 in three, two, this is twist. This Week in Science episode number 724 recorded on Wednesday, June 5th, 2019. Mind the gap, science. Hey everybody, welcome to This Week in Science. Tonight we have, sorry. Hey everybody, I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on This Week in Science we will fill your head with babies, pain and curiosities. But first, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Most of the things we have invented over the last 100,000 years of humans being on the earth are still with us in some form. The wheel, the bush hook, the elastic band and touch screens to name just a few. Fire on the other hand is much older than the last 100,000 years. It is a technology older than current humans by a million years or more. When a thing is useful, when knowledge has a benefit is preserved, handed down as if knowledge were a living organism, reproducing through teaching, sharing and learning, the exchange of information from one generation to the next. And like any living thing, knowledge can also die if we fail to teach or if we fail to learn. We humans look at the world of today as if it is a permanent place, it is not, it will change. Based on the lessons we have learned and the new discoveries we make, the world will change for the better and it can also change by the knowledge we fail to nurture in the next generation for the worse. Like any living thing, knowledge needs a healthy environment like the one between your ears and something good to munch on. Like, this week in science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind I 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. Good, I love you Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin, Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week In Science. We are back again. Yeah, to talk about science. Yes, there is so much news once again, but of course we were throwing the stories away saying not good enough, not good enough. And we brought the best stories. The stories we loved the most for this week's conversation. So I hope that you will enjoy them. I have stories about gaps, cats and guts. I do, I hope you look forward to that. Justin, what'd you bring? I have got a giant virus. I've got a reason people should be picking up the pace and lost tribe of ancient humans. Ooh, lost tribe, I like that. Blair, what's in the animal corner? The animal corner is filled with peas, pain, the phylum, porifera, and puddles. And plosives, lots of plosives, great for radio, plosives. You're welcome everyone. And as we enjoy getting into all this fun, I would like to remind you that you can find information about twist at twist.org. And as a podcast, we are found all places podcasts are found. You can also find us on Facebook and YouTube. But now I'm going to fast forward into science news. Science news, that's what y'all came here for, right? I'm going to take you into a stellar nursery right now. We always wonder what happens, we have this hypothesis about how solar systems form. What happens around stars as they age to allow planets that we see in our own solar system and that we see as exoplanets, the hundreds, thousands that we've found now. I mean, there have not been a lot that we've visibly imaged over the years where we've actually gone, hey, baby planet, I'm going to look at you little planet, these exoplanets. So out of Hubble, this week there is the story of a new planetary system. It orbits around a star, which is about 370 light years from Earth. You know, it'd be like Gilligan's three-hour tour, give or take a few hundred years to try and get there. It's known as PDS 70. And it is a six million year old star. So it's little and it's young. Oh, it's a baby star. Yeah. It's a little baby star. It's tiny. It's a cute little baby star. Yeah, exactly. It's a cute little baby star, smaller than our sun. So it's not really hot. It's accreting a lot of gas. And so we have these ideas, right? We've seen in space these disks of dust and gas that extend around these little proto stars, these stars that are maybe creating planetary systems, these protoplanetary systems, from which we think planets must emerge. And from looking at our own planet's planetary system, our solar system, and also the rings of Jupiter, we have come up with this hypothesis that planets accrete. That means they gather the material from around themselves within their orbit. And so there should be gaps. There should be bands of blank space, dust-free, gas-free space in these protoplanetary disks. And we really haven't seen them before, but low. Looking at PDS 70, we have now discovered gaps. Big gap. There's one that extends from about two billion to almost four billion miles away from its star. So there's dust, dust, dust, until about two billion miles away from the star and then clear space. And there's a planet. There are two planets, little baby planets inside this dust gap. And the innermost planet, they think it's at about a distance of two billion miles about the orbit of Uranus from our star. And they think it weighs about four to 17 times as much as Jupiter. So it's bigger than Jupiter. It's out there and it's a big thing. It was detected in 2018. There's another one that's newly discovered and it's near the outer edge of this gap at about 3.3 billion miles about Neptuneian distance from a sun. It's not so big around Jupiter mass. Not much bigger. I mean, it could be 10 times bigger than Jupiter, but it probably isn't, it's right around Jupiter size. And so these orbits have what's thought to be a two to one resonance where the inner planet goes around the star two times for every time that that outer planet goes around one time. But this is the first direct evidence that supports our protoplanetary disk planet formation hypothesis, which is pretty cool. This is the first time that we have seen this gap and planets that are unambiguously creating that gap around a star within its dust and gas disk. That's kind of neat. It puts a lot of support to this idea. That's very exciting. Very exciting. Researchers are thrilled that the James Webb Space Telescope that may be launching in a couple of years might be able to study this planet and others to be able to figure out more about these newly forming planets. We get to watch as they grow up. These are toddlers to our view, which is very exciting. I mean, we're gonna have to have pretty long lives to really watch them and see what they're doing. But still, we can get our snapshot. Nice. Very cool. Yeah. Little babies, we found little babies. Mind the gap because it's important. Could be planets in there. And then moving on from babies, let's go to kitty cats because babies and kitty cats are such a wonderful combination. I'm trying to break the internet. Is that what this is about? I am. This show, let's break the internet. I should rename the show. Science, let's break the internet. Yes, first babies, baby planets. Now cats, Schrodinger's cats. We're going to talk about quantum physics now, everyone. Which means, oh, okay. I'm jumping out of my depth a little bit. But, all right, quantum computers. We would like quantum computers. There are a number of companies that are working on quantum computers. We would like quantum computing because it will increase processing time. It will also increase security for encrypted communications. There's so much that quantum computing could potentially do for us. However, these computers, while we're getting them going and we're increasing the number of qubits that are processing at any point in time, in the computers, one of the big problems is errors. They are very prone to errors. Cubits just go, I'm gonna jump and turn into some random state. And nobody knows when they're gonna jump, why they're gonna jump or what they're gonna jump to until possibly now. So, researchers at Yale University, what just happened? Is that me? Did you hear that? Yes. No. I heard that. That's a ghost in the internet. That's what that is. What was it? No, I don't know. It's because we were talking about quantum computing. I didn't hear it. Ghost. Ghost in the internet. Oh, it was spooky. Spooky action at a distance, everyone. Researchers at Yale University have been looking into quantum computing, quantum particles, these qubits, in the idea of superposition. And so we go back to Schrodinger and his cats with the idea that the story is, hey, Schrodinger's thought experiment is you could put a cat into the box. You don't know what's going on in the box. When you open the box, is the cat alive or is it dead? It's going to be either of those things when you observe it. And of course, we know with quantum physics, observation is the key, right? Observing makes something happen. But it can be alive and dead at the same time, the superposition of opposite states while nobody's observing it. And so these researchers, Michael, Michelle Deveret and Zlatko Minev, they've been working at this idea of quantum jumps and quantum jumps are these, what are considered discrete, so a very singular thing happening, but random change in the state of an atom of a particle, at particular time when it's observed. It's random in that it can't be predicted how it's going to turn out. You don't know whether the cat is alive or dead. And so the quantum qubits that we're talking about, they put together an experiment in which they had an artificial atom, which I think is a very interesting concept in and of itself. It's a superconducting artificial atom. They used three microwave generators to irradiate the atom and they encapsulated the whole thing in aluminum. So it's surrounded in aluminum, getting irradiated with microwaves and you have the superconducting atom. And at this point, if no science comes out of it, still really cool. So it's all these things, exactly. But they used an indirect monitoring method to be able to observe without really observing. And this is something that Minev came up with for superconducting circuits. It allows them to observe the atom with even more efficiency than they have ever had before. Okay, so this microwave radiation is coming in irradiate, irradiate, irradiate. They're watching, they're watching, they're watching. And the atom's like, ah, I don't know what to do. And it jumps. And so you get these, they got these quanta, ah, I gotta do something, jumps. And so the atom's like, oh, you're watching me. Here I go, jumping. And what they found is that they could amplify the signal of these jumps. And in doing that, they could monitor the signal and they found that there's this period of time right before the jump in which they stopped detecting photons, which is part of their whole setup. And there are photons in this other part of the microwave setup. But they stopped detecting them for just a briefest moment. And what they realized is that the lack of atoms, the absence of photo, I mean, not atoms, the lack of photons is a warning signal that a quantum jump is going to happen. Which is exciting because they're observing it. They now know when it's going to happen. And because they know when it's going to happen, they can now take that jump. And so they go, ah, there you go, I see where you went. And they can reverse it. And they can tell the atom to go back to where it was. You just go back there, you get back there. They found that it's quantum jumps are deterministic. The quantum state may be undetermined and random to begin with, but the jump is always deterministic. It always happens in the same way from whatever random starting point the bit starts from. So the researcher Minov, he says quantum jumps of an atom are somewhat analogous to the eruption of a volcano. They're unpredictable in the long term. However, with correct monitoring, you can with certainty detect advance warning of a disaster and act on it before it's occurred. So why is this research important? It means that now researchers may have a way of knowing when these quantum jumps are going to happen during quantum computing processes. And it's the quantum jumps that create errors or that are the errors. And so if you have a way to know that they're going to happen and then reverse them, you can reduce the error rate in quantum computing, which will make them more accurate and more efficient, better quantum computers. Why is there a case in the woman when I'm being heavier than? I mean... I mean, it's still a little bit. I mean, it's still far off. Yeah. I got it. I think that the... This is a little annoying. It's suddenly the non-persistent universe. Universe is always there when you observe it. You observe it, you get a reading. You observe it's always there. It's always there. As soon as the universe thinks you're not looking, no photons. There's nothing. There's nothing there. And then, oh, you're looking. Oh yeah. Oh no, there's an atom. Sure, it's right here. It's been here all along. No, no, I know. There was nothing. I was thinking, there's nothing. Now you put an atom there. It's a completely non-persistent universe. That's frightening. It is, but it's also where there was no predictability from the Schrodinger thought experiment previously. Now, we have predictability. Now, we know some aspect of what these qubits are going to do. And so, we have taken the next step in this quantum, the understanding of that quantum realm. And we are making it more tangible than it has been in the past. Which is exciting. It's great. I like deep questions with little information or a little ability to process the information. Is this forcing a deterministic universe out of this? Or is this just, that's just, is it because of the way the experiment is designed that's creating a deterministic outcome? Or is there just a deterministic backbone to this? And that's the question we would need to ask one of these people. Yes, we would have to ask someone who's an expert in quantum mechanics. Because I don't know the answer to that question. I cannot answer that question. Yes. Justin, do you have a story for us? Oh, I do. Boy, do I. I've got one right over here. So this is sort of an interesting story. This is, which is, if it wasn't, I wouldn't have brought it. Researchers at Whithole Oceanographic Institute and University Medical School examined genes in a giant virus that are interesting because these genes that they found appear pretty much everywhere in the biological kingdoms. This is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers searched more than 8,000 virus genomes. And found that many of their newly discovered giant viruses, which we've been talking about for a few years now. In one particular case, I believe they were generating DNA, which was something we thought to be unheard of. Right. That was a big story last year, wasn't it? Yeah. This time they found a giant virus with multiple genes for a type of enzyme, cytochrome P450. These enzymes are common in animals, plants, bacteria. Finding them in a virus was totally unexpected. And actually thought not to be possible until giant viruses, which had enough DNA to encompass something like genes of these lengths. This is Cody Voice John Stegman, senior author of the paper and director of the Whithole Center for Oceans and Human Health. This is an extremely interesting finding. Oh, he agrees. He also thinks it's interesting. Cool. In animals, P450 enzymes metabolize drugs, make steroid hormones, defend against pollutants. We have yet to find out what they are doing in these viruses, but for sure they are unique, unlike P450s and other organisms and any other organisms. So the P450 enzymes are one of the largest enzyme superfamilies that are known. And so they're looking at it from a health perspective and trying to determine ways to prevent pneumonia. I think giant viruses are linked to pneumonia. So looking, maybe this is a thing that we can exploit to reduce our weakness to pneumonia or maybe find a cure kind of a thing for people who are walking around with pneumonia. These sorts of things. Drug targeting that. But I think the more fascinating thing is what are they doing there? Is this some sort of horizontal gene transfer that this gene found its way into this? Or is this something that these giant viruses, and also they're finding these in the oceans, these are deep sea, they're finding these giant viruses. Is this something that giant viruses have always have? This gene rolling around in different forms, maybe having the ability to produce enzymes. And what are these enzymes? What work are they doing? And is the horizontal gene transfer, or is the evolution and adaptation of this gene to do other functions? Something that came after viruses had already created. Right. It starts to get us into that question of what came first. Is the virus the original life form on the planet? Yeah, I think the whole thing I think about viruses is that they're none of the fluff, right? They're just like the bare bones information that you need. Not even the information that you need to duplicate yourself because you're outsourcing that. So any of this kind of extra stuff that we're finding, yeah, it either has some really beneficial function or it's in there by accident, I gotta think. It was accidentally grabbed as they were running out the door. Could just be that. There you go. There you go. Running out the door. A quick highlight. I have been texting our guest. Apparently messages have not been going where they're supposed to. I have recently sent the Hangout link and we will see if Dr. Stanley is able to join us. We'll see. But as he joins the show, maybe I do believe it is time now for this wonderful part of the show that we love called Players Animal. Wait, should we do? Hello, Dr. Stanley. Hey, Dr. Kiki. Hello. I'm so sorry. I don't know what happened with the Hangout links. The Internet is a mysterious place. It is. I think there was a black hole somewhere. Sucks the emails away. I know it's late where you are. We were just about to start Blair's Animal Corner. Blair, are you cool with doing your corner after? Absolutely, yeah. Cool. Okay, so we will run forward. For the podcast, I get to edit. Yeah. Okay, let me make sure I've got everything here. Okay. And now I would love to introduce our guest for the evening. We are joined by Dr. Matthew Stanley. He's a professor at NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He teaches and researches the history and philosophy of science. He holds degrees in astronomy, religion, physics, the history of science and is interested in the connections between science and the wider culture. He is the author of the recently published book, Einstein's War, how relativity triumphed amid the vicious nationalism of World War I. And he also is the host, one of the hosts of the What the If podcast. So podcast host to podcast host and as a fan of your work. Thank you for joining us tonight on the show, Dr. Stanley. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. Honestly, astronomy, physics, religion, history, philosophy, science, you have so many interests and degrees and they're kind of all over the place, disparate things. How did you take them and go, this is what I'm going to do with my life. And this is what I'm going to study. What's your path? How'd you get here? That's a good question. So I started off being interested in physics. I wanted to be an engineer. I used to build lasers. And then I took a history class by accident that was cross-listed in the religion department back at my alma mater of the University of Rochester. And I found that the humanities were pretty cool, that they had some interesting stuff going on that I had not thought about before. But I still wanted to work in physics and be an engineer. So I was just doing history and philosophy and religion on the side for fun. But gradually I found that the humanities corrupted my thinking. And I started asking questions in my science classes and in the lab that didn't quite register as scientific questions for the people I was working with. But I was still interested in. So things like where did this equation come from? Why choose this kind of derivation and not another? Where did somebody get this idea from in the first place? And I discovered through some trial and error that there was such a field, a history of science where I could ask those sorts of questions. So in retrospect, like my CV makes total sense, everything kind of builds together. And the book you just held up is the Venn diagram of all of my interests. But at the time, I had no idea what I was doing. I love that so often. When you're moving forward through life, it's not a clear path. But then when you look back, you go, oh, this all makes sense. So I love the questions that you're asking. I mean, when we talk about science on the show, so often it's, here's a science story for you. It's a result or there is a paper that's published. And we don't know much about the stories behind it, like where it came from. Do you see the history of science as something that kind of goes around in the background of all of this modern media and how we talk about science? Do you feel like it's gaining ground? Do you feel like it's losing ground? That's a good question. There's an important sense in which the history of science gets deleted from the stories people usually tell about science, right? Because as you say, we're interested in the results. We want to know what the new thing is. And the people who do that work want to make the story seem as straightforward and convincing as possible. And often that means you delete all of the mistakes you made, the wrong turns, the screw-ups. But I think those are actually the interesting parts of the story, right? Because if it's just the story of somebody has a cool idea and they test it in their right, all right, I guess that's kind of interesting. But I'd much rather hear about the person who starts off with a completely wrong idea and battles their way through all of the difficulties and finally gets to something cool at the end. But Einstein, he didn't start with a wrong idea. Well, this is the question, right? So a big chunk of my book is Einstein screwing up. And I think that's one of the things I enjoy most about the story is we have this terrific documentary record of Einstein creating general relativity. So we have his notebooks and we have his letters to his friends. So we can see the places where he screws up. So, you know, sometimes there's a page in his notebook where he just X's out the whole thing, right? He just had a bad day and he's like, exactly, that's just a total mess. And at one point he makes an enormous mistake that he doesn't realize for about three years. And then he has to go back and redo everything, right? And then when people ask him years later, how did you create the theory of relativity? He doesn't tell them that part. He has a totally different story. So I love that I was able to go back and recover all the messiness from which it actually came. Well, and that's why in school they tell you there's no pencils in lab notebooks and things like that. No scribbling out just a single line through your mistake. That's so we can learn from them ultimately, right? Yeah, that's exactly it. And that's actually what Einstein does in 1915 when he realizes he's made a mistake. He goes back to the stuff he wrote in 1912 and he's able to go through line by line. He says, oh, this is the screw-up. Yeah. Wow. That is impressive. I mean, seriously, that is testament to keeping good notes, writing everything down, which they tell you to do in science. Yeah. A sense of who, for lack of better phraseology, who Einstein was reading at the time. Yeah. Because it seemed that the way it's stories told, too, it's him alone isolated from the world, developing all of this, but he must have been feeding off of other things and other people that were contemporaries. Yeah. And I think this is also a really important part of the story is there's a sense in which I think this book is the story of Einstein and his posse, right? And his friends are the ones who give him ideas, tell him when he's screwing up, they do things he can't do in very literal ways often. So for instance, he goes, so Einstein's working on general relativity in the middle of World War I, right? So he's blockaded in Berlin. So he can't contact many of the people he needs to about this. One of the few groups he can talk to are his friends in the Netherlands. His friends in the Netherlands are neutral. So as often as he can, he takes a train over to the Netherlands and he has to, you know, get harassed by the German border guards and things as he's going through. And he sits down with folks like Paul Ehrenfest and Willem de Sitter and Conrad, excuse me, Hendrik Lorenz, to talk about relativity because he knows he can't just do it all in his own own way. So he's trying to go bounce ideas off of people. And then after each trip he makes, there's this flurry of correspondence back and forth as they try to make sense of the things he was talking about and he tries to make sense of the things they said. And it's this really dynamic thing. So he gets big, you know, he makes big leaps forward every time he's able to find a kindred spirit to talk to. And Hilbert's not just a kindred mathematical spirit, but he's a kindred political and social spirit too. That is, he's another kind of socialist liberal who Einstein is happy to be himself with. And that turns out to really matter. Einstein has a hard time hanging out with the right-wing scientists. Yeah, it's a big part of the story is the rise of nationalism, the politics that are going on in the day and age, the beginning of World War I and how all of these things affect the science that is able to take place. How did things change the relationships between the scientists and also the way that they could do their science from before the war to during the war to after? Well, right before World War I breaks out, so the early years of the 20th century, science is this intensely international project. So everyone is working across borders. It's not just sort of expeditions to different places, but things that we take for granted simply circulation of journals from place to place. This is an era long before email, of course, or even telephones. So a lot of the work gets done by personal letters, right? Einstein has a cool idea, so he writes to his friend in Finland about this idea and his friend writes back a couple of weeks later. So the work is intensely internationalist until August 1914 and then very suddenly after the war breaks out, all the scientists retreat into their nationalist camps. So England, I can't sort of overemphasize how crazy this was. So English scientists refused to send their journals to German scientists. German scientists refused to cite any English papers. They set up special conferences, so they don't have to use the language of their enemy. It's the magnitude of the nationalism, sort of this knee-jerk intense hatred, is really dramatic. So science goes overnight from being an intensely globalized international project to being an intensely nationalized one. How did that affect, I mean this is a big part of the story, the work of someone from Einstein who is relying on his international colleagues, you know, part of one of the, one of his tests of relativity relied on a astronomical imaging of a solar eclipse. And this is something that he couldn't do from where he was and he had to rely on other people doing it and getting that information sent to him. And so yay, it happened before and stuff like that just stopped. Like what, what was the impact? Yeah, so Einstein actually gets this particular test you mentioned, one of the predictions of the general theory of relativity is the idea that light is bent as it goes by the sun, by the sun's gravity. And you observe this out of solar eclipse by looking to see if stars are displaced slightly from where they're supposed to be. So Einstein had spent years trying to set up this experiment and get somebody to go do it. And so what he does is to get the experiment set up, he's not doing it himself because Einstein's not good at the hands-on kind of stuff, but he gets friends sent to observe an eclipse in August of 1914 in Russia. So this is perfect, this is supposed to test Einstein's idea. Unfortunately, the eclipse is scheduled for a couple of days after the war breaks out. So once the war breaks out, the Russians say, well, we've got this bunch of Germans here trying to advance the optical equipment right near one of our naval bases. They say they're doing an astronomical experiment, but I'll bet they're just spies. So the group of Germans that's supposed to test Einstein's theory get arrested and impounded. And amazingly, they actually survived the experience. But Einstein, the first thing we have that Einstein writes down in reaction to the outbreak of the war has nothing to do with actual, like, slaughter of people and invasions. So it's a set that his experiment got ruined. Oh, that's about it. And then, of course, during the war, he can't, I mean, he isn't even getting enough food in Berlin, much less the possibility of conducting an experiment elsewhere. So he has to rely actually on people who he's never met in the end to conduct the observation in 1919. And he, meanwhile, at one point in his movement different places, he was I guess, classified, categorized as a Jew because he came from Jewish heritage. His family was Jewish, but he was atheist, but they wouldn't allow him in Austria to say he was atheist. He had to pick the religion. Yeah, that's the story, as Einstein would tell it, is he grew up in a family of secular Jews, no interest in what we would think of as Jewish practice and didn't identify that way until he got his first, he got a job in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Prague. And there was a form he had to fill out and on that form you had to declare your creed, your religious belief. And he tried to put in none and they said no. And so eventually he said, okay, I can't leave a blank. So he liked to say that the Austrian Empire made him a Jew. And did that affect him personally in terms of fear for his life as... Well, not during the war. I should say it's after he becomes famous that that becomes an issue. So right after the end of the war Germany is in total chaos and there's a huge rise in anti-Semitism. So the right wing, the people who would try to blame the Nazis, try to blame the Jews for the loss of the war. And Einstein is suddenly famous so he becomes an easy target for this right wing. So there's actually an organized anti-relativity movement in 1920 and 1921 to make the case that relativity was Jewish science. And Einstein again, he's so cheeky. Einstein actually goes to one of the anti-Einstein rallies in Berlin just to see what they're saying about him. And he describes in detail all these anti-Semites getting together to attack his science. That's fantastic. And he started doing... But he started also publicly speaking out against this rise of the right. I mean, he was not hiding in any... I mean, he was getting warnings, wasn't he? You need to tone it down. You're being too much of a public figure. Yeah, this was a problem for Einstein both during and after the war that he was outspoken politically. So during the war he's a pacifist and a socialist and he speaks out against the war and nationalism, which is a really bad thing to do in Imperial Germany. So eventually he actually gets his travel curtailed and people are reading his mail and such. He doesn't actually get arrested before the war is over. But then in the post-war era when the anti-Einstein groups are mobilizing, he pushes back. As you say, he's not willing to take this and that's actually how he gets interested in Zionism is he's not interested in the Jewish homeland for any religious or scriptural reasons. He just suddenly realizes that he and people like him need a safe place to go. So he throws his weight behind the Zionist movement just so literally people who share names with him can find some place safe. When we look back at history there's often the interpretation of the historian looking at these letters and putting everything together. What is your process in going back through the writings and the works to be able to create this kind of a story of the life and time of the creation of one of the most important theories in physics? Yeah, so there's two kind of broad categories I try to work with. So one is what historians call context. So it's what Dustin was just asking about. Who is Einstein reading? Who are the other people working on this? Because we particularly scientists like to pull an equation out of its context. So for instance, there's a reason we call the equations in special relativity the Lorenz transformations. It's because Einstein was not the first one to write them down. His friend Lorenz was. So that's really important to think about that scientific ideas don't emerge out of nothingness, but they emerge out of vigorous conversations among different sorts of people. So there's scientific context and there's wider context. Things like the war as well. So the first thing I try to do is get a sense of what you might call the times. What are the events going on? What is Einstein living through? What are his friends interested in? What are they talking about? What are they worried about? And then the second is more of a personal focus, which is I need to get a sense of the people themselves. So in this story that's Einstein and Eddington and understanding why they make the choices they do. What do they care about? What are they willing to put themselves on the line for? And usually for this error, at least, that's documents that we have. So there's been a heroic effort to collect essentially everything Einstein wrote over the course of his life. So it's the collected papers of Albert Einstein, which are online, should you ever want to go browse through them. So I just sat through and read them all kind of from start to finish. So I got to know what he worried about day to day and it was great to see that sometimes he's really concerned about these detailed scientific problems. Sometimes he has just forgotten his keys and he's writing to his wife to say, can you let me in when I get home from this trip? He loses his keys a lot. Reading through your book it was you're like, and he lost his keys again. Making comments through the book about his clothes and we all know he had that reputation for just kind of being unkempt looking a lot of the time. But he does have that from the way you portray him just the I guess absent minded professor aspect of what he's doing. That stereotype, right? But then you also get him climbing across the revolutionary barricades in November 1918 in Berlin and facing down gun-wielding people in order to literally, you know, rescue professors at the University of Berlin. And I love that both those things are true, right? He can't remember his keys but he fearlessly walks through a barricade. I like that. That's pretty awesome. I think this book in the very beginning you comment on how women loved the way he looked and he was a magnet for the girls and so you get this idea of Einstein as a young man like a vibrant, curious well-spoken kind of he was not artistic but because of his sensibilities and the time and the place. I could imagine having hung out with him at a cafe having a conversation and but then you also see his growth through his career and how he became a real I don't know, you know, he grew as an adult but it's just I love this realization of the scientist as a human person instead of okay, man wearing white lab coat in a laboratory with crazy white hair, yeah. We know him as someone who was really into math didn't do well in math in school. That's the story everyone tells. I thought that was just a thing that they told kids who were bad at math. Yeah, I should say he does fine in math but he himself complains about his mathematical ability sometimes so I think that has gotten legs. And I love how it gets into there were mathematicians who took his early ideas and turned them into math and he was turned off by it. I just want to do the physics and now you've taken it and described it in math and now I have to do the math too? Exactly. You've made this harder for me. It's hard to imagine him as someone who would be upset with that but it's that's right and this is I think the early Einstein and the late Einstein and the book is as you say the kind of this transition period but the early Einstein is all about concrete ideas and visualizable things and what can you feel and see and he's deeply suspicious of philosophy and mathematics and then by the end of the story he's this crazed Platonist who thinks mathematics can reveal all the truths of the universe and is sometimes suspicious of experiments and it's this is one of the reasons I like this period in his life is he has this kind of conversion experience in which suddenly he accepts that well maybe we can know the truths of the universe through math through math. Not through our own eyes we can't trust our eyes what's one of your favorite stories about Einstein? One of the my favorite stories from the book is that this is the great transition period for Einstein when he goes from being obscure academic to the most famous person in the world and I love all the anecdotes of the pre-fame years of Einstein so for instance it's 1918 so this is three years after he finishes the theory of general relativity his magnum opus and he goes to Switzerland to give a series of lectures on relativity and they cancel the lectures because nobody's interested right there are not 12 people in the country of Switzerland interested in hearing Einstein talk about relativity now that's laughable exactly right and even a year after that it would have been laughable but at the time they're just like don't bother coming Albert there's you know we literally it would cost us too much money to heat the lecture hall if you come so we're just gonna cancel I bet those people felt stupid later yeah we missed the slight opportunity there right all those people that were offered a chance to listen to Einstein they were like nah what interesting thing could this guy have to say we like to think about mentors now it's very important for people coming into careers to have mentors can you talk a bit about the relationship that Einstein had with his mentor and then whether or not he became mentor as he moved forward that's a really good question and I think it's the role of mentors and mentees is super important in Einstein's life so his first sort of intellectual mentor is Ernst Mach sort of this physicist and philosopher and he's the one who teaches Einstein originally to not think about mathematics and philosophy and just focus on the concrete things and it's this kind of Machian approach that gives rise to special relativity in the first place and then Einstein has his miracle year in 1905 I should say Einstein has trouble with mentors early on because he hates authority figures so all the people who he should have been like sucking up to to get good letters of recommendation he's just pisses off when he's in college so that's why he has to take the job at the Padden office is because no one will write him a letter of recommendation 1905 comes he has his miracle year and some people are impressed and most importantly is Mach's Planck who's the great leader of European physics at the time and Planck is the editor at the Anallender Physique so he's the one who decides to publish Einstein's original papers and most people can't make heads or tails of relativity early on it's not at all clear why it's interesting or important but Planck is the one who says there's something really important here so he eventually gets Einstein the job in Berlin and kind of pulls him from obscurity and even once Einstein is in Berlin everybody's kind of looking around and saying what is this guy here for and it isn't if it wasn't for Planck nobody would have paid any attention to this Planck keeps saying you've got to listen to what this guy has to say you've got to pay attention and Einstein is deeply grateful for this another one of his mentors at the time is Hendrik Lorenz his Dutch friend who has this kind of fatherly relationship and we have these great stories of the two of them meeting and like Lorenz would set up interesting problems for Einstein to solve and then like gather people around so they could all watch him solve the problem the the public challenges yep that's exactly it it's like set him up for Jeopardy or something and then and then the flip side of that is once Einstein becomes famous he does what he can to help out I think particularly marginalized people that is once he starts feeling marginalized as a Jew himself he feels the need to help out people who who are having trouble fitting in as it were so one of the classic examples here is Emmy Notter of Notter's Theorem so she's she's teaching at Gerdengen but without pay for years and years because that's forbidden that women can't actually take the habilitation drift and become professors so Einstein starts writing letters and he's like this is ridiculous this is the she's the best mathematician I have ever met we have to fix this right and his ability to or in his willingness to help out junior scholars and marginalized scholars turns out to actually be kind of life or death after the Nazis come to power in 1933 because suddenly so Einstein has to flee the Nazis and he ends up in New Jersey of all places right but he's in America and he's had needs to he knows there are all these nowadays we would say at risk scholars in Europe who need to get out there and he dedicates years of his life to finding them jobs and getting them visas getting them into countries where they will be safe from the Nazis so mentorship for many years there is not just a matter of kind of intellectual work but literally life for death we know that history has a tendency to repeat itself if we don't learn from it and right now we are in a time that is right with populist ideals and a bit of nationalism thrown in there how do you see what when you look at the scientific landscape of today versus the early part of the 19th century do you see any parallels do you see any lessons that we could take with us well I think there are definitely some worrying signs these days so for instance the NSF these days is checking to see whether American scientists have unacceptably close ties to Chinese and Iranian scholars right so a couple of scientists at Emory lost their positions just last week I think over undisclosed Chinese ties right and these are not specific concerns it's not like they're being accused of espionage on some specific point but rather there's the sense that it's not okay for American scientists to be working closely with scientists who are seen to be in competing nations and that's of course much gentler than what happened at the beginning of World War 1 but it's the same problem right there's this sense that it's not acceptable to work with scientists across borders and this gets there's often a hope that there's something about science that will just fix this problem automatically right science is automatically international and rises above questions of nationalism but I think as you say history shows us that that's not the case there's plenty of scientists who say science should be nationalistic and should be closely tied to military or political concerns and it takes people like Einstein and Eddington who consciously say no that's not what science is supposed to be like and they have to do their science differently and they have to make connections with different sorts of people and put themselves out on the line so if we want to push back against the kind of creeping scientific nationalism we see today the only solution is for scientists to step up and do their science differently to push back against that and say that's not how they think it should work do you think the internet is a is good for our continued scientific communications or do you think with the do you see the how do you see that well I should say Einstein would have been happy to have the web as a work that would have solved a lot of his problems at the day but even in 1914 they had what they thought of as instantaneous communication which was the telegraph network so there was actually kind of a proto scientific internet done over telegraph lines at the start of the war so observations could get sent around quickly and such but the center of that was in Kiel which is in Germany so as soon as the war began the British Navy cuts the telegraph lines and all of a sudden this worldwide network was gone so I think the lesson there is that we should not get we should not be complacent about our connectivity it could be removed quite quickly because it's just as easy to cut a fiber optic cable today as it was a telegraph cable then maybe satellites will save us I don't know the idea too of reading Einstein's letters could monitor communications it's really much easier done now in fact it's archived you don't even have to send somebody there on the right day to intercept and so it's a whole I was going to say it would be a sort of canary coal mine sort of situation to see collaborations between scientists across borders being being shut down as they prelude but you're explaining this is already something that we are now facing and that is now taking place yes I think that's right we're a few steps along it's a something that I think not a lot of people are aware of so this is an important thing so what are you what are you doing moving forward to help with these problems are you or are you working on your books that's one of the reasons I wrote the book to try to put out some of these historical lessons that I think we've forgotten over the last hundred years and as a teacher you have to hope that the work you do in the classroom every day will come to fruition down the line right because I'm not a climb over the barricades kind of guy and I'm glad there are people like that out there who do that work and I hope I can support them with ideas and stories stories are really important the stories we tell define us for sure and your podcast is full of stories I've gotten to be a guest on your podcast and it was so enjoyable but I would love it if you would tell our audience about the what the if podcast yeah so I should say it was a pleasure having you on this is one of our first guests actually as I recall so on what the if my friend Phillip Shane and I we get together and we change something about the universe so it might be what if there was no gravity what if water froze at a different temperature in your case what if people were birds yeah I got to pick a kind of bird and it was like we're all Shrikes now and then we and then we run with whatever that thing is and it turns out to be we end up in some absurd place as I recall with the Shrikes we had a whole Shrike society of reported birds songs and enemies being impaled on trees and things and then along the way the thing is that the doing that thought experiment really thinking through the consequences of changing some little thing means you need to think through the science really deeply and figure out the connections between things that you might not otherwise see so it's a game right Phillip likes to call it a game show because it is a game right we're just kind of having fun but in the process of figuring out the rules of the game we learn something about those rules right and hopefully we understand the science a little bit better at the end of the day and have some fun while we're doing it yeah and I mean there was a TV show years ago called connections that did this wonderful job of taking you through a scientific idea the thread that carried it from one modality to another but in this case if you learn the connections by that one shift what are the dominoes that fall what are the things that are affected and I kept having to be reminded over and over again oh my gosh we're birds okay how do I think like this bird if I were a strike what would I do right now that is exactly it right or if I was not restrained by gravity right now how would that change the sort of choices I would make I would tie myself down well that's down what's down exactly if I'm on the planet and I want to stay on the planet then I'm going to have something to attach me to the earth I want to stay down here but why I don't know yes okay so we're starting to play the game right now here we go oh my goodness you know what would be super fun we should find a way to do what's week in science what the if crossover yeah yeah we could do a hero we could team up I will be in touch with you both about this okay that would be great we often get our ideas from fine stories of the week so if you find something juicy right I don't know I'm imagining pulling stories out of a bowl this is what happens now let's roll with it could be fun is there anything else that you'd like to tell us about your book or your work and what you're doing right now well it's kind of what we were saying a minute ago it's an appeal for the importance of stories in science right to remember that a scientific discovery or an equation or experiment isn't a singular thing but it's the result of real human people interested in real things talking to other people and that they screw up and they make mistakes but because they care about things and they push forward we get stuff done I really want science to be kind of a messy thing actually I want people to understand it's a warts and all approach to science because I feel a lot of my experiences with a lot of my students they're told early on third grade that science is all about rationality and if they don't get the right answer they've done something wrong and it doesn't feel connected to their life at all so I'm trying to tell stories about how science is connected to our lives and it's even if you're a poet or a dancer or a politician there are interesting things in science for you that you should care about if you're a politician especially I would recommend you start paying attention to what is available in the knowledge banks of science that would be helpful let's vote for more science oriented politicians Matthew Stanley author of Einstein's war how relativity triumphed amid the vicious nationalism of world war one it is available now if you are interested in the book thank you for joining us on twist tonight it's been really great talking with you this is so fun great hope to talk to you again soon yeah me too we'll be in touch thank you alright everyone let's take a break right now and when we come back we will have a follow on to the end of Dr. Stanley's interview what has science done for you lately and we have Blair's animal corner coming up we have the science yet to come stay tuned for more this week in science new conclusion the methods of hypothesis and patience are the only things I need put on a pair of goggles and go looking for the things I couldn't see thank you for joining us for this episode of this week in science we do appreciate you joining us for this time in your life you're taking your precious time and you're sharing it with us and we hope that you're learning interesting things because we are I mean that's why we do this it's so much so much fun science needs to be shared we need to be talking about it and understanding how it applies to our lives let's share more of it you can help us share twist by telling people to go to twist.org and to subscribe to our podcast or to subscribe to our YouTube page where they can also find videos of this week in science we are available also on iTunes, Google Play we make it easy with a nice orange subscribe button for the big three there but we are available other places Spotify, Pandora, Spreaker tune in, radio.com some of the big places out there you will find this week in science 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next oh I think it is time for this weekend what has science done for me everyone this week we have been blessed by a letter from one of our facebook followers and the letter is this hi guys my name is johnny blind man hamson I am blind and I just love your show for sure it makes me look good in front of people for sure and gives me lots of toys to play with if you want to see to play with if you want to see much more of me just look for me on youtube just search for blind man cyber cave show and johnny plays the keys thank you guys hope this gets on your show I only have one person watching me so far we'll see you later from johnny blind man and his computer lacia love you this was and this is from lacia in brackets done by voice only very cool what I can do thanks to science so this whole note was written by voice through a computer interface johnny is blind and he has also sent us a voice message which I'm going to play right now oh why is it so quiet oh it's quiet I don't know why 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science done for you lately I need some more everyone I need them send them to me the letters of what science has done for you I need them now don't be don't be scared that it's whatever you write won't be enough it's always enough if you're sending something come on you're sharing it's great we need you to do that share with me share with us kirsten at thisweekinscience.com or send a message to our facebook page facebook.com this week in science we got to keep this segment of the show going and now do you know what time it is is it finally time oh yeah we're just going to talk about science now no it's time for Blair's Animal Corner oh with flair oh my goodness I have an amazing story about mole rats mole rats we already know they're immune to cancer and you can spill acid on them they're not technically immune to cancer they're just they're just they're just they're just they're just they're just they're just they're just they're just basically immune to cancer they don't grow tumors they have a resistance to tumors so popular media would often say like oh mole rats are immune to cancer it's all splitting hairs but basically they're amazing and they're really good at survival and they avoid a lot of the worst parts of life which is very interesting so if we can figure out how they do that that would be very advantageous to us potentially but one of the things that we're resistant to is if you splash acid on them in a very scientific and methodological fashion they don't seem to mind which ultimately comes down to pain receptors mole rats are insensitive to many kinds of pain and this bit of research coming out this week from the Max De Bruyck Center for Molecular Medicine is looking at specifically how they avoid the sensation of pain from different stimuli so about 10 years ago the Max De Bruyck Center of Molecular Medicine became famous this was about in 2008 because they found that mole rats felt no pain when exposed to acid or capsaicin which is a substance in chili peppers that gives them their spice so if you've ever accidentally chopped a jalapeno and then touched your eye, I've done that that is because of capsaicin that terrible burning painful sensation so in the experiments in 2008 they found that in general these mole rats showed an amazing resistance to pain specifically is the naked mole rat in this 2008 study they didn't seem to mind the acid or the capsaicin so in this new study they went to South Africa and Tanzania to look at pain sensitivity a little more broadly they wanted to see what was happening specifically why they were immune to certain pain what specific types of pain and if it's something that could be extrapolated to humans so they looked at naked mole rats and eight other related species a lot of mole rats, a lot of people don't know there are many types of mole rats not just the naked ones so they looked at nine species all looking at their response to three substances that usually cause quite a bit of pain in humans and other mammals those substances were diluted hydrochloric acid definitely ouch capsaicin ouch and allyl isothiocyanate AITC AITC is what gives wasabi its hot taste so kind of another side of the coin in relation to capsaicin the mole rats are naturally exposed to these substances or something very similar in the wild from a bunch of things one of the big ones is the food that they eat they live near and eat roots that have some of these kind of spicy elements to them which is to keep other animals from eating them but also there was one type of mole rat which I'll get to in a second that lives alongside ants that have a very painful bite so knowing that they looked at these nine different species and they found that three mole rat species were insensitive to acid those three were not closely related through evolution so this is most likely a convergent trait two of those three species did not show evidence of pain from capsaicin and the third so when they injected the capsaicin into their paw they just kind of lifted their paw they licked at it which is a general demonstration of pain and so there was a response to the capsaicin in one of the three but then just one mole rat species was as they say impervious to AITC that was the wasabi like compound it was not the naked mole rat it was the high velled mole rat which is named after the region in eastern South Africa where they're found so from there looking further they found what the AITC does specifically it attacks amino acids in the body and can destroy proteins and that's why other species avoid coming into contact with it and that might be physiologically why there is pain involved they took sensory tissue from the spinal cord and dorsal root ganglia of all nine species that they looked at in the dorsal root ganglia they're clusters of neurons that transmit pain signals through the spinal cord with sequencing technology they compared around 7,000 genes inside that dorsal root ganglia and they found that two genes were altered within the animals that felt no pain in the high velled mole rats these genes had ion channels TRPA1 and NAV1 7 it is known that these two channels are related to pain perception AITC the wasabi compound and many other irritants found in roots which again the mole rats eat activate one of these ion channels TRPA1 so that all is making sense so far that that would be related to the pain response from this wasabi channel that is the only one that was switched off in the mole rat so they definitely zoned in on this one ion channel related to this AITC compound when they blocked that channel by administering a drug the mole rat was suddenly sensitive to the wasabi compound and one day later they were indifferent once again which means that ion channel you could use a simple pain reliever to temporarily shut that down so that is a very interesting start they also found that the high velled mole rats as I mentioned before they share their burrows with Natal drop tail ants they have a pungent venom that when they dilute that and then inject it into the paw of a mole rat they it's using the same ion channel when they blocked that ion channel once again the animals they they had a sensitivity to the venom so the they were definitely finding that both this root and these ants had to do with a pain receptor that in these animals that live in those areas they found the exact ion channel that was causing this so from here this is a lot of mumbo jumbo to say this one particular mole rat is like as far as we can tell the king of avoiding pain from otherwise very painful things and they have figured out the exact ion channel responsible which means that's something that we can use and potentially extrapolate further and further and further to make pain relief way better but could we do it by eating the roots that would be a very spicy root we have to block the ion channel first right we would have to evolve we would have to adapt our own our own blockade to the spiciness of the root this is how interesting I mean it's an ecological it's a it's a physiological solution to an ecological problem the ants and the roots and the pain and like I want to live here but I don't like all this pain so we're going to just block it so and ignore it because it's not doing me any damage I would be very interested to see more about the mole rat family tree and this is something that I could do I know the information's out there I could do my own research and figure it out I'm very curious how old this family tree is and how old each of these species are because it really sounds like they have through convergent evolution they have the mole rats in particular keep finding a way to live where nothing else can live so there's something going on there so they're an evolutionary tree their family tree is really good at popping up mutations that allow them to live where nothing else can something's going on there but that are different and that are kind of these extreme these adaptations for extreme environments that when we look at them we go hey that might be really nice I'd like to not get tumors hey it would be really nice to have a high pain tolerance or to be able to manage chronic pain right which again I've talked about this on the show before pain there's a reason there's an evolutionary reason that we feel pain fire hot right like it's teaching our body what to not do so that we don't break our body basically is why pain exists so we don't want to eliminate pain entirely but in this case the mole rat lives with this root and these ants they would be in pain all day so that becomes white noise for pain so they have figured out their body has they have evolved in such a way that that specific pain goes away because it's not beneficial to them anymore it's all the time pain so they don't really need it but yeah I think it's all the time pain pain yeah which often that's the problem with chronic pain in humans right something is going wrong in the body where you're getting just this low level or sometimes high level of constant pain and your body doesn't need that because then not only does that just suck for you personally but it's it's reducing your ability to feel other pain that you actually need to feel anyway yeah rats yeah pain because it's general and not specific so what pain is good what pain is bad what pain is neutral how do we manage it apparently the mole rats have branched off around the time of porcupines the Eurasian porcupines from a family tree that's split off separately from mice rat hamsters beavers right very interesting yeah make it more rat more closely related to a guinea pig than to a hamster yeah yeah because guinea pigs and mole rats what's your next story oh it's about sponges first let me ask the audience did you all know that sponges are animals so I have to start there not everyone knows that they are in the kingdom they are animals porifera which is why I had my pee popping earlier so sponges they are these little unsuspecting filter feeders all over the planet most places that are wet they can filter about 10,000 liters of water a day and new research tells us that they can actually catch DNA in the water column oh since they're filtering that would make sense so we've talked a few times on the show before about environmental DNA and how you can just kind of scoop up a bunch of water from the ocean and you can figure out who was swimming there earlier that day but our current methods for doing that are pretty problematic for a bunch of reasons one is that they have to filter through water manually first so you kind of have to dredge through this huge volume of water to find a little bit of environmental DNA that's hanging out in there then there's also the possibility of DNA contamination did you accidentally put human DNA in there when you were sampling did your remotely operated vehicle bring in DNA from the last sampling trip there's also things that can happen there preserving water samples as a result risks in degrading DNA the longer you hold it the less DNA survives and then also bringing machines into certain regions that are ecologically of note areas where there's animals that might get scared away or disturbed by bringing in a machine to do some sort of water filtration and DNA isolation might be problematic and might be illegal so what this new study has found is that sponges could be doing this job for us as they filter feed they are filtering through water and DNA environmental DNA is getting caught up in the sponges body cavity they are found in every aquatic habitat including freshwater habitats and they are not selective filter feeders they're not moving they're in one place they're just letting water move through them all day they are also pretty resilient you can tear off a piece of sponge for sampling and they don't get stressed out it's not like coral where they'll expel anything they just grow it back it's pretty much it and so they in this research project from University of Salford they found that they could actually really easily isolate the sponge DNA and throw it out there was a particular DNA primer with a short sequence that allowed them to identify the sponge DNA and isolate it so that they were just stuck with the environmental DNA which is what they wanted and then they used that process in tandem with meta bar coding which sorts a jumble of DNA from tissue samples into distinguishable species specific piles they just sort them into different types of piles throughout this very short sampling process they found 31 taxa most of them as you might imagine were fish but they also found whettle seals and chin strap penguins the sample that had the penguins in it was identified later to be offshore of a penguin breeding colony so it proved effective in identifying what hung out there a lot so this is a cool way that you could potentially get some environmental DNA find out who's living in the area without bringing in a machine and reducing the amount of water filtration you need to do the other exciting thing about this is that if you're not just looking for areas that are close to the sea floor which is where sponges hang out if you want to find out more about closer to the surface in the open ocean ocean there's a possibility that you could use other filter feeders like jellyfish or salps which sieve water but are floating you could potentially use them to look at the environmental DNA inside absolutely yeah take advantage of the the species there well I mean I guess the idea starts with the best way of collecting that well we could take a sponge and submerse it there you go what if we used a sponge we're already there we'll just borrow a couple yeah oh my goodness yeah oh my goodness I love it it's kind of a simple solution to a complex problem it's one of those things where the second you hear it you go it makes no sense I've been doing that all along you don't always think about it since we're getting towards the end of the show do you want my quick story to round out the animal corner it is time for our quick stories at the end of the shows so yeah I gotta make your long story quick time for quick stories yeah give it to me Blair great a new WCS that's wildlife conservation society lids study looks at the role of Asian elephants in their ecosystem I'm sure you've heard a lot about African elephants being architects dredging out paths and pulling down trees but in this case Asian elephants are creating frog condominiums where in their footprints yeah frog condos the elephant developers they're making habitats for frogs okay I love it they're predator free because fish can't live in an elephant footprint they are rain filled for they can actually stay for up to a year filled with water and they are temporary habitat where frogs and tadpoles and eggs can use they can use the footprints as stepping stones so they can stay there until they're big enough and strong enough to go to another footprint to another footprint to a pond so this is another way that elephants are ecosystem engineers most as I mentioned most of the research on this has been done on African elephants but in this case the Asian elephants have a really really big part of the frog life cycle in Myanmar that's fascinating it is interesting we have these conversations occasionally about animals as engineers beavers are of course obviously but large animals like elephants are too and this is yet another way animals in their actions affect habitat create habitat create create the ecosystem speaking of what the if if all the Asian elephants were gone there might be no more frogs in Myanmar say it isn't so it's not so yet save the elephants save the elephants that's right and the amount of red recently the demand for ivory is going down and so the number of elephants being killed for poaching of ivory is also decreasing yes we're doing it we're working we're doing it that or is there just less elephants to poach and the price of ivory skyrocketed I like my story better than your story I think they know how to test for those variables yeah all right I have a couple of quick stories all about microbes and mice and some crazy experiments that have been done here so this last week publishing in Nature magazine research or it's Nature Communications researchers have published their study in which they gave fecal transplants to mice from children with autism and the mice developed autistic like symptoms what yes so the researchers at Caltech they put fecal samples from children with and without autism into the stomachs of germ free mice these mice had no microbiomes of their own to begin with they behaved as they did they mated pairs of these mice with the same microbiome so their offspring would be exposed so you start with no microbes you give them the with or without and then mate them and the offspring were the ones that were exposed those offspring in the autistic fecal sample group developed like symptoms in that they were less social and performed more repetitive like motions so this is an interesting follow up on the study we're talking about very recently where they did the fecal transplants microbiome wipeout transplants on autistic kids and saw 50% reduction in symptoms two years later what if you took this and put it down where there wasn't so now we have two different looks at this in the same way and now it's now we're not yeah there are still missing links we don't have it it's not causal for sure but it's getting there and this is corroborative evidence as you're saying which is very it's saying a lot in pushing our ideas in one direction so more research will definitely be to come researchers are going to be looking into what exactly bacteria are doing in the gut to create or possibly lead to these symptoms the gut brain axis is a major area of study and along those lines there is a recent study that is just out in proceedings of the national academy of science if you shorten it it's penis and young blood not just microbes but researchers researchers discovered that the blood of young mice is enriched in certain factors that lead to synaptic connectivity between neurons and so the blood of young versus old contains neural connectivity proteins that lead to connectivity which is very exciting and then again all the time studies that we've talked about rejuvenation in old mice by getting infusion of young mice blood now we're looking at a possible mechanism for neural connectivity which I would assume may affect the nervous system therefore we may this might be whereas before we were seeing the correlation between taking out the old putting in the new blood of young mice into an old and having them act now we're starting to get down to mechanisms for why oh look what happened this may be the why coming out of this study and again along those lines we're back to fecal transplants my final story is from researchers who published in nature communications and in their study they housed old mice with young mice and because the mice groom each other is what they think the old mice saw their gut immune system start to act younger they also did fecal transplants themselves and to also show that the fecal transplant from a young mouse to an older mouse could improve the performance of the older mouse's gut immune system but you don't necessarily have to have the fecal transplant if you're a mouse because you lick other mice and so all the bacteria are getting passed around but there is definitely there is immune system there's microbes there are nervous factors there we're piecing things together and this story is just in general getting more and more interesting bottom the chat room all this means is Justin or Jackson probably wants to drink young people's blood yes it's right that's all no no no young mice the blood of young mice still I don't know about that bring me the blood of a young mouse bring me their blood yes we will be young we will be young haha alright Justin give us your stories for the end of the show please two children's teeth these are the ones that fall out before the adult teeth show we're discovered in a remote archaeological site in northeastern Siberia and they're revealing a previously unknown group of people that inhabited the region international team of scientists led by professor Viller Slugh who holds position at St. John's College University of Cambridge director of the Foundation Center for Geogenetics University of Copenhagen have named the new group the ancient north Siberians so they got DNA from these teeth these children's teeth and one of the things that was interesting is that they didn't fear that these two children were interbred I mean we're a product of inbreeding meaning that they needed to be for this definition of population in the area of 500 or more individuals for that to have been possible this was they have thousands of artifacts mostly animal bones ivory stone tools evidence of human habitation and at this site known as the yena rhinoceros horn site which was discovered in 2001 so the yena rhinoceros horn site has all these artifacts just two human remains of these disposable teeth that were found and in sequence interesting thing about the sequencing these are not related to Siberians or really so much modern-day Asians it's they're much more closely related to European populations early European populations at the time so this is a group that when when people were sort of spreading out and taking territories they think had already gone to Siberia previous to the European Asian split divergence that took place in western Eurasia so a very ancient group they think they were living there at some time around 31,000 years ago surviving in an ice age type environment they were hunting woolly mammoths woolly rhinoceroses in Siberia so really interesting also part of the larger study they did DNA analysis of human remains that they found at another site that was dated about 10,000 years old which is an interesting mix of Siberian East Asian and very similar to what would be considered Native American North American population DNA so a not a precursor to the Native American populations it would have been a concurrent population that hadn't made a crack but they are finding relations in that the crossing over the Bering Strait scenario it's another puzzle piece that now has a identifiable location genetically whereas we hypothesized that this took place based on larger gene flows from other ancient people of the times it would have been there long after the track had been made but close enough of a family resemblance there too so a lot of interesting discoveries taking place there and then the last story I've got for us today oh where is this one this is researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the VA Boston healthcare system have uncovered new vital sign for engaging survival and likelihood of having unplanned hospitalization and older patients with blood cancers rather specific but it all comes down to the speed at which they walk which we talk about you could predict longevity on a large meta study just on people self reported walking speed and it doesn't take much people in this study published in the journal Blood which I'm a big fan of the researchers report that for every 0.1 meter per second decrease and how fast patients could walk a 4 meter a jaunt the risk of dying unexpectedly going to the hospital or using the emergency room increased by 22% 33% and 34% respectively every 0.1 meter per second was a significant increase in your potential dramatic decline association they say was strongest in patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma so the average patient age in this was up there was 79.7 this was this was not a sprint this was but still in the older age category 448 adults and all participated they had to be 75 years or older it's just 4 meters see how fast they make it 0.1 meter per second decreases were dramatic in the negative outcomes so you titled this story walk don't run but it should really be called run don't walk yeah pick up the pace but it's one of these things like what comes first is it are we just recognizing that they are in a more decline state because the walking pace is a little bit shorter or do we correlate it to the other study that showed that people who walk faster live longer because that's also sort of the interesting thing about this is that they it was the correlation remained regardless of the aggressiveness of the cancer that these people had have a more aggressive cancer but if you walked a little bit faster you did not see the dramatic negative outcome so whatever you're doing we don't know why it's all correlative it's mean nothing yet but whatever pick up the pace a little bit just walk just consciously think about it walk a little faster than you did yesterday and walk a little bit faster tomorrow as well walk fast chase those children young blood be young forever that's right the fountain of youth we will find it no that's not what this is about but still I will take one please have we come to the end of our show I think we have I think we have also thank you for another great show thank you everyone for listening to the show thank you to Fada for helping in the YouTube chat room for social media and show notes help thank you to identity for for helping to record the show thank you to Gordon McLeod for helping in our chat room chat room to maintain things keep things above board we do love all you chatters too thank you for chatting and asking questions and making comments it makes it so fun and thank you to our Patreon sponsors thank you to Paul Disney Richard Onimus Ed Dyer Andy Gross Dupalik Philip Shane Ken Hayes Harrison Prather Charlene Henry Joshua Fury Steve DeBell Alex Wilson Tony Steele Craig Landon Mark Miseros Jack Matthew Litwin Jason Roberts 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This Week in Science. This Week in Science. I keep hitting the wrong keyboard. Hey everybody, it's the after show. It's time for the after show. The after show. The after show. It's time now for the after show. Please don't go. Or you can if you want, but you know, it's the after show. I'm closing windows. Tabs all over the place. I'm closing tabs. Gonna talk science. Yeah. Sorry Blair. I didn't mean to be slamming your laptop in the chat room during the last song. No, it's the. It's walking real slow if you catch my drift. I know you've talked about it before and I thought people were paying attention and keeping up and then they're talking about me being a mean girl over here. No, no, no. It's like news mean girl. And I was just saying what I thought was an obvious back. No, I just. When Blair gets a new computer. Yeah, then maybe. Everything's fine. Fine. No, but the hot dog was wondering. I think it was a question Blair. At Kiki Blair and would like to know. See where you're using to do the podcast right now. It's just Google Hangouts and Blair can do it. No problem. Yeah, so I actually. I. Understand. It was a conversation in discord. Where everyone else was saying. Oh, we want to get. Twist on Twitch. And they were saying, you know, they were asking all the reasons why we haven't made that switch fully. And. We were talking about a bunch of things wanting to be able to simulcast on YouTube, et cetera. And I also mentioned that in the current situation, I do not have the software or hardware to host if you were not hosting. But also there's some barriers to having guests on. And so. There was all of these questions about with software it was. I don't actually know, but I know I don't have it. So it's right now it is moot. But yeah, I use. That was the conversation that happened before. Yeah. I use, I use V mix and I was. Just thinking about, you know, like how many licenses. Like my license, how many instances, installs it allows. And. It may be the kind of thing. It's, it's, but it's only allowed to be on one computer at a time, but it may be the kind of thing that if you downloaded it. And had it and use my license. You know, if you're only using it for. The twist broadcast when I'm not around, then it might be okay. So. Yeah, we should test it sometime. But I also am concerned that. Because it's, it's decent hefty software. And it takes some setting up and it's, yeah, it's, yeah. And it could, you could load it and try it and see if it works. And it could be, and it could also, but there's also, I had to up, I had to pay more to get a bigger internet to be able to do stuff with V mix on Twitch. Yeah, I have to have, I had to get a bigger internet connection to be able to do it. And so hence my comments, not being tech mean girl. Yeah, I know. Everybody take a, take a big fat chill pill. Yeah. I'm Gord. Yeah. I mean, it's true. Blair could also possibly do OBS. Like if Blair wanted to download the open broadcast system. A lot of people use OBS. It is free and. Very good. I don't know that OBS. Like what. I don't know. I don't know how OBS allows you to bring people in. From different calls and stuff like that. So Gord, maybe you could help us if we want to figure that out. I got V mix because it has it's call, it's call V mix call involved, which is. It basically takes care of it. It's a browser based video call system that I don't have to mess with. And so that's why I got V mix. Yeah. I think that's something that makes our show particularly interesting. And our tech needs is that we have this kind of three way call going. Yeah. Yeah. So it's definitely, it's an extra, extra hurdle, which my whole thing is. I don't want to cause a whole bunch of weird stuff trying to see what's going to work on my computer. If we're not sure what we're going to use, how we're going to use it because technology changes so often. So if we end up making the move, if something happens with Google, I will be more than happy to jump in, download all the things, try all the things, do all the things. But until that happens, it seems like a lot of ways to that hurt personally. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So Gord and Fada are asking about Tom and Tom Merritt and Daily Tech News Show. And I know they are changing things up and it's work that Roger and another person have done to figure out a new setup for them. And they are making the jump to Twitch. And actually this week, I was on the Daily Tech News Show and was thinking, Hey, maybe I should talk with Roger and find out because I think it's pretty much Tom knows what's going on, but I think it was pretty much Roger and someone else who figured out all their tech needs to move. And they do very similar to what we do, bringing in callers and all that. So, yeah, I'm going to, so it's already on my mind to reach out to them. And speaking, I know they just jumped. They did, they jumped, but they did one crossover where they simulcast to YouTube this week because they wanted to make sure everyone knew they were going over to Twitch, but they're not going to be doing YouTube anymore. I think at all. Maybe they might upload stuff after they're not doing live anymore, which is going to be interesting. Um, yeah, totally stable geniuses. Yes. Yes, yes. But on the Daily Tech News Show front, now that Justin has come back and you're here, I was speaking with them this week and Tom is still very keen on doing a twist crossovers. And so I am going to be sending emails between you both and Roger, who is does their scheduling. So the two of you can schedule to be on episodes of the Daily Tech News Show. Fun. Yeah. So the thing about doing their show is you have to be able to do it. Like it's like, uh, it starts at 130 in the afternoon. So on a weekend. No, it's five. It's Monday through Friday. Okay. There are days of the week. I can make that work. Yeah. So if there are days of the week, you can make it work. But if you can't make it work, you can't make it work, but we're going to go on lunch, Justin. Yeah. And so at some point we're going to have the crossover. So Sarah. Tom has been on the show. Sarah is going to come on the show. She's fun. Um, And maybe Roger also. Yeah. We're going to have. Hosting crossovers. It'll be fun. Sounds exciting. Yeah. We're bringing people in doing stuff. I, Sarah is awesome. Gord. I totally agree. She's great. And I think it'll be fun to have her on the show. I like the idea of crossovers and I want to figure out how to do a what the if crossover. Yeah. That sounds very fun. Like we have to go to New York. And. I love, you know, I love New York. That's where they are. Or maybe we can meet them somewhere at a science festival and do some kind of. Some kind of special episode. I mean, we can always just do an episode. But I kind of feel like the way they do their show. And the way we do our show, like if we could figure out how to. Merge them in some interesting way for an audience, like it would. Could be a really great live show. Yeah. Sounds awesome. Those two us and then maybe like. A scientist or two and everybody like. I don't know if you can figure out. Yeah. You know, because there is as Philip describes it is Philip Shane. It's already a game show of sorts. So let's make it. Yeah. All concept of improvised thinking. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not too thought out. Which is. Kind of how I go about. I think that would just be normal. Day. I have questions about next week. Yes. Speaking of, I forgot to mention that during the show because we were all over the place. Next week, we are going to Santa Fe next week. Wednesday. We're normal. Yeah. Then we go to Santa Fe. When do you Justin? When do you go to Santa Fe? Yeah, you gotta send me those tickets again. It's Thursday. So I fly on Friday. Thursday. Okay. Justin. I think you might fly Wednesday. Don't you. Justin's frozen. So that's interesting. What just happened there? I didn't do that. I have. Oh yeah. Maybe I am flying Wednesday now. I don't know why. June 12th. That's a Wednesday. That's Wednesday. June 12th. So you may be missing next week's show. I guess so. All right. So time to find somebody else to do the show. Boy, we thought that went through. Just that little detail. Didn't think about it. I am. Marshall and I were considering today. Extending our stay. In Santa Fe for another day. Maybe. When are you currently flying back? Monday. Same about the same time as you all. So we would all kind of go back around the same time. Okay. That's what I was going to ask about was how you're planning on getting from Albuquerque to Santa Fe? Apparently there is a train or a shuttle or something that everybody was like, you just get on the shuttle and it takes you there. It takes an hour or so and it's really easy. Okay. Because I would also. We could run a car. I don't know what you're planning on doing on like Sunday and Monday because we could potentially run a car. Yeah. There is also that. Yeah. So. I don't know. Thanks. Thanks. Maybe four or five things. I need to find out when I'm playing. Just look at how much a rental car would be that would fit a lot of people in it. We get a van. Yeah. The second thing is we should coordinate. I'll be in Albuquerque already. Yeah, you'll have to. You can either just meet us in Santa Fe or meet us back at the airport. Yeah. I'll probably want to pick you up at the airport. That was a reasonable thing to do. Yeah. And travel together from there. Yeah. There is a couple. There was a few things I think that we might want to go and check out in Santa Fe. So. Whether we Uber a van. Lift the van. Is there another one? That's your screecher. I don't know how many of these things are. I don't know if we need to. I don't know if renting a car is a thing people need to do anymore if you're staying within the city limits. I've definitely, I did it when I went to Galveston and it was very helpful. But that's Galveston. Well, this is New Mexico. Isn't New Mexico very sprawling? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I have a feeling Santa Fe has a modern transportation. Like. Did your screecher. Many vans are so expensive. I know. Airport. Let me just see AVR real quick. What's the, I don't know how to spell Albuquerque, guys. That's not spellable. I don't know how to spell Albuquerque. I don't know how to spell Albuquerque. I don't know how to spell Albuquerque. I don't know how to spell Albuquerque. I don't know how to spell Albuquerque. I don't know how to spell it. It's not spellable. It's hard to spell. If you get to ALBE and it didn't populate. It's ALBU, my friend. That's what I just found out. Albuquerque. Yeah. Albu. Albuquerque. 8706. I still have some adulting to do about this trip. Oh, went to the zoo today. Good old Sacramento zoo. Yep, school field trip. So I had three wild ones running around with me. It was about 100 degrees by the time we left. It's brutal. Yeah. The animals don't seem to like it when it's really hot. They become very inactive. Yeah, this is the thing. This is the great lie that has perpetuated about zoos. Is people assume when it's foggy out or it's a little bit on the chilly side that the animals are miserable. Oh, they love it. That's how they want it. They have hair on their body. They don't want it to be 100 degrees. Yeah. Lion was on its back. Oh yeah, I bet. They're actually kind of cute. Legs of Kimbo. Yeah, just like spread. Like I need any bit of breeze coming through to just go go on my underside, please. The new exhibit. Newish. They have a new exhibit. A new exhibit that was super popular was the me crats. Meerkats. Meerkats. No, me crats. What? Yeah. What are you talking about? Isn't it me crats? What's a me crats? Meerkats. Meerkats. Meerkats. Super cute. And but they're really active running around and like saying hi to everybody. Oh yeah. Well, they're weasels. So they're still not to be trusted. No, no. I don't trust them, but they were like standing up. They were right up to the glass, like following the kids, like, being really fun. And otters, the otters. Do you know what kind of otters they were? uh freshwater uh well all otters are fresh water well not all the others were where are typically you find them most active on like a rainy day but they were they were out and about which was I thought unusual the artwork was sleeping in full sun it has like an enclosure can go to in the shape of an art bark uh sleeping except for his ears we're sort of tracking like loud noises that was pretty cool uh draft zebras they don't care about the heat well they they're definitely they prefer a more temperate climate but they seemed fine red river hogs we're out red river hogging yeah the primates were all down for the camp yeah for sure yeah none of the primates wanted anything to do with today what did I miss uh oh zoo field trip today zoo field trip awesome sacramendi oh sacramental zoo that's a good zoo yeah all right lara quick challenge uh name a bad zoo well paris zoo is shut down that was a very bad zoo sounds like a bad zoo okay it was a lot of uh grass and chain link yeah um trying to think i've been to so many um so there are some zoos that i get very frustrated with their um their pedestrian flow this is something i get very like very frustrated about i should be able to walk an entire zoo and not have to double back and not miss anything yeah there should be a very clear pathway to walk and see everything and there's not a lot of zoos that have figured that out sacramental zoo is okay let's go back past everything we just saw so we can see that one thing we don't want to miss and then we're going to double back again so we can get out of that place because she's sacramental zoo is that a constantly yeah that's frustrating bear all right blare this will make and davis yes what happened so okay kiki arboretum the redwood patch which is kind of close to the little shopping area it's like it's like downtown davis it's almost like downtown yeah uh somebody spotted a bear yeah uh get there like it had to travel across sacramento across the causeway i think it came from the other way possibly because we occasionally there will be a bear that will show up in woodland this they think this is the same bear that showed up in back of it a little while ago um which is which is weird but it's sort of going the roundabout route it's a coastal it's a coastal bear well or at least it's coming they think they've moved it an hour and a half north i don't know who they released like there's nowhere that's rural 90 miles from here anymore no so i they just put the bear in some strange neighborhood it's just gonna wander into some other town now i love writing is it they they uh uh tranquilizer started it yeah and then it climbed a tree yeah and yeah that happens that's so that's one of the reasons they try not to drink specifically black bears because it's the thing that black bears do all the time it takes usually a even a good sedative will take about 30 minutes so any this is why when people say like when there are tragedies and things and stuff like that people always go like well why didn't they just tranquilize the animal it's because first of all it takes about 15 minutes for the vet staff to mix the drugs because you don't hold you can't just have drugs of the varying concentrations and volumes just sitting around so you have to estimate the size of the bear it's yes weight it's per kilogram yeah so you have to figure out what species it is and how big they are mix the drugs load the drugs get to the location and then after you get a tranquilizer in an animal first of all it usually pisses them off which is dangerous if they're in any sort of human space and secondly it takes up to a half an hour for a sedative to take effect a lot of the time if there's lots of adrenaline happening the first sedative doesn't even work and then you need to go for another one you got the adrenaline going so your first shot misses yeah i get it no the animal has the adrenaline going so their blood processes the sedative in a different way than anticipated so anyway um yeah that's why they try not to tranq black bears they try to catch them without tranquilizing them if they can is because they they always they're like uh oh i've been shot up a tree this one was but well in to the city and campus there's a bit it's there is an edge it is sort of on the edge of town from a very specific but it's all ag land and it's all inhabited and it's amazing that this bear made it to you this area without being spotted uh and this i mean there's i'm looking at the there's a lot of wild land out there and i'm you know so so woodland davis though it's you know between davis there's ag land or cities trees but there's davis to lake berry asa it gets more and more empty space you know that's just agricultural and then rural where it's rolling hills and oak oak scrub and then you've got around lake berry asa which probably there's a certain amount of fishing and then you probably have the creek that comes down next to winters and into davis and so you have this creek that goes lake berry asa to winters to davis and then probably even taking this bear all the way from lake county where some fires were a lot a couple years ago right which is what they also think it might have been driven away from its habitat by those fires exactly okay well i mean we see um mountain lions in like sausalito and nevado to bear yeah but i'm but i'm saying they're so bear neto much and it's very suburban neighborhood bear and mountain lion um range size are actually pretty similar um and so it's it's pretty interesting it's just a situation where um if you have wild spaces even if they're actually smaller than an average range for an animal is uh sometimes that can be enough for an animal to go unnoticed for a pretty long period of time or in some cases like with coyotes they'll go from space to space at dawn or dusk and then you won't see them and they're kind of hopscotch-ing from one very small wild space to another and you don't realize it because they're actually very good at avoiding human contact right and that could be what this is they could this bear could have hopscotch from um there's enough green space in uh in the sacramento area that i feel like you could definitely hopscotch from place to place down the delta towards davis and eventually you have to run into somebody but from barry us at a winters to davis down the puta creek greenland i mean yeah if you're moving at night i can see it but what i'm assuming is that no bear in my entire life has always mountain lions never bears yeah dozens though i am assuming of people saw the bear corner of the eye driving by maybe full on thought it was a stray dog or something saw it and just didn't really discounted the idea that it was a bear yep there's no way it's a bear because we all know what bears bears in the central valley that is just nothing we've never heard of ever i think also black bears are a lot smaller than people expect bears to be and i could see how especially out of the corner of an eye your brain would just tell you that's a big dog and that's what they do it's i've only seen brown bears uh and and the sierras right sierras and maybe or you will not mistake them for anything else they are big bears bears big bears big bears i got i got it within oh less than six feet of one once and let me tell you that thing was just its size was and it was it was it was cold and so as it breathed there was like smoke of steam coming out of its nose uh yeah bears don't mess with bears so i'm saying yeah yeah not to be messed with for sure no bears but i love that they just like found a place to how do you know where to deposit a bear there no there's a whole there's a whole network of not only uh people knowing where to deposit bears but bears have a strike system so uh the grizzly bears at the san francisco zoo for example had their two strikes and after that an animal is euthanized or placed and it's because if you move a bear enough times and they keep going back to human space that means they are completely conditioned to look for human space to find food so uh at a certain point there is no way for a bear to live functionally in the wild without endangering human lives and you know more than just you know valuing human lives over bear lives there's this whole issue of if there is an altercation between a human who has a gun and a bear humans can also get shot in that scenario there's all sorts of bad stuff that can happen so um at a certain point the decision has to be made to remove that bear from the wild because they can't go be a wild bear and so this vast network kind of figures all of that out and then based on that they can figure out how old the bear is what the bear's temperament is all this kind of stuff is there's space in zoos or wildlife centers and from all of that that animal is either placed or euthanized and i think in a bear like this they should have probably kept it in one of these uh rural community uh hodgepodge zoos type things it's i mean it made it to a like a pretty suburban neighborhood a an arboretum on campus of a university of 30 000 people something like this undetected and was just chilling out and didn't have an altercation i think that that bear should is probably already too acclimatized to being close to humans and should not have just been sent to the wild well everybody gets a second chance that's the policy like Blair said it's a strike policy and so if i catch the bear again that's another strike on its record but you don't yeah just one time and it's not run bear usually usually it's a two strike two strike policy for bears so um the idea is if they did it once maybe they got a nice treat from the trash but they still will go and forage like a normal bear they do it twice that's a good uh indicator that they will not be able to go out there and be a wild bear so normal foraging this is ag land there's normal forage growing everywhere that's yes but human food is always better for a bunch of reasons so if it's available if they're near it they're gonna go for it i just think the thing that i i understand all the things that you're saying that's very close to a better sushi restaurant but the issue you know there's human encroachment and then there's also like we were saying like the fires in lake county that destroyed a huge amount of habitat and probably pushed a large number of animals out which is maybe why that bear is out wandering because it's its range is now different because it's like i don't know where to find food so is it that it's going for human food or is it just that it's just figuring out its new life oh absolutely and i think um the the fires especially can cause fragmentation which is a huge problem for bears because their habitats so huge people think all the time like oh well there's this uh wild space and there's this wild space and there's this wild space but if a bear can't safely get yeah from one place to another because there's scorched earth in the middle or a freeway then they don't actually have that much functional space so yeah i think that the fires especially i mean that's been a huge driver in getting mountain lions in a lot of the more um more uh urban areas in the bay area is because after the sonoma fires a lot of mountain lions were pushed south towards san francisco and we had a mountain lion in the prosidio last year so um there's yeah there's all sorts of weird stuff happening um that kind of it pushes us back together in a way that is not conducive yeah eric and ak alaska is saying blare we had a brown bear that was added to the alaska zoo after it broke into the zoo twice after that you really want to be there put me in the zoo i just really want to be in the zoo usually the animals are breaking out this one's like i'm breaking in and man yeah life looks better in there well there are things that are pretty convenient about being in a zoo uh on call vet staff uh square meals every day um enrichment exercise i just can't make it on the outside i need the routines of the institution just i just want to live in a all expenses paid resort year round this is the bear breaking into the zoo there you go it's like breaking into a sandals did it i i want to wait well i want to know there did they did they let the bear in because that would i would just at that point all right we need the bear in in the zoo well that's a that's what eric says in the chat room is that it broke into the zoo twice so then um they kept it oh good okay because that's the two strike policy that bear is not gonna look for its own food it's gonna look for i love it that bear knows what it was doing yeah and for a prey animal in a zoo no predators no looking over the shoulder and yeah just live in life don't have to compete for resources live life um okay so next week yes no bears on the well apparently justin will be in albuquerque yeah fairly justin will will be waiting for us at our next location uh yeah we will text you i guess next friday to coordinate uh arriving at the airport great so that we can all travel to santa bay together did you receive no i probably got it i received the invitation to the vip party vip party all three of us are going oh um so quick question about that uh do i need to bring nice clothes oh i wasn't oh okay no i was not planning on that okay besides i i only have nice clothes oh never an issue excuse me yes please wear your finest rick and morty t-shirt and socks yeah and morty socks one is morty and i always put morty on the left because i feel like he gets left behind uh and your logic crazy oh my gosh they named the bear trouble that's great come on flying out we can be there is video of the releasing very interplanetary where they took him in the cage and let him go and he was running off in the distance and he's like what's wrong with you guys looks like a happening one minute i'm in a tree the next minute i'm in a cage and sore oh my butt hurts everything hurts um yeah so uh not packing anything nice okay got it what about uh what are we um what are we prepping for the show are we prepping some old stories that are planetary in nature or do you only want this week nothing that we've ever talked about before okay um i think it would so let's see we will be interviewing hold on let me get Jenna's email here festival zhoup scrolling down okay scheduled for 15 to 545 p m uh there will be time the previous podcast planetary red radio before we're only doing a half an hour no it's and no it's 90 minutes oh 415 to 545 oh i did not hear that i heard 415 to 445 whoa it's 545 so we have 90 minutes there yeah so i'm hoping we have one interview that is science related science related i would like to have a couple more stories i was also thinking it would be fun to get another um maybe grab another interview while we're there see what we can do um so what would you like me to prep that's kind of my question so i'm feeling like an animal corner might not be super appropriate unless it's somehow animals in space planetarily related yeah so look at look at uh interplanetaryfest.org and the schedule um the or no maybe the lineup you better look at June 15th yeah so um we've got extremophiles oceans first space second is another topic people are going to be talking about um let's see they're going to be screening the movie alien oh um you know so we can kind of you know take inspiration from the idea of you know interesting life on the planet things like like this week talking about the naked mole rats and it's relative shoot i should have saved it no it's fine you'll find another one um but yeah like thinking about okay animals and what would animals what how do how do animals adapt to their environments and animals as aliens okay nice as aliens uh and then i would just talk about humans mm-hmm we're the most alien form of life on this planet yeah ooh there's a beer garden there is did you see it's the area 21 yes i love it all funny um this will be fun ooh free screening of planet of the apes that's fun uh let's see ooh there's a cosmotedy market uh oh better leave some room in my suitcase cryptocurrency what microbes yep okay oceans good good good oceans first base second that sounds right up my alley time share in space music of spheres oh there's lots of stuff okay it's going to be packed all right i'll just have to interesting interesting interesting to come with an angle all right uh i gotta go why do you have to run away like this all the time it's it's because it's late and i'm in the old person i don't believe you but okay um are we should i bring any because i don't have much in the way of merch should i bring anything just trying to plan oh bring your fancy clothes besides uh i'm already bringing my tuxedo don't worry yeah tardigrades spiders in space i like it at any four things put on the outside of the international space station i don't think they were animals it wasn't they're tiny animals yeah bacteria they did put bacteria on the outside of international algae and bacteria they put two of every bacteria oh yeah let's just see what would happen look at the international space station it was the space arc um let's see so yeah next wednesday okay we won't be talking to justin justin then you just have to get stories for saturday next week and we are theming up with the interplanetary festival theme so in your own preparation and thinking in the next week or whatever just kind of look at the interplanetary website and get some ideas i know what interplanetary means do you yeah okay okay um they all showed up with the same stories yeah and then i do think let's see if that's good otherwise i would suggest not speaking okay my alaskan okay i'm flying so friday albuquerque three ish in the afternoon let's see what's the uh i land at 120 i can definitely hang out oh wait but that's my time i think how they do this no no they're an hour and a head i uh 230 sorry i arrive in albuquerque at 230 next next friday united the app here uh i'm just gonna go to the airport or the sign says does anybody know what where's Blair yeah sorry justin where's Blair oh yeah i land at 220 so that's perfect okay we land yeah so 220 230 justin just try and get to the airport when what day what friday the 14th around two o'clock 230 before that i need to know what my flight i just sent it to you i emailed oh email okay i was looking at the text i was looking for text i don't have any text messages i got it in my email i sent you an email check your email and then on monday i'm flying out at 325 yeah i quieted at 310 perfect in a week it's in a week that's why i'm asking so many questions that's why we're talking about this is silly billy no um so why you gotta be such a silly billy sometimes perspective context that's all we're talking about uh the context of me not being able to tell time or dates um kiki am i bringing my laptop of course okay as the answer to that ever been no yes it has technology at home yes it has technology at home we're not gonna need the first two times we went to new york i think i didn't bring my laptop i just brought printouts oh yeah that's back when i had paper and printers still in the old days so apparently we will have most of the stuff that we need most of the things that we need time for just to go i'm will have all the microphones we'll have a mixer um and i'm gonna bring the mevo and my ipad just in case they can make it work in case we can make it work it has worked for video audio has always been the problem so if we can figure out audio then great and maybe there's a tech person who can make it work when i can't yeah this then knows we've had for 10 years we don't know how to make it go it's it's only been probably four they will have they will have a laptop they will have a laptop there um and i'm sure so for our music and stuff like that we should definitely bring i'm gonna bring my laptop you bring your laptop um and yeah we'll see how it goes but yeah my plan is to very soon get a new laptop and then empty this laptop of pretty much everything but a browser and then this laptop will be my travel laptop great idea and all it needs to do is open itunes and browse perfect that's my hope once i get a new laptop yeah uh and yeah maybe i don't know i don't want to bring a bunch of stuff but i don't know maybe i'm gonna i don't know camera microphone that kind of stuff for talking to people that's extra bring a whole suitcase full of t-shirts i know i'll be like i carry all this stuff such an opportunity look my merchandise but i'm like i'm so lazy it's a lot it's a lot to take a lot to travel with and you have to pack it yeah yeah i mean patches are a good start patches and stickers badges i don't need no sticky badges yes ed i cannot wait to go see the georgio kief museum and i want to see meow wolf and i want to see santa fe and oh yeah los alamos national lab emailed me and asked if i want to visit can i push buttons i don't know toggle toggle i'm like i need a this is why i need another day oh my goodness hilas alamos yeah say good night justin good night justin say good night player good night player good night good night everyone i hope you all have a wonderful week i will be back on next wednesday we'll be back we will be back for more this weekend science i'll keep you all updated on my twitch stream for this friday scheduling things but i'm gonna do my best to make it happen and and then that's it i hope everyone has a wonderful science week we are round in the corners summer is coming have a good night sleep justin stop peeing so sarcastic good night