 and hang out is live. I have a child reading a book, starting in three, two, this is twist. This Week in Science episode number 648, recorded on Wednesday, December 6th, 2017. Consider the magnitude, dude. Hey everyone, I am Dr. Kiki and tonight on This Week in Science we are going to fill your heads with lost ears. Mental illness and a sense of scale, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. We live in interesting times. There are other descriptors we could apply, but for the sake of time and the lack of safe harbor, we'll leave it at that for the moment. In these interesting times, there are plenty of things vying to occupy your mind and these things are everywhere. Every form of entertainment is at your disposal. Television and movies that take you away to strange and exotic places. That, during the car chase and after the recycled formulaic, plot twists may seem pretty familiar by now. Our political satire has never been better, often performed by actual politicians. You can watch your favorite sports ballteamers play the game they've been playing over and over again, year after year. You know, I think they're getting pretty good at it too. And video gaming has never been better. Stickling brains with better graphics than ever before, but at the end of the day, if all of these things that have attempted to occupy your mind have failed to be interesting to you, fear not for the truly interesting content your brain has been thirsting for is finally here on This Week in Science, coming up next. Got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I wanna learn everything. I wanna fill it all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I wanna know what's happening, what's happening, what's happening This Week in Science. What's happening, what's happening, what's happening This Week in Science. Yeah, science to Kiki. And a good science to you too, Justin. And not Blair. We have other people on the show today. We have guests. It's going to be very exciting. We are going to be interviewing them about magnitude and scale dimensions. We're gonna wrap our heads around it. They are going to help us. It's going to be very exciting. This show is gonna be great. Welcome to This Week in Science, everyone. I'm so excited to be back for another episode. I hope that you are here excited and ready to dive in to all the world and has to offer the wonders. You've got everything here. Everything, well, maybe not everything, a few things. I have stories about climatia, sea turtle wanderings and an interview of great magnitude, as I mentioned. Justin, what do you have? I have Iron Age artifacts in the Bronze Age and a missing link in evolutionary history. Yeah, I'd love to find out. We always love the missing links. It's like that missing puzzle piece that just you can't finish the puzzle without it. But then there are also everything is already a link and so everything, any animal that we haven't found is a missing link because it's all transitional anyway. But yeah. There's a lot of missing puzzle pieces in this puzzle actually. But as we jump into the show, I want to remind everyone that you can always subscribe this week in Science on iTunes, the Google Play podcast portal, Stitcher, Spreaker, and tune in and you can find us online on YouTube, on Facebook, on Twitter. Just look for this week in Science and for all the notes and all the things, the links and the things and the sciencey goodness, you can always go to twist.org where we currently have our this week in Science Blair's Animal Corner calendars for 2018 available. They have come in and the colors on the calendar, there aren't any. It's black and white. No colors on the calendar. This is a coloring calendar. There would be a terrible coloring calendar if it was already colored in when you got it. That would be. No, you can color it in if you decide to go to the website. I could make a rainbow tardigrade. You could. And additionally, reminding everyone, if you're in the San Francisco Bay Area around January 18th, we are going to be performing live at the Cal Academy of Sciences SF Sketch Fest Nightlife event. We are, yes. The little voice from the background is my son, Kai. He's reading books. He's gonna be my peanut gallery for the rest of the evening, just so you know. All right, let's dive into the show right now. I would love to welcome our guests for the evening. Megan Watsky, am I pronouncing your last name right? No. Good job. Megan Watsky and Kimberly Arkand, authors of magnitude, the scale of the universe. And it's a beautiful hardcover book that is beautifully illustrated throughout, nice graphic illustrations throughout the book. Kimberly is the visualization lead for NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory, specializing in image and meaning research and in data representation. She lives near Providence, Rhode Island. Megan Watsky is the press officer for NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory, specializing in communicating astronomy with the public. She lives in Seattle. She's a west coaster, like we are. And together, these two intelligent, brilliant, amazing women communicate about the wonders of the universe. They have published several popular science books. One, Light, The Visible Spectrum, and Beyond, and Your Ticket to the Universe, a guide to exploring the universe. So this is not your first endeavor into the world of explaining science, but maybe one at a time, if you can talk about how you came to work together and get into this area that it's not easy to delve into writing books on these tough subjects. How did it all get started? Kimberly. Well, I can start and Kim can finish. Great. Oh, Kim, go ahead. Sure, so Megan and I have worked for the Chandra X-Ray Observatory together for quite a while. I actually don't want to list the numbers because it's in the teams for sure. And I'm not sure if we're at the two-decked point together, but I think we're pretty close. So we have kind of a really solid report for our day job. And I think we both were always interested in being a little more creative and expressive on our own outside of our day job. And we ended up writing our first book together, Your Ticket to the Universe, after being approached by an agent, a literary agent who had seen an article that we had written together for a magazine. So it's kind of been an organic relationship. I'm East Coast, she's West Coast. We jive very well that way. And the time zones, especially with the kids, really work in our favor. Megan. We kind of joke that we're each other's work wives or something, I mean, because we've been together for so long. And of course we started working together as infants, so that helps. But no, we are now, as Kim said, we've been together roughly, give or take. And I think that it was just a natural progression. We both have a diverse set of interests and we enjoy our day job very much. But it was also, we wanted to sort of always push the envelope of different ways to communicate science and depict science. And we also have this very common interest in diversifying the pool of people who have access to science and who feel comfortable around science. That's kind of been a common theme, I think, for both of us throughout our careers. And I think that the book world is another avenue that we can sort of do a little bit in that realm to try to bring more people under the science tent. And so something like expounding on your ticket to the universe, that's digging into people's, people's, they're yearning to explore, maybe. And then you have something that's about light, the visible spectrum, right? We've got lights in our houses. We can look outside and see the blue sky or rainbow. And so it's kind of a tangible concept that people can grab onto when you describe it. And it's light, pretty colors. It's probably very amenable to book form magnitude. This is something that people struggle with from very, very young when you're learning the difference between ones to tens to hundreds until you're very old and people have issues figuring out scale and magnitude. I mean, how did you approach this, Kimberly? Yeah, so that's actually a really great introduction to the book because that's really a main reason why we wrote it because Megan and I have been talking about some of the largest structures in the universe for so much of our careers. Having a book that kind of delved into that topic really completely was useful for us. So whenever we give talks or if we're answering questions online or getting emails, almost always the highest, the most frequent question that we'll get is about scale. And it's not surprising. I mean, when you're talking about a galaxy cluster and it's the largest gravitationally brown structure in the universe, how to grasp that size is really challenging. So this book was kind of a way for us to answer some of those questions that we get and also have a little fun. I think we're both, we've both been really huge fans of powers of 10, the movie from Ray and Charles Eames from, and this is, I think this is the 40th anniversary of that movie coming out. Well, one of the versions at least. And that movie always had such an impact on me and Megan as well. So to be able to approach a book with that topic but updated, so it's not just size and distance but also pressure and spin and area and all these other concepts that connect so well to that idea of magnitude and scale. It was just a really fun thing to sink our teeth into. Yeah, if I could just add onto that. So I mean, I think the one thing that was really interesting for us is that obviously we start from a science background with this topic but then I think we realize subconsciously that this goes beyond just a science of people in size and understanding big numbers on a daily basis, whether it's talking about the tax cut that's being discussed in Congress or how much bigger is this hurricane than the last one or there's so many current events where there's the concept of magnitude or at least the concept of large numbers is out there and people are I think expected to sort of understand that in a lot of times they don't. So we were trying to do something that was sort of a toolkit for not just science topics but also just understanding numbers and figures and throughout our daily lives because I think we are inundated and can almost become immune to understanding what they really mean because there's so many numbers. Every move from your days in math or whatever maybe kind of between a billion and a trillion and that's not, that's nothing to be ashamed of it's just we wanted to help these concepts of people so that they were comfortable a little bit more with these things that could really impact not only their sense of wonder but their daily lives. So that was part of the motivation and that was another thing to sort of get us excited about it as we were working on the project like we could see lots of applications that might be a little bit even farther afield in our science background. And I think for some people it doesn't still that sense of wonder. I think for some though, maybe it just makes them feel really insignificant. That's okay. I think a little humility is good. If you're just having a day where you're just like, I can't believe this is happening. You're just like, you know, we're a tiny speck on one planet in a billion stars or whatever. It can help you cope. I find it comforting. Yeah, I do. Each of us has power. And yet each of us is just part of the whole. And yeah, in terms of the concept of magnitude, how did you start thinking about how to approach it in putting the book together? You wanna start, Megan? Sure. So I think the one thing that we've always found very useful is the power of analogies or comparisons. I think because we've dealt with some pretty esoteric topics over the years, when we're doing our day job, we're talking about black holes, or these hot gas in a distant cluster or whatever, you're always looking for a way to explain these concepts in a way that's understandable. So for us, I think when we started thinking about how do you explain this stuff, you have to sort of start at a point where people have a reference point that's meaningful. And then you build on that and sort of say, well, this is bigger than that. And this is again, sort of the way that the Eames did that in powers of 10, they started with that person lying on the blanket in the park of Chicago and they kind of went out. So our basis for tackling this topic was always gonna be comparisons and analogies and sort of using anchors with everyday experiences that people will hopefully identify with and building on that. So it's never, I mean, you do get the numbers in scientific notation, but hopefully it has some meaning because you're starting in a place of, so I think that's really, there are best idea of how to tackle some of these part of the fun really big questions when it comes to talking about magnitude. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, that idea of relevancy is just so important. I mean, if you think about just the topic of time and how long it might take you to count to a hundred, well, so about a hundred seconds. And then you think about well, how long would be say a million seconds and that'd be say a couple of weeks. And then how long to a billion? And well, if you had to count to a billion, maybe it would take you 32 years. So then how about to a trillion? Like you think you know that number, but until you put it into a form that's a little more relatable and you think, well, it would take like 32,000 years to count to a trillion if you're making, you know, very specific arrangements for those counting and not taking any breaks at all. So, you know, just being able to put those numbers into a way that you can relate to, it's really useful because as Megan mentioned, you know, on the news, you might hear about millions of Spotify downloads and billions of tons of ice being lost in the Antarctic and a trillions of dollars of US debt. You know, those numbers are really hard to grasp in a meaningful way for all of us, whether you work in astronomy or not. So this book just kind of helped us sort through some of that both for our own sakes, but also for other people who would hopefully find that helpful. Yeah, I did the bank bailout and it's heightened pennies. Wow. Insanely, I mean, not just past the moon, I think I might have gotten to Mars even. I wouldn't be surprised. It was really ridiculous. Once that number got out of that, just stacking pennies got going. Yeah, it definitely helps put it in perfective, you know, that you don't really think about it until you, if you think about it in a different way, we hear these numbers, especially in terms of context of money and those are, they're different. So there's a big difference between trillion and billion and we're talking about them right now. So it's good to not get a handle on that. Yeah. And it's just, it's so far beyond just what your normal everyday numerical capacity is or what your, you have 10 fingers, you have 10 toes. You maybe, we talk about people maybe having 100 friends that could consider close friends and contacts. And then it starts getting really big. You know, then we start thinking, okay, how many people is it in that football stadium? You know, how many people is it? How much money is this? And it becomes just, it's funny numbers. It doesn't make any sense. And I've always loved the role of the reporter in reporting the numbers, but then also coming up with an analogy. So as you said, you know, the tons of ice coming off of Antarctica, some people would say, okay, this is a piece of ice the size of the state of Delaware. You know, and then suddenly, you know, maybe you've been to Delaware. You have an idea of how long it takes to drive across Delaware. And you start being able to get there. Do you have any, any individual, each of you individually have any kind of personal stories where you've tried to explain magnitude to people? I mean, you say you get emails all the time on the questions of scale. Have you had any, any stories that, that really stand out in your memory about trying to explain these concepts to people? I mean, I think for me, you know, even, you know, we've got like that 10 year old twins and they ask a lot of questions about, you know, sort of space stuff and anything specific off the top of my head, except for when I've shown them things, usually, you know, something that's been launching or the Mars landers or the voyage, for example, firing up the thruster. And we were talking about that and we were trying, and I, but I said it was, you know, voyagers 13 billion give or take. And then we sat there and talked about that, like, what does that mean and where is that? You know, and that's just one random thing for my kids. Like there's just a million questions that people will ask you, whether you're sitting next to them on an airplane or they find out that you're, you know, you know, you somehow work for NASA and they expect you to know all that NASA does, you know, so it's really a common thing about like, oh, isn't that really far away or how far away is that? So I think that was sort of, it's not a specific case, but it's sort of an evergreen case of just being asked, like, you know, what does that mean or how far away is that? And I talk a lot about CASA PA A, which is a supernova remnant because we have some really fantastic kids we have some really fantastic data on this object. So it's a star that was many times the size of our sun that ran out of fuel, collapsed on itself and then exploded. So we have great data sets that have been helping us do things like 3D printing and new virtual reality programs around it. So I talk about CASA PA A a lot. So I do get a lot of questions about the size of it, the density of it, the temperature of it. I mean, all of these sort of topics that we talk about in magnitude and you will see CASA PA A definitely features, I think prominently in the book, it's in there a few times, a few different examples. And one question that I get a lot about it is, you know, how big is this thing? So you talk about a star that's exploded and that's expanding and it's been expanding for a long time because this happened over 10,000 years ago, you know, how big is it? Well, if you want to compare it to the solar system, it's even there, it's hard to do, but you can. So if you think about the surface area, it would be about 40 million billion times the size of the surface area of the sun and you can toss in the eight planets, it doesn't really help. So, you know, that number gives you a sense of how much area this supernova remnant takes up. But even that number, I think is a little bit hard to grasp, which is why in our book, we provided like a lot of steps so you can see how much effort it takes to get from one small thing to the next bigger thing and then on and on and on because having that kind of graduated scale just helps, I think, make it a little bit more approachable in like your churning mental capacity for these topics. Can you tell me a bit about your choice of the illustrator, Katie Peake, for the book? Sure, you know, this is the first time we've done a book with other books have all been featured, you know, where we didn't take them personally, but we, you know, from NASA, whereas we take pictures mainly of space, but in our white book, we, you know, lots of sources, but of real things, you know, real images. And so for this one, it was really our publisher, Black Dog and Leventhal, who had the idea originally to, which is for this, but to go the illustrated route and, you know, we were thrilled with the idea and then finding Katie was just so lucky. I mean, her background is so perfect for this kind of work and she's so talented. You know, she was an astrophysicist, but she's been doing scientific illustrations for a number of years and it was just, I always found her, but we were just very lucky and happy that she was able to be on this project and we were just her work integrated with ours and, you know, how everything turned out. And I think what the illustrations, I think, allowed us to do is to provide a really nice continuum because having to track down, say, individual data-driven images on each of these topics, we could have done for sure, we've done similar projects, but having the illustrations all done in a similar way just provides a nice bit of continuity, not just visually, but also topically the way they're handled. And Katie was really able to narrow that down and do it just perfectly. So we were really happy to have something that was a little bit of a different kind of visual representation than what we're used to doing and, well, we love the result. Yeah, it's visually, graphically, it's just really a very, it's beautiful. It's just the style is consistent throughout the book and I think you're right. I mean, there are some things, you know, when you're talking about nanoscale or picoscale where you're looking down inside of an atom at its component parts, you know, that's not something that, well, we do have some images, but not really great. And so it's nice to be able to have that consistent illustration. I really enjoyed having the pictures because it gave my head like a place to start creatively thinking about it. Yeah, exactly. And there's kind of like a jumping off point or a launching pad from the imagery. Do you have anything from the book that you just, you left it out? You're like, nope, can't do this. We don't want to include this example or just something, if nothing was left out that you came up with, is there something that was particularly hard to explain? Well, I can't think of anything that we left out. I will say, you know, for me, even though my undergraduate work was in molecular biology and I was used to working with smaller scales when I was younger, I think I've been in the astronomy field for so long that when it came time to going back into that molecular, atomic, subatomic level, I was kind of like, whoa, this is a whole new world, you know, because I think another important thing to think about is, you know, this book was partly inspired by powers of 10, but in the 40 years time since that movie was put out so much has been discovered. Yes, yes. And so much has happened since then. I mean, that's, you know, a little less than I've been alive. So in that timeframe, so much has happened. Science has picked up so much. We've learned so much more. I mean, of course, every time you learn more, you learn how much you don't know. But, you know, kind of for me, like delving into some of that ultra small stuff, oof, that was, I had to dust off some of the brain power to get that, hit that small again. Yeah, and for me, I think one big challenge was, one of the ways we want to make magnitude different than say just the powers of 10 or just sort of redoing powers of 10, many other topics other than physical sizes can mention. And when we've got, I can't remember exact number of topics like everything from area and volume to pressure and rotation and sound and energy. And so I think sort of going, in the start of each chapter, we do a bit of an introduction to these concepts. That was a challenge to sort of get, nail that physical description. Right, I think, you know, and then it was fun to go and, you know, find the examples, but like, it was a little daunting because, you know, you're kind of, I'm dredging up from undergrad that I'm like, wait a second, is this right? Cause I, it's been so long and it was challenging, but really fun to push myself sort of out of that and really kind of dive deep into some of these topics. And then for me, an accessible way to describe them. Right. Cause it kind of stuff that, you know, it might be tricky and might be kind of daunting, but I also think, nope. She has, she has stalled. I hope that it starts frozen. My back frozen. Yep, you're back for a moment. We lost her. Too much. So hang on. Hold on. There you go. I think you're back. And we're back. And we're back. Try not to move very much. I'm just doing it. That's not how that works. It's not, but that's okay. If you hold the rabbit ears. I was saying it was, it was fun to get off. Ow. Her internet is not agreeing at this moment. All right, Kimberly, you know what? You've known her for a long time. What was she going to say? I think she was done. She was done saying what she had to say. So let's, next question. See how we've known each other so long. I just know that. Yeah, it sounds, I mean, as a scientist, you know, having gone through all the same undergraduate classes, you go through chemistry, physics, and magnitude, and the units, right? It's one of the things that's drilled into you. Did you remember to adjust the units? Have you, have you canceled the units? Have you made sure that your units are correct? And so it's, you know, the units of measure are important, but then also it is that sense of how big they are. How much, how many is it? 0.0001, 0.0000001? This makes a huge difference in the, and to be able to go beyond the numbers themselves into these conceptual aspects that can grab people's imaginations, that's the challenge. It just sounds, go ahead Kimberly. Yeah, I was gonna say exactly. So this book is kind of like, I mean, I would have loved to have this book in college as kind of like a way to think about some of these topics and to be able to I think grasp it better. I would have loved to have this book in high school when I was just starting to dabble in some of these topics and kind of figuring things out. And honestly, it's still useful for me now because, you know, you never know enough about any topic really. And I think that's one of the reasons just going back to your first question really is, you know, when you write a book, it's like you have to give yourself a crash course in it all over again. Because as Megan mentioned, being able to explain something really well, I mean, you have to know it. That's why I think I love teachers so much because they have to know their stuff so well in order to be able to help other people understand it. So this book definitely just, you know, dropped us right back into it. And all those SI units and, oh gosh, it was a lot of fun to write. And it really kind of stretched our muscle, you know, of memory and that I appreciated a lot. Megan, did you want to comment on that at all? Internet again, but I will try. I will try, I will see. Yeah. Yeah, no, I think, you know, it's units. That sounds like sort of an old topic, but it's so important. And then adding on, you know, which units to use, how to express them, like how to get people to understand that like, you know, the conversion between miles per hour or, you know, mile meters per second. I mean, there's just so many, we use units all the time. And people, I'm not sure fully understand them. So that had to be part of the book too. So I mean, it was, again, reliving some, maybe not great college memories of like, oh wait, I forgot how to do some of this, but I also think it's really powerful that once you realize you can do this and you can, it's not anything that's overwhelming. You can, everyone can do this if they're just given the right tools. It's a way to understand our world a little bit better. And so that was fun, I think, once we got over, you know, figuring it out and how to make it all explainable. But- Doing all the calculations. Yeah, that was a little scary, honestly. There are so many conclusions in the book. A really great person who's helping us, Adrienne Gauthier, she was, she double checked our numbers, which was super helpful because what we didn't want to do is have a book come out in print and then find some typos or we that we missed a digit or, you know, and there's a ton of numbers in here that could have happened. So it was great to have an extra set of eyes on that too. That happens a lot in the stories that we do on the, for the show too. But I always make a point of converting whenever there's something talking about kilometers, how many kilometers it is, I always take a moment and convert that to meters for the audience because I can do kilometers to meters. That one, I've got it down. You got it down. Yep. Got that one down. But yeah. Yeah, can be tricky, you know, once you start mixing up the units. And then talking solar masses, we were talking about this black hole thing going on a couple of weeks ago and how many mega solar masses, it was just ridiculous. Like I have no concept about what we were talking about, what we're trying to explain. And I have no mental concept of how big this thing actually is. Yeah, so just to tell you what's actually a story that came out about the newest, most distant black hole in a quasar. And it was like 800 million times the mass of our sun. 800 million, one black hole, 800 million times the mass of our sun. Like that's a crazy number. So yeah. Well, it was also 13 billion light years away. Yes. So it's super distant. So once you start trying to wrap your head around those two things together, that's where some people can just either tune it out or you can really kind of appreciate it, depending on what you can understand or what you can wrap your head around. Yeah, so going back, you brought up the Voyager example. So Voyager one out there, firing its thrusters for the first time in like what, 37 years I think. And the math of that 13 billion miles that it is away from earth, that's 19 and a half hours of radio transmitted light speed travel. So 13 billion miles away takes 19 and a half hours for light to travel from Voyager one to here. And so then 13 billion light years away, it's even more distant. Yes. Yep. Yep. Right. And then people just get confused and we would have had to send a signal. We would have had to have sent it at the moment of the Big Bang, pretty much. Maybe like 600,000 years right after the Big Bang. So we had time. Yeah. Yeah. So 600,000 years after that. I mean, come on. What's that? Yeah. And then you have to worry about understanding what a light year is. And that's not, it sounds like a unit of time. It's actually distance. And then you have things like Han Solo and Star Trek or Star Wars talking about parsecs as a unit of time. It's very confusing. Yeah. Sorry. We have to get the science fiction to get on board with the language of the science. I mean, I know there is the difference between the soft science fiction and the hard science fiction novels, but. Mm-hmm. Yeah. You know what? Too much science fiction though because it's like, okay, we're going to this planet to address this problem. When are we gonna be there? Probably 35 generations. It's gonna be a long trip. I'm sorry. It's really fine. Yeah. Yeah. So that's something I really enjoy is that, you know, in fiction, in literature and movies and stuff, they have to make up things like in the series, The Expanse, they've had to make up, you know, a special drive that allows them to travel faster through space. It's still not anywhere near light speed, but they're able to move a lot faster through the solar system. And so, but people are still talking about how vast the distances are between things and how absolutely distant the outer belt is from the inner planets and how long that takes to travel between and how long it takes for communications to get from one place to another. It's not like you can just pick up your cell phone and say, hey. Hi. Hi. Yeah. So for this book, you mentioned, Kimberly, you mentioned college students and if, or yourself maybe as a college student or a high school student, maybe appreciating this book. Do you think that is, you wanna reach out to more people with this book, but who do you think the best audience is? You know, the one thing I really like about the way the book was laid out is that it doesn't have to be read from start to finish. I mean, it's the type of book that you can just kind of jump in and read a couple of pages in one of the chapters and then put it back and jump in again the next day, which is great for people with short attentions, fans like me. But also I think it helps make the material a little bit more accessible. So it's not really meant to be, you know, a textbook that you start, you know, chapter one and you go all the way through. Not that I ever really did that with my textbook or whatever, that's the story for another day. So yeah, I kind of pictured the audience for this book being much more broad. I mean, I think I used the example of high school and college students, you know, for me specifically just because I was studying science and really, really interested in these types of topics. I would say though, like the language is very accessible, the illustrations help make it, I think even more so. The style of the book is meant to be, you know, useful and educational but still really fun. So there's no reason why, you know, anybody without a science degree or whatever could not pick up this book and enjoy it too. That's kind of our end game. We're trying to help, you know, make this type of material a little bit easier to digest and a little bit fun and interesting to approach. Yeah, I mean, like you, and as you both mentioned earlier, I mean, the numbers that are involved in the United States budget and the potential, you know, tax cut versus deficits and these numbers that are being thrown around, that's something that everybody could be able to understand and if your book can help, people access those numbers a little bit more easily, that would be amazing. Do you have another project in store? Is this going to be magnitude the movie or magnitude the coloring book? What comes next? Yeah, that's a great question. You know, we don't have it mapped out quite yet. I mean, Kim and I have bought the book in four years. So we've been at a pretty prodigious rate in the past few years. So, you know, I'm sure it will not be our last project but we don't have anything exactly to announce yet. So stay tuned, there'll be something I'm sure because Kim and I can't stop working together apparently. You know? Maybe so. Nope. Kimberly, did you want to? Well, I figured we should have left you hanging. I know, she did leave me hanging. No, we... Yeah. And then, silence. Yeah, no, just like Megan said, we really, really enjoy working together so I'm sure we will have a new project at some point but we did say after we wrote this book, oh, we should probably take a little time off because after the book number three, we dove right into this one and it was like a lot to write into all the math for and everything. And I'm like, you know, we should probably just take a couple months off but then just, I think two days ago, Megan and I were tossing a couple ideas over email and I'm like, okay, maybe not a couple months but we'll try. So stay tuned, stay tuned. I love that. I love that you both enjoy working together so much and you just have the ideas flowing and it's like, okay, we've got ideas again. We said we would take a break, but really? Maybe this is our break. Maybe not, exactly. So the book, magnitude, the scale of the universe, it is available now. Where can people find it? Anywhere books are sold. Yep, it's on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, independent booksellers, you name it. So, yeah, Black Dog and Levinthal, our publisher has done a really good job with distribution, so it's all over. I hope it's not old, it's not all over. It's the continuing saga. No, both of you, wonderful speaking with you and getting this time with you to talk about your book this evening and I would love to know where people can find out more about each of you if they are so inclined to find you, hunt you down on the internet. So we'll start Kimberly and then Megan. Yeah, we have a website, arcanwaski.com, not exactly, you know, it doesn't like slip off the tongue, but you can Google us that way and then we also have pretty active presences on Twitter and Instagram and even a little bit on Facebook. Okay, Kim said. Very cool. Yeah. We have a joint website, we have individual social media accounts, so you won't get the same perspective exactly, but website's the same. Well, I've got these now both ordered for Christmas. I think I'm gonna enjoy them, I think my kids will too, so I think it's so. Aw, thank you. Yeah, I think the books that you have been involved in, it's making the universe more accessible to the public, to everybody, it's a wonderful cause and I am glad that you are engaged in it and that we got the chance to talk with you tonight. Thank you. Well, thanks so much for having us on, it was really fun. Thank you. It was wonderful. All right, everyone, you heard it, arcanandwaski.com, you can visit there to find information, their book is available, their books, multiple books are available where books are sold and it is time for us to move on to the rest of our show. We have science news ahead, but before we go there, we are going to take a very brief break and we'll come back with stories about sea turtles and what, missing links? And lost. Missing links. And I've got a tongue also, a colorful tongue. This is This Week in Science, we'll be back in just a few moments. These are shows the way to get the time of the solicitations on the only thing time. We're on a pair of goggles and we're looking for the things I couldn't see. This is Scattlefront. Hey, everybody, thank you so much for watching or for listening, wherever you are. I really appreciate you being here. We appreciate you being here with us. Just a reminder, if you go to twist.org, you will be able to find information about the Twist Blair's Animal Corner calendar, which is available now. Get the 2018 calendar hand drawn by Blair. It's a coloring calendar with lots of wonderful geeky holidays for you throughout the year. Don't just know when Groundhog Day is, know when it's World Pangolin Day. You can also know about things like Nicholas Copernicus's birthday and International Polar Bear Day, all sorts of fun stuff. It's all in the calendar. And you'll only find out about that if you go to twist.org and click on the calendar link that's on our main page. 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Subscribe to Twists. When you help share twists with the world, it helps us grow. And the more we grow, the more we are able to do. So help us out and we'll help you learn more science. Ta-da! And that's all I have to say about that right now because you know what? We couldn't do this without you. Thank you for your support. The Twists were held in their looks while waste precious time and try selling their books. Oh, I sit and wait for your publishing. Royalty everyone has real power who needs real power. And we're back with more of this week in science. Yes we are. Oh my goodness. And now is the time for the science stories. Are you ready for the science stories? And wait. No, you know what? No, it's not. It's time for that segment that we introduced a while ago and then changed where we put it in the show and almost forgot about it, but didn't because it's too important. It is too important. It is time for this week and what has science done for me? This letter today is from Minyan Nero Kosanen. Nero writes in and says, Hi, I really love your show. I listen to it on my daily walks around the neighborhood Pokestops. I found you just a few weeks ago searching through the podcast addict app, another app where you can find us. There we go. And I have a lot to catch up on. Yes, episode 648. There's a bunch out there, aren't there? Anyway, anyway, I'd like to tell you what science has done for me lately. Neuropsychology has helped me understand who I am and why I'm a bit weird. I was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome just a year ago at the age of 41. Of course, now it's known as ASD, Autism Spectrum Disorder. When I was a child, this syndrome or disorder wasn't widely known and so it took all this time for the doctors to realize this. Until then, I had been treated for depression when in fact I was just tired from meltdowns. Now that I know what I am, I understand myself so much better and it also helps me understand others a bit more. Praise be to those much smarter than I am, Nero. Nice, Nero. Yes, I am very thankful for the intelligent people of the world, endeavoring to find out more about it, help us find out more about ourselves and it's things like this. I mean, making one person's life better because of that personal understanding of their own personal neuropsychology and their own brain traits. It can make a huge difference in somebody's life and I'm glad that it is making a difference in yours, Nero. Thank you for writing in. And everyone out there, remember, write in. Let us know what science has done for you lately. What does it do for you every day? How does it inspire you? We wanna know. You can leave us a message on our Facebook page, facebook.com slash thisweekandscience. Yep, that's where you go. Go to our thisweekandscience Facebook page, leave us a message and I will put you in the schedule and read your message so that everyone can be inspired the way that I am being inspired by all of your responses. Every week, let's do it, you guys. Let's keep it going. You ready? And now it's time for the science news. So California's on fire again. Oh my gosh. Or it hasn't stopped being on fire, right? Well, no, it's new fires. Yeah, it's down in Southern California, ginormous blazes. Yeah, yeah. So there was a posting that I recently saw on Facebook from somebody in the Los Angeles area who is on the mayor's crisis response team and it's making the rounds saying that tomorrow and tonight are gonna be pretty bad and the only two places in all of Southern California that are not projected to be affected by the wildfires are Compton and downtown LA. So Los Angeles is experiencing the burn. And it's not great. Yeah, I'm hoping for the best for everyone. The Bay Area just went through it. Oregon went through it earlier. These fires in the west, I mean, we thought it was a big wet year last year with water coming through, lots of rains last year, La Nina, other patterns. But all that rain led to a lot of vegetative matter being produced and therefore the ongoing lack of rain has allowed these fires to spread. Ah, fires like these are potentially something we will see a lot more in the future or at least the drought conditions that we have seen. And especially from the 2012 to 2016 years, drought conditions like those are expected to be a lot more consistent in California, especially as the Arctic Ocean loses ice. There's a connection between the melting Arctic and sunny California. Betcha didn't think about that, did ya? So the Arctic is melting and as the Arctic ice melts, it changes the albedo of the earth and instead of reflecting heat from the sun, the dark waters of the Northern Ocean start to collect the heat from the sun and begin to warm. And so the warming of the ocean will lead to high pressure ridges setting up over the North so that heat actually and dry, dry patterns end up sitting over California for much longer periods of time than we've experienced previously. So the circulation patterns are gonna change. They take in much further North over these warming waters and pushed off the Northern California coast. So this pressure system, a high pressure system that could be developed, they're known as atmospheric ridges and they steer storms North to Alaska and Canada. So it could be even more than California that are affected. We could see Oregon and Washington also significantly affected by changes in water dispersal across the West. So this is going to affect all sorts of things and we talk about people wonder how climate change is really going to affect them. Well, if more melting, if more warming occurs in the world as it's going to do, the water will warm in the Arctic, the ice will melt further, the Arctic will warm, it will change the circulation patterns. This could lead, if there's drought for extended periods of time, this will change the ability of communities, agricultural communities in California and other regions to be able to do agricultural business. This will change. And just to throw in there too that California, that's not just fruits and veggies on the tables for Californians. We are the bread basket of the nation. There's more edible farming done here than most other, the states combined. It's ridiculous how fertile and abundant the agriculture is here in California and has been for so long. And the researchers say that studies like this would imply that it's not only a problem for communities in Alaska. So yeah, the ice melting in Alaska is going to pose ecological problems and community level problems there, but the Arctic sea ice loss that we expect in the next couple of decades. I'm talking about magnitude here. We're not talking a hundred years from now. We're talking decades, not very long within lifespans could have massive effects on Californians and other people around the world. And they expect the modeling by the scientists who were looking at this, suggests that loss of sea ice in the Arctic could cause a 10 to 15% decrease in California's rainfall over a 20 year mean. So some years would be a lot drier, other years would be a lot wetter, but overall about 10 to 15% of the rainfall would be lost. This research was published in Nature. Yeah. And more hurricanes hitting the East Coast as they start cracking further and further north there. Intense rainfalls in the South flooding. Yeah, it's gonna be different. It's gonna be a lot different. It's going, things are gonna change. I mean, I really need to get myself a copy of Cadillac Desert. I think that's a book ahead of its time. So we've seen movies, you know, like A Turtle's Tale, Sammy Two, A Turtle's Tale. There's also, you know, these nice cartoon movies where like Nemo, Saving Nemo also, the sea turtles are being carried along, just carried along by the currents. And that's just what they do. They go out there in the ocean after they get off of that sandy beach where they hatch from their little eggs in the sand, waddle themselves into the surf and go off to be pushed by the currents, right? And end up wherever they end up until at one point they're like, I'm old enough, I'm gonna go back and reproduce and a new generation will do what I have done, right? But researchers and other people consider this period of time of this adolescent developmental period where the sea turtles go out to the open ocean. They call it the lost years because nobody's really known. They just, everyone was like, oh yeah, they just go out and drift around on the sea currents, eating jellyfish, right? Nobody really knew. And so these lost years of the turtles have been under some scrutiny recently. And there's a University of Central Florida Biologist who has been working on tracking sea turtle yearlings in the North Atlantic Ocean and has just recently completed a similar study in the South Atlantic. And this woman, assistant professor Kate Mansfield from University of Central Florida, she says, it is important from a conservation perspective to understand where the youngest sea turtles go and how they interact with their environment. Knowing they disperse in different directions, depending on changes in ocean currents, will help us get a better sense of where and when we need conservation efforts to ensure continued survival of these protected species. So this study, they basically put trackers on 19 loggerhead turtles for more than 120 days. Off of the coast of Bahia, Brazil. And turtles in this study, they released different groups of them, either early in the hatching season when the prevailing currents are going to the South, in the middle of the hatching season when the currents are in this transitional switching period, they switch from North to South. And then late in the hatching season when offshore currents can't come in to be prevalent and head mostly to the Northwest, they also released passive floats that just drift on the currents and don't actually have flippers like sea turtles do. I mean, sea turtles have flippers, they can't just be for the sand, right? Anyway, these passive floats oceanographic drifters were also released with the tagged turtles to test if the turtles were actually swimming. And so there's a comparison between things that swim the turtles and things that don't swim the drifters that would just move with the currents. And they found in these turtles from the South, there's a difference between in their behavior based on when they were released. So early in the hatching season, most of the turtles followed those Southward currents. Turtles that were released in the middle of the season started moving South and then moved North as the currents shifted. So they kind of went against the currents and all of the drifters that were with the turtles ended up beached back on the beaches within a month, but the turtles didn't. The turtles remained out in the ocean. So obviously the turtles are swimming in the late in the hatching season. And so this is when the currents, I said they moved North, Northwest, the turtles moved North and Northwest across the equator. And Mansfield said that the active orientation combined with swimming behavior helped the turtles remain at seaward of the Brazilian continental shelf instead of allowing themselves to be driven toward land like the drifters. And so the North Atlantic study that Mansfield did, she found that these turtles, they unexpectedly left the currents associated with the North Atlantic subtropical gyre and entered the Sargasso Sea, kind of hung out in the Sargasso Sea for a while. But the South Atlantic turtles, these turtles didn't do the same thing. They just kind of stayed out and had very diverse movement patterns, but the main similarity to all of them was that they just stayed out to sea. All of their movements were to avoid getting pushed back past the edge of the continental shelf so that they wouldn't get beached. And so the main thing here is these lost years, these turtles, they're not lost. They're doing what they wanna do. They're out there. They're sea turtles. They're sea turtles. That's it, exactly. They're living in the sea. And so they're not just passive current writers. They're not just getting floated along, but they orient themselves, which makes sense since these turtles are using orientation to be able to return to the beaches where they were born to reproduce later in their lives. So it kind of makes sense to me. Yeah. Anyway, cute sea turtles eating jellyfish, not just floating, not just floating, but swimming, swimming, swim jellyfish, swim sea turtles. What you got for me? Now it's time for Justin's Dead Animal Corner with Justin. Oh no. There are missing links in evolution, though there are very few to speak of as every life form known to science as a transitional link from the ones next to it in one way or another. Then again, if that's true, then any life form yet undiscovered becomes a missing link of sorts. In which case there are many, many, many missing links, but most of those may not be very exciting, like finding an older, slightly smaller ancestor to horses when a much smaller, even more ancient predecessor has already been discovered. Super cool, but nothing to go on and on and on about. So to keep the integrity of my initial statement that evolution has some filling in to do, I promise only to use missing link for occasions of major transition, like flippered fish into forelimbed mouth breather or fuzzy dinos into birds in flight. That said, 155 million years ago there was a reptile and its fossil was somewhat recently discovered and this reptile is a missing link discovered in limestone quarries near Sohoffen, Germany, part of a once shallow sea. Researchers are reporting new discoveries about the reptile, Vadasaurus herzagae, and suggests that some of the, some of the foot-long animal's features, including its elongated, with like tail, triangular shaped head, long nozzle, are well suited and adapted to the aquatic life. While there's relatively large limbs that it still has, link it to land-lubbering activities. Vadasaurus, this is Latin term for waiting lizard, is at the American Museum of Natural History where research associate Gabriel Bever says their study offers evidence that the waiting lizard can be linked by its anatomy to a small group of marine species called pluosaurs. Not pluosaurs, but pluosaurs, which are thought to have roots on land. Pluosaurs lived during its rasp period, 185 to 150 million years ago. They're eel-like, they have very, very significantly reduced limbs, they're very long, probably used their limbs for steering, not so much propulsion, and did like a snake-like maneuver going through the water. So, only three, though, of the ancient species of pluosaur have actually been discovered. So this is a, this is now they're making a link between this, which is rare fossil find, to a very rare fossil record. They're a very small fossil record, but to fell the question how to categorize this creature, these two types of statistical algorithms and reconstructions of evolutionary trees, Bever and Mark Norrell, the Museum's paleontology division chair, say that vatosaurus and the pluosaurs are part of a larger lineage of reptiles called ranchocephalia, which are still with us today, only just barely, there's actually one species that's descended, that still exists in New Zealand. Like the sea-bound pluosaurs, the vatosaurus skull was triangular shape, adaption found among many streamlined water-dwelling animals, such as most fish, eels, and whales. Long-gated snout, common amongst sea animals, had teeth farther away from the body, better for ensnaring fish. According to Bever, the work adds to the list of creatures whose ancestors were once land-dwelling vertebrates. These include modern-day whales, seals, sea snakes, and the ancient species, ecaphosaurus, mesaurus, and pluosaurus. That's the pluosaurus like the one that we sort of picture the most. That's the, or at least that I do it. That's the Loch Ness looking things. Right. By examining the shape and structure of vatosaurus' skull, Bever and Oral had also concluded that vatosaurus' bite was likely a quick side-to-side motion compared with the slower, stronger bite, typical of many land-dwelling animals. Some 155 million years ago, its tail, they say, had begun to lengthen like most sea animals, but not to, it's only a foot-bump big. The one that they're saying it's its cousin, the pluosaur was five feet long. The vatosaur only has 24 pre-sacral vertebrae, which span from the head to the beginning of the tail, whereas the pluosaurus had more than 50 of these backbones, much longer, much more eel-like, more streamlined. But despite these aquatic features, vatosaurus retained some features most often found among land reverts, still had large limbs relative to its body, which you would expect from more of a land-dwelling reptile. And they figure it probably also didn't use its limbs for propulsion, but just steering. They have also swum sort of snake-like, moving its spinal column and undulating, which is actually, I think, kind of unusual for that transition from land to sea. At least when you think of like the whales and seals, they're not side-to-side swimmers. They're like, we would have to kind of do, like we could kind of emulate the way that they swim. We could kind of emulate it, you know? With our spines. Like we couldn't do the side-to-side thing that like fish and sharks do as easily, but you know, sort of the, yeah, we've got the same kind of vertebrates set up, I guess. One thing I always find interesting is the evolutionary change that leads to either, like in the giraffe, just larger vertebrae for a longer neck, or more vertebrae. And what makes the difference there? I mean, with the Vata stories, having like 50-some-odd vertebrae, I mean, that's a lot of vertebrae. Yeah. And the first thing I would think was you would just sort of being incorporating tail, right? Instead of just losing a tail, tail becomes more part of spine. And then I guess, I would think at least it would be easier to add vertebrae at the end of a tail, if you're gonna have to, like as opposed to trying to fit one in the middle somewhere, you just grow a couple extra at the end. Like just put a few, right at the end there, that's right. Yeah, that's sort of how I picture it. But like, to do that transition and evolution, you just move the legs back a little further and make some of that tail spine. It just, I don't know if that's how that actually works, but Bevers says here, anatomical and behavioral characteristics of monogrypsal living things accumulated over long spans of time. Fossils can teach us a lot about that evolutionary history, including the order in which those features evolved in their adaptive role in the changing environment. And this, Norrell goes on, anytime we get a fossil like this, it's so well-preserved and so significant in understanding a major environmental transition. It is very important. It's also important, he adds, that we can consider Vatosaurus to be the Archaeopteryx of Reinkocephalians, which I don't think a truer thing has ever been said. I don't know, maybe not. It's debatable, it's debatable, yeah. It's like another old story. Well, if you're living in the Bronze Age, say around 3200 BC, and you want the next big upgrade to your Bronze Age tools, you're pretty much out of luck. Yes, the new Ice Sword X is out, but frankly, it's still just a sword made out of bronze. And you're gonna have to wait around for a while. Then you notice your neighbor has a new axe, an axe like nothing you've ever seen before. It's stronger, sharpened, sharper, and it's fashioned out of some material. Wait, that's made out of iron. But who, wait, iron isn't even scheduled to occur for another 2,000 years. Smelting furnaces aren't even a thing yet. Where did they get that? Turns out your neighbor wasn't gonna wait around for human technology to advance. They got their axe from Spain. And while this could raise a whole host of other questions, the real fact of that is that many objects were fashioned out of iron long before the Iron Age began. And they did so out of meteorites that were found here and about. However, there's so many of these things. There's beads from, here's the Egypt, a dagger from Alakadahoya Turkey, a pendant from Alamara, Syria, an axe from Ugrit, Syria, and several others from Saint Dynasty civilization, dagger bracelet and headrest of Tutankhamen in Egypt all far away from where Smelting was taking place either in time or space. And these items were extremely rare. They were always greatly treasured. They always seemed to fall into the hands of the most powerful as we're finding here. At least maybe that's also an easier way to find these treasures in the burial tombs of these very wealthy people. But the question lingered, were there pockets of smelting somewhere, technology that was found and then lost over and over again? Like one good Smith kind of figured out how to do it or was it something else? So we knew some of these were meteorites. So Albert Jambon as part of his work for the Institut des Minerales-Legers de Physique des Métriques somewhere in France, I'm assuming has demonstrated that iron used during the Bronze Age is always from a meteor. They went there as always. Like there's none of it that wasn't from a meteor. There was no finding of a cache of iron somewhere. And it's kind of, I remember in Greenland in a museum there, they have this giant iron ball of meteorite with part of it missing. And I guess the locals had managed to get some of the iron off this meteorite and the Inuits were using it for hunting tips, I suppose. So he went there and did an analysis. There's characteristics that make it possible to identify the source of iron based on whether it was terrestrial or came down from a meteorite, ran his tests and turns out, yep, all Bronze Age iron. Came from space. That's pretty amazing. And also interestingly, not very much after the Iron Age, like pretty much they stopped, it didn't matter. You didn't have to track down this very rare material. You could just dig up other things and do this smelting reduction process and come up with iron. So after smelting furnaces became a thing, it wasn't as hard to acquire, I guess. And so still valuable, the whole Iron Age took off, but it wasn't as prized the thing to have that one ax of iron or those couple beads of iron unlike any other material that anyone would have. Yeah, I mean, I've always thought of iron as, I mean, from the Vikings where they isolated iron from bogs. And it was, you wanted to know where the bog was that had all the iron in it because then you'd be a rich Viking if you had all the bog iron. So it's interesting to think that at a certain point when they were able to create technologies, like you said, the smelting forge, like the new technology, this advancement to be able to create heat at the levels necessary, that you could get, you can pick up these chunks of rock that are probably strewn across the desert or that you have been found in random places that you know they're a little different and let's throw it in there and see what happens. That's fascinating. There was that kind of a change in the sourcing, probably instigated because of the technology. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty cool. That was pretty cool. All right, so got some more stories for you. You ready? Yeah. Not too many more, but a few more. We've talked before on the show about the potential epigenetic transfer of information from one generation to another, right? And there's the question of what happens and how does it occur? Now that's still a question. This story that I'm about to talk about, it's still a question in this story, but it's a very interesting question. Researchers from the National Institute of Health published in JAMA Psychiatry, the study looking at people from Finland, adults from Finland who were either evacuated as children during World War II and their offspring versus children who stayed in Finland and did not get evacuated and their offspring and their health outcomes. So they looked at basically female evacuees and many of these evacuees had mental health disorders at rates greater than the individuals that stayed in Finland. And at the time, from 1941 to 1945, about 49,000 children were evacuated from Finland to protect them because they figured, oh my gosh, this is gonna be such hardship. We need to protect them from the bombings, the malnutrition, the wars with the, what was happening as a result of the war with the Soviet Union. A lot of these kids were preschoolers and they were then placed with foster families in Sweden. So these evacuees were separated from their families. They didn't get evacuated with their families. And so they had to also adapt to completely new families, these foster families that took them in and they went to Sweden, which is a country that speaks a different language from Finland. So they had to learn a new language, a new culture have completely different families. And so it was probably a very stressful experience. And then many of them actually returned to Finland and had then had to readjust to Finnish society after growing up in Sweden. So the risk of being hospitalized for a psychiatric disorder among the offspring of the evacuees was compared to the risks of psychiatric hospitalization among the offspring of the siblings who remained with their parents and didn't end up getting evacuated. They found that female evacuees and their daughters were at the greatest risk for being hospitalized for mood disorders like depression and bipolar disorder. The evacuees daughters had more than four times the risk of hospitalization for a mood disorder compared to those that stayed in Finland, that compared to the daughters of mothers that stayed in Finland. And it was regardless of whether or not the mothers were actually hospitalized for disorders. Put in the hospital Sweden. So the question is that wasn't able to be answered by this study or one of the questions that couldn't be answered was whether or not or why the daughters of the female evacuees have this higher risk of mental illness. And so the question is, is it a social change that these female evacuees grew up a certain way and took in behavioral experiential changes that affected their parenting style? Or is it that they were so stressed out from the experience that it actually led to changes, epigenetic changes that may have been passed on. And there is evidence, the researchers cite an example from a Holocaust, a study of Holocaust survivors in which methyl groups bound to a specific gene called FKBP5, this epigenetic methyl group change was passed on to their children. The higher level of methyl groups alters apparently, alters the production of cortisol, which is a stress hormone, which could have many downstream effects. So now what needs to be understood is how this kind of experience affects not only the people who go through it, but also consequent generations. So I wish they had looked at methylation of this particular gene. I wish they had dug into the epigenetic aspect of it, but it was beyond the scope of this particular study, but it's fascinating that we think of ourselves, you know, it's like, oh, you're a product of your environment, but you think you're kind of separate from something, your parents or your grandparents experienced something and oh, you're not influenced by that, but maybe you are. And is it behaviorally affected or influenced or is it genetically or both? Big question still to be answered about humans and how we behave. Yeah, and it's, this one has those other complications of, yeah, the mothers went through this stress, but they're also the ones raising these children. So, and they've gone through, you know, so there's a little bit of a direct connection there that makes it sort of difficult to assess this out as is this a genetic trait or is this, you know, the aftereffects of when you take a child from preschool and you put them through a different country, then you throw them back into their society and then they're maybe maladjusted and then they raise more maladjusted children kind of hard to distinguish, but we've seen it in skipping generations for nutritional reasons. And actually, if they're of the age, if they're, you know, pre puberty when they're leaving, that's when those genetic traits are thought to be able to be passed on. Like, if you have a traumatic event at 30 and have a kid at 35, I think it's probably a lot less likely that your genes have been primed for them to have, you know, any sort of alterations. But when you're that young, you're still forming some of those genes that are gonna be passing on, you're still sort of, I guess, prioritizing or determining the health of the offspring. So the timeframe is right for at least a comparison to the nutritional studies we've seen. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question. If this kind of stress affects adult epigenetic changes similarly to how it affects children. So yeah, I mean, I'm sure that, you know, early periods of development are very easily influenced and affected. So I don't know, that's fascinating. You know what is definitely affected by our environment? A tongue. A tongue affected by our environment? A tongue affected by our environment. Tongues. Yes, our wonderful, wonderful tongues. They're covered in microbes, covered in bacteria. And Justin, you reported on a study, I think it was about a year ago on the lab from which the study I'm talking about today, they published the first study of the microbiome of the mouth. And in their initial study from a year ago, they came up with these beautiful structures that they called hedgehogs and cauliflower. And there were these structures where the external areas were oxygen consuming bacteria, but the internal areas didn't contain a lot of oxygen. And so these were bacteria that didn't need oxygen to survive for their metabolism in the center of the structures. And so there were these hedgehog structures that existed as well as other more general grouping of these bacteria. But pretty much they found that the bacteria of the mouth, the gum line, your teeth, just generally, the bacteria were all mixed together. And it's too bad Blair's not here, because one thing I remember is how freaked out she was. She doesn't like it very much, yes. This will make her want to scrape her tongue a little bit more. So as opposed to the hedgehog and cauliflower structures of your teeth and your gum line, it turns out they have a reported on a new study that they have done in which they scraped the tongues of people. And basically they described it as kind of like, if you could imagine kind of trying to scrape the carpet off of your floor. So it might bunch up in some places, but basically it's pretty flat and you can see where things would exist. And they determined that the surface of the tongue is segregated that the bacterial communities aren't living all mixed, like they are in the hedgehog structures of your teeth and gum line. They are grouped together by type of bacteria. And so there are the staining that they did. They did fluorescent labeling and staining that each color of fluorescent stain that they used was specific to one group of bacteria, a specific genera of bacteria. And so they were able to be able to see basically where different bacteria hang out on people's tongues. And the question now is why don't they mix on your tongue? Why are they separated to different areas? So if you think about how your tongue is structured, the surface of your tongue has, you know, the papillae or these little fibers that come up that allow, well, your taste buds, where your taste buds live, right? And all these little fibers are on the surface of your tongue and it's not a flat, smooth surface. And different areas of your tongue are receptive to different flavors. But why would different bacteria potentially be hanging out in these different areas? Wait, you're gonna tell me that my sense of taste comes from the bacteria? I'm not saying anything. Oh. What the study has done is that now by looking at the spatial aspects of where bacteria are on the tongue and how they kind of clump together, do these different groups of bacteria have different functions and do they affect certain things related to taste in the mouth, right? What do they do in the mouth? They had one particular group that they say the bacteria have the capacity to perform nitrate reduction. And the researchers say, researcher Borisi, who's the head of the lab, he says, we're thinking of the tongue community as an unrecognized organ that facilitates nitric oxide homeostasis. So there's much more to be, much more to be investigated there. Anyway, your bacterially segregated tongue. So, I mean, I had a root canal, I don't know, I can't remember four or five years ago, whatever it was, six years ago. Maybe, no, it wasn't that long ago. It wasn't that long, it was just a few years ago. Anyway, they took this oral antibiotic and all of a sudden I couldn't taste anything. My entire sense of taste was like knocked out. Yeah, and that is an effect from some antibiotics is losing your sense of smell or your sense of taste. Yeah. Yeah. So I wonder if they're sort of doing a little bit of a fixing that helps allow for that taste to go. Oh my gosh. And then, if you could find the sweetness bacteria, the ones that enhance that, you could infuse that into your probiotic chocolates and there you go. What's a probiotic chocolate? It's one that just tastes sweeter than you could possibly imagine. That's all it does. Yeah, so anyway, I think the tongue is very interesting and it's neat to find out that we are looking at it in a new way. We're not just looking at the physical aspects of the anatomy of the tongue. We're starting to delve into this microbiome aspect of it and how does that all work together? Does the microbiome affect the function of the tongue and thus that sense, that perceptive sense? Pretty cool. Did you have any more stories? That's all I got for today. That's all you have for today. Well, I had one more that was sent to me by Fada and he had sent me this story and I was like, I'm not into this and I've been angsty all day and I've been kind of cranky about it. But the story actually- What is the story? It's really, the story itself is that the first baby in the United States has been born to a woman who got a uterus transplant. Oh, yeah, this came across my feet a few times, yeah. So the uterus, it's the organ that holds the baby. Some women are born without uteruses. Sometimes disease leads to the need for a hysterectomy and for the uterus to be removed. And women have the many women would like to be able to carry their own baby through a pregnancy. They want to get pregnant. They want to be able to try to do it and if you really want to do it yourself, adoption and surrogacy are not going to work. And there are researchers, one of the head researchers from Sweden, Dr. Giuliano Testa, he's been working at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas on a trial with 10 women and this is the first success that they've had and the woman was the first transplant operation there are other women who are carrying pregnancies at this right now and we will probably expect more successful reports of babies born to these women. But the thing I was upset about was the headline for NPR. And I love NPR, I'm like NPR, they usually look at things barely unsensationally but their headline was first baby born to U.S. uterus transplant patient raises ethics questions. Wow, what? Yeah, and so I read the story and it was taken from an interview and you can listen to the interview which is more extensive than just the text that they have put on their website. But they get into kind of the ethics of it but not really, not really at all. So they ask about the risks for the baby and possible complications that have to be considered and one of the doctors says in that sense we know a lot. We have a good knowledge of this because females have been giving birth after kidney and liver transplants for many years on immunosuppressive drugs. So we know what the effect of immunosuppressive drugs has on pregnancies, on babies and recipients and we know which immunosuppressive drugs you should not take during pregnancy. So because of other transplant operations and experiences, we have research on this. We know how to treat a person who is pregnant, who has, yeah, who is pregnant, who's had a transplant. We can do that. Wait, does that mean I can have one now? Like if I wanted to have a baby. I don't think you have the right hormone profile for it but maybe, I don't know. I mean, maybe this is where the ethics questions come into play. I mean, what it comes down to at this point in time is that because it's not a life or death situation to have a baby, this is not something that will be, this is an elective surgery. This transplant is not the same as a kidney transplant. It's elective and so most likely it will not be covered by insurance and it will most likely have to be paid by the women who want the procedure. We don't exactly know how successful these procedures will be all the time. You have to have a donor. So somebody has to be willing to go through a surgery to give up their uterus, to give it to somebody who needs a uterus and people who have gone through menopause don't need their uteruses anymore but the uteruses are perfectly well functioning organs. It's just the hormones that have changed after menopause. So this maybe, I don't know. I mean, if people are up for it and they want to pay for it, I don't understand what the big deal is. I'm just, this is where I am. My consideration of the ethics question here, Fada brought up to me, well, the world is overpopulated. We shouldn't, maybe we shouldn't be having babies anyway. I'm like, well, if somebody's gonna have a baby and they want to do it themselves, they're not even considering adoption. If you really wanna do it yourself, you're gonna try and find other ways to make it happen. Yourself. There are people who will consider adoption. Many people do that, but we can't force people into that either. I don't know, yeah, I don't, I guess I don't quite see it as the ethics thing. At this point, I'm like, awesome, do it. Whenever you bring up, it's an ethics issue. I'm like, no, you're just finding something to be upset about. Don't work, fix it, right? Why do you think that there's every other ad during every cable news is for a pill that fixes something that don't work in men no more? Let's get right. Why are we fighting something that can fix something in women? That doesn't work no more, right? Yes, yes. And Fada, it is not exactly what you said, but it is one part of what you said. There were multiple points to that conversation. Yes, yes, exactly what you said. The best thing we can do now to slow climate change is have less babies. Your people use less energy, contribute less to climate change. It's true. That's not true. We can do all of, we can have twice as many people, plenty of food and everything else, and not because of climate change. All we need is more scientifically educated people. That's what we need. And that's what we're trying to do here. Make science brain babies. I want more science brain babies, yes. Are you a science brain baby, Kai? Yeah, he's so tired. He's staring at me from the couch. He really should have fallen asleep, but he didn't. He's been listening to me. Yeah, let's give him back his mama. Let's give him back his mama. Let's go into the... Let's go into the end of the show. Let's do this final rundown here. It's so interesting, he's staring up. It is time to put my child to bed, so we are going to take it to the end of the show. I want to remind everyone that you can go to twist.org to find out about our twist, Blair's Animal Corner 2018 calendar. That's where you go. It's almost 2018. You need a calendar? We've got some. Also, SF SketchFest January 18th in San Francisco, a Cal Academy of Sciences. You can find information about that on our Facebook page. I would like to shout out to FADA for helping with social media, Identity 4 for helping with the audio files, and Brandon for helping out to Simulcast us to Facebook. Thank you for all you do. Everyone in the chat room and everyone over there on YouTube and Facebook who have been commenting. Thank you so much for being a part of the show, for commenting as we go through it. I do appreciate, even though I don't comment back, I do appreciate the fact that you are all there. 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And you can watch and join our chat room if you go there, but don't worry if you can't make it because you can find past episodes at twist.org slash YouTube. Also at facebook.com slash this week in science and always at twist.org. Thank you for enjoying the show. Twist is also available as a podcast. Just Google this week in Science in your iTunes directory or if you have a mobile type device, you can look for twist number four droid app in the Android Marketplace. For more information, oh, this week in Science in anything Apple Marketplace-y. Never more information on anything you've heard here today. Show notes are going to be available on our website twist.org where you can also make comments and start conversations with the hosts and other listeners. Or you can contact us directly, email kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinScience.com Justin at twistminion at gmail.com or Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org. 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Let's put those in there. There's twistmas ornaments. There's there's belt buckles. There are jigsaw puzzles. I got to go tackle my to-do list for the day. That's right. You get your to-do list done after the show. Yeah. Hold on. Kai is still awake. So let say, Kai, let me say good night to Justin. OK. Yeah. Here out there. Oh, there he is. Hear anything? Good night. Good night. Thanks for doing a good job during the show. You're welcome. I hope we didn't keep you up too late. Uh, what time is it? It's, it's actually, it's already tomorrow. It's 9.57. Almost. Yeah. Is that later than you normally stay up? Yeah. Oh, oops. That didn't go right. Oops. What happened? I accidentally took the microphone out of its stand. Put that back in there. Justin, is that what you feel? No. No. You said good night. Good night, Kai. You said good night. I say good night. No, no, no. Don't take it down. Good bye. Bye, buddy. Oh, my tired child. This is what happens when I'm on solo mom duty. Kai stays up because he's not going to go to sleep by himself. He's like, nope. You did a fantastic job though. He's like, nope, mom, I'm going to stay up and see what you do on your show. He did a great job tonight. Yeah, he did. He tries. He loves talking. And so it was, I'm sure it was very hard of him to hold back. Yeah, he's not on Christmas break, hot rod. He needs to go to school in the morning. So I need to get him to bed. Oh boy. No, it's not 15 more days. It's like seven more days. Yeah, so Christmas break is coming. The goose is getting fat. Please put a penny in my Patreon account. I used to get it through my house with my mommy. Thanks a lot, Kai. I'm going to take away one of your abs. Oh, no. I got to go. Say good night, Kiki. I got to go. Good night, Kiki. Say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Good night, Minions. Good night, everybody. And yes, Wiz Mike. You did see me on What on Earth. He did. Being rude. I hope to see you all next week, when I'm obviously going to be a lot fatter. OK, everyone. 10 times fatter. 10 times fatter. He was paying attention. He's learning about scale and magnitude. He's six. What do I have to look forward to? A lifetime of this. Man. All right. Good night. Good night, Kiki. Good night, Minions. See you guys soon. Bye.