 the anticipation for that was just waiting for that to get down was too much we're the annual Christmas episode of this weekend science broadcasting live via streamyard oh i guess i get a lollipop mary twist mess says i okay go to bed i love you take your lollipop and leave say mary twist mess oh thank you i get a lollipop okay have a good night all right everybody we're here to do a show a show about science this is the live broadcast of the twist podcast we're gonna do it all right now and talk about science because that's what we like to do there might be things cut out but we don't have a Blair tonight so maybe it'll just hit that tight 90 like we like to try to hit tight 90 just like i'm not even trying i'm not even know i don't even know how that works actually uh yeah without flaila though you're right it might speed up the show quite a bit maybe because all the parts where she's talking it won't be there so how could it not be quicker that's what you're saying how could it not be move your microphone a little closer to yourself it's uh it's gotta be a level thing or something because this is like i'm almost eating this mic i i really like it when you're up closer to it but i know you so like this i'd have to do this show like this and then i don't have to kind of whisper otherwise it'd be too loud probably i don't want you whispering but you're like 12 feet away from it it's right it's literally right here it's six inches away i know for Christmas i need to get you a mic stand so you can position it next to your face all right like this i can just do it like that like that like a radio show style not gonna work okay everyone let's do this podcast thing i'm a jigger majugi thing let's make it happen and yeah you ready let's do it yes i know i can turn up the recording volume like maybe but if i turn him up too much then when he yells then it's too loud later so well you gotta take it you gotta take the the uh the overs gotta take the overs get your get your get your mic skills get get all the mic okay let's do this program right now we're gonna start this you ready i'm ready we're ready in a three two this is twis this week in science episode number 855 recorded on wednesday december 15th 2021 bringing twismas cheer with science that's what we like to do hi everyone i'm dr kiki and tonight we will fill your head with organs and mammals and twismas-y stuff but first disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer well maybe you've been to school for a year or two and think you've seen it all what you really need is a holiday in science yes it's beginning to sound a lot like twismas intro to the show a pair of nasa probes oh gosh that's it i knew this was not gonna work okay you can try again let's try again this is what edits are for i knew this wasn't gonna work though because it's uh on paper it looked like i was gonna be able to pull it off but in reality it's a medley which is not a thing i know how to do okay it's beginning to sound a lot like twismas intro to the show a pair of nasa probes and a rover that robes is the wish of barnie and jen a robot that walks in and goes for a talk is the hope of jenison ben she's but then it stops and it does a different one and it's uh such beautiful side habit of night talking in a science wonderland and then it's a different song it hops into as we hope to do and decorate dark into the holiday season that's even another one with science stories coming around then we're going to switch again we want to wish you a merry christmas we wish you a merry christmas and a happy new year before we are off dashing through the snow and a science podcast sleigh on the year we go with this weekend science all the way coming up next oh it's gonna get edited out i hope i hope should edit that entire yeah we just get rid of that disclaimer all together it just i loved it i mean what i'm gonna what i want to do is like take your part maybe i'll like do some singing on top of it no it looked good like as writing it it's like yeah i can just switch in real time between different completely different melodies take three sing along for them no no this is not gonna be a take three this is the take maybe there'll be an edit but it's good coming up the important thing is not everything you plan for christmas is going to go exactly the way you expected it to and it's okay it's fine it's all part of the holiday story but what you do expect is this weekend science coming up next i've got the kind of mine that can't get enough i want to learn new discoveries that happen every day of the week there's only one place to go to find the knowledge i seek i want to know good science to you kiki and just kiki no Blair no Blair it's just the two of us this twismas yes yeah i like the good old days in the last week there have been a couple of birthdays happy birthday to you justin and thank you you're welcome and happy birthday to Blair out there enjoying her holiday oh we're all about to have a lot of fun though because you know what twismas is a time to celebrate science and we have a whole bunch of science on the show tonight just because Blair is not here doesn't mean that we're missing the science i mean we're going to miss Blair but we have a ton of science to go through so i have stories about bomb diffusion yikes uh some new organs well how do we get organs anyway where do they come from krypton yes and it it could be a superman reference but it's not details coming up soon i also have a bit of a positive well not positive a covid update and um some plastic brains what did you bring justin i've got nasa gets corona dragon worm dogs reigning shrews bow guarding birthdays 10000 2000 year old monoliths and neanderthal pyromaniacs that sounds like a party if i ever did hear it and i think you know you're you're bringing a bunch of animal news so i think we've got animal corner ish topics covered as well as we jump into the show i do want to remind all of you that if you're not subscribed to us in all the different places we are in all the different places we are on the podcast platforms look for this week in science or twist we are also on youtube facebook and twitch live streaming every wednesday at 8 p.m pacific time we are twist science on twitch on instagram on twitter and our website is twist.org but now it's time for the twist miss science mariness okay let's go with the superman first want to dig into krypton all right all right so the planet called krypton were the people that spawned a superhero called superman he came to earth you know there was tragedy and all that kind of stuff but anyway his his his kryptonite was kryptonite and well kryptonite allergic to it or something yeah pretty badly yeah but you know there is krypton here on earth it is an element but it really is not in the element krypton the mineral krypton kryptonite that causes superman all sorts of problems so really this isn't a story about a far off planet this is a story about our very earth and its ancestry how it came to be not populated but seeded with elements like carbon and nitrogen that are in our atmosphere water where did all this stuff come from in order to discover this researchers at uc davis looked at volcanoes they they studied magma uh that was being shoved up from the mantle of the earth in places like greenland and the gala no not greenland i'm sorry iceland and the galapagos island islands um this research looking at the magma that's being welling up being pushed up from the mantle through this the pressures that are there this is old material from deep in the earth and so it is indicative of earlier phases of the earth's formation and so looking at these volatile elements water carbon nitrogen these researchers uh have determined that a lot of these volatile elements actually came to be part of earth before the big giant moon forming impact that created the moon and created the earth that we now know there was an early young earth in which where did this stuff come from and we've had ideas of comets and asteroids and all sorts of things last week i talked a bit about the solar solar winds or maybe it was two weeks ago talked about solar winds causing oxidation reduction reactions and leading to hydrogen and water on grains of dust in the solar system and so this evidence that's coming out of uc davis and uh and also with researchers from eth zurek in switzerland it really really adds to the evidence that there are multiple sources for all of these elements within our earth and that yes some of it did come billions of years ago in the form of you know during the volatile period of our solar systems formation in in the form of meteorites chunks of chunks of space rocks landing on the earth but it also came from dust raining down onto the earth and that a lot of what we know to be in the earth now uh is it came from these early early processes and the the strange thing is like okay the volatile elements that you think would have disappeared that they they clung to the rocks of the earth even during that massive impact that made the moon yeah so so the stuff that's in the earth is older than the moon yeah or that the stuff that's in the moon partially is part of yes because the moon is made partially of the earth and the merging of the big uh planetisimal that ran into the earth and caused the moon to be formed um yeah but what they say is the study provides clues for the sources and timing of volatile accretion on earth and is going to help researchers understand how not only the earth formed but other planets in our solar system and planets around other stars as well so this whole process of of a earth creation rocky planet relate recreation yeah so anyway they got these gassy gas bubbles from lava to sample this old noble gas krypton and they were able to attempt determine the krypton isotopes and the signatures of the different isotopes in the mantle krypton it differs in its isotope ratio from the atmospheric krypton ratio and also the atmospheric ratio of carbon and oxygen and water is different than what was that then what is in the the planet itself so they've determined that not our atmosphere didn't necessarily come from the same source as the rocks of the earth yeah multiple origin story yes multiple origin story exactly that there are multiple different ways that these volatile elements have come to be a part of everything basically there's a lot of stuff falling on the earth over a long long long long time at different times before the moon and after the moon we should have like pre-moon and post-moon periods do you want to tell us oh you're doing a wardrobe he's putting on a hat the twismas capping is begun there we go twismas cap now i'm a little bit more in the season i don't have a kerchief but justin is in his cap uh yes anyway interesting interesting work out of uc davis on the origins of really interesting compounds that make life possible here on our planet yeah the thing that also makes life possible on our planet is the sun which we recently we reached out and touched it almost what did we do justin uh yeah set the controls for the heart of the sun some out of the world corona news nasa's parker solar probe is partying on the sun back in april the parker probe reached the sun's extended solar atmosphere uh aka the corona and spent five hours there entering and exiting the boundary about three times the data of that interaction is just now being analyzed confirming that the spacecraft is the first ever to enter the outer boundaries of our sun and is the fastest object ever created by humans current speed between 370 000 miles and 600 000 kilometers per hour the fastest man-made object ever probe made its first direct observations of what lies within the sun's atmosphere measuring the phenomena previously only estimated from the earth oh wow it got bright uh and so far things have actually been pretty strange it's not exactly what was expected sun's outer edge uh begins at something called an alphabian uh critical surface point below which the sun and its gravitational magnetic forces control the solar wind beyond it the solar wind goes accelerating away from the sun super fast the sun's outer edge uh then uh was penetrated by this probe surprisingly they found that the critical surface that alphabian surface is wrinkled so as the as the probe went through sort of entered and re-entered uh the boundary of the sun's interior without just going directly in so they got to figure out why that is why it's not just uniform uh the data so far suggests that the largest and most distant wrinkle on the surface was produced by something they're calling a pseudo streamer a large magnetic structure that is found back in the innermost visible face of the sun and they don't currently know why that pseudo streamer on the surface of the sun is pushing this critical surface which is far away from it away from the sun but it seems to be having that effect researchers also knows far fewer switchbacks below the alphabian critical surface than above it finally could mean that switchbacks do not form in the corona probe also recorded some evidence of a potential power boost just inside the corona which might point to some unknown physics affecting heating anticipation that they hadn't anticipated taking place so having uh achieved its goal of touching a star parker pro solar probe will now descend even deeper into the sun's atmosphere and linger for longer periods of time which should be just fine because the temperature further in to the sun cooler it's cooler than the outer yeah it's still very hot but uh the the technology behind the shields on this solar probe is amazing it's a the ability of the shield to block to i guess to dissipate that solar heat is incredible you can you can put a blow torch on one side of the heat shield it's about it's several inches thick you can blow torch one side of it and the other side stayed stays cold the heat doesn't really transfer transfer through um i don't know but this is a this is a probe with a deathwitch deathwish we're gonna be getting a whole bunch of this is like the twismis science version of diehard oh gosh is this suicide and diehard i didn't think there was no uh yeah uh it does remind me of the pink fluid song uh heart of the sun uh you know set the controls for the heart of the sun that's what this probe is actually done it's i'm actually was surprised to know that this is the first time we've sent to anything into the sun i would have expected we would have been sending things into the sun long time like you know one-way trip get as much data as you can before the thing melts but they waited till they got something that wouldn't melt before sending it to the sun which i guess is smart if you're conserving resources you know that it is going to be a one-way trip not coming back how can you create something that will last long enough to be able to send sufficient data back that won't be compromised by the magnetic fields by the cosmic rays by everything that comes from our sun fastest fastest craft ever made by man that's uh pretty good pretty good speed there that thing's built up and it's not like it if anyway if you look at it it doesn't look like a fancy fast flying spaceship that you would expect uh the fastest ship ever to be it looks like a little satellite probe looking thing but i can't wait to see like gravity that's pulled into making yeah i mean they've they've done a pre-analysis now of all this data so i guess it's going to be like what else is going to come from the data as they analyze it further what more as they go deeper into the corona yeah it's so exciting we're not just we're touching the sun it should be safe because it's in the millions of degrees and that's millions of degrees Fahrenheit if you switch it over to celsius it's millions of degrees it's still not really hot pretty much really just super hot at that point you would not survive i would not survive no but it's gonna get cooler still not human survivable cooler but it's gonna it's gonna get much uh like i think it's like a magnitude or more cooler as it heads into the interior so it's gonna uh should be fine should be able to report back no problem should be no problem should be no problem uh you know what else is cooling down india's population growth oh oh gosh that's not this is not a corona story this is not a corona story this is a story of some questions about methodology in which this target was reached but it's a success story in a country that seemed to have an explosive population growth rate massively contributing to the human population here on earth with a replacement level of more than 2.1 children per couple per woman per woman the replacement rate is basically you know 2.2.1 is replacing the partners in the relationship two children for two parents but in this announcement the national family health survey in india has announced that the fertility rate has for the first time fallen below this replacement level and that it is on a track to continue decreasing a bit um and that even though there is a population boom that they are still dealing with and so they will experience growth in the population until about 2050 probably to about 1.8 billion people in the uh in the country um with the decrease by the end of the century they will potentially be in negative population growth which is good news for the earth as a whole uh this was achieved through planned family planning through sterilization through contraception and through education of women and it was a uh an effort that the government has been working on for years however in the 1970s this is not the best best story in the long run a lot of countries have made big mistakes when it comes to sterilization and in the 1970s gondi allowed the operation of compulsory sterilization camps in which about 19 million people three quarters of them being men were sterilized uh were ordered to be sterilized uh not consensually necessarily um sterilization was only compulsory for two years according to an article from science magazine and uh after that point they offered uh about $15 up up to $15 for women to be sterilized so there are still debates as to whether that or not the monetary incentive is related to coercion or whether it's just hey we're helping you out so that $15 are we down here in 15 us yes 15 us dollars not um what then what does that translate into uh weekly monthly yearly yeah and it depends in the more rural the more impoverished rural areas that's going to be a significant sum of money especially going back into the 1980s yeah and then is it is it uh then you're talking also it's like hey yeah there's not enough uh food to go around here these days uh you know as can happen in india uh yeah and uh is that $15 something somebody will take up in an emergency to feed existing children themselves and then oh it's just you know that's just not a i completely see the point of needing population control and it seems to go just fine if you just give women the rights to their reproductive system the right to choose yeah and education education correct yes education and i and that that's something that i want to stress here that the availability of family planning services the availability of contraception the availability of female education you know you know for everybody to be educated really uh that when people who can bear children are educated about the responsibilities of bearing children about the uh the options that are available to them it is better for everyone and when women are educated as in educated beyond just you know this is what you can do for contraception and families but actually educated going to high school going to college learning about the world so that they can get a job and afford to uh to to afford to have a family if they want it you know that that becomes a big incentive and actually you know it's one of these things it's a big question for a lot of governments as more women are educated and choose not to have children what does that mean for future population growth many countries now they're looking at india as being one of them the united states is another many uh northern european scandinavian countries are in this group negative population population growth is going to impact the economy because you do not have as many young people able to work and then additionally you don't have as many young people within the public health system to take care of your aging your big aging population that occurred before so there are downsides that have to be managed but they are not unmanageable yeah anyway I am I am of the biological ecological opinion that humanity we've we're growing too much and you know I don't think we're having a population bomb anymore uh assessments of world population growth have been suggesting that after about 2050 there will be a major decline in the earth's population of humans barring any massive tragedies um like a pandemic how could that be a barring like it's kind of doesn't that mean there's got to be a tragedy no just because just with just with educating women availability of contraception and family planning services that's pretty much all you need to create a recipe for not necessarily you know not for not necessarily having a growing population no and it also tends to lend itself towards democratic control of government it tends to let it lend itself towards less inclination to go to war to better economic outcomes it actually does it's a whole like the empowerment of women as a starting point for your society is a great trajectory to be on for the rest of the way because that seems somehow seems somehow to take care of a lot of the problems turns out men maybe not best social managers maybe priorities a little off there at times uh let's see let's talk about parent we were talking about humanity on earth let's talk about parasites yeah this is uh oh gosh we got so close so efforts to eradicate a human parasitic disease are being hampered by dogs oh no this is we were so close this one are best friends why would they do this to us is they're evil like deep down they're not evil they're just gullible they're just gullible this is the dumb uh dog parasite uh dracunculus medidensis or dragonworm is around worm nematode that causes a disease called guinea worm disease these the disease is basically a result of a parasite's reproductive cycle taking place in an animal host when it takes place in humans those humans find it to be most unpleasant so the initial sort of target uh of i guess of the worm in this cycle here is a freshwater crustacean known as a water flea where the worms larvae seems to accumulate i don't know if they're just getting stuck to it or if this if the water fleas are gobbling them up but somehow these water fleas accumulate a bunch of the worms larvae then they get caught up in some drinking water so guinea worm disease is usually caught by drinking water containing these water fleas that are then themselves carrying the larvae if you happen to drink a bunch of worm larvae nothing noticeable happens at first no going unnoticed are the hatched larva worms mating and growing inside of your body no mary twismas but things are still fine until about a year uh later the year of growing mating and reproducing and producing new larvae inside of you long long after you've forgotten about that having sipped that water unfiltered from a stagnant pond in central Africa thinking you are well clear of any ill that could have come from that carelessness painful blisters begin to form typically on the arms and legs they create a burning sensation and that's where the worms are it's not it's not blisters is it no it's blisters it's just blisters and they have like this burning sensation to them that you feel immediately compelled to to say oh put those burning sores in some cool cold water and and then as soon as you're touching that water adult worms begin to emerge from the blisters uh because they're they're wanting to then shed larvae back into the water right continue their life cycle that makes sense and these uh these adult worms when they emerge they're very small teeny tiny little things uh they're around they're small around but they can be anywhere from three feet to a meter long in length three feet to a meter yeah somewhere somewhere in there right in there you can pull them out but only just a few centimeters each day so removing them removing them can take weeks and you have to be careful not to kill them because if you kill them if you break them off if they die they die in you and they decompose and the remaining worm beneath the skin can cause all sorts of problems as it decays away within your flesh now terrifying me it's almost as hard it's probably as painful to have it as it is listening to you describe it right it is not a it's not a hey it's just only on the christmasy show because it happened to be uh published then uh yeah i grew up with that where there is no doctor book and i'm still having a hard time with this okay keep going i can do this okay so bad news is uh around 19 in the 1980s uh there were millions of cases of guinea worm a year millions of cases of this uh 2020 there were just 27 largely through education and the introduction to uh personal water filtration systems even to the point where you can get a straw if you're in central africa it's pretty accessible we got a straw with a filter that's sufficient to drink from one of these stagnant ponds if you need to that prevents water fleas from being uptaken so the larva stays out so this guinea worm disease almost completely eradicated from humans it'd be the only the second disease since smallpox that's been completely eliminated but the dogs now you have to tell us where the dogs come in so yeah just now uh it seems like it was it was going away turns out it is thriving in dog populations and 2020 they did that they were they did a bunch of testing uh they even had satellite tracking on these dogs to try to figure out where they were going because 93% of guinea worms detected worldwide now are in dogs and specifically dogs in chad africa so this is this is very now specifically in dogs and they after some research they figured out this is research by university of xeter they found that dogs are eating fish that were caught by fishermen and discarded so these are small fish that maybe didn't make it to the meal this is uh cut up guts from the fish that they're being fed to the dogs that are containing these parasites so uncooked fish being fed to dogs is maintaining this population so cook the fish before you feed it to the dog before you cook the food before you eat it or maybe freeze it to the point where the parasite dies yeah there there or stop uh stop having dogs i don't know i don't know what they're right i don't know about that solution we're gonna keep having dogs yet maybe don't feed them the raw fish if you're in central africa maybe yeah but it's a good story uh because we're all we almost got rid of it and and it's got a little reservoir but we've identified it so that's the good news just good news we identified the reservoir for a parasite so now we can deal with it however however that the public health and more just good news uh you may never have to hear description of that worm again may never have to endure that again i would i would like to never have to go through that again that would be great i would really appreciate that please so let's talk about uh let's move on to some other interesting topics like i don't know worms have organs dogs have organs we all animals have organs organs are composed of multiple different cell types all working together for some overarching function so like your stomach digests your food your kidneys filter your blood your spleen does anyone really know what the spleen does no i'm kidding the spleen is very important uh but organs where do they come from where do they come from researchers publishing in cell this last week have uh have been looking at a little beetle a rove beetle and its defense gland to answer this question and in looking at this defense gland they have determined that there have been through the evolution of the beetle it modified cuticle cells in its outer in its exoskeleton and other cells within a different pathway and kind of put them together merged them and adapted the cells so they all started working together and created a gland that the beetle could then use for defense and so this is a an unexpected cellular what they're saying co evolution and that that it is this co evolution of purpose between multiple different cell types coming together that allows for organ level properties to be selected they say that in their abstract we show that evolution of each cell type was shaped by co evolution between the two cell types yielding a potent secretion that confers adaptive value our findings illustrate how cooperation between cell types arises generating new organ level behaviors so your organs they didn't just come out of nowhere and it's just like you have a spleen no that's not how it works there were step by step processes that different cells began to work together for a common purpose cool it's pretty I find it very interesting the evolution the evolution of these these organs these cell types to and interesting that just studying a beetle can lead researchers to these larger larger realizations yeah human body itself is just an incredible thing to know that like we could have had a couple different organs we could have had like a venom sac we could have had you know we could have worked on some other tissues as well apparently like it was all out there available we could have had a venom sac if we you know decided to take cuticle cells from our our skin and you know our things that became fingernails maybe they could have been venomous fingernails and the thing is now thanks to the wonderers breakers and science we still can have those things we can yeah so anyway they what they were able to do is figure all this out not just by looking at the gland and going look at that all the types they must have merged together they looked specifically at the molecular architecture and were able to use single cell transcriptomics to determine the pathways for these defensive compounds in that what they call the Turgle cells the Turgle gland the Turgle gland cell types and they were able to infer transcript transcriptomic and pathway relationships to be able to between the cell types to be able to trace how it was assembled over time so the transcriptome being the transcripts the the messenger RNA the mRNA the pieces little bits and pieces that are copied from the DNA to go on to make proteins and create the rest of the organs so anyway I guess you could also then sort of back engineer stepwise to some extent uh how the how do how do set about forming biological life and that's it I mean that's an interesting additional thing to think about is knowing this where could you take it yeah so if you if you have the the well I mean I'm sort of thinking for like uh if you wanted to actually do like create the humans with venom sacks that's not a thing uh anybody really I don't think it wants to have but when you're when you're sort of doing artificial engineering of evolution you try to push things in a direction you might want a tissue that does a function uh in a in a small microorganism in a biotech setting for instance one of those uh Chinese hamster ovary hamster hamster ovaries one of those things are yeast or some kind of a thing like this that you're trying to add just a function to knowing how cells issues on a larger scale get directed into becoming a thing might be useful I don't know yeah maybe we'll be on evolution in a dish we'll we'll see how that goes hello sci-fi all right you want to tell me another story do you have one yeah there was a major mammal discovery manifesting in the description of 14 new species of shrews largest number of new mammals described shrews scientific in the scientific papers since 1931 so it's uh it's been a while since one paper held as many as 14 new species of mammal kind of a kind of a long record they're a long time since this has happened this is a decade long journey of taking inventory in of indonesian shrews living in the island of suwesi group of scientists led by lsu mammalologist mammalologist jake esselstein has identified the 14 new species uh they detailed this in a recently published paper in bulletin of the american museum of natural history the quote from uh esselstein is uh i really like this it's an exciting discovery but it was frustrating at times usually we discover one species at a time and there is a big thrill that comes with that but in this case it was overwhelming because for the first several years we couldn't figure out how many species there were so a clearer picture began to merge once the research team examined not just what they could find uh and their and their searches but also the extensive collection of genetic and morphological data from from the other species that were collected back in 1916 they ended up with 1400 specimens in all and recognized 21 species of shrew on the island of suwesi including that's a lot for one island it is it is that's the other remarkable part of the story that's a lot for one big island it's a pretty decent size for an island it's a big island but but still i mean that's a lot of diversity that there are all sorts of different ecosystems that would have pushed the adaptations that would have led to the eventual speciation that occurred yeah right maybe there were population bottlenecks maybe they're like this is fascinating yeah so this is uh he's gonna keep studying those uh those shrews there but it's also yeah like you like you're saying it's a great way of looking at biological evolution and it's gonna be a wonderful thing to sort of study uh for a long time to come especially since you know you got 21 species currently there that's fantastic that's a that's a massive increase just for i mean just go mammals there's more of us now that we named them yeah that's right they were already there uh but you know the if it's just if all 21 species are just called the shrews of indomitia and it's just the shrews you know but knowing that they have individual the speciation is pretty interesting and i yeah and i think the definitely understanding what are the what are the environmental forces at play that allow them to be species and how can we pay attention to that for conservation and maintaining ecosystems and knowing what's necessary yeah and if you didn't know individuals alive and if you didn't know that there was 21 individual species as a shrew breeder you know i'm having a shrew farm might uh might explain why it hasn't always been successful uh breeding shrews if they're all different species that you've been bringing in exactly oops i got the wrong one i didn't know they didn't like each other because they don't they're not recognizing each other that's not necessarily how it works we hope you're here recognizing this week in science this is our twist miss episode so far on the show it's been full of um kind of disturbing presence but i like having a whole bunch of shrews under the tree uh yeah am i shrewd for thinking that thank you for being a part of twist we're so glad that you are enjoying science with us all right let's come back wait where did justin go all right i'm gonna come back with a covid update so we've got some covid news for you covid news for you yes oh macron continues to spread rapidly very rapidly around the globe spurring heightened alerts by public health agencies and local governments at least one american university cornell has shuttered in-person finals and graduation has been canceled as a result of a dramatic increase in cases on campus of covid 19 and evidence of omicron in their testing they have shut everything down in the hopes that it's going to prevent a larger outbreak in the community a large and scientists are warning that although omicron might not result in serious disease as often especially with high rates of vaccination and previous infection in many places the transmissibility is enough that the sheer number of cases will very likely overload house hospitals if people do not play their part and take prevention seriously so here is a list of twist miss safety recommendations get your booster if you're vaccinated that's really gonna help you should do it this week so you're ready for it next week that would be great take ventilation and masks seriously open those windows if you can hepa filtration works if you've got hepa filters and definitely dig out those n95s k and 95 masks definitely for the win be transparent talk openly with your friends and family about risk factors where have you been who you've been talking to where have they been who have they been talking to who needs to be protected you need to have these conversations if you have not yet had them with your family and you're planning to spend time together over these holiday weeks rapid testing is your friend rapid tests can really help to determine infection or lack of contagiousness so is PCR PCR might be harder to come by but wrap but it's there and we should use these tools to our advantage if we can think about ways to reduce your potential for infection what can you do what can you as a person do to be good for your community if you have concerns talk to a doctor check the cdc website and do your best to keep your community protected we are all in this together mm-hmm yeah so i'm making a list and checking it twice for christmas is gonna be nice if we all are doing our best i haven't gotten the corona virus yet the rona yet i haven't gotten the vid the majority people pretty much everybody will probably get it eventually i mean that's what's gonna happen and i'm starting to think of it in terms of the yet because yeah that's how we should all kind of get get to at some point yeah and i'm like is this uh it's in this this one is going bad like this is uh the i think the british the uk is saying that they're going to be this is going to be the predominant species or variant causing infection in the uk by the end of this month yeah it's going to take over it's had a 40 daily increase i think uh something horrible like that like it's really insanely taking off much more transmissible like you said that even if it's less deadly on to an individual basis it's gonna hit more people it's just more shots at causing human suffrage yep and it is a respiratory virus so masks can help to slow the spread of those respiratory aerosol particles and the droplets that we've heard so much about and additionally what was that what else was oh the transmissibility part of what makes it more infectious is from what they have seen is that it replicates in it gets into cells and replicates inside cells much faster even than delta so the the rate of viral proliferation within your cells is very high but it's in the bronchioles it doesn't do a good job of replicating in the lungs and they don't know why that is yet but they're hoping that maybe what this means is it's going to be more transmissible but if it's not getting into the lungs as easily perhaps it won't be as severe and we also know that so far it's been a lot of younger individuals who have been infected and who are showing up as uh as having been exposed so we don't necessarily know if this is like a population age group bias or if it is actually a less severe virus could also be vaccination and previous infection are allowing people to fight it off a little bit even though it might be evading some of those defenses there are so many questions still but the best we can do is to remember that we can do our best our choices matter and our choices will affect the future and speaking of the past and the future I have a retracted study yeah um so back back in March or something like that there was a a study that came out finding no effect of lockdowns on COVID-19 deaths and some researchers went back and looked at the data and they found that the methods were faulty they tried putting data into like fake data into the model that the original study used and they found they could not even with data that would prove would show that there was an effect or was an effect they the model didn't work the model was faulty um so really uh the faulty moth methods were unable to actually find the effects that they reported even if they did actually exist so wow the authors have retracted the paper yeah yeah uh test your models boys and girls uh before uh publishing your science papers yeah make sure your model is telling you something not just noise what are the good things about this also is that the researchers were very transparent they uploaded all of their data to and their model to uh a research database so that other researchers could model their data and do what they did and that that is what allowed the other researchers to come in and say oh you actually didn't do this right we put in more data more numbers and it's not working the right way uh the researchers were very unhappy about having to retract their paper yeah but they did and uh and it's good for everyone although the harm has already been done because this is the kind of thing it's like the first headline that's out there if you retract a news story people remember the original they don't remember the retraction so this is in the public in the public sphere the original lockdowns don't work is the is the take-home message but now this retraction is we have to work very hard to let people know that this study didn't actually show that here's what's really tricky about this you do the study says lockdowns have no effect if you're a rational person which maybe nobody none of these scientists were on this this common sensey rationality thing you go hey that doesn't make any sense there's no way that having a lockdown during a pandemic has no effect versus not having a lockdown this can't be right let's go check all of our models and see what's going on here on the other hand if the scientist doesn't like the result of their experiment and decides to can it and try to get that's confirmation bias yep so you're kind of like you kind of have to go oh gosh oh we're gonna have to publish this i don't like it i don't like it at all but i kind of have to because this is the result that we got and somebody knock it down or tell me i'm right or wrong that's fine here's how we did it not my problem now other people can look at this because yeah because there is like that when it comes to like giving a healthy something that can be taken as a health advice i kind of agree maybe they should have like waited longer maybe this one didn't need to publish so soon but again they thought they had something so yeah it was a bit of that i just watched an episode of the big bang theory i'm watching the big bang theory with my 10 year old son and it was an episode in which Sheldon Cooper had discovered a new heavy element super heavy element and some and his roommate Leonard had done some experiments on it and discovered that the Chinese researchers who had found the element for with Sheldon had falsified their data and that there was actually no heavy element and at first Sheldon was upset that he had incorrectly he had the logic incorrect on why the element was there in the first place and so he was like i shouldn't have found it and he was mad that he was getting attention but then when Leonard had the confirmation that there was no element he comes back and says you need to publish you have to publish this and Leonard says okay and Sheldon says why are you ruining my day science you have to do it you're not going to make someone's day but it has to be done it's a great episode this is this week in science we hope we are filling your day with merriment and cheer and a whole bunch of science this year science today science this year that's what we're all about i do have a few calendars yet left so if you are interested in getting your 2022 Blair's Animal Corner twist calendar head over to twist.org click on the frog and order away the order is through PayPal i will be able to mail them out until Wednesday of next week so if you want them before the new year hopefully the mail will work that way to get them to you in time for 2022 this is this week in science we thank you for your support we really can't do any of this without you thank you for everything all right Justin we're gonna come back right now and i think it's i think it's your turn because there's no animal corner what do you have oh yeah let me see the order of the things oh yeah here we go it started snowing here by the way oh wow the snow is falling in the dark what do you have researchers from washington state university of evidence the giant stone monoliths of southern ethiopia or a thousand years older than previously thought this is a caro soto is known to have the largest number and highest concentration of these megalithic monuments in africa with an estimate of more than 10 000 of these things and 60 or more different clusters and to be clear these are aren't just phallic stones raising up out of the out of the landscape these are 10 000 carved penises jetting up some six wait what tall others as much as 20 feet high what these are they're they're penises they're not just phallic like an uh like a like a tall obelisk of carved stone might generally be phallic no these ones have a little bit more detail to them and we that we're just figuring this out so no we we so this is the thing it's they're a thousand years old we would we didn't figure this out before now they were they were thought to be uh a thousand years old it turns out they're more like 2000 years old so these were first studied by some french researchers back in the 90s they said ah uh probably year 1180 and now they've gone back they're being they're under consideration for being a unesco world heritage site but they still have they've been there for in that holding pattern for a while uh still haven't gotten approved and i'm thinking it's because at some point the world heritage site is going to be 10 000 stone penises many of which are three meters high that that it's just it's a world heritage site this is 2000 years old and it's and it's an amazing amazing site yeah but those are penises they're large stone obelisks no no no they're not just obelisks those are some pictures go google it up and pull up some other photos some of them are much more obvious about what they're what they are than being i'm gonna i'm gonna refrain from googling but no this is a archaeological site right and researchers are going and looking at the old stone penises and going those are old but they seem to have some significance too it seems like generation after generation some of these were burial sites some of them seem to be showing the transfer of power between generations i'm assuming it's a male dominated society yeah uh the researcher who went down there is Ethiopian descent researchers out of i think it's North Dakota University of North Carolina let's see i lost the the uh straight but uh we actually initially went down there to was going to study some caves or something this is uh Ashinafi Zina is the lead author of the study doctoral researcher now at the state historical society of North Dakota has gone down to study caves and came you know went to go look at these things and went oh my goodness this is this is an incredible archaeological site and very little very little study really has been had been done on this even though it's been there for thousands of years so looking at the stones many of which had fallen to the ground and some have broken pieces i decided to focus my dissertation work there instead of investigating cave sites in southern Ethiopia one of the things they discovered uh on the aside from some sort of the getting the carbon dating right on on these stone structures was the obsidian that had been identified at those sites was sourced some 190 miles to 300 kilometers away in northern Kenya hmm so that also illustrates that thousands years ago pretty extensive trade routes were already operating across Africa allow the the which doesn't which is not surprising when you think about it uh people have been living in Africa for for since the beginning and it's not surprising that people would be having trade routes and moving from place to place yeah so in western Africa uh it's very well known what the the sort of trade routes that existed because you had people who were living in sort of different ecological regions some plains some more jungle connected by rivers and there's a really nice record of that trade going way way way way back there wasn't that you get to the western side and that that the records of trade sort of fall off so it has been this idea that african society sort of was burgeoned in in in west Africa and then as trade and connections uh to i guess from the camel i guess that once the camel could cross deserts and they could trade with the you know regions further and further away there became an additional livestock available and you know there's another big expansion there uh but i think a lot a lot less is known what what went on during those times and sort of eastern african trade routes um but yeah so a lot a lot of fun stuff but i i have a feeling i really do the the idea that uh this is a world heritage site and it's been delayed and there hasn't been that much research done not even though you have 10 000 10 000 of them that is i mean look at how much uh stonehenge gets uh gets looked at and there isn't no 10 000 stones standing up and the only reason i can think is that the vast majority of these obelisks are carved to look like penises and that apparently has some effect on their ability to be researched possibly i yeah or it could be that people have uh had not had enough of a real academic interest in the cultural heritage of many civilizations tribal bradley bradley white in africa chat room saying bonehenge no no these are not made out of bone they're made out of stone but you can't use henge because that's a different anyway so many i i i'm fascinated with the significance of it like this it's you know it's definitely power related but like you said generational shifting of power there's uh celebratory aspects of it they're like it's fascinating fascinating and the way that you know abebus and but hen butt head trained mind initially heads is not the direction that other people will think of it you have more stories uh yeah i got a bunch more as we grew up on divas and butt head i i'm very infantile as we approach uh December 25th they're prepared to celebrate the birthday of the beloved uh uh baby Humphrey Bogart as well as the pernicus or something Galileo Galileo's birthday is coming up there's also like a dozen or more famous once popular deities who are specifically born to virgin mothers who are also born on this day like there's like a long list it's a very popular day to be born to a virgin uh mother so somebody needs to do the backtrack right the nine months the 40 weeks back yeah from the date and figure out what is god uh getting randy one of the gods they mean like oh i need to in the spring time because it was spring i mean come on okay what you got go what you got for me here all right so let's have a pregnant pause for a moment think about the mothers and babies in this uh this time nearly one in four pregnant women in a new study say they've been unable to afford necessary healthcare three out of five have concerns about paying basic medical bills pregnancy and the year after delivery are critical period for healthcare access for expecting mothers and babies yet more than half of women in a five-year study describe general financial stress over all their expenses including monthly bills housing costs minimum payments and credit cards maintaining good standard of living uh just getting through the pregnancy and the sort of post-pregnancy period this is quoting uh michelle moniz who's an md in obstetrician gynecologist university of health von voit lander of women's hospital senior author of the study our study suggests that financial hardship is exceedingly common among the birthing population in the united states with many parents experiencing unmet healthcare need due to cost healthcare unaffordability and general financial stress these findings appear in jamma network open include a national sample of 3500 uh peripartum women between 2013 and 2015 prenatal and postpartum visits provide essential preventative services for both women and infants including vaccinations screening for gestational diabetes and anemia an opportunity to do early diagnosis and management of pregnancy complications moniz says but for some the cost of healthcare is a barrier to actually utilizing these services that are recommended women with private insurance and those living on lower incomes were more likely to experience unaffordable healthcare than women with public insurance and those with higher incomes the study found 24 percent of women with unmet healthcare need reported during being unable to afford the medical care prescription medications eyeglasses mental health care or said that they or a family member had delayed or deferred needed care due to costs people who delay or forgo medical care due to financial barriers are more likely to report worse health outcomes says moniz financial hardship has also been shown to be associated with poor mental health household income often fails dramatically around the time of childbirth this is something uh that uh there was a study i don't know if we talked about it that uh germany had done that showed like they that having a baby also had an 18 percent decline in income from others beyond that it was like a career interrupter uh and they created programs that that allowed women to maintain um their jobs basically it's uh you know maternity leave uh got reliable and more extensive maternity leave got added and it removed that 18 percent decline findings suggest urgent need to improve health care and affordability reducing or eliminating out-of-pocket costs co-payments co-insurance deductible payments for recommended health care one of the solutions you think could be useful but it underscores the importance of stable insurance coverage for pregnant and postpartum women a lot of women have to change coverage yeah you change a job you have to change coverage you leave a job you need to get cobra and then find your own coverage um there are you know the volatility of it is is difficult to maintain and when you change insurance you have to sometimes change providers because not all providers take all insurances and there are different systems and so you can't even have consistency in people who treat you yeah uh the it says does point out that the uh affordable care act that's that uh obama care uh dealio has made some definite advances has has made things better one of things did eliminate a lot of health plans that weren't actually health plans just called them health plans you know they didn't cover anything usually you couldn't get anything covered any kind of coverage for being pregnant right and under a lot of these plans which meant there were huge regions of the united states where you couldn't even get a health care plan to cover pregnancy it all had to come out of pocket private which is a ridiculous thing which is a huge financial burden yeah in short there's little support from the health care system of the financial system in america for having children and while there's growing political support for limiting women's access to birth control following this trajectory will lead the nation down a path of worse and worse outcomes for newborn health every pregnancy me thing every pregnancy pregnancy should be accompanied by access to midwives it's some of the best training you can possibly get on what to expect uh and how to deal with things if you're going to have a baby go consult with some midwives this is just an advice this is just an advice this is just an advice yeah absolutely just an advice but this should be mandatory uh that you everyone should have access to midwives uh medical screenings and financial support should have access yeah should have yeah should have access should consult with them you should have medical screenings and yes you should go take a class from midwives if you plan on having a baby they will teach you things that you aren't going to hear from a nurse practitioner from your doctor from anybody else uh uh having done this uh numerous times the best information about giving birth and being pregnant you just come from midwives uh there should be also mandatory mandatory maternity leave for no less than four weeks and six months after a child was born in my opinion there is a minimum standard uh close to this i think it's uh up to four months now the european union has created some minimum standards for for uh mandatory maternity leave uh that allows women to take time off to have a baby bond with a baby uh and recoup to return to the workplace the united states has none really has no minimum yep there's so yeah so we're not looking at getting one either yay uh but newtons birthday was december 25th according to eric nap and schnago says that newton's birthday is december 25th only on the julian calendar because england england was switching at the time okay yeah yeah tax cuts for billionaires so they can become rocketeers is apparently the thing preventing us from meeting the basic needs of mother how about fire fire what are you talking about fire you had a story about fire fire you're done with this story okay yeah i'm done with it let me move on then okay i'm like okay yeah so neanderthals used fire uh we know that used it warm the cave cook with and now we've uh discovering that they also used it to clear landscapes uh studied by archaeologists from leading university in the collaboration with researchers elsewhere found neanderthals used fire to keep their landscapes open and did so for thousands of years this is the newmark nord area it's a quarry in germany we found abundant traces of neanderthal activity hundreds and hundreds of slaughtered animals surrounded by the stone tools the the neanderthals used and a huge amount of charcoal remains traces were found in what 125 thousand years ago was a forest area where they had prey like horses deer cattle elephants lions hyenas this is a quarry in germany i didn't know they had lions hyenas there mixed deciduous forest stretched from the netherlands to poland in several places in the area where lakes and on the edges of some of these lakes traces of neanderthals have been found will robux or archaeology professor leiden university explains that the point when these neanderthals turn up and start showing up in the record the closed uh forest made way to open spaces in part due to fires so the question then was okay were there fires and then the neanderthals were like hey this is uh handy this big open space let's move there or did the neanderthals move there and start fires and create open spaces and they found sufficient evidence conclude that the neanderthals kept the area open for about 2000 years because they were shown that there's lake areas where the same animals roam but there are no traces of neanderthal and there's no traces of fires huh the fire seems to follow the neanderthals everywhere they go on this landscape so they were using fire to clear the landscape to manage the landscape to help them hunt all these probably help hunt to be able to uh look longer distances to see if there was like dangerous animals around and so it was a tool they were they were they were doing environmental management yeah or they were just really bad at putting out fires they were bad at campfires like you don't like we don't actually you know i mean that's one one idea one interpretation is that they were doing all this yeah could have just been they were bad at putting out campfires like they didn't know how to do it hadn't been figured out i hopefully they were thinking about what they were doing i like i like to think of i like the the idea of our neanderthal relatives as spotful 2000 years of campfires i think you figure out how to put a campfire out maybe maybe that's neat though what an interesting what an interesting connection the fire follows the neanderthals this is this week in science we give you the gift of twists every week right now it's the gift of twist mess and we hope that you all have a wonderful twist mess with science and please share this with a friend i got some stories how about some stories about the brain let me surprise you with something huh if i never talk about the brain brain plasticity is crucial for our ability to learn for the brain's ability to adapt for the brain's ability to protect itself this ability of the brain to form new connections to be plastic we think of it as kind of this moving thing where it's got these little projections the dendrites the axons that go out and connect with other neurons and that can make new connections and that maybe it's constantly always moving around but there is actually a part of the of the functioning of the brain in which it likes to not necessarily be plastic when something's working really well when connections are where they want to be uh the brain likes to stabilize those things and so in stabilizing those connections they have an extracellular matrix which is like scaffolding within the brain and the scaffolding of the brain is made up of these metalloproteins these which which is interesting Justin because on previous shows you've talked about these organic metalloprotein complexes that chemists are starting to use to do a lot of scaffolding and hold onto things in the environment and so it's a really fascinating interesting that in the brain we also have these metalloproteins that scaffold the structure of the architecture of the brain so we have the stability that is provided by that extracellular matrix but then when plasticity needs to happen something needs to degrade those structural proteins so that growth and change can happen and so there's a family of proteinases these enzymes called matrix metalloproteinases because they digest the metalloproteins and or they enzymatically cleave them so that they break up and allow plasticity to occur and so these researchers publishing in the journal of neuroscience this week looked at how a couple of these metalloproteinases are involved in mediating plasticity in the adult primary visual cortex and so that in mice so much in mice this is like they give a gift to mice no in these mice it's healthy adult mice they were inhibiting the metalloproteinases to see what happened when they did these ocular dominance tests so like an eye one eye was covered up and not allowed to have any vision for a period of time and they inhibited the metalloproteinase to see what would happen they did the same with a different metalloproteinase after a cortical stroke that they that they initiated in the mouse brain to see what happened and so they determined that when the brain was injured and needed to recover the extracellular mace matrix provides this scap the scaffolding for the synaptic circuits so that it so it's uh what they're thinking is that this an enzymatic proteolysis is what they call it the process of the enzymes breaking up the proteins regulates homeostasis between stability and reorganization or plasticity and so they actually found that there were there was differential responses when the brain was in a healthy state and was kind of damaged when these metalloproteinases were allowing plasticity to occur or when the brain was injured and the the plasticity occurred and so in the brain these enzymes work kind of balancing the need for stability or change so in the future we may end up in a situation where where we are you know able to use these metalloproteinases to help increase plasticity in a brain that has suffered a stroke or when there's been damage and a brain is fighting and trying to maintain its rigidness its structural structural integrity but needs to be plastic so that function behavioral function can be restored potentially we can use these metalloproteinases as targets in the future to be able to therapeutically help people with brain injuries yeah inducing plasticity sounds like a beneficial just a midlife crisis you're like oh i don't like the way my brain is wired i need more plasticity in my life i just need to i want to rearrange my brain in a less painful way than has been done traditionally because that could actually even be it yeah just add some enzymes so just just no big deal just add some just add the enzymes and my last story for the night it's all about life because that is this planet's great gift to all of us this twismis we're going to talk about how life could have come to be and we've talked so many times about so many different hypotheses about the origins of life on the planet what are some of these stories that that we've talked about remember a couple of them one is the one is the pan spermia life game via comet water right another another is the thermal vent the clay down in the cell becoming the first structure that was like cell walls for chemical reactions to take place porous rocks maybe or maybe that's the same as the clay one maybe it's only two pond water didn't necessarily it didn't have to be hydrothermal vents it could have been volcanic ponds you know it could have been just where hot water is happening yeah but there are all these ideas and and there have been experiments through the years showing the chemical processes that oh if you start with these ingredients these little building blocks you get these other pieces that could have gone on to become the building blocks of life right you have these things that could happen this could happen okay a new paper out in frontiers of microbiology has looking taken a look at all of the evidence to date related to the thermodynamics of the chemistry of hydrothermal vents and the big take home message after analyzing over 400 chemical reactions that could have taken place in a very ancient ancestor of ours they've they have said hydrothermal vents have all of the pieces in place to allow for the spontaneous construction of life that start based on the heat based on the environment based on the chemical starting blocks that all of the factors are in place around hydrothermal vents to potentially the therm and the thermodynamics of the chemical reactions work so that they would step one chemical reaction on another to create all the all the possible parts needed to create something living now there's a researcher david demer who's at i think is uc san diego no uc santa cruise who provoked who proposed hot springs this volcanic hot spring hypothesis for the origin of life years ago and according to the scientist he says the paper is impressive particularly significant is that their argument is based firmly on thermodynamic principles that revealed how molecular hydrogen in solution could act as the reducing agent to drive multiple reactions related to metabolism and what's not yet addressed is how the reactions were encapsulated in some form of compartment so that's the big question you you mentioned a clay or a mud and that's another hypothesis that's been out there that maybe they're maybe they're clay if there are if there are sponge like compartments near these or sponges no there wouldn't have been sponges but if she had scud you gotta go back before the sponge that's you gotta go back before that but if the clay had compartments yeah yeah bubbles there is something that made bubbles in mud bubbles and you got your compartments your cell walls and you can have your little chemical reactions yeah yeah yeah i got something you said was oh it's got the right conditions for metabolism oh that sounds great wait wait wait back up we gotta start with we gotta start with just dna we're gonna start with there's something that's replicating we're gonna start with where do you even get that machine how does this what starts before the i don't understand still what has to come first but i guess i guess it's it doesn't have to necessarily be be an intentional process exactly life is not going to be not not intentional just right and and you try to start that way because you're chemistry when you back engineer and want to re-engineer like you have an intentional goal you want to get from here to here to here to here so you gotta put this thing and then we gotta have this component but this works with this so how these fit together so perfectly how could they have just happened to be because they nothing was designed things worked together because eventually things did and that's kind of you can imagine there are some chemical components in in chemical systems we call some some uh some molecule scavengers all the way down yeah we've got scavengers and could you imagine the chemical processes that one chemical process is scavenging the uh the energy from another chemical process it's scavenging one thing from another and eventually that scavenging turns into something that needs to be replicated and the molecules start to align in a particular way and processes can happen in a repeated in a repeated way um and yeah this idea as Bradley White is is saying in the chat a biogenesis yeah where life came just from the stuff that was luck of the draw all the right things in the right place but I think at the end of the day it makes you know makes for a merry twistness life it finds a way yeah those are some words as uh the chemical reactions uh that we're talking about are going to be completely unique to one planet in our universe and our galaxy there's gonna be plenty of planets that have the similar chemistry that have the similar thermo events uh maybe even have similar uh size and amounts of water and all those things that we think are crucial in this instance and there may be other ways it might be the thermo events here could be the the muck ponds of another planet it could be something that happens in the dry space it's a very human environment yeah they say here though the the key factor to these processes happening here it's hydrogen if you take hydrogen out nothing works oh gosh and what's the most abundant element in the universe hydrogen there you go hydrogen everywhere life can be everywhere out there it is does it have a sense of humor have we done it think so we made it to the end of another episode yeah our very very special twistness episode you know every episode is special but this week we're celebrating all the science saying thank you all for being here um there was one twistness 2014 I believe episode 494 when Justin's disclaimer read it was the night before twistness went all through the house no science was stirring not even a mouse the stories were laid by the webcam with care in hopes that the minions soon would be there Blair was already hiding her bed while visions of peacock spiders danced in her head and kiki in her lab coat and eye on the moon preparing our brains to bring the show soon when all of a sudden there arose such a clatter so to the chat room I sprang to see what just what was the matter the minions were there and the minions were ready for the show to begin and the news to come steady I opened a window and I saw with surprise that the google hangout was going about to be live I looked for my invite I found it in text just in time for this weekend science coming up week after next it's going to be week after next is our next episode December 29th for our top 11 science stories of the year yeah that's my one of my favorite shows the recap all the great science that was a great disclaimer I should have done that one today instead god awful thing that I was trying oh it's fantastic I think we should try and do it again in the after show let's do it again do it again I don't think I can do it all right uh yeah uh so next week is the top 11 no next week is our week off we twist is taking a week we're taking a week off why do that that's you always take a week off well it's one night to some it's a week it's a week in between but the 29th we're coming back with our top 11 science stories show if you would like to let us know what stories you think should be in the top 11 please do email or you can you can hashtag us on twitter with twists top 11 and we will be able to be able to see your recommendations yes no peacocks no peacocks got spiders this year I don't think we had any peacock spider stories in 2021 which stories will make our final countdown oh the tension is rising you have two weeks before we tell you I think I already know a minor but now we have come to the end of our episode so I just want to say thank you so much for listening and I hope you did enjoy the show shout outs shout outs shout out thank you for your help on the social medias and for show notes and all the other things you do gourd thank you for manning the chat the chat rooms and identity four thank you for recording the show Rachel thank you for editing and for other assistance that you give and I definitely would like to thank our patreon 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kirsten at kirsten at this week in science.com Justin at twist minion at gmail.com or Blair Blair Baz at twist.org one of these days I will give everybody the same email address domain just put twist in the subject line so your email doesn't get spam filtered into a hydrothermal vent and spawn respawn life or a guinea worm we'll be back next oh wait no that's not the one you can also hit us up on the twitter where we are at with science at dr kiki and jackson playing at belaris menagerie we love your feedback if there's a topic you'd like us to cover or address a suggestion for an interview a haiku that comes to you tonight please let us know and we will be back here december 29th so tough for our last show of the year top 11 science stories of the year we hope that 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 week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science is the end of the world so i'm setting up the shop got my banner unfurled it says the scientist is in i'm gonna sell my advice show them how to stop the robot with a simple device i'll reverse all the warming with a wave of my hand and all it'll cost you is a couple of grand this week science is coming your way so everybody listen to what i say i use the scientific method for all that it's worth and i'll broadcast my opinion all over the air because it's this week in science this week in science this week in science science science this week in science this week in science this week in science science i've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be me may not represent your views the show. I'm going to use down the calculations. Oh yeah. Oh hello hello. What did it just in time for the show. Yeah wait time to start the show. Rehound it. Very Christmas. It's our after show now. Thank you for joining us for this episode of TWIS. We are very glad that you have joined us for the show this week. This year. This decade. This decade. There's been a whole decade. It's true. It is true. I'm not driving angry. What? Yay! Eric got a calendar. Nice. Everyone who has gotten calendars. Glad you got your calendar. I did a mailing. I got them out. Glad Eric that you got your calendar. I still have some more to mail out. I have gotten a few more orders. All right. Anthony got your calendar. Everyone out there getting calendars. You need to give me an address in Denmark. It'll probably take a month. It's not on the moon. Like airplanes go everywhere. Mail is pretty quick. It was a gift. Yay. Wonderful. Airplanes do go everywhere but mail recently takes a long time. I'm not insured. Yes! A week off. It's on the calendar. Our calendar. If you have the 2021 TWIS calendar and you look at the calendar for next Wednesday it says no live show. TWISmas holiday. So tonight was our TWISmas show. The 29th will be our year in review show. Okay. I have a question. Going to be a lot of fun. What day is it right now? That's why I'm in a different. Are you because you're Thursday? Yeah. My shows are on Thursdays now. Five in the morning on Thursdays. Wednesday 2021. The 22nd is what we're taking off. Is that right? It's the 22nd here which would be 5 a.m. on the 23rd for you will not happen. It's like two weeks of no show then. It's almost. Why is calendar so hard? It's how it works. There's all of this week till that show. There's a whole another week till there's another show. It's two weeks off. Nobody needs that much time away from the show. Are you sure about that? I'm pretty sure that's how math works. Calendar math is different. By the calendar math is different than other math. Flying out got his calendar but Kai didn't sign the envelope this year. He was actually in school. I'm going to say it's one week off because it's one episode. I don't want to talk about the math of it being two episodes. It's just going to make people sad. It's one episode but it's two weeks. It's going to make people sad. No. It's just one episode. That's all. Calendar math is very special. Don't drink the eggnog and drive everyone. I found some. This might be disgusting to other people. I found eggnog. Flavored oat milk. It's oat milk. It's oat milk. It's oat milk. It's oat milk. It's oat milk. It's oat milk. It's oat milk. It's oat milk. It's oat milk. It's not really milk. It's not super thick. You don't call it oat milk. What is oat milk? When you think about it? It's like oat solution. because you're not, it's not like you're juicing. Squeezing a bunch of oats to get the most out of them. Squeezing oats. Squeezing oats. Merry Christmas, Fada. Have a wonderful, wonderful, Christmas. Merry Christmas. Yeah, I know it's a week late after the end of Hanukkah, but happy Hanukkah to all who celebrate Hanukkah. Happy Kwanzaa, happy all of the holidays. This is a special time of year, I think. Regardless of your faith or lack thereof, the darkness is something that makes us turn to the light, makes us shelter, makes us seek company, makes us, you know, when it cozy up and find the people we know and the people we love and the people we like to spend time with. And so I wish for everyone to be able to have good times. With others, safely, we can do it. We can do it well. We can get through this holiday for show. You're gonna have a good holiday in Denmark, huh, Justin? Yeah, I guess. I mean, it's the same thing here. The Omicron, personally, I ate the diseases spreading over here like crazy. But yeah, I got a tree. Don't burn the house down. Went and hunted down a tree. And yeah, getting ready for the Christmas and New Year's, which is a big holiday. It's like the biggest holiday. So I think it's bigger than a Christmas. Yeah, it is New Year's. It's interesting because New Year's has been like a big holiday for several years for me. And it's like last year and this year, I'm kind of like, yeah, okay. Is it just turning 2020 now? Again, can we have a do-over? I don't think I want to do this year, last year over. No, yeah, no. There have been lots of wonderful things that have happened for many people, but many bad things out there. And I don't know what is that Apache vulnerability that Rick Loveman is asking about. Does mine have? I don't know. You're reading random comments now. It's a random, like this is not a random comment. Rick Loveman comes to the show all the time. So it's not totally, it's random, but I don't understand. I hope my website does not, but it might. It probably does, I don't know. It's managed server. So hopefully the server manager IT people will update things appropriately. Or not. You know, every once in a while, you need to just tear down a website and start all over again. We've done it a few years ago. No, we only did it once. I've thought about tearing down the twist site previously. I still think about it occasionally. I think I just want it to work for people to find it. What did you do for your birthday? Cleaned. Yeah. You cleaned? Yeah. So the plan on my birthday was to, I was gonna go hunt a Christmas tree at this. Oh my gosh. Oh, the most picture-esque snow filled Christmas tree farm. With a bunch of oldie time barn buildings and stuff. Oh, it was fantastic. It was an amazing place to go. Christmas tree hunting. And chop down, you go, you pick it out, want to run the spores and you cut it down and you drag the tree back and then some proper lumberjacks help you get it into your car. Right. But I was gonna do that on my birthday and then this was like no place to put a tree. And then you start moving things. You're like, all right, this has got to move out of the way for the tree. And oh, wait, now I can't use that door because they put the thing in front of it. So you take that and you go to put that in storage and then you get down to the storage of, oh, okay, now I got all this stuff in storage already. I got to get rid of some of it. So you take some of that out, you bring it back into the apartment. And then by the end of it was like a whole day, just reorganizing the way humans interact with an apartment based on this tree taking over a bunch of space. So that ended up taking up enough of that day along with I think some bread making and cookie baking that took place. That sounds like nice birthday stuff. Oh, it was, it was fine. And then the next day went out and got a tree. So it's beautiful. Clean, prepare for the tree. It's not cleaning, it's preparation. Yeah, it was, and then made a big mess, made a huge mess getting the tree. And you put the, what do you call them? The little fake planets that you put all over the tree? The ornaments. They're up there now. And so yeah, now there's all these boxes where the ornaments were that I need to get put away still, but yeah, it's looking very Christmassy all of a sudden. Yeah. It's fun. Yeah, yeah, it is. I like the celebratory, the preparatory, the decorative, all the stuff, the hat-wearing. The hat-wearing is fine. The hat-wearing, I've got my Christmas tree earrings. Oh, nice, I didn't notice this before. Those are cool. They got, they have little planets on them. Yeah. Planets called ornaments. I like it, I like it, I like it. But yeah, everything, everything's very Christmassy. The Danes know Christmas well, I think. Very into it. What time is the sun going down there? It's actually, yeah, it's still getting darker earlier. We got another week. Yeah. And then it'll just start getting lighter a little bit more each day. Yeah, it's a fairly, it's a fairly, okay, it's 7 a.m. It's pitch black outside. Is it? It's still dark. It's pitch black out there. It will be probably, I think, for another hour. At least, maybe more. And then, yeah, usually by about 3.30, 3.45, the sun goes down. Wow, yeah, it's going down here at like 4.30, and I thought that was early, but. Yeah, and then if it's an overcast day, it can be very overcast. And you might never see sun or light. Yeah. From the, conversely, though, when it's summertime, it's like spring weather, and the sun is out to like 11 o'clock at night or something crazy. Yeah. So you have very long, long days. So your latitude is a bit, is still northward of Portland. Yeah, so. Probably more equivalent to Vancouver, Canada. Yeah, one of the things, what is it? London is as far north as Juneau, Alaska, I think it is. What? Yeah. I think we talked about that before. That just, yeah. What? Yeah, so all of Europe is much further north than Americans tend to think of it. And so Denmark is, you know, I think a little bit further north than London actually, probably not that much further north, to be honest. It's a little further north. Yeah, so yeah, your sunrise was 45 minutes, is at 8.34 a.m. So 45 minutes after the sunrise that I have here, and then your sun goes down at 3.30. 3.30, huh? And ours goes down at, yeah, 3.45, and ours goes down at 4.30. Yeah. Oy! That is dark. Mm-hmm. Yeah, 3.42. Yeah, so all sorts of maps are weird, like yeah, like what is it, Lake Tahoe is west of Los Angeles. Yes. And that confuses everybody in California, who lived in that state for forever, and you ask any California in that, and they're like, that can't be right. It's just the way it is. It is? But you learn your longitude and latitudes. That's also sort of the fear of the global warming thing with the Atlantic Ocean conveyor belt is how far north Europe actually is. Yep. If they don't get that tropical conveyor belt of warming coming up to keep things nice and warm, that should all really be much colder than it is. But, you know, Alaska, or yeah, I think Alaska, it's the hottest that it's been. What was the Arctic? The Arctic is the hottest temperature recorded in November or December recently. Well, the temperatures are going up, so hey, just good news, it's getting warmer in northern Europe too, probably, or at least a little while until that ocean current brings the cold water and the ice. You don't look happy. You're like, no. So somebody's asking, what is the parallel? What parallel is Denmark on? According to this, I think it's the 55th. Okay. Northern parallel, parallel north, 55. The border between Canada and the USA is 49. Yes. Denmark. And there's a 48th parallel that I drive past. I think it's between Salem and Portland. There's a sign that notes passing a parallel at some point. I think it's the 48th parallel. I think it's the 48th in Oregon. That would make sense. 49th is the border between Canada and the USA. A little bit down from there. What parallel? Oh, no, no, no. Okay, so Oregon is on the 45th parallel. That's what it is. Oh, that's a lot more parallel. The 45th parallel forms some boundaries of or passes through many US states, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, as well as going through Canadian provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Okay, so the 49th parallel. Let's see about that one. What does it cross? I really need to update my computer, but I can't because it's old. And I can't update my computer, so I can't update my Chrome browser. So I can't look these things up. Makes me sad. The city of Paris is about 15 kilometers south of the 49th parallel. Yeah, who thinks of lovely Paris as being, you know, as far north as Montana? Yeah, Canada. Which parallel runs through this Ask the Google, Denmark? 55. 55th. Oh, there's a small memorial at 55 degrees north, 15 degrees east at the island of Bornholm. So if you want an outing, Justin, you could go find the 55th parallel memorial. A memorial. A memorial on the island of Bornholm. I've been to Bornholm. It's a nice, it's a little ways for me. You actually kind of have to go to Sweden to get the boat to, it's off there out in the east. It's a little ways east, I guess. But yeah, that's the island I kept circling around trying to find a place that had fish that wasn't smoked. Oh yes. But apparently the island is famous for its smoked fish. Everywhere they sell smoked fish there. Also that's one of the oldest breweries. Oh, that's cool. So are you avoiding fish or just not eating the smoked fish? Just not a big fan of the smoked fish. She said last week. Just not a big fan of the smoked fish, yeah. I didn't go with a new MacBook Pro. I have a new, I think it's an Acer, no a Razer. I have a Razer laptop, but I just haven't transferred everything over from my Mac to the Razer because of the Mac to PC change and. Yeah, it's not worth it. It'll be fine, it's just a process. I have to know, make sure I have all the programs on the computer that I need. I have to get all the passwords, the things, it's just sitting down. I haven't emptied my voicemail. I don't, there are things I don't do because they take two seconds and that is just too long. You think it's gonna take two seconds. The problem with then you go in is, oh, I gotta recover a password and then, oh, what's the email I used 20 years ago to start this account and then do I have access? Oh, I gotta get the password to that and it wants a phone number. I gotta go climb a telephone pole and get a landline to ship the phone call from it. It's just a whole. It's a scavenger hunt. I have to, yeah. It's like, you've gotta invest like two weeks at least into this project. Yeah, I mean, that's where my brain goes is, oh, this is gonna take a long time and so I put it off and put it off and put it off. Maybe it'll be the thing that I can tackle over the next two weeks. Yeah, maybe. I'm not doing that. And I gotta find a new microphone is what we've been to saying because I can't, unless I do this show. That microphone sounds great. Right into, but I have to be like this. Right in there, yeah. Oh, can you see the reflection of the light that's from the thing saying it's on? If I don't have that reflection on my nose, I'm too far away from the microphone. It doesn't take very much for it to just. Yeah, and then you're back there and then it's echoey and, yeah. Up there. So I'm gonna have it like. And it just sounds so much warmer when you're up close. Oh, that's nice. Oh, it's just a nice, nice microphone. I should probably, like, yeah, I understand you need like a mic stand I think maybe a different mic. Maybe, maybe this mic's okay. Maybe it just needs the stand. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, I mean. And just do it like a proper show. I mean, this show, it should be a radio show style thing. I don't know this whole, and nobody needs to see my face anymore. Like I should really be doing this show like this. That's great. Yeah, it should just be about the sound quality. Just be about the sound. Nothing to do with visual. I should just get a stand that I'll sit. The other thing is where the mic is, where the camera is, it's far back enough that I do need a stand. If the camera's gonna be there, I do need a stand that can be like up. Yeah. I have something in a storage unit in a town called Davis, California. That would work. Well, that is not in Denmark, but there is this thing called Amazon that ships to different countries. Oh no, it doesn't. Doesn't shoot to Denmark? No, can't get Amazon to Denmark. Well. Cool, what? There is, people don't realize this. There is a, there's different Amazons. Well, there are also stores that ship to other countries. There's a UK, hang on, there's a UK Amazon. Yes, exactly. There's a German Amazon. There's no Denmark or Scandinavia Amazon, which also means that- Because they have IKEA. No, I don't know. Is that right? Because anything that you send into Denmark has extra taxes, import taxes that can be applied. Nice. Yeah, they, look, they don't have people on rocket ships, billionaires on rocket ships giving tours to their besties, but they do provide extensive maternal leave to every mother and baby. prenatal care and postnatal care and all of that stuff. It's pretty great. I mean, there's- It turns out to have a really wealthy nation is completely meaningless. If all of that wealth is in the hands of very few of the people that live there. If you have a well-distributed wealth system in the country, turns out it's great for everybody. Then people, like, it's just so funny. Like, all of the, like, the, the experience of like seeing the, the difference between- Oh, I like sweet water. Dispursed ink. I, I do and I don't. I, I, I absolutely have had good experiences with sweet water, but, oh my goodness. I've been ordering stuff and it's been getting delayed. Well, yeah, it would get delayed. I'm sure there are- That's the, that's the whole thing that's going on everywhere. That's what's happening right now, exactly. I do like a sweet water. Also, there's the- Yeah, I don't know if I can get things direct here. Right, that's what I, I don't know if sweet water can deliver to Denmark. I mean, you could pop international postage, which might be a bit, but I'm sure there's something that could be more local. I'm just looking for a stand. I can figure something out. If you just, if you're getting a stand, I could, I can, I can reimburse you for a stand. Make that happen. If you find one that you think will work, let me know. Yeah, well, I'll go check out some music store things I think I can get delivered from. I think I've done that before here. So yeah, I should be okay. I think I can do these things very possibly. Yeah, I mean, the microphone sounds good. It looks pretty. It's just big and bulky. It's just a matter of- Well, the other problem with it is- What if you kind of put it to the side a little bit? Does it still feel like this? Like this? Yeah, so it'd be like- I talk out of the side of my mouth anyway, so it's just on the right side. I talk over here on this side of the mouth, I could put it over here or talk over this side of the mouth. Yeah, but you don't have to have it right in front of your face. You can if you want to. I feel like it's gonna end up- I mean, at one point, you were doing the show with a sock puppet, so- Oh gosh, yeah, that was like the very first video show. It was like, I'm not gonna be in front of the camera. I'll put a little sock puppet in front of the camera. Not even when that was being operated. It was just gonna stare at the camera. It was your attempt at Sifl and Ollie, I think. I don't know. Yeah, but I think like the mic works great if you can get it kind of just get the placement right. And it can be in front of your face or it can be to the side slightly. As long as it's closer to you- Closer. Lightning rod brings up this. Was that the largest tornado in recorded human history that tore through the United States? Oh, I don't- It does seem to have the longest track ever recorded. If it, I don't know if they ever determined if it was one, that one tornado was continuously a tornado or if it stopped and started and was other tornadoes or what have you. But, well, you can really see the problem like every once in a while, somebody who's not a familiar with tornadoes will ask the question, why can't you just build houses that are tornado proof? And- Very hard. I think you could do a better job than we do. Part of the problem is it's more expensive, much more expensive probably. And, you know, that town that got the, what is it, Mayfield or whatever it was that got completely leveled? This has been in the Tornado Alley for hundreds of years. Yeah, it is in Tornado Alley, but the probability of, yeah, it's like the probability of being there. Yeah. But then when you are hit, you're hit, you know? And the other problem is, it's not just how strong you make a building. You also gotta make it, you know, missile proof because there's gonna be maybe cars picked up and slammed into your building. There's gonna be debris. Somebody's roof or somebody's mobile home is gonna be airborne for a while and slam into a house. But yeah, it'd be kind of expensive. But yeah, you could, you could make them. There are, I mean, and there are universities who are actually studying building materials and building technologies and strategies to see how we can create more hurricane-proof, tornado-proof, earthquake-proof buildings. They're like, this is an active area of engineering science. I was in Gainesville, Florida. I think it was Gainesville for at university, of Gainesville, University of Florida, Gainesville. I think that's where it was. But they had a whole building set aside where they had a wind tunnel that they would put things in and they had a shaker where they would build, it's like building a Lincoln log house. And then on top of this shaking platform, and then they would like simulate earthquakes or they would blow wind through the wind tunnel. And they were like, so they had all these ways to simulate these forces that would affect houses or commercial buildings and pretty awesome. I mean, that if you're gonna do structural engineering, that would be a pretty fun thing to do. Let's build a house and then see if we can shake it and shake it and break it. Yeah. So, but in California, they got those machines, but you can't put a full house there. They only have time for you to build a small thing and then remove it. So, you know, you might try a different structure of support the thingy or whatever or a different design there and see if that, how that works out. But it's usually small elements. These things gotta get thrown on there and pulled off again and, oh gosh. But you know the other thing I noticed with that little town that got knocked down? Had like four churches that had these huge church buildings and nice amphitheaters and everything. People must, the town had like a population, like 10,000 people. Yeah. But they had four, what looked like really decent sized churches. Yeah, their own building, real estate, a cathedral-y thing where people go in there and they watch the church show on Sundays. That's, I found that very fascinating. Because now I'm like, we've got probably more people who listen to this show on a weekly basis than they have going to their churches. Where's our twist headquarters building? You know what I mean? Like where's, how come we don't have a twist cathedral studio built? I'm thinking these people must be given pretty decent tribute. Because we don't ask for tithes, maybe? That's what we need to start doing. We need to get taxed at tithes. The twist, the twist tithing. We need 10% of your income should always go to twist. But he has like super such a small town to have such four, four of them, at least. Mega churches, yeah. Big church looking things in a town of 10,000 people. I do not want twist to be a church. No, we are not. I think we should. And the other thing though is people were offering their thoughts and prayers to the people of the town. And I thought, you know, they already had four churches in a town of 10,000. If prayers were gonna help, I don't think that hurricane would, or tornado would have hit the town in the first place. Seems like with four churches and the only thing that you think ever you'd be covered having the prayers going on there, but. So, okay, let's see. So an article on Kentucky.com has said preliminary assessments by the National Weather Service show the tornado peaked at EF3 wind speeds, which ranges from 136 to 165 miles per hour. That's the peak? Doesn't seem, I mean, that's a high wind. That can't be right. That can't be a tornado wind, can it? Yeah, that was in Bowling Green. That's one long track tornado in Bowling Green. There was another in, yeah, the long track Western Kentucky tornado. They're still figuring everything out. Surveyors believe the twister traveled 128 miles in Kentucky, moving along the ground at speeds of roughly 60 miles per hour with, and also with wind speeds ranging from 158 to 206 miles per hour, putting it anywhere between EF3 and EF5 on the Enhanced Vegeta Scale. Ooh, Enhanced Vegeta's. Yeah, it had a maximum width of three fourths of a mile, and it's possible. Governor Andy Bashar Bashir previously reported the tornado traveled 227 miles across multiple states, and if that's true, it would break a 96-year-old record for the longest continuous distance traveled by a tornado. Bam. Yeah, so that's one of them. And the thing is that there were multiple tornadoes. There's one tornado that had a huge long track, but then there were other tornadoes that also. Almost 40 of them. Yeah, it was like all over the place. All over. I will not be moving to Kentucky anytime soon. No, but that wasn't gonna be a plan anyway. It's not like tornadoes put you off of that plan, like, oh, tornadoes now is set to move to Kentucky and right where everything good is going on in the world. I thought probably not that much bad is happening either. Kentucky. Got to see a map here for a second. I haven't looked at my, okay. Arkansas is not really in, is that in? It's not. Is that in Tornado Alley? It's Tornado Alley. Which states are included in Tornado Alley? Ah, Arkansas, South Dakota, Iowa. Out of Kansas. Kansas has to be Kansas, those little red shoes. I don't know what I know. Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Texas, Central Plains and Southern States. Illinois got hit. That was where the Amazon factory was. Yeah, that's pretty far north actually. Fascinating. But you know, it's not related to climate change, so. Eric, you'll take earthquakes and volcanoes any day of the week. Yeah, I think I might too. I don't know, it's interesting. People pick different risks, right? Some people are fine with the possibility of tornadoes. You have a basement. You can go shelter during tornado season. Other people are fine with the preeminent risk of an earthquake or a volcanic eruption. Some people don't even think about it at all. Other people go to places like Arizona and don't think about impending drought and water scarcity. I mean, we have all these different risks and we don't really consider any of them. I don't know. Nebraska, really a state? Yeah. I mean that quite sincerely. Their mom grew up in Nebraska, smack in the middle of the tornado alley. I don't know where Nebraska is. Is that weird? I have no, like I could not place Nebraska. That is the problem with Americans. Oh, here it is. It's right there in the middle of the other states in the middle. I'm not really sure of, like rectangle states. Okay, that's Nebraska, huh? It's by South of the Dakotas. South of the Dakotas. Yes. It's when you get into Nebraska. You know, when you bring up the state and it gives you, okay, just put in Nebraska into the Google. I got two maps showing me where Nebraska is, meaning they knew that was gonna be the first question. That's what they do with every state. They show a picture of some city and then the next picture is a covered wagon. Wait, really? The fourth image related to Nebraska, the first two are a map showing you where Nebraska is. The fourth one is a covered wagon because not much has happened since, apparently. How much has happened since, apparently? Oh, wait a minute, though. Atlas Obscura has something, has 40 cool and unusual things to do in Nebraska. Oh, that's got the car henge is in Nebraska. Oh, okay, I'm gonna, I need to open this thing up for you. Hold on. Get you pictures of this. This, we're gonna go to Nebraska because I wanna see this. This has gotta be one of the things to do car henge in Nebraska. It is a replica of Stonehenge with cars. Yeah. Which sounds just weird and awesome and I love people who do kind of weird artistic things. So great. There were a bunch of people who went to car henge for the Eclipse that went across the United States a few years back. Yeah. So you had no light pollution. Exactly. It's kind of in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, a car henge, but yes. Atlas Obscura has a list of many things. There's a chimney rock, toadstooled geological park. Ooh, ancient fossils. Nebraska has badlands. Nebraska also has the world's largest ball of stamps. Okay. This one. This one, this one I love. The highest point in Nebraska. It's called Panorama Point. This highest point in Nebraska. How, let's see, how, what is its altitude? Oh, come on. You're not gonna tell me the altitude when you say it's the highest point. It's very, Nebraska's very flat. Yeah, so is Dunmark. Oh, okay, Panorama Point in Nebraska is 5,429 feet. Elevated. That I did not expect. It's flat, but it's well above sea level. That's a fairly high altitude. Fascinating. Fascinating. See, you learn something every day. We just learned things about Nebraska. Don't you feel edified? Oh, I think, hang on now, hang on. There is kitsch in all 50 states. I think a kitsch tour is, if you're ever going around you have to do a kitsch tour. I mean, a science tour and a kitsch tour because that's very entertaining as you travel. All right, hang on a second. Okay, what are you finding? What was the altitude above sea level there? What do you call it? Panorama Point. Yeah, how high up was it? 5,429 feet. Oh, 5,000. Right. It's a very high altitude plane. It's a high plateau? Yeah, high plateau, for sure. Okay. Yeah, so it's that high because you've got the Rocky Mountains that come down on their Easter side in Colorado still at a fairly high altitude. And so that this location is near the point where Nebraska and Wyoming meet on Colorado's northern boundary. So this is at a very, it is a place that's at a very high elevation. It hasn't tapered all the way down yet. Highest point in Denmark? It's 566 feet above sea level. Woo, get that altitude. You got real elevation. Well, that's not the highest point. I think there's, actually there's plenty of buildings in Denmark I think they're much taller, actually. Then there's mountain, much higher above sea level than the tallest mountain, which I think they normally refer to in its number of centimeters. High because of the, it seems taller that way. But yeah, Denmark is very, very flat. Very flat. It's very, very flat. And so the engineers in Denmark decided that they would show through human engineering prowess that they were able to create buildings taller than nature could build. That's mountains. The mountains. Right next door. Yeah, you got your Sweden and Norway. Plenty of mountains. More mountains, so many mountains. You can go mountain climbing all day if you want to. Denmark, no mountains. Nice and flat. Yeah, got two gamers talking about poor Denmark when the glaciers all melt and the sea level rises. Interestingly, it's not, the sea level is not really gonna rise that much in Scandinavia. It's gonna be one of the least affected places on the planet. Most of the water collection is gonna happen equatorial. Most of sea level rise is gonna happen equatorially. Part of that is because as the giant glaciers on the poles melts, the ground level for a large region will slowly rise. As weird as that sounds, it's the weight of that ice is actually compressing land that will uncompress to some degree. Yeah, and rise up. Yeah. That's gonna be really interesting. I mean, just things are gonna slightly shift over hundreds of years, but you think of these kinds of changes usually taking place over thousands, tens of thousands. Yeah. Hundreds of thousands, and yet here we are like, oh, this could be like, yeah, next century. 100 years, 100 years, and we're gonna just see what happens. Let's go humans, look what we can do. Best planetary engineers. It's like the North Pole. Oh, well, you know, the glaciers of Canada and Greenland and whatever's going on in Northern Russian ice, mountainy stuff. North Pole region. It's much larger region, that Arctic circle. Pretty big. Very big. Yeah, Florida will be gone. Florida is going away. So. Yeah. That has been reiterated by many people. Now, the question is what happens to the Floridians, the people of Florida? Do they move to neighboring states or do they become like water world people? Like, I think a lot of them are probably already pirates. Yeah. That's just sort of my picture of Florida is where all the pirates in the United States live. But some of them may actually adapt to have gills. I don't think that's gonna happen, but houses on stilts. Prospering with the manatees? I mean, how long do you think it'll take? Some people are gonna move. Things are gonna encroach too much. They're not gonna get their houses. They're gonna be too close to the sea. Hurricanes are gonna come and batter them. They're not gonna like it. They're gonna, their jobs are gonna suffer. Economy is gonna suffer. I'm gonna move out. But some people are gonna move out. But some people are gonna be like, I like this. This is like cool. Yeah. Cool living and they'll create, you know, tourist places or communities that are on stilts and maybe they all live on boats. Who knows what'll happen and how long it'll take. Yeah, it's going to be really interesting to watch it happen. Yeah. The entire, but coastlines around the world are gonna be experiencing so much. It's gonna be different. So much. And people are gonna move so much. But people adapt. We can, we can abide. There will be struggle and strife, but. Yeah. Our behavior. We can do good things. Hey, you know what's the real estate prices? Pretty cheap in Florida. I wonder why. There might be a reason that the hedge funds aren't investing heavily in your real estate, Florida. You might wanna look at why. So much anymore. Which is great on one hand because you're not competing against Wall Street and the wealthy class to buying up all your property. But on the other hand, there's a reason they're not buying it all up. You're not, if you're buying that property or nobody wants to buy your property, you haven't invested in generational wealth. No. That's quite the opposite. Stephen Reign says we should create floating islands. People, there are people trying to do that. Create their, I mean, I think mostly they're crypto enthusiasts. But. What? Off-store crypto tax havens. I think Singapore is 70%. Gosh, that's a number in my head and I don't know if it's right. 70% reclaimed from the sea. It's not floating. It's not floating. They've filled the sand from India into their ocean and filled it up with sand to build structures on. Yeah. It's 70%, 70% reclaimed already. I just have to keep doing that. You know, one of the things I've seen, I mean, you can't do this everywhere. Downtown Sacramento is a fantastic example. The city I grew up in there for a while. City of Sacramento, downtown region is right along the river. We used to flood every once in a while and destroy the downtown of the city of the bustling city of Sacramento. So they raised the city like 15 feet. They said, we're done with this. They trucked in dirt from wherever they could get it and all over California, right? They brought it there, raised the downtown district. Forget just the levy. Let's raise all of downtown. Let's raise it up. That's what they did. And it's funny, because you can still see it if they demolished one of the older buildings in town, you can see storefronts. They just added the dirt in front of the storefronts and built a street, a story up. That's just, there were almost two stories up. This is what they did, they just forget it. So there's all these storefronts that are underground. There are all these first floors of basements of buildings that were actually just the first floors of buildings. When you go to the old town of Sacramento and they left some of the original storefronts there, where you drive way down the alley, goes way down like a whole story and then it comes back up again. But you can only do that so many places and for so long before California is fine because there's plenty of dirt, there's mountains to see areas. You're never gonna run out of dirt in California. You could infill for forever. What are you gonna do in Florida? You're gonna pull dirt from swamp lands? You're gonna just create even more swamp land. Yeah, and it's salty so it's not gonna make good farming topsoil. They're the beaches of the Long Miami's coast. It's already fake, it's already gets washed away and dredged up from out in the sea and sprayed back up there to make beaches again. The beaches are already fake. They're already being washed away. I don't know if everybody realizes that. It's a bunch of change. But life, we're lucky to be here to witness all of this amazingness. Yeah, it's never been easy for you. And to be witness to our own destruction. Life will continue. I think the big take home is, our time here could be short, it could be long, but regardless, the principles of life abide and that if the thermodynamics and the chemistry allow, life will happen. The kiki abides. They're abides. I abide. That's right, the kiki abides. The dude. The dude. I don't know. I don't know. Nihilism has a certain attraction, but when it comes down to it, it's like, it's all good, it's okay. I gotta try and come back to these big picture perceptions of things, not get tied up and bogged down in the negative details. And it's great to understand all this stuff. It's neat to learn more. It's good for us to understand what we're doing and how we're doing it. We might or might not be on time to fix it. Hopefully we can fix it, right? For future generations, Denmark, the Scandinavian countries, Denmark specifically has much more of a long view where they have like a 100 year plan. They have a, they look, like their planning is part of it has this century long perspective of like, okay, we're here now, short-term gains, whatever, but what's gonna be happening in 100 years and how can we plan for that and how can we plan to help future generations? And that kind of perspective proactiveness, I think, is wonderful. Yeah, I don't know, maybe. I don't know, I don't know. Well, you have a wonderful day. Has the sun come up yet? Oh yeah, no, it's still an hour away, apparently. Yeah. Yeah, in 100 years, Denmark will be all that remains. Well, so this is one of the things, Denmark in the past had conquered or owned or was running most of Europe, it was down into Spain, it's got the Britain, it had all the islands, it had, Denmark ruled much of the world at some point and then decided, eh, not worth it. Yeah. Yeah, Denmark still has some interesting habits related to its past. Everyone has a past, yep. Everyone has a past, but it's one of those past, like if you're talking about going back all the way to the Viking days, I'll tell you what happened to Denmark, it was probably a natural selection experiment, like the Foxtrot study, Foxtrot study, whatever it is, they took all of the aggressive males and stuck them on boats and sent them away and what's left is actually very peaceful people. Very, very domestic, very like that's good. Do you want to go ready to think, nah, I think I'll put on a warm blanket over my legs, sit in this comfy chair and have some. It's time for some Higa. Yeah. Yeah. Higa, yeah, it's Higa season. That's what we're going to do. We need to take all the aggressive people and let them go conquer Mars and then their planet will be fine. Yes, you go, you conquer Mars, have fun with that. Yeah. You go do that, that's great. Fight those rocks. Bye-bye. We'll give you some cliff bars and some tang and off you go. Yeah. All right, good night. Say, what did you say? Say good night, Kiki. No, wait, say good morning, Justin. Good morning, Justin. Good night, Kiki. Here we are, good night everyone. Thank you for some wonderful science time. We appreciate you being here. Have a wonderful, wonderful time between twist episodes. We hope you stay safe, stay healthy, take care of yourselves, and we will see you on December 29th. Ah, I don't think I have anything else going on before then, it's family time. Time to get Higa. All right, thank you. We will see you soon. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas.