gravitational waves are very simple. You need a lot of matter Accelerating very quickly. So where would you think you'd get the most amount of matter in the universe? And the biggest acceleration that you could possibly have is at the very beginning When not just 30 solar mass black holes the entire universe's mass was exploding accelerating Perhaps i'm saying faster than the speed of light And so at that time, that's what inflation is. It's the superluminal faster than speed of light expansion of space and time itself, which is potentially so violent that the fabric of spacetime is resonant and is ringing with gravitational radiation or gravitational waves These waves of gravity like light particles live forever. They have no clocks. No lifetimes associated with them They travel at the speed of light in fact And they existed until the time of the formation Of that dead body of that cmb the cosmic microwave background 500 400 000 years after the big bang Formation of our current universe So they would have messed up the matter and energy distribution when the cosmic microwave background photons started traveling towards our telescopes So I realized after you know consulting many theoretical Arguments in the 90s that we could build a telescope that could capture these waves of gravity Not directly by coming into our laboratory today because they're much too faint to do to be detectable But rather use the universe and an infant state back when it was about 400 000 years old And by doing that, um, the we'd use the universe as our gravitational wave detector And that produced what are called curl mode or b mode patterns of microwaves And I don't want to get too technical. I described with illustrations, etc In the book But really what we expected to see if inflation took place are waves of gravity Those waves of gravity in turn imprint a swirling twisting Curling pattern on the microwave sky And that's why I came up with the name bicep which is an acronym for microwave background integer of cosmic extra galactic polarization say that five times fast And we actually made a discovery which Which indicated that we saw gravitational waves and they made this twisting curling pattern of microwaves and we announced it on march 17th Which is st. Patrick's day in 2014 and that's when you guys were covering it And it made the front page of every newspaper in the world. I mean literally the new york times, you know The economist every single magazine newspaper that you could imagine And you know one of the leaders was one of time magazines, you know top hundred most fascinating people of the year And by this time I had been Excised in some sense from the collaboration unfortunately because I had chosen to join a team which was viewed by many as a competitor So even though I created the experiment and it was the you know had paternity rights They were kind of taken away. I still have visitation rights, but I didn't have paternity rights You can still kind of look at the data Look, man go man go never got paid properly for a starry night Like it might be this I could drive by you know look through the window and But um, but we had this press conference at harvard and and um, I wasn't at it But but yeah, I was it made you know Millions of views on youtube a video produced by stanford university one of the home institutions of the project And so it captivated the world because it was described on that day as perhaps the greatest discovery of all time and assuredly worthy of not one but many Nobel Prizes by previous Nobel Prize winners and and and Commentators and pundits in the world of science And eventually it came to be that even I was being whispered as a potential person of interest for the Nobel committee to consider When doling out the Nobel Prize later that year There was only one problem. There were other sources of swirling twisting curling microwaves Exactly identically mimicking the this imprimatur the signature of the inflationary period And the most humble substance of all as I said before dust Uh pervades the cosmos. In fact, it pervades Uh it pervades, you know most of my house space in my in my house everywhere Every piece of electronics I know We don't have like a giant space anduster that can go out into our galaxy and really thank goodness for the dust because We actually have as you know from the johnny mitchell song. We have star dust Flowing through our veins. We have as carl sagan put it The you know, we're we're standing on this pale blue dot this this rock this mode of dust as sagan described it Is giant ball of rock is really the eminence of a of a distant supernova or a past supernova and the distant past in our galaxy That exploded and then the material within it can yield to make the rocky iron silicon, etc inside of our earth's the planet earth And it also can be aligned in the cosmic in the milky way galaxy's magnetic field The light the heat that is emitted by tiny grains of dust as microscopic as they are In aggregate when you've got planets worth and asteroid belts worth and just vast repositories in our galaxy It can mimic the signal and a few months after publication. We basically retracted The claim that we had made I always like to point out. We didn't have like a front page You know, we didn't call a press conference. You never see that right? Have you ever seen like big press conference tomorrow at nasa to retract the previous claim? Yeah, no It didn't happen and there's a pressure on scientists and it's unfortunate Because, you know, we and I'll say, you know, I myself I'll just speak for myself You know for a long time I was driven by a desire to win the Nobel Prize And it arguably was one of the reasons that I created the experiment I'm very candid about that that I wanted to make a discovery of all time You know a huge discovery on a par with the origin of the universe itself and that Would clearly be worthy of a Nobel Prize. I didn't think I would get to see it And maybe don't believe that that would be but it was certainly part of my motivation and you know I'm not ashamed to say that but I think a lot of scientists are and they're not honest enough to admit That it does motivate things. I mean, I was told very early on I have to get The Nobel Prize or be eligible in some sense to win to get tenure or to get the highest promotion in the University of California It's actually true To get a parking space that you see Berkeley That's next to the physics department. You have to win a Nobel Prize Oh my gosh The parking space is nl. Nobel laureate. It's hilarious but There are all these hidden signals and signs that go to young people and I remember a young an early reader of my book She's a science editor, but she had started off life as an astronomer and her father discouraged her from pursuing A career in science as a scientist rather than a journalist And he said well only you're only a good scientist if you win the Nobel Prize and she gave me She said I wish I had your book 10 years ago to give to my dad and and I felt just very emotional about that but In the end what ended up happening is yeah, we retracted the claim And part of it, you know, as I said, it was driven in this fiercely competitive field of astrophysics You don't think of it like that, but it is a competition and there's only so much funding There's only so much publicity. There's only so much recognition and only so many faculty jobs available And so there is a huge element of competition Which is in my mind engendered at least in part by the Nobel Prize and some of the fatal flaws encoded within the Nobel Prize So you mentioned to like enjoy it like that you really like a an experiment that has a lot of risk to it I'm quoting somebody from my my research lab Who said nobody here really knows what they're doing Because they're trying to do something that's not been done before You know, and there's like it really like made sense of the fact that like no wonder everybody does sort of have that like sort of sense of I caveat about everything because I really know but we could try and think but it's really, you know, that's what what's happening when you're exploring a thing that Doesn't have the answer yet. And yeah, that's required that risk. Yeah. So geeking out a little bit, you know John Archibald Wheeler who is, you know, one of Feynman's, you know, thesis or undergraduate advisors He used to say things like, you know, the job of a scientist Is to increase the island of knowledge, you know, within the ocean of ignorance But when you do that, you're also increasing the coastline You know of the border, which is this quasi state of like you don't really know what's going on And uh, luckily, you know, the area increases faster than the circumference, right? So, um, so in that sense Yeah, we we do pursue the unknown and the word science itself, it means knowledge It doesn't mean wisdom. It doesn't mean creativity. It means knowledge and how do you know There's no greater tool than than science and there's no greater show than this weekend science Thank you This weekend knowledge, but it's true it's like the most delightful state to be in is one of You know puzzlement and befuddlement because that's when you know that you have the chance to do something That no one's ever done before Yeah So tell us what you're going to be working on with the simons observatory and what are you going to be doing that no one's been Doing yet So what what's so exciting for me now is that the technology has improved thanks to the work Of hundreds of young people around the planet the technology that we are building is so Extremely sensitive We can detect the most faint signals from the early universe And we can build massive numbers of these detectors. I'll just say, you know, I got my phd Uh, you know about 20 years ago now. Actually, this is the 20th year anniversary of my phd And there'll be parties around the world for that undoubtedly, but the um not the smithsoni and But the actual um detector that I built was a single detector back in 99 And that that made some nice and now we're building an instrument that will have uh 60 000 detectors And each one will be, you know, five or 10 times more sensitive than the detector I made So we're increasing more and more rapidly. Yeah, there it is We're increasing more and more rapidly than even Moore's law So so the the progress of my colleagues at at the national institute of standards and technology in boulder at uc berkeley And or building such phenomenally sensitive detectors and at scale That we can do things that no human being has been able to do before because we have Been limited by the amount of technology that was available And so our goal is to build this instrument at one of the world's highest driest deserts the Atacama desert of northern chile And uh, and the instrument we have is truly massive. We have one telescope It's going to be two mirrors that each one is six meters in diameter Uh, and it will be coupled to a detector system Which will be inside of a of a there's there's that observatory there That's the building that whole building has to rotate on its axis tilt up and down And swivel around with an accuracy of holding a human hair out at the distance of of 10 football fields It's just an incredibly incredibly amazing piece of engineering driven by scientific optimization Which is driven and interned by the desire to understand the composition and origin of the universe and Perhaps to shed light on this most mysterious question of the multiverse That is the goal and it just takes massive amounts of brilliant people from around the world to do it so there are some there are some of my students at san diego and um Working really hard on building What's cool about this project is that you see there all that stuff is built But those guys are you know and gals are in their 20s, you know And they get to build this you know 80 million dollar observatory and the pieces from scratch And they're actually using their hands to do it It's not like oh, we're just going to design something in some company and we'll build a detector And i'm not i'm not you know dismissing how hard that product type of project is But this is really hands-on super fun to build and people just really enjoy Getting to to work on this technology is phenomenal and the technology that you're working on So it's a high altitude desert your you know clear air cold air But at the at the same time it's not space Correct Yeah to go to space would be ideal But the problem is space missions cost at least 100 times more than a comparable ground base mission And in some cases you can't get to space you can't put that 50 You know foot tall building into space. It's just impractical in terms of you know the logistics and space Launch capabilities And you see now even with a telescope like the web telescope, which i'm you know I know you guys have talked about it at length and it's been delayed that telescope is smaller You know than one of the mirrors that we're building in our telescope and that's doing it on earth so What we would love to do is you know kind of a blend and we have benefited from space missions But uh, we call this the poor scientist spacecraft You know even though it's hard to cry poverty with a you know 70 million dollar 80 million dollar experiment And are the you what did you say 60 000? Yes components and so is the ability of shoving that many Components in detectors in is it that they're smaller? Is it that that transistors and everything that we use technically has gotten smaller If you look at you know a cell phone camera there So there's a tiny lens which is you know, maybe a few thousand times The diameter of the wavelength of light that it's trying to detect So for us, we're trying to detect light that has a wavelength of about two millimeters So four thousand times larger than visible light So everything scales not as the as that length but as that length squared So to put you know 60 thou imagine you can't buy a you know a phone with a 60 000 pixel camera Nobody's going to buy that right 60 megapixels, you know million a thousand times more. Maybe I'll get interested Um, uh, but in these cases these detectors work down near absolute zero So you can't really do that with your iPhone and and not void apple care warranty In our case those detects you see those those uh ladies and gentlemen working on the lab They have to be cooled down to about point one degree above absolute zero a hundred milli degrees above absolute zero And at that temperature they they're these are what are called superconductors. They have no resistance to electrical Uh flow of energy And at that state they're Exquisitely sensitive detectors of heat like the heat from the big bag In addition, they have to be sensitive to different colors of light or frequency bands and polarizations And that remembers what we're looking for the swirling twisting pattern of of light emanating from from the big bang and With stuff like LIGO, they're using triangulation and they can get rid of all these You know variants things that are just noise in the signal There's heat all over the place on our planet every like everything booming in here There's energy that's heat energy So how are you how do you deal with all that noise? So if you take if you convert what room temperature is to to kelvin, it's about 300 kelvin The microwave background signal itself is a hundred times colder So if you heat something up to to you know, 300 kelvin It glows with uh with a certain type of what's called black body spectrum a heat spectrum If you heat it up to 5000 degrees it starts to glow like the temperature of the sun and the visible But going the other way if you cool it down to three kelvin a hundred times colder than the surrounding ambient temperature It it emits much much less light and heat which is a contaminant But we will have to go actually a factor of another You know factor of 10 below that at least that's why we get down to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero At that temperature the super connecting materials that we use in our detectors become very efficient And they are very accurate and precise detectors of this heat And so ultimately yes, but there's no place in the universe that you can go to That has an ambient temperature lower than three degrees kelvin because we're always be we're inside of an oven The oven is the very distant reaches of the universe that is thankfully emitting a very cold temperature of only three kelvin But we actually have to get colder than the temperature of that interstellar space in order to make these detectors work So it's a it's a real fun fun thing to do and you see those people as young men and women That's really the greatest joy is that they get to build this stuff and they're going to be taking over You know, i'm just planting the seeds. They're going to eat the fruit later on when we actually get results And learn about the composition. You know, we didn't have time maybe some other time We'll chat about these exotic materials particles called neutrinos that we're trying to capture with this telescope And perhaps only be able to capture with experiments of this kind That's wonderful So we are coming to the end of the first hour of our show and I would love to know What do you want our audience to take home with you about Your work and your experiences like what what key message do you think our audience would benefit from? well, I think that you know in my in my line of work you have to be Comfortable and you have to be humble, but you can't be Humiliated in other words you we really face this this, you know potentially humiliating crushing defeat But we learned from it. We learned what we did wrong and why the Mistakes were made and and we did make the mistakes, you know There's a book called mistakes by were made but not by us But the but it was done by us and and that's okay because we're people and we're human beings and the object is to as to not make those same mistakes in the future learn from and And in doing so it really advanced that that coastline of knowledge and the boundary Deep into into the abyss and that's that's the the most fun part of what we get to do But it's it's also a great challenge because you have to simultaneously Not invest so much of your ego in what you do that you're going to be crushed by literal tiny grains of dust But you're going to actually you know be be humble enough that they could crush you as Gandhi used to say Be humble enough. Yes, absolutely Thank you so much for your time tonight. It has been just be with you guys Yeah, it's just been great talking with you. Where can people find you online? Where can they find out more about your work and follow you? Well, my book is online, you know amazon google etc and all sorts of bookstores around the country in the world the There's a website that I have called briankeating.com. There it is They call it the twisted universe there. There's me at the south pole And I give a lot of talks around the country public talks, etc My schedule is there. I have a mailing list and then On twitter, I am dr. Brian Keating dr. Brian Keating and we set up There's a little link there called losing the Nobel prize org And that's kind of a side note That's kind of like a move on org for scientists in that we're trying to crowd source A real movement that people will help us rectify the Sort of the injustices that the Nobel prize has conferred upon science and make it better for its own Good and for the good of all young scientists That is definitely something worth looking into. Thank you so much for sharing that and again, thank you for joining us and I I for one would love to have you back on it might be fun to have you We could do a we could do a commentary on this next year's Nobel prizes. I was thinking the exact same thing Yes, I was thinking the exact same thing. Yes, october will be able to do it And yeah, we could do a you know, kind of like the Oscars but with the Nobel prizes It would be super fun. Yeah, we always have a conversation. We always bring them up and the winners and everything Yeah, I would love that. Yeah, so let's let's definitely keep in touch. I will be following you guys as always Thank you guys so much Thank you. Have a wonderful night. Thank you. Good night guys. Bye. Bye Good night All right, everybody we I've come to our break and we are going to be Taking a few moments to tell you a few things about twist But we will be back for the second half of our show in just a few moments If you wanted to get the name of his book again It is called losing the Nobel Prize a story of cosmology ambition and the perils of science's highest honor That was dr. Brian Keating and this weekend science will be back In just a few moments with more science. We've got valentine science. Stay tuned Put on a pair of goggles and go look at all the things I couldn't see The answers lie somewhere within this scatter blotter Hey everybody, thank you so much for joining us for another episode of twist We are so glad to have you here I would love to tell you a few ways that you can help support twist and Keep us in podcasting business. Yes this weekend science relies on listener support and one way you can do that You can support us first off by heading over to twist.org Oh first thing twist.org. We've got a new pop-up window You will find there that if you have not replied to my patreon My patreon message about this you can subscribe to our newsletter That's right twist will be creating a newsletter that will keep you updated on all things twist like new shows interviews that come up also occasional articles things that Blair and I and maybe Justin, I don't know he's a writer too We'll see how it goes We'll keep you updated on things that we're doing and things that we're thinking and I hope that You enjoy it and you know if you can sign up you can always delete it if you don't want to read it But I I ask you go to twist.org and maybe consider signing up for our newsletter. It's coming coming in hot Once you get there to twist.org The things the ways that you can help us out the subscribe button is a huge one subscribe You click on that button tell a friend to click on it youtube itunes google play easy way to Access twists on a weekly basis aside from the newsletter Also, you can support us with your purchases. We have a merchandise store. That's right the zazzle store Click on the link in our header bar. It'll take you to zazzle.com slash this weekend science where we have all sorts of goodies with twist logos and images from previous Blair's animal corner calendars lots of things for you to Choose through do you need a cup for your coffee a tote bag for your groceries a cover for your phone? Just a t-shirt that Proclaims your valentine'sy love for twists. Oh, yes, that's right. Make that purchase a portion of the proceeds support this show back at twist.org You can also donate directly. There's a yellow paypal button The yellow button takes you to a paypal interface where you can donate One time any amount of your choosing if you want to donate on a recurring basis An easy way to do that is to click on the patreon link It'll take you to patreon.com slash this weekend science Where you can click on the red button to become a patron at the level of your choosing You will be charged on a recurring basis once per month. That's right once per month We will charge you the amount that you decide you are able to pay and we send you fun gifts That's right. And if you uh, join us at the $10 a month level We will thank you by name at the end of every episode That's right. It's fun stuff support us get your twist all the good times everybody You know we rely on you and We really couldn't do it without you from listening to being being a part of the audience to helping us make the show happen We couldn't do this show without you. Thank you for your support And We're back with more this weekend science Yes, we are and it is time for that part of the show that people have become begun bringing us submissions once for once again this week in what has science done for me lately Well today's letter comes to us from Oh If I could get past my camera there Dale Moore Minion Dale Moore has written in before and he says science has allowed me the luxury of Contemplation science has allowed me the knowledge of my world To be able to see the beauty of it all through the details of it all Science has allowed me to be able to sit on a beach mesmerized by the Awesomeness of the ocean knowing full well that there are more water molecules in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in the ocean Science has allowed me to hold the sand in my hand And know that the sand does not actually touch me nor do the grains of sand touch each other But that we are all held slightly apart suspended by the interactions of the electrons filling the surface Science allows me to contemplate that even though I sit on the beach. I am mostly empty space And if that space were removed I would be reduced To the size of the grains of sand that's my skin I can gaze at a beautiful sunset knowing that the gorgeous sight is made visible by the light streaming into my eyes after a 93 million mile journey for a ball of plasma And that it only took eight minutes to get to me But that doesn't diminish the beauty of the moment it heightens it It makes the moment that much more awe inspiring because while I a small bag of atoms Sit on this one beach on this one small planet in this ordinary system in this average arm of this common galaxy in this vast universe I am here and I am alive and I can appreciate it for what it really is All because men and women striving for truth striving to know this place and our place in it have made it possible science has given me perspective and gratitude And for that I am truly and forever grateful Minion Dale Moore That's that is the makings of a song in it. That's so poetic. Yeah, it's beautiful Uh, yes, you know, we all need these words every once in a while These words that can be created by the neuronal flashings and people's brains and uh Yes perspective Thank you Dale. I really loved this. I loved reading this one. So Thank you so much for writing in and I'm really glad that science allows you this perspective and gratitude. Yes I have gratitude for you and all of you Remember we need you to write in and let us know What science has done for you lately whether it is a short poem sonnet haiku a song a an short essay a blurb A pondering amusing. Yes amuse us with your ponderings send us a message Facebook page That's right. Facebook.com slash this week in science or email me at Kirsten at this week in science dot com. That's k i r s t e n at this week in science dot com Let's keep filling it with your letters. I want to keep doing that. Let's talk some Now it's time for science now all the world is ending Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, the music Science now Hang on back up the song wait Yeah, wait, I just kind of slipped that in there didn't I well no It's a slow death. It's it's it's gonna be slow and good That's actually what I look forward to Like so what's happening is kind of like, you know, you your your leg Is falling off, but you don't you're just starting to go do I have pins and needles? Where humanity is right now is kind of the way I feel about the earth's leg. What is that in the metaphor? No, no, it's human humanity's leg Yes, okay, humanity. The earth is fine. The earth is always fine. Yeah, the earth will survive us You're right about that So a review published in biological conservation this week has made big headlines globally as it should as It has reviewed several studies from around the world 73 historical reports of insect declines They systematically assessed the underlying drivers of decline in these reports and have discovered that over 40 percent of insect species are threatened with extinction and And that's that's not great So I was I was um listening to a like a comedy news podcast a couple days ago and they had this story on and they said, um So the bugs are in trouble insects are dying. I know that's bad But I don't know why And this is something that we do need to talk about because everybody it's like, oh, I'm not being bitten by as many bugs You know, I don't have to wash my windshield as often You know if I do a cross-country drive, it's like hey I made the whole way. I never had to clear the windshield. So this is not how many bugs can you name that you've been bitten by Really like the list is pretty small compared to the amount of bugs that exist Yeah, it is a smear campaign bugs are essential to the functioning of this planet. There is the the The massive bugs on this planet far outweighs the mass of vertebrates And it underlies the food chain Bugs are a an incredibly important part of the food web and we have seen Numbers we've lost numbers of honeybees since the 1940s 1950s We're at a fraction of what we once had and people are like, oh colony collapse disorder but they're not talking about the just mass death of multiple species of honeybees that has taken place over the last 60 to 80 years so Bugs we call them bugs because oh they bug us right insects Insects are essential to the functioning of food webs. The majority of them are Not majority, but many of them are essential to our agriculture In that they are pollinators and recyclers and these if we see a decline in Precipitous a more precipitous decline in insects on this planet and don't do something about it It is going to affect our ability to exist on the planet. So humanity. This is like the pins and needles stage We should do something before our leg falls off And so the question may come to you, what am I going to do about bugs? Well One idea is to if you have the economic ability to buy organic Because pesticide pesticides according to this study Are one of the main drivers agrochemical pollutants are one of the main drivers of of these extinctions That said invasive species and climate change are also additional causes and part of climate change is also environmental change and in our human human spread as we remove what we're once riparian areas as we Cut down trees and forests and replace them with houses and streets and roads and concrete that does not grow A plant that can support an insect ecosystem Your mind climate change causes flowers to flower at the wrong time And and and also the use of lawns lawns are Big drains on our water system. Maybe get rid of a lawn and consider planting wildflowers Local wildflowers exactly wildflowers. Absolutely. Yeah, don't be afraid of the bugs We need to foster those bugs Um, yeah, so anything we can do to help reduce This rapidity of climate change and also to assist in the ecosystem maintenance of animals And these insects now now So like silver lining Uh When you do eliminate A lot of species from this planet as has happened naturally a number of times Uh, you open up a lot of niches for new evolution to fill into for Speciation to events usually Show up right after a mass extinction event. So We may be even though we're looking at this from the perspective of humanity Decimating life on this planet to a great extent We may actually be creating a new speciation event as we eliminate life forms across ecological niches for a foreseeable future. This may actually be I know I know it's not fun being in the in the point where Things are going down you mean speciation as in humanity dies out and there's Human species I was gonna say is when you say right after Right after is like tens to hundreds of thousands of years. Oh, yeah Way after we've died because crops won't grow right but the future uh squid Sentient life forms or whatever takes over after look back at the at the the The the most Cambrian like age of of expansion of life that took place after the humans finally died out Yeah, my money's on snails and slugs. You like the snails and slugs? I think I think I think they might have they might have what it takes They might have what it takes. Yeah, this I mean, this is just one among many stories of uh issues that they're There needs to be a very concerted global effort to discuss um, how we are going to I don't redesign our agricultural practices. We don't we I mean, we're losing top soil at a ridiculous rate Which is again going to reduce our ability to grow food for growing in population Dust in the wind, baby. Yes dust in the wind Yeah, um So the top soil is going we're having water redistribution because of different weather patterns and The climate changing. Uh, so water is going to be less Available in some areas than it has been Agricultural have come more difficult to do insects are dying and moving. I mean, this is all tied in together But the bugs on the windshield are that, you know, one of those big indicators that To me, you know, we're done there was a Catherine hey ho a climate scientist Who was very active on twitter. She posted a Now the results of a survey. I think it's a pew pew pew survey looking at attitudes related to climate change and the basically Alarmed concerned somewhat concerned don't really care and down down the line and There used to be a lot more of a lot more people in the didn't care or in the kind of what concerned group and Those individuals have now shifted and more people are highly concerned and alarmed and Really looking at the numbers the number of people who don't really care and aren't looking at this are in the minority But what I think is so interesting about this is Do what I'm saying is the numbers of people we are at a point where things are shifting and we can do something Yeah, so I think what's super important as people are getting more engaged is that we make sure that they can connect the dots from The initial cause which is the burning of fossil fuels or whatever it is, right and the Final result which in this case is the Um decline of insects and connect that back to humans because just kind of like the joke that I made at the beginning about this comedian Who said okay insects are disappearing and I know that's bad, but I don't know why I think that's part of this conversation, right is making sure that these findings are communicated to the general public In a way that is relevant and pressing instead of just the bees are dying and we're all going to die It's okay. So insects are pollinators. We depend on them for food Here's what you can do to make sure that pollinators are still around so that we still get our food, right? butterflies well Plants that like butterflies too. Yeah, so so and not to like put too dark a footnote on this um Even if it wasn't for global warming at all Even if this didn't exist what we're doing is unsustainable so So this is a nice thing to rally around and and utilize to connect those dots as you're saying Blair I I think that is absolutely necessary because it's It's something that is global Yeah, and it's affects and therefore should be able to like we were talking about like You know cosmology being something people around the world can all engage in because we all have the same view um This is something that could be a it could be utilized as a good rally and cry around all of those other downstream unsustainable issues That in some ways may be more impactful even Absolutely People may listen to yes Yeah And then on to a happier more, you know valentine's day appropriate story Just in time valentine's day researchers have published a dinosaur discovery in the journal plus one It is a dinosaur With a heart shaped tail Yes, the bones of belonging to this this dinosaur's tail are uh, they are in the shape Of a heart and this is a dinosaur found in africa, which is an area not Historically thought to have had these giant titanosaur dinosaurs, which are Usually from south found in south america Or that part of land that is now south america But these dinosaurs are related to They are related to uh, titanosaurs and other parts of the world and Are have the bones of their tail are a very interesting shape They're huge bones for one and you know, these are massive massive dinosaurs and for two they have They really are it's not that the The end of the tail is shaped like a heart It is the bones themselves inside the tail that are in the shape of the heart that give The tail something of a you know a heart ish top and then a A tapered heart bottom like underside Okay Yes, um, so first uh when I thought it was Very obviously heart-shaped was wondering when did they find this and how long have they been sitting exactly like In december no no no no no no no no no we gotta wait This can only be published Right before valentine's day. That's how we're gonna do this. Yeah The skeleton is from the cretaceous. So it's been hanging out waiting A while Um, it was discovered in 2004 when part of the skeleton was found in a dry riverbed overlooking Uh an area called it's a matuka is the area in which it was found in Africa And the excavations continued through 2008 and then you know, how things go working on the bones and Figuring around figuring out exactly all the details of how things fit together And the phylogenetic relationships of the animals. Um, this dinosaur has a Very long name. It is derived from swahili the swahili means animal of the matuka with a heart-shaped tail so specific I'm very Straightforward very straightforward. However I don't I'm three more time This is I'm going to show uh, those of you who even get all the way through it like how long is this name This is not going to be any eight-year-old's favorite dinosaurs just because of this No, so the name it's except for the one that does learn how to pronounce it and and because Here she learns how to pronounce it that's going to be their favorite Exactly someday I will have the dinosaur name down But it is appropriate in that is derived from swahili and it is appropriate to the region and so The the the nomenclature is fantastic, but it's going to take Uh, a while for people to wrap their tongues around this one And I don't know that the pronunciation key is any better than the actual doesn't look like it's helping I think you probably nailed it right there. I think that I would I'd buy it I'll buy that for a dollar. Tell me a story, Justin. Oh my gosh, is it story time for just, okay, uh See, yes, what would valentine's day be with just and without a neanderthal story One small step for man was of course preceded by many many small steps by neanderthals And now thanks to scientists from the Gibraltar National Museum alongside colleagues from Spain, Portugal and Japan We have found that some of those steps of meandering neanderthals were captured in rock print This is published in the journal quaternary science reviews prints found in the cattle in bay sand dune of a time when the sea level was 120 meters below what it is presently and a great field of dunes that stretched out from the rock of Gibraltar in Gibraltar Gibraltar is Gibraltar It's not in anywhere unless the uk and spain have a war at some point It will stay just Gibraltar, but you could say it's the southernmost tip tip of uh, iberia Uh, the work started 10 years ago when the first dates were obtained It is then that the first traces of footprints left by bird brits were found subsequent years the success of Natural collapse of the sand has revealed further material that has permit permitted them to do an even more detailed study Including some new dating techniques. So they identified footprints that correspond to species Which are known from fossil material already to have inhabited Gibraltar They identified red deer ibex. I don't know what this animal is our rocks a u r o c h s. Where does that blare? a u r o a u r s a u r o c h It's a huge cattle type thing Okay, used to be common in europe is now extinct. It was a wild Um animal not domesticated. It looks it looks like a giant cow Wow, uh, they also uh found footprints for leopard Which is leopard in iberia. I didn't know straight tusked elephant In addition scientists have found the footprints of a young human Who they think is a neanderthal which dates around 29 000 years ago, which would coincide with neanderthal? Dates from a nearby gorms cave If confirmed to be neanderthal these dunes would eventually be would then become the only the second site in the world Where neanderthal footprints have been captured in stone the other being bar top cave in romania uh slightly interesting at least if the the rock print Turns out to be neanderthals looks like they had a giant big toe like way bigger Like then the rest of their toes, which would be very interesting Uh, if that's already in the fossil record somewhere our research was supported by the government of Gibraltar Uh under a project of the caves project. They have ongoing As well as with scientists from the spanish u project Um, so yeah a little a little bit of insight there Uh, a little a little footprint. I love it whenever we see these hominin footprints captured in stone whether they're they're uh of our current human Ancestors or the more ancienty uh relatives It's it's always fun that that something can leave that much of an indelible mark On the earth that we can find it all this this time Yeah, that just I mean footprints from that long ago Blow my mind, you know, it's just this mind boggling like wait what then then my next story We'll really blow your mind Um Life on earth we already talked about how wonderfully improbable it all seems Uh, the origins of life on earth is a mystery raptor and an enigma Likely hidden at the fringes of an ancient ocean which happens to be exactly where they found What might just be the oldest example of multicellular life on earth so Multi-cellular life other than you know, not just these like the traces that we've seen of bacteria in the light that we've We've possibly been able to date to about three billion years old On a four billion year old planet. That's pretty soon for life. Just sorry multi-cellular life though that more complex life That eventually leads to fish and us and plants and everything Uh, it's considered to be very old 600 million ish years old in fact Which you know compared to three billion for just single cells. That's a pretty good. That's still pretty quick Uh, so the life is very old and it started pretty much right away on the planet However the invention into the unknown Uh, and into the anything new information worth mentioning a cocktail party is just getting started because newly discovered fossilized slime tracks suggest multi-cellular life could be Much older than previously snails. I told you Yeah, they they started uh the preservation of fossilized tracks quotey voice here preservation of fossilized tracks or trace fossils That multi-cellular organisms that could move around to reach food resources may already have existed 2.1 billion years ago more than 1.5 billion years older than previously thought explained Kurt Kahn hauser professor of the university of albertas department of earth and atmospheric sciences and co-author of the study fossils found in the france-a-villain series formation located in gaban africa Are likely the result of ancient mucus trails that by multis multi-cellular life Uh, that could have been just a Something akin to a modern amoeboid cell And and these tracks have been left as they nails They went looking for food Samples range from six millimeters across to 170 millimeters in the length through the sediment layer Despite the small size though It's been creating a rather large controversy. This is more cody voice from kahn hauser The question arising from this research Then is why do we go 1.5 billion years before we see similar features in the rock record? We don't see anything like this again until 585 million years ago Some speculate that this early emergence of complex life went extinct due to some environmental factors. So this could have been like one one round of of evolution that then just got eliminated Others though are suggesting that similar fossilized traces may have existed Just didn't get preserved or simply Have been found Would have gone unnoticed Cody voice, uh, uh, even more of kahn hauser the broader community has a right to be skeptical about the interpretation However, one of the current paradigms Relating to the evolution multicellular organisms is oxygen availability in 2.1 billion years ago There was no shortage of oxygen in shallow marine waters so Another layer to the research that's going to be Coming up. They're going to do more examination Of well oxygen well oxygenated shallow marine environments In the time period between the 500 ish million years and the 2.1 billion year period To to see if it fits with where they found multicellular life other places Yeah, because you know We we just dig where we dig right we get we see the rocks where we see the rocks and and It's not a Continuous history of the earth that we have and life's development on it And so maybe we just haven't looked in the right place to have the right evidence for that time That occurred between 2.1 billion years ago and 500,000 years 500 million years ago Yeah, the earth plows everything under In time right so so the the the When we found like 3 billion year old rock formations that were uh, you know, haven't been Devoured into the deep into the crust It's a rarity that we even get back to rocks that we can actually date to Being that ancient and still accessible from the surface Um, so when we find these traces, uh, they're they're They're a sample within a tiny sample within a sample of what's even available to see Which should be actually much more encouraging than I think uh, we we We proclaimed them because the fact that we can we have a sample That's 2 billion years old that shows a trace in and we don't have 2 billion years old samples to look through all the time Should tell us it's probably not a one-off It probably yeah was everywhere Well, I mean when we when we look at fossils of soft bodied animals We know that it's really unusual right because anything that's squishy that doesn't have some sort of exoskeleton Getting a fossil out of that. It's like a flash in the pan. It's it's it's really It's it's more telling than it should be just as one item because of this because it has to kind of represent This larger group of animals that weren't preserved. So if you're talking about slime That's that's really hard to to be able to capture in a fossil So especially a very very very very very small piece of slime so like It's yeah, absolutely. I agree that this has to be it can't be a fluke unless they're they're Identifying what it is incorrectly. That's the only question which which has happened before like this This is the debate that's gone on like a geologist might look at the same thing and say Ah, there's a way to form this geologically that just would make sense enough to eliminate the more impossible type idea Right. I mean that's that's been a conversation about some of the three billion year old fossil finds not all of them But but on some of them. So so this is this is again One of these fun things in science where science isn't only about being right It's also about trying to prove yourself for the other person wrong Which I I love the fact that the researcher who is the co-author of the study Actually points out that the other side has a very good argument He's like in the game. He's like he's totally understands the That they can be refutable The evidences that we find this is why I feel like sometimes science and what makes The media successful doesn't always mix well, right? Because because you want these these big grand statements Um that become headlines kind of like what we were talking about at the beginning of the show but to say like Oh, well, but this is slime that might mean multicellular multicellular organisms are way older, but also It could be nothing at all like that's not a headline Oh, but you know That was those were some pretty good valentine's day headline stories right there footprints in the sand Left by neanderthals maybe chasing a lover or food or whatever slime And now it's time There's a Blair's animal corner with Blair What you got Blair. Oh my gosh, you know what love it's falooses Sorry everyone. I know tomorrow is valentine's day, but love is for losers. It's science A recent study looking at uh, this is actually a cricket the two spotted cricket Demonstrated that in some cases female choice Does not depend on victory in battles proceeding mating process Instead the losers may be the winners In the end Yes, so love is for losers, but in a good way Like the fight between males the act of mating crickets is preceded by a period of mating behaviors They have sound they have communication. They have movements that they make so with With fighting it's antagonistic behaviors. We talked about this with things like deer On the show before but so they kind of size each other up and then at some point they might end up actually fighting Biting wrestling all that kind of stuff, but mating also involves sizing up One another making calls. So there's similarities there And uh scientists I just I just got a headline out of this But We're we're gonna appreciate men who can lose arguments. Yes, there you go Um, so there might be something to that Justin science identified Uh 19 behavioral elements that these crickets did during court sheet courtship and then they um, they sorted all these males out Into different statuses. So they had two rounds of combat In the absence of females for the yes, so, uh Only absolute champions and absolute looter losers were selected for mating So those who refused to fight was one group tossed right out Or if they won and lost or lost and won They were also tossed out only those that lost both times or won both times We're sent into the second stage of the experiment where they were prepared to fight cricket with females Exactly the aggressive fighters Um We're we're still kind of in this like kill kill mode And so they perceived the females as a potential rival and they showed aggression They gave signals of attack. Some of them actually started beating or biting the females So as you might imagine That happens with humans like don't act too surprised kiki. So this behavior humans do these things quote interferes with further courtship Um, unlike the alpha males the losers began courtship as soon as they saw the female They were ready to switch in to romance mode um So the winning crickets had a high level of hormones responsible for aggression as you might expect And they had more trouble immediately switching into that courtship mode So they looked at all these different types of signals And they measured the time between the start of courtship and mating directly And so they they really saw that these losers quote unquote in battle Were far more successful in getting to the point of mating which is the ultimate game here, right? so This is a a weird thing where In a lot of biological wisdom with mating displays with fighting for female for access to females the most Virile male the the male with the greatest levels of male hormone The the males that are most successful are usually the ones that we expect to have the most babies to have the best job Passing forth their DNA and to have the best access and success with mates But this is a case where the losers actually did far better So of course this is a step wise thing, right? So they just did the extremes I think in the next step of this study if they started to look at those in the middle in those gray areas I'm guessing that's who's going to have the best success are those that win sometimes so that they get better access to females but aren't so kind of Roided out so that they can't switch to the romance What this is also a very misogynistic study because it's looking at all the male Yeah, two dot crickets. Yeah, what if the female crickets are just have a more nurturing attitude? So it's like, yeah, he needs me more. Yeah It just means they could just be more caring the sensitive cricket is is more sexy He just just he needs my help more. That's why I'm really I really like the cricket who didn't want to beat me up Exactly Yes, I really like a life partner who doesn't try to bite and hit me the second that I walk in a room That would be great Yeah, so this is an interesting study that kind of makes us just reassess some of the fundamental expectations in mate choice, I think and so You know, the researchers say that insects are a great suitable model for Starting to learn these sorts of things because in laboratory conditions Their behaviors remain very consistent to how they are in the wild. So in this case, for example crickets They don't really see a difference when you take them out of the wild and put them in laboratory conditions Of course with other animals, you're going to have a harder time Uh replicating how two male bucks would uh have Competing antagonistic behaviors fight Hit their antlers together then have access to a female like that's much harder to Uh replicate in a laboratory, but from this sort of thing you can potentially go out into the field And see things that are happening behaviorally and and this also might explain why you get kind of these um gradients of behaviors Even though you would expect that over time evolution would give you just all of these super aggressive males This might be why that's not the case Yeah, absolutely would minimize their pop their frequency in the population So gentlemen this valentine's day take a note from the crickets You know be be nurturing be sweet chill out. Yeah, just chill out, man Maybe don't get in that fight once in a while. Yeah lose an argument. There we go A better day to lose arguments in valentine's day. Um, and so often in uh studies that I bring into the animal corner There's studies on animals that have implications potentially for humans I have something that was a study on humans that I think actually have Implications for animals that weren't even mentioned in the article. So I'm really excited to bring this Um to the show today. This is a story about oral contraceptives and how they may impair women's recognition of complex emotions So we know that oral contraceptives have um, you know, they are hormone based, right? And so we also know that hormones these same hormones that are in the oral contraceptives have um previously been shown to impact uh certain recognition recognition of of Emotions in other people or animals or all these sorts of things. So so these progesterone and estrogen Um, we know they affect emotion recognition in humans and in other animals. So This is not a surprise in theory But this is actually a situation where they took um the They took a group. It's a small group 42 oral contraceptive users and 53 non-users and they Administered a special emotion recognition task They tried to pick emotions and expressions that are hard to identify um and they found that The oral contraceptive users were around 10 worse on average than non-users in deciphering the more difficult emotional expressions and this Kind of raises a larger question about what these oral contraceptives are doing to our social emotional processes in humans So again, this is a very small Study itself selecting because they didn't take people who weren't on oral contraceptives Test them put them on oral contraceptives test them again. No, there's just people who are on them who are who are not So there's there's many further levels to this that need to happen before there's any clear identifier Of how much this affects and what specifically this affects in humans. Yeah, just is it possible that just they are having more sex and that's that's why They like the complex emotional thing wasn't as readily apparent or important to them right I mean They're already on oral contraception and the other group isn't And you might associate where the amount of sex somebody is engaged in with the fact that they're doing active steps for contraception and the other group isn't What does having sex have to do with identifying emotional expressions exactly? That's why this is so fascinating even with its tiny subset of Okay, so, uh, that is a very different, uh, manipulated variable But I understand you are just trying to imply that there are other variables in play. I get that um But maybe maybe the desire. I mean, maybe the the heightened state of attempting to differentiate emotional states Is more important in in attempting to attain mate selection versus you already have a mate Now you can kind of like resource Down a lot of that tuned-inness to people's current constant emotional states because now maybe it's like not okay I and yeah, okay. I I totally get what you're saying there. I think that However, there are a large number of women who take oral contraceptives who are not taking it for sex Yes, they are taking or they take oral contraceptives for just control of their menstrual cycles for there are some women with uh with Endometriosis endometriosis where it's an issue and the pill helps uh to ameliorate some of the symptoms You know, if you're at high risk of ovarian uterine or colon cancers, they'll put you on it to reduce your so 50 samples Because they manipulate hormones 50 samples, right? So so I mean like this is too small. It's too small a sample. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, but but we do know Like I said, we do know that these hormones that you are taking affect social emotional um There have been studies in the past that have We've talked about it previously about the social emotional effects one study going way back that still needs to be replicated in my opinion is The one that suggests women who uh when they go off the pill aren't as attracted to their partners If they met if they met their partner while they were on the pill Yeah, yeah, which that one has to do with um scent, doesn't it? I thought that one was about scent but there's but this is this is a matter of These oral contraceptives right control hormones within the body and hormones are Involved in just about everything right and into a large degree in social emotional uh psychological states Right, so so there's there's a bunch of stuff going on here further studies are required Every researcher involved in this study has said further studies are needed So they're they're just saying that this is an initial look But I think that there's there's a couple things that I just want to mention before I go on to my my crazy theories from from this point um, but This is not to say that oral contraceptives are bad This is not to say that they need to be looked at before they're administered They are a huge life changing thing for a huge amount of women and so why it's called the pill Yes, there's lots of pills. Yes, and everybody knows exactly what's pill you're talking about the invention of oral contraceptives for women Has been credited with the second renaissance of women in society in a lot of ways And so I'm not going to stand here and say that uh, uh-oh the pill might be messing with your brain Don't take it. No, I'm not saying that what I am saying is that there is still a lot for us to learn As we have been taking this and so first of all Hey, there are oral contraceptives for men that aren't out there. What if they don't affect men? But oral contraceptives for women do affect women. Maybe that's something we need to be looking at right But also there are other options and contraceptives for women for some women And so this might be part of the conversation if somebody notices that they're foggy I can I can tell you right now on a personal note I was foggier when I was on oral contraceptives and when I went to a different type Um, it was like this fog had kind of lifted. That's not scientific I can't tell you exactly what was happening But anecdotally this is a thing that people talk about and this might be exactly what that is And so if there are other options for people who have adverse reactions, this might help us identify that Now all of that aside Yes, I want to know what you think. Tell me about the animals Oral contraceptives are used in captive management of animals and in research projects for um For all sorts of studies And they are not considered as a potential confounding variable in a lot of research studies when you look at social Dynamics if you think about primate groups, there's all sorts of studies done on primate groups But they have to put give contraceptives to some animals to control their population in that group This is something that we might need to look at also in zoos and in wildlife rehabilitation centers They give oral contraceptives to animals that live in packs that live in social groups This is something that might be a big deal So so it would make uh observation of this animal behavior. Maybe Uh more applicable to modern human society, but less applicable to that Wild type animal society But also if you have a pride of lions that live in a zoo And all of the females aren't oral contraceptives And you take one of them off because they have a breeding recommendation And suddenly they're not getting along with the other lions the way that they were There's lots of things going on here That that could have an impact captive management of animals In a in a pretty interesting way potentially I just I I kind of saw this this kind of light bulb over my head that actually a lot of people don't realize A lot of animals are on the pill I I don't think many people give it a second thought. Yeah fascinating Something to think about how is that affecting the social interactions of the animals we give the pills? How is it affecting our research? Inquiring minds would love to know We'd love to know. Hey, do you have drinking plans for valentine's day? Um What day of the week does it follow on Yes, yeah For me, so I'm gonna have a beer or two while I bowl Okay. Well beer. Have you heard this the saying? Beer before wine is fine beer before What is it? Liquor wine is fine Wine before beer. You're in the clear Hard than soft you're in the loft Uh, and then soft and hard, uh Yeah, you've been trying to It's always worked out Liquor than beer you're in the clear There we go anyhow some researchers Researchers just published a study in the american journal of clinical nutrition Really just putting that to the test if you have one before the other does it really matter Oh, can I guess? No, it doesn't yeah, you're right. You're right. It doesn't matter Okay, so I don't know how they do this test, but I will I will say but no part of the part of the wisdom behind that would be um, how how quickly Uh alcohol takes effect Um, and and so and so if you've been drinking the beer before liquor Or before soft before hard You've been drinking and you've put up a a little bit of drinking, but then you've done Heavier drinking after it's building off of that and you may not have noticed how far you had gone. That's I think Yeah, but but now I don't know People should know how they feel the next day Regardless and anyway, there's been a study 90 people researchers got 90 people Tipsy they uh were they were given uh control groups had either beer or only wine Uh, and then the groups study group one consumed beer Up to a blood alcohol net level of about 0.05 percent drunk and then wine To a blood alcohol of 0.11 percent and then study group two did Wine to 0.11 percent and beer Sorry wine to 0.05 percent and up then drinking beer up to 0.11 percent They switched them all around later to make sure it was all mixed up nicely, but it didn't matter everybody had um The hangover severity as it was assessed by the acute hangover scale rating on the day following each intervention um Pretty much if people were intoxicated. They had a little bit of a hangover and it didn't matter which was first Didn't matter also. This is nowhere near the actual level of Drinking at a college party. This is just like nowhere Nowhere close. Yeah Point a little 0.11 percent is a is a decent amount that's definitely past buzz to drunk probably drunk. Yeah. Yeah Yep, um, anyway other other uh news at the end of the show here, um Ultima tool which researchers and people have been saying oh, it looks like It looks like a a snowman. It looks like a peanut. It's this object that new horizons found floating out past Pluto and uh It's so cute, but The reality is is it's like the pancakes that I make It's kind of flat and lumpy It's not spherical They thought it was spherical because of a trick of the angle But upon observing the background stars in the images and how they blinked out as the object passed in front of them Researchers were able to determine that it wasn't as much of a sphere and was actually a bit more of a Flat pancake Yeah Ultima pancake this is what I will call all of my pancakes from now on you think it's lumpy and flat Well, yeah, it's an object from out beyond Pluto. This is science pancakes people You'll love them And then my final stories are from mars We've talked before about mars 1 the mission to get people out to mars All right, we've interviewed interviewed people who Were trying out to be one of the mars 1 crew and it was supposed to be this big, you know Reality tv show get them all out there all it anyway Uh, they're going bankrupt There you know, they want they really really wanted to do this thing that's really hard and yeah They're reassessing their options at the moment anyhow, but in terms of reassessing options Opportunity the rover opportunity will assess its options no more. NASA will no longer communicate with opportunity After a giant dust storm last year covered at solar panels. We presume with dust and Took away the ability of the rover rover to refresh recharge its batteries They have been trying for a long time several months to Regain communications with opportunity and finally today have decided that communiques will be no more 15 years of exploration Opportunity covered over 45 kilometers The surface of mars Brilliant little rover that could that what was it? It was one of the rovers It was supposed to have like a year-long mission six months 15 years and there's still the curiosity rover. There's we still it's amazing We're on mars. We got robots on mars and you know one decent windstorm to knock off the dust and I might kick kick some dust off the project It might start it up a little bit Or maybe curiosity you'll bump into him and kind of blow off the dust There's also going to be other other probes going out, you know with more advanced abilities and things so But yeah, that was it was a six month expected project Stunning how How awesome nasa is and they're overbuilding of things It's amazing. I love you nasa for your overbuilding Mm-hmm. Yes I mean it it takes so much money to get it up there. I appreciate that No, it doesn't they have No, it doesn't it's nothing, huh? It's jump change. No, like we had that interview with one of the one of the One of the people running was it was a curiosity? um, but they Basically, it was like the the the entire project was the cost of like three houses in davis I mean we talk about it being an insane amount of money, but then you're like actually That's Really not you're just massively underfunded. Yeah Exactly. Yep They do well on a shoestring budget. Does anybody else have any stories for the end of the show? Uh, I'm all done No more news No more news everyone. All right. Well I am Having an issue connecting to patreon So I am not going to be I keep they're down for maintenance And I use the website to be able to read the names of patreon sponsors So I apologize. I am not going to be able to read Oh, nope. Ah, just now it came back. Yes I have been refreshing it for the past 10 minutes and trying to extend the end of the show I've got it Come on. Come on. You can do it. You can do it patreon You can load it getting there One yes Got it. Okay. We could do the end of the show now Yeah All right, so we have made it to the end of the show I would love to say thank you to everyone for Enjoying the show with us tonight. Happy valentine's day to all of you happen. Happy darwin's birthday to everyone Happy international day of science of women and girls in science There were so many there were so many great days this week So many wonderful sciency days And I hope you enjoyed them all there will be more to come Next week when we we are back everyone Thank you to fada for helping out with show notes and the chat room over on youtube and our social media Thank you so much. Thank you to identity for for helping to record the show Appreciate you allowing us to have audio files for the show gourd mccloud Thank you for helping in the chat room keeping everything happy keeping it running in there. I appreciate that and Thank you to our patreon sponsors Thank you to paul disney richard onamis ed dire stu polyc philip shane ken haze harrison prather charlene henry joshua furie steve debel alex wilson tony steele craig landon mark mazaros jack matthew litwin jason roberts bill k bob caulder time jumper 319 eric nap richard brian kondren Dave neighbor adan jeff stefan albaron john ratna swami dav fridel daryl myshack andrew swanson paul ronovich karin benton sue doster dav wilkinson ben bignell richard porter noodles kevin reardon christof zucnerach ashish pansy lissey's adkins sarah chavis rtom rick ramus paul john mckay jason olds brine carrington christopher drier lisa slzowski dream depot Greg riley sean lamb and rothig steve leesman curt larson rudy garcia marjorie gary s robert greg briggs brendan minnish christopher rappin flying out erin luthin matt sutter marqueson flow kevin parochan biren lee e oh thank you for all of your support on patreon and if any of you out there are interested in finding out more about patreon you can find information at patreon.com slash this week in science or just click the patreon button at twist.org and if you're over there maybe recommend it to some of your friends on next week's show oh we have more physics coming for you we are going to be speaking with a wonderful researcher from the fair me lab about a big antenella palmice who will be telling us some amazing things going on at fair me lab and big picture physics so we will look forward to that next week during our normal showtime of eight p.m pacific time on wednesday and is there anything else oh yeah twist.org slash live is where you can watch it live and join the chat room but if you can't make it don't worry because past episodes end up on our youtube channel and at twist.org thank you for enjoying the show twist is also available as a podcast just google this week in science in your itunes directory or if you have one of the mobile type devices that are going around you can look up twist the number for droid app in the android marketplace or simply this weekend science and anything apple market placey for more information on anything you've heard here today show notes will be available on our website that's at www.twist.org where you can also while you're there make comments and start conversations with the hosts or other listeners or you can contact us directly email kirsten at kirsten at thisweekandscience.com Justin at twistminion at gmail.com or Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org just be sure to put twist twis somewhere in the subject line otherwise your email is very likely to be spam filtered into you can also hit us up on the twitter where we are at twist science at dr kiki at jackson fly and at players menagerie we love your feedback if there's a topic you would like us to cover or address a suggestion for an interview haiku that comes during 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've learned anything from the show remember it's all in your head this weekend science this weekend science this weekend science it's the end of the world so i'm setting up a shop got my banner on furrow it says the scientist is in i'm gonna sell my advice show them how to stop the robot with a simple device i'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand and a little costume is a couple of grand science is coming your way so everybody listen to what i say i use a scientific method for all that it's worth and i'll broadcast my opinion all over the earth because it's this weekend science this weekend science science science this weekend science this weekend science i've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news that what i say may not represent your views but i've done the calculations and i've got a plan if you listen to the science you may just get understand that we're not trying to threaten your philosophy we're just trying to save the world from japanese and this weekend science is coming away so everybody listen do everything we say and if you use our methods better roll and i we may rid the world of toxoplasma got the eye because it's this weekend science this weekend science this weekend science this weekend science 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 So how can 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 I keep forgetting to push the right buttons We're gonna have to show I'm tired I'm gonna stop the screen sharing Stop the screen sharing Gotta to start work if you wanna sign up For a newsletter, yeah, yeah, yeah When do you wanna try to plop this thing? Newsletter Yeah How many people do we have on the list right now? About 70 or 80, I think Okay Do we wanna do a social media push to sign up And then I can try to We could start pushing it out for March Do you think that's reasonable? Give us a couple of weeks to throw a couple together Yeah Try a template Yeah I could send a beta test out Just a short one Friday Because Friday is Hippo day It is Hippo day International Hippo day I was thinking I could just write an ode to the hippopotamus I believe you should do that Okay I think that would be great Great, I'll work on that I'll try to send it out on Friday It's Hippo day Yeah, we can do something I was looking at the calendars And I was thinking It'd be nice to kind of Theme up different weeks with Different newsletters with stuff The days that are happening Our thoughts about those Or if there's something that we've done If we like how it looks and it works I can talk about I'm going to the AAAS conference this week And there's gonna be a lot of Talk of climate change And science communication And maybe it'll be something that's Maybe I'll get something interesting From the meeting I want to tell people about Yeah It'll be fun Am I tired from shoveling All of Portland snow? Oh yeah, I mean it was so much snow It was really sad It melted Yes, twist T-W-I-S dot org Or website There's a pop-up window and you use it And you sign up and that'll make it the sign up And you'll be on our list Yeah You have a Peppa Pig calendar, Pam That's not the same as our twist calendar With the science With the science I understand the thrall of Peppa the pig though Actually I don't She's not one of the ones Kai was ever into Is that the one that's made out of felt? I don't know, Peppa's a pig Yeah, she looks like she's made out of felt To me Really, she's probably not She's just very two-dimensional Kids like two-dimensional things Yeah, everybody Oh, you don't see the newsletter When running an ad block program Well, there you go Well, if you want to get on the newsletter And it doesn't pop up when you're running an ad block program Then you can email me And tell me that you want to be added To the newsletter list And I will add, I will use your email And I will add you I think you can add like a Is it called like a discussion or whatever? Identity four, that's right Identity, you were in Seattle That was, Seattle totally got snowpocalypse Snowed in Is it melting now? Are you getting your bananas back? Oh, announcements So I think you can make an announcement That is like, sign up for the newsletter You mean like if I put a post on our website? Okay, yeah, I can add an announcement post Okay, I need to have a better list Of things that I need to get done It's getting to the, the things that I need to do now Are getting to the point where I think I need to write them down Yes, I can make an announcement Oh yeah, because I just went And I like signed myself the newsletter And I was going to put another email address in But it won't pop up again After the one time it's done One and done We can use MailChimp to spam people That's not what we want to do though No, that's not what we're trying to do Yeah, you can buy email lists for cheap And add them without authorization Yeah, I don't really want to do that I mean, yeah, so, you know, I Our newsletter, we're going to have a newsletter Oh, we'll decide for a newsletter Yes, spam them with smarts If only that would work That would be great Yeah, so, like I was thinking at first I'm like, oh, we've got all these people Supporting us on Patreon And I have their email addresses And then I was like But they didn't sign up for a newsletter They're supporting us And they listen to the podcast But maybe they don't want a newsletter And so instead of just taking the emails I sent a message to a bunch of people And I've had about a quarter of the Yeah, I probably had about a quarter of the people That I sent the email to respond And the 99% of those were in positive So probably could just take everybody and add them But I'm not going to do that I will not do that Because I respect you people Ah, but on the other hand If you're getting an unwanted email On a regular basis, how hard is it to spam filter it? Also, there's an unsubscribe button at the bottom Okay, yeah, I mean I guess the presumption of opting somebody in Who doesn't want to be opted in Sounds bad, but haven't they opted into To show if you're talking about the Patreon group? Like But they haven't opted into a newsletter They want to support us And they like the podcast But they don't necessarily need more things in their inbox And I'm not about to assume that BS because Okay, but isn't sending an email Asking if they want to subscribe? That's just an email But I know I know There's a point where it's like Ow, it's just done the thing in the first place Except now we've done the thing where we asked to do the thing But it's doing the thing I don't know These are tough questions But it was in the thing that they had signed into In the first place Which is the system, Patreon system Allowing us to communicate with these people But Yeah Yeah, not everybody wants to support us On Patreon, not everybody You know, it's like the combo of things I want to get all the people Oh, Pam, you're giving me your email You want me to put you in there? Go find that Look at me, look at me I'm gonna, oh, I wonder if I can just add you Matt and Chero, good to see you in the chat room And yes, we should play chess again someday Did you play chess? We did And I Don't recall Exactly How that went I assumed that I won a bunch But I think Several times I always won I think you must have beaten me At least once Come on Okay Almost Almost once I haven't played chess in a long time So it would be, it would actually be Your best opportunity To take me down For sure It's one of those things that it's not like A thing I I'll brag about it now But it's one of these things like I learned to play chess when I was like Six or seven years old And so something about learning A thing that young Kind of embeds it Like I don't, I feel like Like even though I haven't played chess in years I could I could hold my own Immediately It would just be like I'm gonna run for the first time In a long time Or try that yoga pose I haven't had There's like a muscle memory to it But yeah, that's something I need to do again I haven't done that in way too long And yeah, Pam Haramick, yeah, we should play again too I'm reading comments Pam gave me her email I added her I learned something I can add people to da It's very exciting Okay, newsletter Live Portland show I had a conversation today It's potentially starting to Come together The location is still the The theater location is still the Tricky point We're hoping we can get into this cool theater The Alberta Rose Theater I'm gonna work on The Wi-Fi situation there Over the next week Isn't there like a pub? Like probably a distance from your place? Oh, it's not gonna be big enough It's not big enough, okay No, it's not big enough It must be bigger I'm gonna try We'll see what we can do But it's not Yeah, so that's coming around April 3rd Those of you who are in the Portland, Oregon area Put it on your calendar April 3rd If you wanna come Location TV The TVA But April 3rd Live Portland On a stage show And I'm talking with Remember Jessica Hebert We've interviewed her She works on Placentas Oh, yeah She's fantastic She's also a In a small trio Called PDX Broad Sides Who performed like Geek Core kind of music And pirate songs and stuff They may perform During our break That would be fun Live show Yeah, to have a little bit of live music For 10 or 15 minutes In the middle of our show And then on we go Yes Yeah, so that is coming together Wow, it's all coming together And apparently Blair They open up the science On tap with trivia Something I'm familiar with Yeah, be ready Be ready to play your trivia Hands Well, I was always a host I never really played But I mean I guess I could figure it out If it's annual trivia, it'll be set I'm really bad at trivia I found I'm very confident About the answers when I'm wrong And I'm always very hesitant About all my right answers That's always the problem Because the right answer pops up Right away and it's like It's this But I'm always wrong When I'm that confident But then like When I struggled to find I'm like, oh I had to work to find this Therefore this must be true Something weird Trivia Oh, trivia If it's all If there's a Neanderthal question Section now Yeah Be ready to go I think you'll probably have that one Neanderthal question You mean Neanderthal question Yeah Is it Denisovan or Denisovan? It is definitely Denisovan Denisovan Yeah How long has it been So, yeah I just remember The shift It was sometime during You know, the last Around 10 years ago on twist I think It shifted from Neanderthal To Neanderthal And it just was this sudden shift That everybody in media decided They were gonna do it Everybody who was Pronouncing it decided Oh, this is how we pronounce it now And I was like When did the memo go out? And why and what's happening And it took me It took me a really long time To realize that it wasn't any big thing It was just people saying Well, the Neanderthals Were discovered and named in Germany And since German It doesn't have a th sound It is proper to call it Neanderthal And I was like What? Can somebody just explain this to people Before you go changing it? I'm like fine But oh my gosh It was like the simple thing And you can't find it anywhere It wasn't on the internet I looked everywhere on the internet But the internet was old back then So it probably just didn't happen The internet wasn't As full of information yet The Denisovan thing Happened kind of suddenly too But that the pronunciation I think that was like We discovered Denisovans And then very rapidly After it was Part of it came about Having Read First Denisovan Is the natural flow Of the word that you're seeing But then when you hear the people Who did the discovery saying Denisovan And knowing that it was named after a real something Then it's like Now I will adjust Yeah But I remember Somebody came up to us once And said you're pronouncing that wrong And we were like no we're not No sorry Yeah To their Whatever It wasn't just like That we had been pronouncing it Denisovan Was doing Not that we're not popular So I remember That was a couple years ago now But I remember us talking about it And I had just seen a lecture at the Cal Academy And so the guy lecturing Had done his life's work Studying Hominids And was talking about Denisovan Oh wow okay well if he's saying it that way That's definitely How you're supposed to say it We have so many babies In our chat room right now But to be fair Like also if you say Neanderthal Versus Neanderthal It's not wrong Nobody's getting confused About what you're talking about Nope Denisovan we all get it It's thankfully Not a lot of other things that have similar names That then mean something else There's no Denisovan going Excuse me you're saying my name wrong By the way It's also not We never called ourselves Denisovans We have this whole other word which you can't pronounce Because your lung structure is different Like Everything's placeholders anyway I saw something today That made me laugh It was In Spanish Anana In French In English Pineapple Pineapple Yeah It's like every language It's called Anana Except English Yeah Like maybe we should just call it Anana too That would be great Too close to banana It's already taken I know but we did the wrong one That's the problem We were too We were too quick to name the banana It's like the whole joke about the orange Hey what should we call these round orange things Oh column oranges How about these long pointy orange things Crap Banana Banana Banana They don't look like pineapples Well wait Which was introduced to this This language first I feel like pineapples Showed up much later I don't know I mean they're both Tropical So in terms of like Europe They didn't have bananas Or pineapples in Europe Yeah So maybe it was a misnomer Do you hear about this banana Yeah it's a long Thing with appeal No no no it's point it's got Stickly things kind of on it And you have to cut it open and it's really sweet Like maybe they just were confused So yeah I want to Now I want to know what those languages call bananas Great Correct great In French I forget what Banana is in French Oh Man I should know what that is I know right So much for my French Minor jeez Yeah it's Daniel Folland I over I was gonna say it I was like that's stupid It's the whole Justin thing again it's a banana Banana There we go banana Yeah uh Daniel Folland It'd be funny if it was pineapple I may use the newsletter to urge Patreon sign ups it may happen Very human All sorts of noises happening above me I don't know what's happening Uh bleak you think I should add A subscribe link to the page Okay Yeah yeah you click the subscribe window Away once and it never comes back I could get it I could make a link I could do that also I'm trying to log in to Mailchip It's asking for I'll get rid of the calendar link And put in a newsletter subscribe link Good Pineapple Piña Yeah you don't want to what do you want to ask for A uh anana Colado Colada Subscribe Link on the subscribe page Thank you Marajuro That's a great idea Okay So email Oh virtual mic That's a great site I'm like virtual Oh Lists that's what I want Lists Oh 79 Scrabbers Me too Yeah I'm watching the names Oh yeah sign up for them that's what we want Mm-hmm Um yeah We just want a form because then we Have an um Yeah I guess we want an embedded form Mm-hmm Classic That's too big condensed There you go subscribe to our email list Here it is email address Subscribe Ta da Great you can Right in the Mm-hmm Or do you need to put it on the site somewhere I have to put it on that Um onto the site I don't have to put it Copy and paste Somewhere To the top to the head Of my html Which html file I'll figure it out Figure out where I want to put it Yeah I think I think an announcement would be fine I feel like Um A tab would be like Best case but that's way harder to make So Like right next to patreon Like newsletter But I feel like that's way harder to Do So I'll just find a place To put it Figure out where to put this little embedded Form and it'll just be Stuck there I mean it could be right under subscribe to twist I guess it could be a little box Mm-hmm I'll figure that out Where's Justin going I'm Yeah I need To go also it's 1030 I need to Finish I need to Finish packing Washington DC Yeah Yeah Mm-hmm Yeah I gotta finish my packing I think I have Everything mostly packed I just need to Pack my backpack And make sure I have Oh but I have to make sure I can't Pack my computer until I download The audio files And because I have to edit The show on the plane Tomorrow I have to remember To pack my headphones It'll be fun I'm gonna do All the working on the plane tomorrow I'm gonna be one of those people However I would prefer to just Sit and veg out to watch a movie But that'll be maybe on my way home on Sunday And Yes Davis to Bakersfield That's fun Why did you oh yeah What was your adventure Auto boost right Oh you went to Bus You got your school bus Yeah I got it Okay Drove all the way back Drove beautifully What I gotta say it's like Writing on earthquakes Everything shakes it's like I was in A massage chair for like Six and a half seven hours or so That's yeah I mean even Your cargo vans are like that Their suspensions are just very unforgiving But the Yeah I bought the thing for the shell And hope to Make it 50 50 chance making it all the way back Assuming I was probably gonna have To leave it at a shop at some point To figure out what was wrong with it Nothing things in beautiful Shape Drove great and Is Rust free What This thing lived in Bakersfield Even though it's It's dry down there Gosh it's Really kind of 25 year old School bus But yeah Bakersfield is dry arid Land I looked all under it I haven't found a significant Rust patch yet It rained heavily on it today Didn't leak And Yeah I said I bought it for the shell But the guts are great She's got heart Great So yeah I'm very excited So the It's the next 8 to 12ish months Depending on how long this whole thing takes It's gonna slowly be getting converted Into an RV Yeah that's cool That's a fun project So much fun Matajaro wants to know If you're gonna make it electric No I But if I was If this was 20 years in the future And we were having this conversation I might only be able to be looking At retired electric school buses They are showing up For reals nowadays There was There's a lot of There are natural gas Compressed natural gas School buses that become available But No the electric school buses That are now being made Are going to be The 25 year from now Generation Of Justin buying a used school bus Are gonna be able to pull that one Yeah it's funny the cng thing Everyone was sure it was Gonna be the next big thing For these kind of Heavy Toe weight vehicles When I was looking at acquiring A cargo van And Actually I've done that a few times In the past 10 years and Every time it's like the new Best next thing So in like 2005 we got a zoom Mobile that was biodiesel And that it sat For a month during the summer when it wasn't running And the biodiesel ate through the fuel line And since then Everyone's like oh yeah biodiesel What a hack like not Any cleaner not cheaper Not better And then cng was like the thing That everyone was talking about When I was looking at buying a cargo van For the aquarium And it was The thing like everybody's Fleet Websites you know forward Chevy like all of them said like Cng vehicles now available So excited can't find them like Anywhere anymore And now they're just Pushing on the like hey We have really good gas mileage of These vehicles for a cargo van Like hey we get like 25 miles a gallon that's Good for a cargo van So yeah and there has been a lot of Improvements In the combustion There's cars out there That are getting Better gas mileage With a standard what is now the standard Compression Gas engine then my Hybrid Which is Now pretty old but So yeah like technologies improving All the way around on these things Yeah I think I'm really excited to see What happens with electric Fleet vehicles because it seems like They keep talking like it's going to happen Or it's plausible Or even hybrids are plausible But then when you get down to it Somebody says like oh well all Aftermarket take your cargo van And for 30 grand I'll transfer It to a hybrid But then you can't have the same As you had before so it's like It's a whole separate thing still But I'm seeing you know these Twinklings even the I'm still waiting to see a Tesla A Big rig I haven't seen it like It was on that stage but I haven't seen It out on the road yet I'm really hoping That it happens If you go look at transit Bus and school bus Manufacturer websites right now They're all pushing Their electric buses That's great I hope it works I'm excited it seems like People are kind of getting behind it Finally And I think You know to their credit I think there is something to The Tesla movement That has made it kind of like Sexy and attractive and interesting For people to put their money behind But also natural gas Played a very pivotal role in this Because cleaning up The air in these cities That are looking for these Clean buses Push the interesting coming up With something that might be More efficient or more practical Than the natural gas vehicles With an easier to Add infrastructure And there's this strange maintenance Things that you have to do of draining Natural gas tanks And pressurizing and there's a lot of Difficulties And really maintaining a fleet like that That they eliminate by pushing The envelope further And developing these electric vehicles So the CNG vehicles played an Incredibly important role I think In this transit Because they were pretty much Trying to do everything but And eventually went like I guess we gotta do the electric And the technology has improved too Absolutely That's the whole deal With solar panels too In San Francisco And in Daily City If you wanted to have solar panels out here Good luck to be able to turn a light on Ten years ago And now you can collect enough solar power Through clouds on a foggy day To power your whole house It's Really Phenomenal This happened and it's unfortunately But fortunately Because of the early adopters They paid more for less So that we could have better Technology It's a weird way this whole thing Works. If government subsidized The technology development a little bit More maybe it wouldn't have But with the situation That we have We have to thank those early adopters Those people that bought the Model S They're the ones who allow us to have The Model 3 that's $35,000 I think now I want to see An entire episode of twist Where it's Blair Corner of Vermont Blair trying to talk about politics Without being too polarizing That's what that side mouth is about And speaking of which I also now can power all of my electronics Over with solar panels That could fit on the roof A small school bus I was gonna ask you about that Absolutely I love that Matajaro suggested Fully charged a YouTube channel It's pretty awesome and I recommend it as well It's a very good channel They do awesome things Bedtime? Yes Okay we will leave you Here is it on Twitter The hashtag academic Valentine Is a big one Roses are red in French May your eppendorf lids Not break off in the centrifuge I made up one that I haven't written yet It's science is smooth Wine is smoother Put them both in the lab And you get a twofer Happy Valentine's Day Poetry by Dr. Kiki Yay I think on that note Say goodnight Blair Say goodnight Justin Goodnight Justin Goodnight Kiki Goodnight everyone And we will see you Next Wednesday Don't forget to come see us again For this week in science We'll have an interview next week It'll be awesome And that is all If I can find the off button There's a button here Have a wonderful science week everyone Happy Valentine's Day