 Wait for the beginning What is that song every new beginning is every every something every new beginning is another beginnings and I think They might be Giants line. No, what what's up from it's a Totally insane that yeah, isn't that experimental film by they might be guys? That might be But we're ready to start in three two This is Twist this week in science episode number 636 recorded on Wednesday September 13th 2017 every ending is a new beginning Hey, everyone. I am dr. Kiki and tonight. We are going to fill your heads with a Viking warrior colorful cephalopods and The death of a spacecraft but first Disclamer disclaimer disclaimer there is more to the world you live in Than the world you are living on there are things so plenty to occupy your time with here It's true and much can be learned about the nature of stuff and the complicated organization of reality without ever looking up But there is much more going on that can be answered if we do up there over there Way way way out there the rest of the universe is waiting to be explored and thankfully some of us are up to the task We reach for new heights and reveal the unknown for the benefit of humankind That is the vision statement of NASA as they lift their gaze to those new heights They lift all of ours freely sharing what is learned and at the same time they have been looking back Constantly looking back revealing the unknowns here on earth as well And if revealing the unknown here on earth or elsewhere is something that you're into You have landed at the right location because it's now time for this week in science Coming up next To go to find the knowledge I seek. I wanna know what's happening What's happening? What's happening this week in science? What's happening? What's happening? What's happening this week in science? Good science to you, Captain Blair. And good science to you too Justin, Blair, and everyone out there Welcome to another episode of this week in science We are back and what a week it is So many things, so many stories, and we have a wonderful conversation to have tonight I'm so excited about the show ahead I have stories about water on the moon Some bad headlines this week in science Oh science headline writers and science writers What have you done? We've also got squirrel chunking And we are joined by Emily Lackdawalla from the Planetary Society to talk about Cassini So very excited to have her on the show, we'll introduce her more in just a moment Justin, what did you bring? I've got Viking games and embedded connectivity Embedded, nice, alright And Blair, what is the animal corner holding in store for us? I brought a couple of old staples to the corner today I brought some very scintillating, interesting, confusing, fascinating invertebrate sex And I also brought a little something for the cephaloenthusious That's cephalo-wonderful Yeah, cephalo-exciting So cephalo-exciting Oh my goodness And everyone as we move into our show I want to remind everyone that you can subscribe to the TWIST podcast on iTunes In the Google Play podcast portal In Stitcher, Spreaker, Tune In We're on YouTube and Facebook And you can also just search for us in all these places by looking for this week in science Visit TWIST.org for all sorts of show note information and links But now it's time for a segment we like to call What has science done for me lately? This week Tina Penman writes in and says, hi there My name is Tina Penman and I met you at the Science Communication Conference in January Thanks for TWIST! I started listening to the podcasts last week and I really enjoy them so far I hope you keep enjoying them Tina Here's what science has done for me A couple weekends ago I completed the 2017 Seattle to Portland bike ride With my friends Anna Dietrich and Nathan Pearson 203 miles in two days Wow! If it weren't for the inventors of the bicycle Which is up for a debate by the way And science I would not have been able to pedal on an actual bike from Seattle to Portland If it weren't for the gears on my bike I would not have been able to climb the rolling hills and glide back down at full speed Using gravity to my advantage If it weren't for speed If it weren't for my understanding of physics And pace lines I would have been trudging into the wind at 15 to 18 miles per hour Out in the open by myself If it weren't for our understanding of food, nutrition And the impact it has on energy levels We may have improperly refueled during the long ride Thanks to science we were able to conquer the ride together Ride on Tina Penman, Portland, Oregon Yeah, so true! The bicycle and our ability to do these amazing races I mean that's a double century, right? 203 miles, two days I'm lucky if I go like two miles Lucky Tina, thank you so much for riding in And everyone out there, remember, we need you to write in Thank you, those of you who have I can't wait to read your letters to everyone And I just want to keep scheduling them Keep them coming Leave us a message on our Facebook page Facebook.com slash this week in Science We want to fill this segment of the show with someone Something from our Minion community Every week of the year So you need to write us Please And now Let's move into the big conversation Of the week If you have been on Twitter This week, or on Facebook as well There is so much conversation About this final week In the life of the Cassini spacecraft mission And to join us tonight is Emily Lactowala She's the senior editor And planetary evangelist For the Planetary Society And we are thrilled to have you back on the show Emily, thank you so much for joining us Once again to talk about Cassini It's a pleasure to be here So I think the last time you were on We were talking about the New Horizons mission Quite likely A while back and there's been all sorts of We've moved past Pluto And we've learned so much about Pluto from New Horizons And New Horizons is off Going out to other outer Solar system bodies But the Cassini mission Can you give us a little history Of the Cassini mission? Sure, it's actually a good time to do that Because everybody who I've been with At the press room at JPL today Has just been reflecting about Cassini It's been such a long mission That everybody is measuring their lives By the length of Cassini There are some people who are around For the protests around its launch In 1997 Because it was nuclear powered And people were worried about a launch accident Causing a problem And I could launch into a 30 minute explanation Of why a launch accident is not going to Contaminate the world of plutonium But that's probably not what you want me to use this time for But anyway, it launched in 1997 It flew This long circuitous path In order to get to Saturn But it finally arrived in 2004 And actually When Cassini arrived at Saturn That was my first professional beat As a science reporter Was writing about the Cassini mission It went into orbit It's orbited Saturn hundreds of times And on each of those orbits It may fly past moons Or get way up above the rings In order to look down and see The dynamics of the rings It's gone behind Saturn To see Saturn block the sun And you can see the sunlight shining through Saturn's atmosphere It's watched bright stars Pass behind the rings It's used radar to penetrate The hazy atmosphere of Titan It discovered geysers coming out Of the south pole of Enceladus And it's done all of that for 13 years So it's actually watched Saturn Go through three seasons It arrived when it was Summer at Saturn's southern hemisphere We've seen it go through equinox And we've seen summer arrive in the northern hemisphere So we've seen everything change over time too So it's just been a tremendous Lengthy mission Revolutionizing our understanding of Saturn And just made it a place And all of its moons Really helped us understand these things In ways we never did before I think one of the The biggest things for me Was hearing Carolyn Porco talk About Cassini when some of the first Images came back Of Saturn and it was We had images from the Voyager mission But there was something different About these images from Cassini Can you talk a little bit about What the images have brought us? Well I think there's two really important Ways in which the images Have been different between Voyager and Cassini One of them is that Voyager's cameras Were television cameras There were these analog instruments They were distorted And they were not very fast So when you wanted to take pictures They had to have these longer exposures Often they were blurred In order to get color pictures You have to take three images in a row Through different color filters And if you can't do that really fast Then things move in between So everything is a little fuzzy It gives it that 70's feel That everything's not quite at the highest possible resolution Cassini's cameras Are so crisp And Cassini is such A stable platform From which to take photos That the images have this HD quality Compared to Voyager There's still actually only barely HD The detectors Only 1,024 pixels square It's a one megapixel camera And the thing you've got in your phone Is way higher resolution than that So in order to get lots of pixels In a Cassini picture Take all these little footprints And puzzle piece them all together But still The pictures are so crisp They make you really feel like you're right there So that's one thing The second thing that's made it's different Is that Voyager did the best that they could With the technology that they had To share all their images with the public As quickly as possible There were TV monitors In various places and JPL in other locations Where you could actually see the images arriving From Jupiter and Saturn As they hit the ground But not very many people had access to that And so you could like Sign up to get a newsletter from JPL Deliver to you once a month that would have Really badly photocopied versions of those images And that was really the best thing you could do And so nowadays Before Cassini arrived They made the decision to share All of these images on the web immediately So that people like me who have nothing Whatever to do with the mission except that I'm a fan Just go download them Make the color pictures, make animations, make mosaics And can really experience everything In the same kind of wow That's awesome brand new thing from Saturn Wonder that the science team gets to do So that's both of those things that made Cassini Just a different experience from Voyager Yeah I can't imagine where You know we know with Cassini And it's technology level It's always like what is it like 10 years Behind at least It's 1980s technology really 1987 you have to realize And so you're And anything that's been space-hardened Is much older than that It's typically about a decade old by the time you get to launch So it's old school Super old school and so As we look to the future Things will get better Our images for our own solar system Will get better but it's so hard to even believe That we can do better Than this amazing view we've had Of Saturn and its moons You mentioned earlier the Jets that were discovered From Enceladus I just would love to talk about that discovery For a minute That was just huge So there was An idea before Cassini got there That Enceladus might have There might be something funky going on Of Enceladus and the reason that idea Existed is because Enceladus was embedded in this thing called the E-ring Which was this kind Of fuzzy Ring that was much more vertically extended Than Saturn's other rings Much larger and seemed to be densest Right around the orbit of Enceladus So that made people think there might be something A little weird about Enceladus But it wasn't until One of the early orbits of the Cassini mission When they shot some photos Of Enceladus That looked at its night side And they saw this little fuzz along the edge And they said Is that something erupting from Enceladus? Or well no, maybe it's just like an imaging artifact It's like internal reflections in the camera Not really sure So they sequenced another set of images Where they did the same thing They looked at Enceladus from the night side But they did something special They rotated the spacecraft Like 20 degrees And took another picture And rotated it 20 degrees and took another picture And did that again and again To make sure that it wasn't an artifact in the camera And sure enough those geysers just spun around Those plumes spun around As they took those pictures and they said Yes, this really is a feature on Enceladus There really is something erupting From its south pole And they flew closer They got better pictures They saw that there were multiple plumes They took lots of pictures at lots of different times They saw that the plumes were erupting Continuously They did More observations where they used Different instrument, not the camera But something called the composite infrared spectrometer Which can detect thermal radiation Coming off of Enceladus And they saw that the cracks on Enceladus south pole Were hotter Than the areas around it There really could be liquid water Close to the surface here Because the temperature is so high Later on in the mission they actually flew Cassini in its mass spectrometer Within 25 kilometers Of the surface of Enceladus About 75,000 feet Above the surface of Enceladus So there are airplanes Commercial airplanes don't fly at that altitude But there are airplanes on earth that fly at that altitude And that's how close they got And they were able to scoop up the stuff That was being spewed out of Enceladus They learned that it was salty So we're talking about an ocean Or at least a sea I think the jury is still out on whether We're talking about a global Layer of water around Enceladus If there's a perched sort of Blob of water Around the south pole I think it's leaning toward the global ocean But I'm not totally sure about that But yeah, so we've got This world that is spewing A saltwater ocean out into space Where it's just easy to fly right through it And sample it, it's pretty awesome I think it's amazing and In Enceladus The idea that there could be places In our solar system Where life could exist The idea that we found this Either moon, global ocean Or whether we found A sea that is salty That is warmer Than the frozen surface It opens up that possibility The imagination and also the exploration This came up several times In the press conference at JPL this morning The fact that the Ocean at Enceladus Which is a really very tiny moon Business being geologically active And the Cassini team still can't really explain How it can be so geologically active But it has, like you said Really opened up the The space of possibilities For where you could have habitable environments Not only in our own solar system But in solar systems elsewhere You keep on hearing about a habitable zone You know the region near a star Where you can have Where it's neither too hot So you don't boil off all the water It's all frozen, it's just right This is Goldilocks zone But Saturn is way outside Of our solar system's habitable zone And yet here we have Enceladus Probably Titan has a sub A crust ocean All four of Jupiter's Large moons may have oceans We know that three of them do And possibly four do Pluto even could have a liquid water Ocean underneath its surface And that's way the heck out there That's the idea of places Where you could have liquid water and chemistry And stuff happening to have life living What other interesting things Have we learned about The moons The moons of Saturn I think one of the things that I found surprising From Cassini is how interconnected All the moons And rings and everything are So at first I was impressed by the different personalities Of the different moons, you have Enceladus Which is bright white and snowy You have Minus which has Much deeper craters and the one big whack on its side You have Dione that has these What they called from Voyager The wispy terrain, it turns out to be these Fine fractures crisscrossing its surface You have Tethys with its hexagonal Craters, you have Hyperion Which just looks like a sponge It's totally bizarre And so each one of them clearly has a different history And a different story to tell And that's kind of interesting The more we learned that The moons Were embedded in The wider system of Saturn And that something like Iapetus Which is this funky two colored moon It's bright on one side and dark on the other The dark stuff probably comes From another moon Phoebe which is farther Out You learn that the I forget now whether it's the leading hemisphere The trailing hemispheres of several of the moons Tethys and Dione And others, they all have a color to them And that color has to do With e-ring material Being bound up in Saturn's magnetic field Which is the whole thing I haven't even mentioned yet And charged particles Impacting I think the trailing sides Of the moons, I'm not really sure So that's moons and rings and magnetic field All interrelating to color The surface of one of the moons So everything is tied together And you can't understand any one thing Without understanding The whole system On the one hand it seems impossibly Complex to understand On the other hand it's like scientists are so excited Because it's like a problem they'll never solve And they'll be busy forever We've got so much work to do Yay I think that's what it's One of these things where everybody is Sad that this is the end of the Cassini mission Because it has opened up So many more questions that people Want to ask Well, that's the nature of every planetary mission So You know every planetary mission ends Typically ends having raised more questions than it's answered It's answered a few, but made you go Oh my gosh, what the heck is that thing over there And you want to send another mission to answer that So I think I mean I can't speak for anybody For everybody, but my personal feeling about Cassini Is that I'm deeply satisfied With what Cassini has accomplished It's done so much more Than was promised And it lasted a really long time As a really high quality mission It's pulled off these mission extensions That are like whole another extra missions On top of its primary mission It's done a fantastic job I'm very satisfied The thing that I'm really sad about Is the fact that there aren't follow on missions There aren't Cassini-like missions On their way to Uranus or Neptune Or Back to Jupiter Another thing that Cassini has made me sad about With Cassini, but it's made me realize How much we lost On Galileo and that stupid antenna Didn't open up We should have had a Cassini-like mission at Jupiter And we didn't, we didn't get it Because we couldn't get the data return And so we need to go back to Jupiter With another Cassini-like mission That can actually open up our understanding Of the moons and the rings And the planet as an integrated system And we don't have that Hopefully Europa and Zeus The European mission, the Europe of Clippers The American mission, the European mission Will be able to do that for us at Jupiter But I want to go back to Uranus and Neptune Yeah, because we really don't know much About those two planets at this point I mean, Jupiter right now, we've got the Juno mission Which is, you know, limited In its scope And hopefully going to tell us A lot about the magnetic fields And the composition of Jupiter Yeah, Jupiter itself But like you're talking about the actual system That's right And Cassini has just taught us About system science At a giant planet In a way that we haven't ever done it In the other planet before Yeah, I read it said that Cassini actually Informed us about solar system Formation Because of looking at this large planet And the ring formation and the moon formation Yeah, and it's just a microcosm For the formation of a stellar system One of the things that Cassini is doing Probably Right now actually Is taking photos Of some of these cool little features In the rings called propellers That are, they're these funky little Formations in the rings That probably indicate that there's some Chunk of mass Bigger than a house, smaller than a moon But it's causing this disturbance in the rings That may or may not form A little moon in a gap in the future We don't anticipate, we don't know But Cassini's been able to watch these features And how they dynamically interact with the rings And those may tell us about How Objects and solar systems form From rings, from Agglomerations of dust Right, how these perturbations Potentially build over time To create larger structures And what kind of attractions are necessary There's so much, there's so much To learn there In terms of what Cassini is doing now This week has actually been Big, or the last few weeks leading up to this It's been big because of All the ring crossings Right, so what they did With the very last orbits of Cassini Is they set up this Really the navigators just Win my respect forever For what they did with Cassini They set up this Titan flyby Cassini spent its entire mission Outside the ring system The closest it ever got to the rings Was during, on the very first Orbit insertion, it was called Rev Zero Before they were even in orbit They passed between the G ring and the F ring In order to get close enough to Saturn To be really deep in its gravity well And get captured into orbit And since then it's been outside the G ring The whole time, so it's been Orbiting, it passes by Titan a lot of times It might get as close as the orbit of Mimus But not much closer To say it outside the ring system And they set up this flyby Of Titan toward the end Where they used Titan's gravity To drop its Periapsis, its closest approach from Saturn To from Outside the G ring To inside the D ring Which is to say in between the rings and Saturn It's not a very big gap It's a very small gap as a matter of fact There isn't a lot of wiggle room And now they had Cassini passing Up once a week on every orbit And in a way It turned Cassini into a duplicate Of Juno And when you think about the fact that Juno Is like a billion-dollar mission This last Several weeks of Cassini flying these proximal Orbits is like getting a whole other new Frontiers, billion-dollar mission Out of a spacecraft that we already had out there And so it's And from what they said at today's press briefing It's really going to do some revolutionary Science. They said that the gravity Field doesn't look anything like What they expected it to be They said the They didn't find any dust Where they expected to find dust between The D ring and the planet. There's actually a lot less Than they expected, which is good news for the survival Of the spacecraft. And to fly it backwards Like the first time through with the Instruments protected What they do When they're concerned about dust hazards Is they turn the whole spacecraft so that the Dish is flying forward So that the dish, like everything Is shielded underneath the dish. And they call That, they say we're flying antenna To ram. That sounds like something you say In Star Trek. That antenna to ram. I loved it when they said that. They did that the first time, but they learned very quickly There really wasn't any dust to worry about. And so they were able to turn so that they could turn Their instruments toward it and sample what was there. They've learned that the magnetic field And the rotation axis are almost perfectly aligned Which is not something that magnetic fields Are supposed to be able to do. So that's sending them back to the drawing board. And so I think that the science From this phase of the mission is not going to come out Very fast. It's going to take a while for them to Understand what's going on. Probably it'll help A lot to have Juno at Jupiter Studying a different planet In the same solar environment And kind of help them go back and forth And try to understand What these two different giant planets Are doing with their magnetic fields And their gravity fields. So that's going to be stuff to look forward to For the next several years. I was wondering about Cassini versus Juno On making these close passes To Saturn. Jupiter is the largest planet So obviously has the largest Magnetosphere has the largest Gravitational field Has the largest possibility for Negatively affecting A spacecraft. But yeah, I was wondering Okay, have we Gotten this close to Saturn before? Because at the end, this is the swan song Taking the risks. The other thing they can do By passing in between the rings and Saturn Is they can measure the mass of the rings for the first time. You know, from up until now All you've been able to do Is measure the mass of the rings plus Saturn. So we've got the mass of both of them together. But when you pass in between them You can separate the influence of their two masses. So we're going to find out for the first time How much Saturn's rings weigh. Which is going to be cool. But we're going to probably end the mission Not knowing how long a day on Saturn is. That's one of the most frustrating things About this magnetic field and rotation axis Being perfectly aligned Is they use the offset To figure out how fast giant planets rotate That's how we know how fast Uranus And Jupiter and everything rotates And we actually don't know We don't know how long a day on Saturn is. That's crazy. That is one of the questions they're trying to answer Is how fast does Saturn actually rotate. We don't know. They measured it with Voyager And they measured it with Cassini And there was a difference of like many seconds Which is simply not physically Possible With a mass the size of Saturn It just that makes no sense. So what that tells you is that the way they thought They were measuring is not the day length. And so They've got a... I don't think we're going to know how long a day is on Saturn After the end of this 13 year mission. Wow. We've been following Saturn for almost an entire year Halfway through it About a half a year Almost a half a year And we're still not going to know How long a day is. Alright. Let's talk about some... You guys want to talk about the end? Yeah. We have about 10 more minutes left To talk with Emily. And so I want to make sure Get the good stuff in here. Right. So I was really up on this a little bit today And at first I was kind of wondering the same thing Why do we need to put Cassini down? Why do we need to send him To the fishes? And the background behind that. Cassini is the reason for its own demise. So if we hadn't discovered These amazing, possibly habitable environments On Enceladus and Titan Mostly Enceladus We could have just left it in a In a, you know, graveyard orbit Around Saturn. But because there is the possibility Of habitable environments there And Cassini was not sterilized To the highest possible standard Before we launched it But there being out of a great abundance Of caution going to kill it into Saturn So that it won't in the future crash into Enceladus. Now Most people listening to that explanation Who know anything about deep space are like But wait a minute, this thing has spent You know, 20 years in space Exposed All kinds of radiation environments There's no way there's any bugs still alive on this thing And yeah, they're probably right What about tardigrades though? There could be a tardigrade We don't want to be wrong about that So it's just the responsible thing to do Is to make sure that we dispose of it properly And make sure that it can't Possibly contaminate anything I always would and I get that But every time I hear that kind of an explanation I think But what if this is the one chance To get life off of our planet Onto another planet in the solar system And how we did it is the off chance That there was a microbe still alive on this craft And we put it into an environment Where it could survive and that's the second Body in the solar system With life now So to allay your fears about this I can promise you That there are meteorites from Earth That have landed on Mars So multiple times Many times So we have tried this experiment Several times before Dinosaur fossils on Mars Not very likely It's possible But the final The turn for the final approach Has been made A couple days ago So we're now This is it It was actually inevitable When they set it into these proximal orbits And that was one of the conditions For doing the proximal orbits Because they couldn't be 100% sure That there wasn't a spacecraft Killing dust particle in the way Of Cassini as it was going between the rings And the planet But it hasn't done a single maneuver On proximal orbits It was always inevitable that it was going to have This encounter with Titan That would nudge it on its death course So even if its first ring plane crossing After entering proximal orbits Had crashed into a moonlet That we didn't see All of Cassini's parts That survived that Would have inevitably crashed into Saturn Very clean And it's going to signally back Signally back to us With the data it can possibly grab It's going to be grabbing and sending And then it's going to be Dead and gone Destroyed In the atmosphere Super dead But it'll still be talking to us Well, not while it's super dead It's data will be talking to us Oh yeah, so there is that So yes, it's final signals Will depart Saturn And they take an hour and 23 minutes To get to earth So in this super position Of is there such a thing as Simultaneity in the universe No, there is not As far as we know We will get the information of its death An hour and 23 minutes After the time on its clock that it died But Simultaneity is an illusion I like that Can you talk about the live streaming That's going to happen? Do you know What are they actually Going to be live streaming People crying at JPL No more I've watched Two spacecraft die in the last Two years And both of them were European ones It was Philae and then Rosetta So what you get When you predict That your spacecraft is going to be dying At a specific time Somebody puts up a little graph That shows you the current Strength of the radio signal That you're receiving from the spacecraft And so probably what we'll see is a Graph that will have like a little Scruff and then a big old spike And that big old spike is the carrier signal From the radio transmitter On Cassini And that shows you that the deep space network Is receiving a good strong signal From the spacecraft And we'll watch that it will be a little Curry and a strength but it should be pretty strong And then all of a sudden it will go And then all we'll see is a scruff It's like flatlining basically And I watched that with Rosetta Last time and it was totally fully Expected you knew the moment was going to happen And it happens and you're like Oh I guess that's it Yeah so that's what I was going to ask too Is it feel like for the people that worked On this mission does it feel Like a death in the Family is it really sad or is it more Like a graduation No I think it's more like the former I think it's more like the former I mean I actually have the experience Of knowing ahead of time That a relative of mine Was about to pass away A whole bunch of family traveled to his bedside It was sort of sad and awkward to be at the hospital But at the same time it's a family reunion Right you're getting together with people That you haven't been with for a while So it's a strange combination of happy sad You're sharing happy stories about the relative And so it's this funny And you don't really know how you're going To be feeling from one moment to the next Like I say I feel very satisfied About what Cassini's done Most of the time I feel very upbeat Sometimes I'm like in denial Sometimes I'm like yelling No don't go I never really know how I'm going to feel From one moment to the next At this morning's press briefing Looking especially at the project manager Who's an engineer you could tell At this time he was feeling mostly pride Great pride At a mission accomplished A mission very well done But also I think having a little bit of difficulty Confronting the fact that As of Friday morning He's not going to be So he won't be able to be devoted To the health of the spacecraft anymore So it's this wild mix of emotions And I imagine there's going to be a lot of weeping And tissues, Kleenex being passed around But also pride And also something that kind of I wonder about too is This is a data collection Mission That data now Is not just done like oh we got the data Now we're through, put it in a box Goes on the shelf, this data is alive This data is going to be worked with This data is going to be gone over, poured over And used for another 20 years Until we can get something else That's absolutely true In fact the science team The mission isn't over at all For them they have another year Of being paid As members of the Cassini mission To validate and archive the data So it takes a year That's the proprietary period Nine months to a year To go through all the data Make sure that it's all been calibrated Prepared properly, it has all the right Metadata associated with it It's all been cataloged And they then deliver these archives Everything called the Planetary Data System Which is NASA's public archive You can Google that right now, PDS And you can find every image From every spacecraft that NASA Has ever launched going back to the 70s Some of the earliest stuff is not Available in the PDS just because it wasn't In a format that's easy to transmit digitally But since like Viking Everything is up there On the PDS and you can go to it right now There's a learning curve associated With learning how to download and use it But it's all there for anybody And that's what's going to happen with Cassini Cassini has something like 425,000 Images 635 gigabytes Of data You could fit that on a fairly small drive These days, but when you compare it To what we got from Voyager, it's actually a lot And we're still using Voyager data now to make discoveries There were scientists who discovered new moons And Voyager Uranus images just a couple years ago Using image processing techniques That hadn't been available before And so we're still going to be developing New techniques, new ways of understanding Data, and remember Cassini isn't just Images, there's spectrometers There's all kinds of radio instruments There's magnetometer, all kinds of stuff That we're going to be learning from for decades to come It might be, this might be This Friday, the 15th Might be the end of Cassini The craft, but it's Legacy That we're going to live on Absolutely And I just want to say From a societal And cultural perspective I don't know if any craft Has quite captured the public's attention And heart the way that Cassini Has I mean Hubble has done an amazing job But Cassini I think Is right up there On the planetary blog you posted an opera That Was written for Cassini Yes, that's Our board member Bob Picardo Pulling out his pipes for performing A little operatic ode to Cassini I love it And if anybody searches Cassini on Twitter On Google you will find Many things that people have to say About the end of the craft And Emily I look forward To reading all of your writing As you go through this I guess it's This ratcheting down And then the morning period A lot of people are posting Like their lists of favorite images this week And I'm totally refraining Because it's a lot of people are doing it And I want to emphasize starting next week That you know there's this archive Of half a million images You can go in there and Even though I've seen a lot of these things before I don't remember them and so just Going to a random spot in the archive That I poke around gives me Odd inspiring views That I don't remember seeing before And we can just go on forever Just sharing these images Go back to Voyager and do that as well And as we end Cassini Let's start working Get NASA to get some Missions out to Uranus and Neptune Absolutely More planetary missions Thank you so much for joining us tonight Can you let people know where they can And follow your writing about this Absolutely, I'm at the Planetary Society Which is Planetary.org On the web since 1996 And And then you can find me on twitter At elockdawalla E-L-A-K-D-A-W-A-L-L-A Wonderful And we won't keep you I know you have other places to be this evening My kids appreciate that Hope you enjoy your evening And have a nice good night Nice good night with your kids Thank you once again Cheers Thank you Emily It was wonderful talking with Emily again She is so knowledgeable And well spoken on these topics And I think she has a wonderful personal connection also She's got the humanity In this stuff And I think Cassini is one of these Missions That I think has really captured humanity I was scrolling through some of those images today And I just kept thinking Are these real? Are these CGI? They look like they've been made by a computer No, they're not And like she said, so crisp I can't believe I'm looking at an actual picture Of Saturn I mean there are some images That are actual pictures of Saturn But they've got artists renderings Where Cassini has been Placed in the foreground Of what it's like Where Cassini is In time For anyone who is interested I know for those of you who are watching live right now This is very helpful And if I get the podcast out in time And you hear it, this will be very helpful For those of you Interested in watching the NASA Coverage Of the live streaming Of the end of NASA So NASA JPL is going to be Streaming to YouTube And also to their Ustream channels And also to nasa.gov Slash live For the mission control End and so from Actually now There's probably Stuff playing but At 4am pacific time Starting at 4am pacific time We can watch the live stream Of the Requiem That's Friday 4am pacific time So if you're on the east coast It's very nice Very manageable I on the other hand I'm going to end up with a stomach ache Because I'll be getting up too early in the morning Be like oh this hurts Yeah I can take a little pain For Cassini I can do that And if anybody is Interested also At Saturn.jpl NASA.gov Is the mission Information For the grand finale Of Cassini And in this grand finale There is There's also a book That you can download A Saturn book that you can download And it's free You can take it as an e-book For your Kindle For Your computer I just love when you get free Data Free science The thing is we say free But the reason is because the American people Paid for this We In America For those of us who are, I would say we Because that's where we as the hosts of the show are We paid for this This was ours And so for these images to be available I say free But they are available to everyone Because they're ours And this is wonderful Government transparency And that's such a great point Is that we all helped pay To get Cassini there And take these pictures There are a few people who ran the mission And were the special people who made it happen In America We did good And we have made space exploration A priority For a long time I hope that it continues And also thanks to collaborations With the European Space Agency And others we've had things like The Huygens probe Which Told us a lot about Titan You know, we've got These wonderful, we've got missions Working together, like she said The Rosetta and Filet, that was The European Space Agency And the Italian Space Agency And we've got so many other things Working on Mars together The New Horizons mission We are collaborating Around the planet To explore our neighborhood Let's keep doing it Come on people Let's do it Alright, is it time for us to take a break? It is definitely time. I think I have said All the things There's lots of, we'll put links to all the Cassini stuff on the TWIST webpage But then there will also be links Available through social media And on our YouTube descriptions But for now We are going to take a quick break Emily Lactawalla was amazing Love having her on the show This is This Week in Science We'll be back with some science news In just a moment, stay tuned Hey everybody, thank you so much For sticking with This Week in Science Day in, day out Week after, well I guess not day in, day out Week in, week out Season after season As we move forward through this world Uncovering more and more scientific gems Little pieces of information To make our understanding of the world A little richer and more interesting Thank you for going on this journey with us And thank you For supporting us through this journey For those of you who are able And willing We do appreciate all the help that you give us In allowing This show to go on And in that sense I would like to Tell everybody about our website Org is where you can go To find information about the show And right now you can Pre-order your 2018 Blair's Animal Quarter Corner calendar And I know a few individuals already have They're starting, people are starting to order Get their orders in To make sure they get those calendars Because they are going to be great Blair is working very hard To complete another quality Calendar of original Artwork And it's going to be a coloring book calendar This time, you guys get to color it Yourselves Animals, you can make them purple If you want Or you can go with anatomically correct colors That's up to you, whatevs But make sure you pre-order Get those orders in So that you don't miss out Go to twist.org and click on the Twist 2018 Pre-order image link If you are interested in Other ways you can support twist Go click on the Zazzle store link The Zazzle store link takes you over to our Zazzle store Which is full of all sorts of wonderful twist goodies Mouse pads, t-shirts, hats, mugs With a twist logo And also with art from Past Blair's Animal Quarter Calendars So if you are interested in a lumbar pillow With a grizzly bear on it This is where you can get it If you want your twist this week in Science Apron, oh yeah you do The holidays are coming up Don't you want a twist apron To cook that Thanksgiving turkey? 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You want your twist in your life every day This is where you get it And a portion of the proceeds go To supporting twist Another way you can help support us By just direct donations We have a donate button along the side panel Click on that donate button It tells you right to a PayPal interface Makes it easy for you to donate At your whim And the amount that you would like to donate Click on the Patreon button on the top bar And that takes you over to our Patreon community Where you can choose which level You'd like to support us at In an ongoing fashion Episode after episode And it helps us Keep this show afloat You're really like executive producing the show When you get into Supporting us through PayPal And Patreon You're keeping this show going Making sure we can actually Pay the intertube bills If Donations Support in an ongoing way Is not something you're capable Of doing Just tell your friends about twists If you can tell people about iTunes About subscribing to us on Google Play Or whether you're someone Who listens to us on Stitcher Or Spreaker or watches on YouTube Let people know Share us Help us out by doing that And regardless We really could not do this show Without you So thank you for your support I can't believe you believe In that show We disagree But I still give a damn The ramification Of treatments from holy men Leaves me slightly Queasy deep down in the abdomen Intense that's the lives That they lead need adjusting They drive to the bookstore And blindly start trusting The miracles and cures All laid down in black ink Never read any father real To stop anything And we are back with More This Week in Science Oh yeah, Justin, what you got? Oh wait, no, I got stuff. I got one. I got one. You want me to go first? I'll go first. You want to go first, but I got things. Yeah, why don't you go first? Go first. Go for it. Do it. Oh, I didn't really mean to step on your toes. Okay, gaming Gaming, for whatever reason Is often considered A guy thing If we picture a pool Hall, a card room, bowling alley A video game arcade We might have a tendency to imagine these places Filled with boys or men The girls are gamers too And have been a lot longer Than you might think And while we're on the subject Games themselves have actually been around For a really long time In the viking era, for instance Cross Scandinavia, a board game Was played, no doubt for fun As well as to train warriors In battlefield strategy These games are mentioned In the sagas, as far back as the fourth century A chess-like game And actually probably most likely Is the predecessor of what became chess Was a game that was played Where the king sits in the middle of the board And must be protected Or attacked from the outside A viking warrior burial Discovered in the 1880s And in pieces, and based on other objects In the burial, this was no ordinary Warrior Surrounded by an axe, a spear A couple of shields, a sword Armor piercing arrows, two horses This was very likely A viking leader, a commander Who in death was laid to rest With their most prized possessions Weapons, yes, horses, sure And A game of strategy The warrior was buried In the viking town of Burka During the mid-10th century Since its discovery, the site has served as a model Of what a professional viking warrior grave looks like Compared to, say, a farmer buried with an axe Who may have swung at nothing more menacing Than a tree This viking, this professional Viking warrior With the game of strategy At their side But what they don't know, or didn't know When they first discovered the viking warrior's grave Was Something that was only hinted at Through more careful observations of the skeleton's morphology In which now Has been proven by DNA That it is the That this gaming viking warrior commander Is a woman Dispelling the myth That girls only recently got into gaming Once and for all Oh, and that lady viking Warlords was like a real thing also Right, right Maybe Maybe, you know, because What would science be without a bit of debate? This story came out It's got a scoop, I can't wait to hear it I do have a scoop and I came across it On Twitter And then again on Facebook As I saw people Starting to talk to historians And Viking history experts People have been studying vikings for Years And The question now Is not whether or not This was a Female Right? That's been solved They were able to say, oh look, there's no Y chromosome In this ancient DNA We've got X's This is a female But there are researchers Who have brought up the point That there's really A lot of unknowns here And that the researchers who Published this research Have jumped to conclusions And So Judith Jesh Who has a blog called Norse and Viking Ramblings She Says that this new paper Doesn't demonstrate that this Woman was in fact A Viking warrior She may have been the wife Or friendly female Of a high ranking Viking warrior And maybe she was buried With these game pieces As a token Of their relationship We also don't know These bones could have gotten all mixed up They've said that this Berka site Where many Different Barials sites have been dug up They've gotten like a thousand different bodies Out of this site But the original The original methodology for Taking the bodies out of the ground Maybe it wasn't the best And there might have been some mixing up of things So to that though, I just threw out A couple things real quick One, for What is it? What year is it now? So for 137 years They just assumed it was a man Yes. And so No controversy there, no reason to dig any deeper No reason to look at the methodology For the recovery of these bones That's a Viking warrior And as soon as it became a woman They're like whoa I think this is Everything all over again Because now we have to raise that And there are stories Of Viking women Viking leaders Even warlords and within the troops And the whole thing of the shield maidens Which is made very popular By it with a Viking warlord woman And the Vikings whatever it's I can't remember what network is putting that out I think it's AMC They That seems normal to people now But it is based off of Some stories of the past Of these women being involved Legends Because it's legends There's no written history That actually says Women were warriors There's no written history that says Women were shield maidens There's no written history that can confirm this And I totally agree with you that Since it was that there's a double standard Here and that since it was a man Everyone was like oh it's a male warrior of course And now that it's a woman People are asking for more evidence But what I hope this does Is asks It ends up making these researchers Ask for more evidence from the very beginning Because it's possible They've since looked at the bones as well And the bones don't show any damage Or stress fractures That you would expect of the type of Somebody who was involved in combat Or involved in strenuous activity There's none of that There are no markings or hallmarks That would be indicative Of that kind of activity And so either this You get to a certain level And maybe there was a certain group of warriors Who never actually had to fight So that wasn't She's a warrior But was in name only So yes and no So like that would not Have been a very Viking way To take the battlefield But it would be the same thing for a male too They're just now looking at the bones And going oh maybe it wasn't really a warrior Maybe this is weird And so now they maybe have to take The story back so the warrior part Like the game Like the game that they play The Viking leaders Take the battlefield They're not behind the lines They're in the very middle of the board Where the action is But it doesn't mean that they're necessarily Doing hand to hand combat And not just directing the troops Go left to go right Shield wall or whatever You could yell if you were Viking Throw some spears that way Whatever Hard to tell You're right We don't really really know We would like to assume That all genders can do all things And always have done all things But why was this This headline that was all Over the internet this week Because it still is Even though we've heard of it In lore it's still unusual It's still a buzz line It's still something to catch people's attention Because it's not the norm It's also hitting A society That's still rather misogynistic About gender roles And one of the things that We do know about the Viking era Scandinavians Is that There wasn't It wasn't so then Women had the same rights as men did They were free in society They weren't chattel or cattle Or however you would say that And that they had vote and condone property And had stay in things That went on around So it is a society That if there's going to be Lady warriors That's one you would expect to see it in To me when I first saw it I was like why are we surprised How come there isn't this record I just kind of assumed that was already a thing That was known But it wasn't the thing that was known Or it maybe still isn't But again in some of the sagas in the stories They talk about female warriors Which is that we haven't found Actual hard proof of it yet So that's well We don't know yet Maybe she was laid to rest with these things For a reason Maybe her body fell in with these things Somehow Maybe things got thrown in after her To my point Because we don't know And I'll stop you Man explaining everything Because we don't know Is exactly why we shouldn't throw Heap extra doubt upon it If for 137 years We were completely satisfied With this being the grave Of a Viking warrior Only now to challenge it Because it's a woman See Justin that's not science That's so not science Science is about finding proof for things And disproof So for example Showing the fact that there's no stress On the body is a big Big piece of doubt On this individual Being a warrior So the question is not Because she's a woman and she's not a warrior The question is have we identified All of the things That potentially could Tell us about this individual And from the get go the answer is no Yeah but then again There are things that there are things So this is the debate And so now what is wonderful And as we learned As we were talking about with Emily About Cassini Science opens up new questions And it's good science if it does open up new questions And so it's not really science If it's like oh it's A dude warrior Viking warrior dude There we go and you don't look at the bones anymore But they're looking more closely And they're starting to ask questions Until now this raises questions About the stress fractures on the bones What was it about the society And the different roles of individuals In society What was the burial like Was it a warrior burial Was she buried that way Because she was the wife Of a warrior This opens new questions And so what I hope Is that this leads to more And better scientific inquiry Into this historical Time period And if you And if all of the raids were on British Isle Monasteries And they were just skewering priests And probably not a lot of wear and tear taking place But I do like the idea that Because the game is in there And that game is probably And if it was the first female gamer Great Well okay I mean so the Personnel that's being presented then is This is possibly The warrior chief's Commander's wife And he wants to go into the next world With a full assortment of weapons Which he's never used A game that perhaps In the most sentimental aspect They played this chess like game together Over long hours Of drinking meat or what I don't know what the Vikings drank back But like that Sentimental burial by the viking to send his But didn't they like I don't know They were people that could be sentimental They were But if it's fully lacking If it's fully lacking then too In any sort of other You know gender specific Role accoutrements You know that tells me That's sort of weird that they would They would put them into a burial With somebody else's Okay so Let's just keep looking at it One last question Do the studies and figure it out If we hadn't found out it was a woman But we had found that there were No signs of stress on this Individual's body Would you be saying what you're saying right now Exactly, no that's my point That's my point I agree with you You wouldn't be challenging the fact that I'm saying we would Fighting the challenge No, I would just say like It was not a time of heavy battles Or they just had the numbers where they just Overpowered whatever enemies that they had Or maybe they just hunted a lot And maybe that's what it was for this woman But the point still Stands That there is New data There's new information to be taken into Into account And it's kind of circumstantial Evidence That she might have been a warrior There's no definitive Smoking gun And when we say warrior we keep saying warrior As if that's the thing Based on what they were saying before This is a leader of warriors Who got there By never getting in a fight before By being a great strategist By being able to lead troops Keep the morale high Get them into position on the battlefield Where they don't get killed I'm gonna sit back here with the map I got the map and the chances I'll sit back here and tell you what to do And protect it That's That's maybe the hallmark of a great strategist That Shouldn't have to swing an axe Very well So I was going to throw this Into the Viking story I was going to throw it into My section on This week's Bad Science Headlines And how science writers have been just jumping the gun On things That's pretty well said Yeah, no So another story Jump into another story this week We've talked before about the Voynich Manuscript In this show The Voynich manuscript is A really strange Illustrated Book out of the 15th century And People have been trying to read it Don't really know what it says There's just these strange pictures in it That people are like, I don't know what this does A history researcher Came out this week His name is Nicholas Gibbs And he wrote an article In the Times Literary Supplement About how he Figured it out What the Voynich manuscript Was And in fact It was an early gynecological Manuscript Oh my gosh There were some George O'Keeffe's in there, huh? Lots of Illustrations of Women showering And very strange Images So this book was discovered In 1912 And since then it's been A subject of great debate And people have been looking at it And trying to translate it and figure it out And so for someone to come out and say I figured it out The media jumped all over this And the fact that the Times Literary Supplement Published his article The media said okay It's coming from a reputable source He's got to know what he's talking about Put on the brakes Turns out this article came out And all the media stuff about it came out Saying Nicholas Gibbs Figured it out When in fact People don't really think so So according to Ars Technica Who Wrote of Lisa Fagan Davis Who's from the medieval academy of America She said They're not grammatically correct It doesn't And she came up with two lines of translation From the text To prove his point about it being A gynecological Book And she said they're not grammatically correct It doesn't result in Latin That makes sense Frankly, I'm a little surprised The TLS, the Times Literary Supplement Published it Sent it to the Beinecke Library Which is where the Voynich manuscript is held They would have rebutted it in the heartbeat And so Part of the claim rests On this idea that the Voynich manuscript Had an index at one time That provided something Of a translation key To abbreviations that were used In the pages But he doesn't have any evidence Other than there are some missing pages From the book So he came up with What he says is He said this is shorthand These are abbreviations Here, look, I'll translate it for you And then he says there must have been an index But it's missing But, look, it all works And people are just saying no And his idea that it was a medical Book on women's health Is not a new idea Other people have come up with that idea Previously using the same Exact evidence And you know what it comes out Gives Is also known as A television writer And he's written a series Of books about how to write and sell Television screenplays And he was paid By a history He was paid by a television channel To do his research Into the Voynich manuscript For a couple of years And so There is a quote That I would like to Give that in five years He would like to think he could have a returnable series Up and running And the writer, Annaly Newitz, says Considering the dubious accuracy Of many history channel documentaries He might just get his wish So you don't like the Vikings? So the Voynich manuscript News that's come out This guy Took the work of other people He got paid by a TV studio He's probably going to have a TV series Come out and He didn't really do original work And what he did isn't Incredibly accurate He didn't actually translate The Voynich manuscript Unfortunately And then The other bad headlines from this week Everybody have you seen all the headlines That if you sit all the time You're going to die I didn't see it this week But I've seen other ones So it's been a question for a while Sitting, standing How much should you move I've got a standing desk now But that's mostly because I have High energy and I like to stand up While I'm talking Kind of makes you wonder About all those times That you spend binge watching Your favorite TV series On Netflix or Amazon These many hours How is this going to affect my health? Or the 8 to 10 hours a day I spend at a desk Exactly, many people work Sedentary jobs and what is that going to do To your health and so there was an article Published in the Annals of Internal Medicine A well respected Outlet and this Article of Patterns of Sedentary Behavior And Mortality in the US Middle-aged and older adults A National Cohort Study This study took A large sample of individuals From Another study And these It was somewhere Originally the regards study Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences And Stroke had 30,239 Whites and Blacks Aged 45 years Or older between 2003 and 2007 They took 7,985 of those Participants Who had worn accelerometers Anyway the News headlines that came out this Last week pretty much They all said All the stories that were written Said sitting a lot Overall and sitting for long Interrupted stretches of time Can increase Your risk of all cause Mortality Basically if you sit a lot For any reason This sounds highly correlated Okay that's better So everybody Ran with the sitting down Thing. The problem is This study did not measure sitting down This study Only had accelerometers on individuals And the accelerometers were limited In their ability to actually Measure movement And so this sedentary activity Could be lying down It could be even doing very light Activity around the house And still be considered And under the headlines That would still be considered sitting So really what it's about Is how much cardio you're doing Sounds like Exactly how much cardio But in the end The individuals the statistics In this study don't really work out Either because of the way they had To manipulate the groups Without who was most active And who was least active And it turns out the most active groups Mean age was 65 And the mean age of the least active Group was 75 And so this is conflating The recommendation here Is like oh you're going to die From any cause if you're sitting down It's conflating age groups too Yeah wow So you're also more likely to die If you're 10 years older Exactly This just in This just in People have a greater chance of dying Than young people More on that at 11 I love just from The abstract Itself Before the conclusion It says limitation Participants may not be representative Of the general US population So Right off the bat they're like yeah This may not actually represent All the people in the United States And then all the news stories Were like you're going to die And then in the Something else the authors did Write In analyses examining the joint effects Of total sedentary time and prolonged Uninterrupted sedentary bouts For example size a number of deaths Were small for the groups of participants Who had high levels of only One of the sedentary characteristics That is high total sedentary time And low sedentary bout time Or low total sedentary time And high sedentary bout time Although the association between Total sedentary time alone But not sedentary bout duration alone And mortality Suggests that the volume of sedentary time May be more hazardous The more hazardous sedentary characteristic The small number of events And wide confidence intervals in these groups Render these findings Inconclusive Caution is warranted When interpreting these results Oh my gosh Hi everybody Headline writers I know and everybody You want to have a big study And you want to get it out there Oh yeah and this study Is also funded by Coca-Cola Ah How, what was there End game So the end game there and the money This was something covered by the New York Times A while back but the issue was Coca-Cola was putting a lot of money Into funding research On exercise and sedentary Versus sedentary behavior In an effort to get the conversation Away from that Of sugary drinks Let's just not talk about sugary drinks Anywhere, let's talk about how active You are Because nothing is great On a marathon like an ice cold Coke That's right There is data out there This study was supposed to be A really good You know Complete study but it really Didn't Answer questions That we wanted to ask I appreciate that the original Study actually said the exact Words that it was inconclusive And you should show caution When drawing conclusions from that Study. The issue is I think some of the science writers Didn't get to that last sentence Before they started deciding What they were going to run with I also kind of like that there's a scientist Who's been paid to do this study by Coca-Cola Who's also, by the way Should totally disregard everything that I wrote Yes, exactly I published this paper because I finished the study And I was paid to do this Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer I was paid to write this So there's a couple Things here, so one is You can't always access full papers Just as a random person But you can often access the abstract So if you read somebody's Article about a study That's come out, be a skeptic Click the link and at least Read the abstract, so you can get an idea Usually you can find out in the abstract If the sample size is bonkers small Right, you can have a good idea If there's some sort of confounding variables If they don't mention a blind at all Right, so there's Things that you can see that are red flags Even in the little free abstract Even if the whole paper isn't available Be your own advocate for truth Because people Are trying to get you to read science Honestly, I can't fault them too much for that They're trying to get you to click On science instead of on The link to Some celebrities breakup News and they're getting you To think critically I hope they get you to think critically Right, so that's the big question We have to make sure that we're Actually That's part of what we're doing Every week I read animal stories That the headline says something I read it and I'll go We already knew that though And then I click on the actual story And there's actually a really interesting thing That we find out But it wasn't the headline Because they want people to click Oh, it's like the Viking lady I had nothing to do with the Viking lady It was all about the fact that they had a game That was as important as the sword That to me was like the cool part Yeah, absolutely And I'm sure A doctor Quack TV show Where everybody stand up Everyone stand up right now Right now you have a much better chance Of living a longer life than you did Three seconds ago, you're welcome Yeah, and everyone's like I just clicked right now Thank you, we're all standing up We're going to get rid of the couch We're going to live forever That's how it's going to happen There's evidence that standing too long Is worse for you than sitting down That's bad for you Because of Venus return There are Venus return issues for many people The muscle pumps in your legs Then your legs moving That's the stuff that gets the blood flowing There's evidence that moving Exercise is good for your brain It's good for your body There are lots of benefits to it Too much moving is really It can be bad for you too We know that high endurance athletes At a higher amount than more moderate athletes There are some strange things That we're finding out If you can We also know that for injuries If you can get up And start moving after an injury Sooner it'll help it heal There are many things Do you know what the most We are learning more about this This study gave a little bit more evidence That yes, being sedentary You should try to move a little bit more Than being sedentary The headlines were wrong Do you know what sport results In the most emergency room visits 5% is the most dangerous sport To be involved in What? Just guess I bet you it's online gaming It's not online gaming I've got some issues Hospital for thumb issue They go to Best Buy When they throw the controller at the TV I just broke my TV What would you think Physically damaging Sport It's not running It's not running You go with Running over football And hockey Because you're not controlling On the percentage of people that do it What is it? It's not the percentage of people that do it It's by percentage of people that do it What is it? What's the answer? What's the answer? Gymnastics Gymnastics results in more emergency room More emergency room visits Than football or hockey I was one of those I went to the emergency room And that's probably a few times I should have gone to the emergency room My mathy question is Is that gross or is that controlled By the percentage of population By the percentage of population involved in the sport So it's not actually more emergency room visits No, that's probably It's percentage of Yeah, it's percentage of people that do it Anybody can go ahead and bring their ankle So you're probably right on your take Absolutely, because By just number of people Sure, there's not that many of us Gymnastics or hockey Exactly But by percentage Let's move Past this percentage Of people who get injured And let's move into the second story Let's get into some real Let's get some cool science news here We're going to talk about Percentage of water on the moon Oh Wait, there's water on the moon Yes, there's water on the moon Researchers from Brown University Just created The first quantitative Map Of water And it's chemical building blocks On the moon The water and the chemical building blocks This was all measured From India's Chandrayan One spacecraft When NASA's moon mineralogy mapper Flew aboard it And they really just wanted They wanted to quantify it And looking at this stuff It's really only looking at The top couple of millimeters Of the lunar topsoil Additionally, it couldn't Take into account areas that Were hidden from view So craters that were in shadow People think that maybe There's water ice And lots more water in areas That maybe Don't get a lot Of sun So these shadowed areas So we don't know how deep Water might go Or if there is How much would be trapped In these shadowed regions But they have been able To determine that there is A lot of water on the moon And that it Increases in its distribution Towards the poles And based on what we understand About chemistry and The solar Winds Scientists now believe That the water on the moon That they're looking at on the surface Has been deposited there By solar winds And also And chemical interactions that take place Between the building Blocks Hydrogen and oxygen In the form of hydroxyls So We have not yet The first areas that are high In water content But this gives us a starting ground And what the researchers say Is that this is Now we can start thinking about Where we can go To really investigate the depth Of the water on the moon The extent of the water on the moon And whether or not it's really Worth it for us to try and Go harvest water on the moon When we go to the moon With the intent to use The water on the moon To support our infrastructure You know Is there enough there? That's where we're getting at Look 70% or more Of the planet is covered in water There's enough water here already People just gotta get the salt out But if we go to the moon As we want to have We want to have a lunar Outpost If we go there We're gonna have to make water somehow So can we get it From the moon itself? Will we be able to harvest it From the surface of the moon? The quantities though Is to put it in perspective Of how much water There actually Is That they've got a maximum Average of around 750 parts per million In the higher latitudes That's less than Is found in the sands Of Earth's driest Deserts So it's not very much It's Really it's like Less than Less than morning dew This is why we need like a space elevator I mean like the whole thing Of the expense of getting things From here to the moon As being the prohibitive thing Of moving water to the moon Is just because right now we use giant rockets And everything costs like Five times it's weight in gold Get it up there A gallon of water is I think $18,000 to get in the space Well really all you need to do Is bring just a little bit more Than each person And then you can just recycle fluids Recycle the people Like the fluids Like the pee Yes the body fluids Or their pee back into water Yeah There are other areas That have higher than average concentrations Of water on the moon Near the moon's equator There are lunar volcanic deposits And instead of coming from solar Wind these deposits are Actually probably from Within the moon's Mantle and from erupted magma Which is cool Multiple possibilities So water on the moon it's there There's a bit of it There might be more More investigation is needed Now I do think we have Hit a certain fun time Of the show This is this week in science everybody Do you know what time it is? Is it time? In the thermal corner Oh well you know guys I'm really getting tired Stop it I'm so tired right now I don't know You know how when you're really tired You know maybe you pull on all nighter And then And then before you know it It's the next day And you're like okay I gotta Just get my day started And adrenaline and a whole bunch of coffee And you make it all the way through your day On zero sleep And then finally you collapse on your bed And you have the deepest Heaviest Longest sleep you've had in a long time Yes So this is actually a known phenomenon With mammals and a lot of other animals Where You actually end up kind of catching up You have this sleep pressure That builds up while you stay awake When normally circadian rhythms tell you to sleep If you're awake too long And you experience sleep deprivation You build up this sleep pressure Next sleep you sleep deeper Longer that's called sleep rebound So researchers Wanted to look at How sleep rebound Is influenced by different External factors So researchers from imperial college Of london wanted to look at this In you know the classic Study animal the fruit fly They say besides being a great genetic model It's also easier for us to study Effects of sleep rebound In flies as we have automatic Equipment that can monitor thousands of them Human trials Rely on people reporting their own sleep Which can be unreliable So watching the fruit flies You really get to see exactly what's happening There's no kind of Bias From reporters So what they found What they wanted to do is they wanted to see How the brain can affect Sleep pressure and sleep rebound And how did they do that They did that by Arousing the flies So They had fruit flies They kept them awake for 24 hours And then they presented them With a virgin female So They were in glass tubes They were allowed to acclimatize to the tubes And then either a male A virgin female Either a male or a virgin female Was introduced to the glass tube And both of those Introductions resulted In keeping them awake for 24 hours So they missed a whole sleep cycle After the intruder was removed The males who had been invaded by another male Had normal rebound sleep They slept deeper and harder Because they were just stressed out by this dude In their space But then the males who had been paired with a female Did not make Up for lost sleep They had a normal night's sleep So yes So they did not experience rebound sleep They did not have built up sleep pressure When males and females were first introduced So for some reason their bodies were like Not as tired Right, they were not as tired Their body didn't tell them they needed extra sleep They were on arousal Adderall Right Yeah, they slept normal But yeah, they didn't sleep heavy They felt they didn't feel You know the The best conclusion I could draw Is that they didn't feel like they missed Sleep Right, that's the way that I would phrase it Their body didn't feel, didn't act Like it missed sleep Right, so When the males and females were introduced When they brought in the virgin females This wasn't just pent up frustration Because they actually all copulated Within the first 30 minutes So the virgin females were deflowered Promptly After that the females Usually didn't engage in sexual activity Again, they were done But the males continued to try And court them Spending more than half Of the next 23 hours Trying to court these females To no avail But They also discovered that The There were some sex pheromones That were left behind By the females And that also may have had to do With keeping the males Somewhat awake Hmm So This is what they've been able to draw here First of all The pheromones Are inhibiting sleep cycles somehow Yeah And inhibiting sleep cycles But also keeping the males Stimulated enough so that That sleep pressure Is not building up So the sleep pressure I'm going to anthropomorphize a little bit But basically You're not sleeping And your body Has metabolites that are building up That need to be cleaned out This is the main idea of sleep Is that we sleep so that our brains Can consolidate memories And do housekeeping On the neurons That our body can refresh itself Together so you can wake up the next day Refreshed and ready to go And so Whatever is going on At the neural level For activation What's happening to the metabolites What's happening to their brains So that is the huge Question now This opens up an entire Field of questions Asking about sleep Doctor Strow The main researcher on this Piece of research says Sleep is a fundamental process For all animals and many of the results The community has obtained With fruit flies have been replicated In other animals including mammals and humans But now And I'm going to paraphrase How are they going to do this study in humans Oh god I can't even They're going to make them sniff t-shirts I don't know This kind of calls the entire idea Of regenerative sleep And the need for sleep into question Because if all it takes Is a brain signal from a pheromone And you're satiated You don't need sleep anymore That This kind of throws everything topsy-turvy On what we know about sleep So I'd want to see this study done On different ages of flies Different ages of male flies So is there a difference between Fertile Nubile males and older A little more decrepit I got to use my cane flies You know Right, one and a half days old Right, well they do a day and a half So different ages and also For a longer time span So can they keep it up Right, yes How long can that arousal last With no detrimental effects Right, and is there a point Is there a limit Is there a certain point where there's detrimental effects Or is there a certain point where they have To have that extra Hard sleep at some point Sleep rebound, does that eventually kick in Yeah, so fruit flies And their arousal Have taught us a lot about sleep It turns out So my analogy for sleep Is this, if you could If you could just go to sleep tonight And leave everything Leave the dishes in the sink Leave the laundry on the floor Leave the garbage piling up And you'd wake up tomorrow And it's all done The dishes were washed And they're back in the cupboard The trash is, there's a new liner In the trash bin in the house And the rest of it was taken out The laundry has all been washed and folded This is what sleep does For your brain And so, yeah The longer you're awake And haven't allowed The fairies to come in And finish the shoemaker's job Or whatever Yeah, these things Pile up, they build up Sleep does all these things for you It allows your brain to take out the trash And that's all you got to do is sleep And sometimes If enough trash builds up You can maybe need to sleep a little longer Because they've got more work to do They're going to put a little bit more of the sleep pixie dust over you So you can knock that longer But then, how does See, this is the big question What happens when you don't do that And you don't act like you need it Yeah, what happens at what point So what's happening basically in this state These flies are getting super aroused And their laundry is staying folded The pixies are coming in and doing something Even though they haven't closed their eyes to go to sleep So that is the question How is that possible And is there at some point A detrimental payback That will happen Maybe arousal equals sleep And so the interesting question here Is like, so what they say here Is like, so there are other biological Drives that can maybe modulate That sleep And if And if this is the case What I am excited about if it applies to people So we've been hearing forever about All you need to be, you need to go to bed At the same time every night We know that shift work is really bad For people, but if we can Figure this out, can we make it better For shift workers, can we assuage The fears of the weekend Party warriors Who like to stay up all night long Is there, you know, people might be like What am I doing to myself by staying up all night On Saturday nights So we provide Sex or sleep Sex or sleep, maybe, you know It's one in the same We provide shift workers with pornography Like, I don't think it's That outlandish Of an idea to think that Being aroused Or being concentrated on sex Actually resting Actually resting a good part Of the human brain That kind of makes sense Like a lot of the rest of the brain Is shut off, not being activated Not being required To run any Any information through it Yeah, but remember these flies only had sex Once in 24 hours And they spent the other 23 hours Trying to get sex and failed It's still arousal It was that activation That they were not actively Still sectional last 24 hours, Blair Yes, but it was Not bad This is part of the conversation That will be removed from the podcast Anyway We have actually left the subject matter We have left the subject matter Let's get back to the animal corner I have one more very quick story But very earth-shattering Octopuses and other cephalopods Have one ability That is Astounding, amazing, and fascinating And that is their ability To change colors At the blink of an eye Their amazing Pigment cells Can do this kind of Crazy color change To communicate with each other To blend in with environments To look like other animals It's fantastic And there's been a lot of research Trying to figure out exactly how they get this A new piece of research From a peaking university Looked at reflectin Which is a protein that exists exclusively In cephalopods and is responsible For structural color changes That help them easily blend In surrounding environments Or send warning signals This research Long story short Looks like This reflectin Came from a symbiotic Bioluminescent Bacteria Called Vibrio fissure And they think this is all A case of horizontal Gene transfer Really? Yes, horizontal gene Transfer in a higher organism Yes We've talked about it in bacteria And there's been inklings Right Wow, really? So that's pretty much All of it for now It's very preliminary But they were looking at This was five years of research I don't know how preliminary But this is the very first inklings Of this information They traced the origin of reflectin The gene responsible for reflectin Back to a transposon Bioluminescent bacteria So the implication Here is that horizontal gene Transfer this event Introduced the reflectin gene Into ancient cephalopods And They can also from this five year Research find an actual hierarchical That's such a great word Hierarchical structure Of reflectin protein I can't say that word either So that Some Chemical modules and neurotransmitters Create This ability for reflectin To form But The team also found That self assembly And higher order assembly in reflectin Urgenated from a core repeating Octopeptide Which is from This symbiotic bacteria They've named it a protopeptide Although octopeptide sounds perfect Because octopuses But anyway There's a lot of smoking Guns here that lead us to believe That this could be all from Horizontal gene transfer It's not been 100% confirmed yet But it's all signs Are pointing to this one This one bacteria One symbiotic Bacteria I love the idea of this being Something that was too An ancient cephalopod When we've talked about the genes That we carry in our DNA We don't talk about an ancient hominin And gene transfer It's like this happened at some point When we were just early multicellular creatures Long, long ago Not when you were a fully Formed organism I love the idea that This could have happened Yeah, absolutely This was an ancient cephalopod An ancient bacteria Yeah, forgiveness Pretty colorful cephalopods What weird stuff do we have In our genome from bacteria I'm sure there's a bunch of it I want to know more How much horizontal gene transfer is happening On a regular basis I've heard lots of hypotheses about this Yeah But this is fascinating Yeah, this is cool Cool, cool Chemistry, biology All coming together in the cephalopods And now I'd like to talk about squirrels Squirrels are nuts Squirrels like nuts I know Blair loves squirrels So she loves this part of the conversation This story Is out of UC Berkeley So it's a near and dear to our hearts Kind of story Researchers from UC Berkeley Published in the Royal Society Open Science Journal Their research looking at fox squirrels And how they remember Where they hide things So fox squirrels Are not larder hoarders Larder hoarders Are the kind of hoarders That take all their nuts And they put them in one place The larder, where they can always go back to it No, no, fox squirrels are Scatter hoarders Which means they're hiding these things all over the place They get an acorn, they get a different kind of nut They're putting it all over the place And they hide Some 3,000 to 10,000 Nuts a year So it turns out, according to Michael Delgado And Lucia Jacobs From UC Berkeley That this is the first demonstration of Chunking In a scatter hoarding animal And it suggests that squirrels Use flexible strategies to Store food depending On how they acquire that food Chunking, you say Yeah, what is chunking You might say We do it when we say Try to remember a phone number Instead of remembering each individual Number in a phone number separately In that order You chunk them into small chunks So you remember the first three digits As the area code, the next three digits As the next three digits And then the last four digits And maybe those last four digits you split into Two digits and two digits But those are chunks of information And so they found that By giving these squirrels different opportunities To take food And different kinds of food They found that if they gave the squirrels Always the food in the same place Squirrels Would take and hide the food And organize it By type So they basically took all the almonds And hid all the almonds Kind of in the same general area The pecans Ended up In a different general area Peanuts In a different general area It was like they were organizing Their refrigerators With Different nut drawers But If the researchers always gave the squirrels Their food from different locations Not from a central location But from different locations Then The squirrels The strategy they used was only To not hide it Where they had hidden something before So basically when they hid something The researchers would then give them a new thing Near that location where they had hidden Something and then the squirrels would be like I can't hide, I just got something I gotta go hide it someplace else And so they'd go to a different location So based on how they got the food The squirrels Hit the food differently They either scattered it Based on I'm not putting it there again Or they organized it Based on category They categorized their nuts Squirrels are nuts Their Their brains work pretty similar to ours I mean, they're mammal brains And we love to categorize things I know, that's how we learn It is, but it's so interesting This is the first time that This kind of chunking behavior Has been attributed To another animal doing This kind of scatter hoarding What a yucky word for that Scatter hoarding or chunking Chunking Chunking Chunks Squirrels got chunks of memory Nut chunks? No, anyway No It's a pretty neat study Very interesting A glimpse into the squirrel brain And as much as you don't like squirrels You gotta admit it's fascinating It is fascinating, they're wily It explains even more Why they're so untrustworthy They remember what they are They know who to bother Untrustworthy Oh my goodness They know where they've hidden their nuts They know where they've hidden things before I think that is Yeah, that's another big one They remember They adapt their behavior They're wily, can't be trusted Alright, two more quick stories And then Justin gets to do one Skin cells Were directly converted into Motor neurons Now you might say what We've talked about Skin cells being turned into embryo Or not embryo but induced Chloropotent stem cells And then turned into motor neurons We're doing this all the time But this is important because What it allows researchers to do Is in a dish, not take The cell back to Embryonic stage To young age Basically one of the researchers At this study out of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis What he says is that when you go back Through the pluripotent stem cell phase Which is like way back It's like demolishing a house And building a new one from the ground up What we're doing is more like renovation We change the interior But leave the original structure Which retains the characteristics Of changing adult neurons That we want to study This is going to allow researchers To actually study diseases That relate to neurodegeneration In the cells of Patients who are going through Those neurodegenerative Processes in real time And so basically it's The idea is that you can really Take a patient's cells And figure out what's going on In their brains or in their motor neurons Like the skins and instead You can't take motor neurons out of a Living human being So instead you can take a biopsy A skin sample and turn those cells Now directly into motor neurons That can tell you a lot more about What is going on in the nervous system Of that living human being Yeah, take some skin I'm covered in it Go ahead motor neuron away Put them in a dish So it's a very exciting Advancement and then also Years ago Back in the early Early 2000s I was early in Graduate school When the hormone replacement Therapy study came out saying Don't take hormone Replacement therapy if you are A post-menopausal woman because It could lead to heart attacks And stroke and increased estrogen Levels are leading to increased Stroke in women and There's a new study out published In JAMA This study looked at 20,000 347 women Who were randomized Mortality follow-up Was available for more than 98% They did an 18-year follow-up Counting the number of deaths In either a hormone Therapy group or a placebo group And the end result is Among post-menopausal women Hormone therapy With conjugated equine Estrogens Oh boy Horse estrogen Yeah, plus medroxy Progesterone acetate Which is a form of progesterone For a median of 5.6 years or with The horse estrogens alone For a median of 7.2 Years was not Associated with risk Of all-cause cardiovascular Or cancer mortality During a cumulative follow-up Of 18 years The end result Is menopausal hormone therapy For 5 to 7 years In the study was not associated With the risk of long-term All-cause mortality So This is good news For women and doctors Who have been interested In the use Of hormone replacement therapy But have been scared away from it Short-term Use of the therapy Could be positive Talk to your doctors It's just a study Justin, that's it for me What's your story? Embedded connectivity Where any object can communicate Some sort of relevant information Wirelessly With low power To another object Or read out of some sort That would take that information To do something useful with it Like a sports jersey That alerts the coach That an athlete has precipitated Beyond good hydration A headband monitoring heart rate A fireproof jacket that alerts you When it is about to fail Shoes That tell you It's time to change your socks Yes It's a vision of a world so bold And currently so bulky That it doesn't exist right now But with a less bulky Bold vision On the near horizon University of Washington researchers have demonstrated For the first time That devices that run almost zero power Can transmit data Across distances Of up to 2.8 kilometers Which of course is for those not familiar With kilometers Approximately 2800 meters Breaking the long held barrier And potentially enabling A vast array A vast array of interconnected devices So Today's Sort of flexible electronics Something that's like a wearable electronic Can't employ Really big battery and need to operate With very low power typically So they can usually talk to something else That's maybe a few feet Or a few meters away This kind of limits Their practical applications University of Washington's Long range backscatter system Uses reflected Radio signals to transmit data Extremely low power and low cost They achieved Reliable coverage Throughout a 4800 Square foot house Office area that covered 41 rooms And A one acre Vegetable farm Quoty voice Until now devices that can communicate over long distances Have consumed a lot of power The trade off and a lower power device That consumes microwatts of power Is that the communication range is short Says Shyam Golekota Professor School of computer science and engineering Now we've shown that we can offer both Which will be Game changing for a lot of different Industries And applications So the To put this in perspective this is The range That they've achieved here It's not so much that the range because we can Communicate with like satellites That are orbiting distant planets But you know those are Powered those probes They did this Range with a thousand times Less power Than all existing technologies Capable of transmitting data over those Similar distances so The real superpower isn't in the range It's in the amount of power That they used To transmit that information And I sort of made up In the lead into the story Shoes that tell you your socks Are sweaty and should be changed And it's sort of like I was trying to think of What flexible wearable Things Or what sort of low energy devices Would you need To do that communication And I couldn't really come up with any One of the Anything for like Your health monitoring Something that can be taking Maybe not your blood pressure But your pulse, your heart rate Monitoring your body temperature The one that I did come up with Was one of those Like Those fake heart things Or some sort of embedded Device within a body Something that's A battery level of your pacemaker But also like It's much smaller That is a stint that's keeping An artery open And signaling that it's structurally Failing and being able to tell Not a device that you're wearing On your neck or on the side Of your head but being able To relay that somewhere in Room at large and Have an alert show up on your phone As a result One of the examples they used Is for a flexible E-brace It could transmit The range of mobility For that knee To a doctor or something But this is like And then it can be used by spies Oh right Then it gets hacked and your knee does weird things That you didn't intend it to do Right Transmitting information About, I don't know Never mind But you know then you can Take it out to a broader context And even look at something Like the wifi device That you now have plugged into your wall Right If you're able to transmit Information over less power Ultimately It could mean a lot of our wireless devices Could at some point be using A lot less of like tristy Or have longer ranges for the same Amount of power Right It's an interesting system I don't know how much further it goes But yeah A thousand times less power Required for the range that they achieved Versus what was previously existing I can't wait to see these things In application Soon Well and with wireless charging Even when it starts to run out You might still be able to charge it Remotely Wow that's a whole thing Then you've got Then you've got that sort of Passive charging Of a car driving on Electric car driving on a highway And it's charging up because it can Transmit Energy But this is basically communication This isn't energy But there are But still something That's something you would need to figure out Even though it doesn't use It uses a thousand times less It still uses something And you're still going to need to either Replace it or recharge it at some point Possibly This is the kind of thing like we've been talking about Batteries This is like batteries being needed for things Because Or battery We've been talking about maybe bacterial batteries That we could build But they don't produce that much power Maybe this is an application That we could use these Low energy Low power energy sources to power These low power needing Devices Bacteria Powering this communications device That potentially Helps doctors to keep you healthier Many interesting ideas Many interesting ideas Will probably come from this This is very very interesting Oh have we done it you guys? We did it! Two hours and we are good We are good What a great show tonight Everyone thank you so much for joining us For another episode of This Week in Science Thank you to our chat room for watching this whole time Thank you for everyone who Who helps us out On this week in science Fada, Brandon Identity 4 Thank you very much for your assistance We could not do this without you Now I'd like to thank our Patreon Sponsors I'd like to say thank you To Paul Disney, Gvert and Lattimore John Ratnaswamy, Richard Onomis, Byron Lee EO, Kevin Perichan, Jacqueline Boyster Tyron Fong, Andy Groh, Keith Corsale Jake Jones, Gerald Sorrells, Chris Clark Richard Hendricks, Charlene Henry Brian Hendrick, John Gridley, Stephen Bickel Kevin Rails, Bakula, Cezad Kinsday Friedel, Jay Verandal, Bob Calder Marshall Clark, Larry Garcia, Randy Mazzucca Tony Steele, General Onyago, Steve DeBell Louis Smith, The Hardin Family, IFSHMN Greg Guthman, Patrick Cohn, Sanya Volkova Daryl Frunzerang, Alex Wilson, Jason Schneiderman, Dave Neighbor, Jason Josie Matthew Littwin, Eric Knapp, Jason Roberts, Richard Porter Rodney, Dave Wiley, Robert Aston, Sir Frank Adellic Christopher Wrappin, Dana Pearson, Paul Stanton David Brennan Minnish, Dale Bryant Todd Northcott, Marlene Moss, Bill Kersey Belden-Rothig, Darwin Hannon, Rudy Garcia Felix Alvarez, Brian Hohn, Orly Radio Brian Condon-Mart, Nathan Greco-Hexlator Dryer, Artyam Chewada, Dave Wilkinson, Steve Mishansky, Rich Bramos, Gary Swinsburg Phil Nadeau, Grapp Baxon Howard, Sal Goodsay, Matt Sutter, Emma Fret, Grenier, Philip Shane James Stobbs and Kurt Larson, Stefan Insama, honey Moss, Mountain Sloth, Jim Topov, Jason Olds, James Paul West, Alec Dodie, Alem Alama, Joe Wheeler, Dougal Campbell, Kurt Porter, Adam Mishkan, Aaron Luthan, Marjorie, David Simoli, Tyler Harrison, and Colombo Ahmed. 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This week in science This week in science This week in science It's the end of the world So I'm setting up a shop Got my banner unfurled It says the scientist is in I'm gonna sell my advice I'll show them how to stop the robot With a simple device I'll reverse all the warming With a wave of my hand And all it'll cost you Is a couple of grand Science is coming your way So everybody listen To what I say I use the scientific method And I'll broadcast my opinion All of it's this week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science I've got one disclaimer And it shouldn't be news That what I say May not represent your views But I've done the calculations And I've got a plan If you listen to the science You may just better understand But we're not trying to threaten Your philosophy We're just trying to save the world This week in science Is coming your way So everybody listen Do everything we say And if you use our methods Better roll and I die We may rid the world of toxoplasma Got the eye Eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye Cause it's this week in science This week in science This week in science Science, science This week in science Science, science This week in science Science, science I've got a laundry list of items I want to address From stopping global hunger To dredging Loch Ness I'm trying to promote More rational thought And I'll try to answer Any question you've got So how can I ever see The changes I seek When I can only set up shop This week in science Is coming your way You better just listen To what we say And if you learn anything From the words that we've said Then please just remember It's all in your head This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science It's the after show And Blair's got a Funny picture Of herself on a polo horse What are you talking about? This is how I always look Always poloing around Yeah, that's me That's you, poloing around You know how I just can't stop talking about polo? Oh, good Wow, did you know that the guy Who's the voice actor for Squidward On SpongeBob SquarePants His last name is Bumpass No I mean maybe it's not pronounced that way Bumpass Bumpass Bumpass Bumpass I did not know Did you know that At Comic-Cons Voice actors get paid For their autographs? That's cool I didn't know I missed seeing Weird Al Yankovic It's Portland Comic-Con right now It was this last weekend At Comic-Con Britt Spiner was there Katie Sackoff Who else was there? Rose MacGyver Who I love from iZombie Who else was there? Pearl Mackie She was in Doctor Who Felicia Day was there And Peter Capaldi Oh and Carl Urban I like Carl Urban McCoy McCoy Bones From the new Star Trek I got to speak on a panel At Rose City Comic-Con That's so cool I'm sorry I didn't mean to do that My friend Jessica Herbert Hebert Who we interviewed About Placentes Oh yeah She's a con type of girl Type of lady She's a pirate She's also kind of a geek music Creator Keonado And so She was already She had already Put together a panel Petitioned to do a panel About geek music At the con And then she found out about the Future track And the Future track had a bunch Of science stuff in it Which I didn't know was a thing At the Rose City Comic-Con Comic-Con's expanding In a lot of cities to be things other than Yeah But what this means Is that I can try And make this weekend's science Panel Or next year maybe Right We could do a Comic-Con thing Maybe Or Do a panel on podcasting Or see if we can do a live podcast Somewhere Or no I'm having ideas But we'll see when next year comes About It's here in Portland so why not Right We've talked about a lot of things on the show That are like Originally based in science fiction Real So I mean You could fill an entire hour with that easily Like just talking about tricorders You could fill an hour I've got the challenge I've got the challenge That I could lay out At a Comic-Con Which I'll go ahead and do right now What You can have any superpower That you want That can be yours right now As long as Nobody has ever had it before In any Comic-Con That is I have found I laid this out with some I would call them comic nerds And They were unable to come up with Anything That hasn't been tried before Isn't there in some form already I wonder I can't wait to discover What the things there are What things are still to come Have not been made up They've all been done We're at the point Have all of them We're at the point where Is it all done? Is there nothing new? No but also I mean I would argue What you're just saying is there are No new ideas which is a fair Thing to talk about But what I really think Is particularly interesting about Science fiction Is that it puts people in a Space where They are specifically Dreaming up scenarios Based on A probable future And so it's different Because it's not just that You put enough monkeys in a room And they'll type out Shakespeare It's an exercise To explore Potential futures Sign this girl The ability to fight allergies, dust, pollen And cry I like that So Yeah So what you're saying A lot of it is putting us Into a sort of foreseeable future And rolling with it And playing out Sort of current day Scenarios With this new future world That we're in here A show that just started I'm already a huge fan of Is The Orville If you haven't seen it It's What is it? Seth McFarland, he did like the family Oh yeah I've heard about it It's a complete total Correct knockoff And it is Brilliant It is just I mean a lot of the gags Are so far It's one episode, there's a whole bunch more It's going to be coming out every Sunday A lot of the gags Some of them are sort of like They're like, okay that was obvious But They're obvious only because They've Punchline has pre-existed In sci-fi All along But nobody ever pulled the trigger on it And he's pulling the trigger on all of them Like there's My favorite like It was actually in a Trailer for it But it's still my favorite part Of what he's creating Is the The alien ship Comes up on viewer They've got to have this Negotiation dialogue To get through this next part Of the confrontation The alien spacecraft Only the alien is Sitting way to the side of center Of the screen Like over here Before they start talking I'm sorry To your right Take one step Just one Yeah, okay, sorry You were out of the middle of the frame Was just totally throwing me off Alien comes up on the viewer And it's just like Way over here Just one step to your left Yeah, okay, okay Now we're good He's playing the minutia Of all those things That were overlooked Because they were staged perfectly For us throughout all sci-fi He's delving into those Anyway, it's a great show I'm already a big fan of it I haven't seen it yet, I can't wait to watch it It sounds awesome It's stupid good I like stupid good In fact, I love stupid good I'm a big fan of Stupid good So many ways We had a really long show tonight Guys And I think it's, I don't know, did we I feel like this is now par for the course I think the two hour show is just like a thing Well, when we do, when we have a guest on For an interview Definitely because I have a hard time I have a hard time Cutting back the science For the second half of the show Which is if you have a 45 minute interview Then you have to cut back the science Or the discussion of the science You know, and then that's like, okay But then I don't know Ed says, sorry, the horrible pilot was 30 minutes So we'll never get back I don't know, Ed, there was gems in there The device that did that Sort of simple seeming thing That like did have this other Huge consequence if it fell into the wrong hands And the way they utilized A You know, planted plot The thing to use it As a counter WI guy didn't like it either Yeah, I think he really got too Out of there, Farland I think so, but He's a polarizing individual Too late to eat chocolate No, it's never too late to eat chocolate Right It's delicious chocolate also The only reason I'm not eating chocolate right now Is that I brush my teeth I have them by the way Stupid WI guy, it is stupid But it's stupid enough To be, I think, good and funny Not Because it can't be good in front of you And you know what? Fair trade Ooh, lemon ginger Oh my goodness With black pepper That's really good I wonder if lady vikings like You want lady viking Chocolate? Oh, that would be good That would taste sweaty Oh man, I totally Missed the opportunity to wear my funny viking hat With the light up horns Aww Oh well Oh yeah, that interview is not going to get edited For the KDBS Radio show, it's going to be all of our Discussion Science news stories are going to go Yeah The podcast Will be pretty much two hours long I think I will cut out part of the conversation About Fruit fly sex Yes, that's fair The part that wasn't really about fruit fly sex Yep I agree with that decision Hey, I mean I think it is a great Gift First of all 90 to 95% Of the stuff that we say Is worth keeping I consider that a great compliment But the other thing is It is really great to be able to go I'm just going to trim that a little bit Yeah, we probably shouldn't go that way That's great No, we're trying to make content People actually want to listen to Yeah It needs to be salacious I appreciate the critical ear I think it's fantastic One of the benefits Of being part of the live audience To get out Hear all the salacious bits that We decided we're Right, hear all the things That maybe we should Yeah, cutting room floor Exactly It's kind of like the beauty though Of doing a live show Without A tremendous amount of planning For a pre-sensoring of what we're going to say Is that you do get to hear A lot of rambling That just follows The conversation wherever it leads Oh boy, and that's a good thing No, I think it's a great thing For the live audience To be able to participate in that And it's sort of getting behind the scenes Who was it As an editor it makes me A little upset on Thursdays When I go to edit I'm just going to cut off The last half hour of the show I'm thinking it's Woody Allen I think Woody Allen was saying Somebody else did this and he doesn't But it was something like A good filmmaker Films Ten times What actually shows up on the screen That was Scorsese, right? Right, okay, so that's Scorsese I think it was Woody Allen said I tried to cut that down to three But it was him talking about it That got, this is how I heard this But yeah, okay So it's like Scorsese Shoots like ten times what you see Because then it's just It's pure gold because they finally got The scene right, the dialogue went off right Whatever it is, finally came through Properly in one of ten versions Of them doing it What you always get here is the only Version that we have to offer you So if you like it It's because we're ten times as good As Scorsese That's how you have to, that's the math I think that's how that works Sure, sure, sure, sure Right, exactly Bleak But that doesn't work for me Just makes me paranoid or I fall asleep So yeah, that wouldn't work necessarily Oh, Identity Four says I went to a live SGU That's Skeptics Guide to the Universe It was a show a few years ago It was shocking how much those shows Get edited down for the podcast Yeah, right, see maybe I should be A more, I should be a I should cut the show down Seriously to only, like the podcast Oh here with me, what would you do Five minutes, five minutes The podcast is gonna be, so here's the thing I'm gonna edit the podcast To always be only 45 minutes Wow That's it, I'll let it down to 45 minutes That'll be it, and then people How will people even know that I'm part of the show Because you're always talking over Kiki So people will have to Oh yeah, so I need to keep Talking over to people I need to talk over people just to get My voice on the show But I want to hear the rest of Kiki So you're gonna narrow it down to 45 And then there was a second half of that Oh yeah, and then what we'll do Is we'll make a second Podcast feed that only Goes out through Patreon To Patreon sponsors, and it is The entire show Then you're getting me You're gonna hear me telling stories But people will pay for you That's the thing, Johnson It's gonna be the podcast freebie Might not have you in it But people who want you Are gonna pay for it Yeah, I'm the drought, we're in trouble You ever hear that That tagline, they don't even say it anymore But you hear the laugh tracks behind TV Shows and then once in a while they'll say Film before live television audience Right Even those shows Sometimes do the show three times For a live audience, they do it three Times and then they edit up Which ones went over better Which ones they executed better Or the audience reacted better too And then sometimes The audience that you hear laughing has nothing To do with the show. This is always something that freaks me out When my kids are watching like a I'm not gonna say the network But watching a kid show With a laugh track Any kid show with a laugh track Laugh tracks tend to be Adults 20s, 30s, 40s, whatever Adult ages there are Laughing at something I'm like always pointing out to my daughter Do you notice this like Kid joke Just got laughed at By a bunch of people who sound like They're 40 years old Isn't that weird? It's not an audience of kids That they could Pull out of school to create the laugh track It's a bunch of adults who thought that Throwaway comment was hilarious Like no They hit a button that's a recording Of people laughing at something completely different And Put it to what you're watching And it actually ruined I think my daughter's ability to watch certain shows Because now she hears the laugh track Like before she never heard the laugh track But now she hears the laugh track and goes You killed it Oh, they made That sound funny by laughing Like exactly But they did this thing in school Where they looked at Three things that take place in writing And I Connected dots between That and things that she watches But when you Read something You can usually fit it into three categories One is informative Which is I think what we do We do informative broadcasts Another is entertainment Which we sprinkle Into this Or we just by happenstance And another is persuasive So these are the three main things That you're going to encounter When you read something It's an informative piece that you're reading It's an entertaining piece that you're reading Or it's a persuasive Persuasion piece And so I connected it to the TV Watching so she can now identify And will tell me When she's watching something That's a persuasion Which is all commercials They're telling me That this looks informative Because they showed a digestive track But they're trying to persuade me That if I take this product I'll get rid of my Acid reflex Whatever that is Or this is just purely for entertainment They're not trying to be informative Or convince me of anything They're just trying to get me to laugh If you look at every kind of media That you encounter Just from those three Three little lenses These three little categories And force them into one of them I think you'll find A lot of the conversation That you feel like you're engaged in In society can be boiled down into that Right? Somebody's trying to inform Entertain Or convince And what do we do? We do a combination Of all of them I think I think we do a heavy amount Of informative Heavy informative though Mainly informative Yeah I think Our entertainment factor Has a lot more to do with the fact that We are The way we're approaching the informative Isn't an entertaining thing Right, it's our approach Not we're doing it to entertain But that we have an entertaining Approach to the informative Which is a blend of the Your concentric circle And we do some persuasive There is an element of our show Where we're like If you've bought into any of the Kool-Aid on global warming Here's why it's not Kool-Aid Which is persuasion Right But it's also just informative So it's hard to tell sometimes The problem too is that Anti-science Is Persuasive When you try to fight a persuasive argument With Purely informative It doesn't always work Which is part of the problem That we've had with things like climate change Is that Scientists bring A pipette to a gunfight Right So I think that's part of Something that In all of my science communication Training that I've had And in the time that we've spent Doing this, you learn How to present Information in a persuasive way Or In an entertaining way So you're still being informative You're not bringing untruths You're not bringing anything in Anything else But you're Using a vocabulary perhaps That is more consistent with a different Communication form I don't know It's a weird thing Right now because You can find support Of literally anything on the internet Which Some parts of the internet are fantastic We have access to things We've never had access to before Which also creates a lot of echo chambers Right But that's what America is And this is It's definitely stronger than it's ever been though With the internet because You're the only person that believes in Chemtrails in your neighborhood You have no one to talk to Unless you have the internet But And this is not an argument that I created But it's when I came across recently That I kind of like buy into a little bit Which is that the whole idea of America Is The freedom To believe what you want And You can believe what you want But people don't have to talk to you And you also don't have to act on it Like if you want to talk about believing Whatever you want There have been some people With some beliefs that are pretty upsetting Running around And just because you believe in something And act on it Well, okay, but So be careful with that No, this is what I mean though This took a different slant On what I think about America In terms of our freedoms And our liberties And our freedom from religion And everything else is that Part of what made America an attractive place To come to In the early stages of The post-colony world That We think of it as freedom from religion Or freedom of your religion But in a way that's also saying Freedom to believe Anything You want And nobody There's not an authority Built into America that tells you No, you're wrong This is the way the world is This is how things are This is the way it is Every religion from religion Of ideology That comes with America Is the ability to believe in absolute bullshit I just said that You said bad words I know But there is like that That has kind of ingrained into The American thing of the freedom Which is that You don't have to accept Somebody else's definition Of how the world works verse works and and I think for the early deists that freedom was liberating and I and I think in our modern day era of all the internets being able to put out any kind of nonsense and people seeking it out and chemtrail believers you know the whole whatever it is as as as repugnant as some of it is you also have to acknowledge that's kind of what America is as this experiment of society is always going to have the ability and the freedom to have really false beliefs because it almost encourages you to to define reality on your own terms and it's a weird it's a weird it's a concept of America that I'm kind of new to and and thinking of it and looking at it as so I don't I can't like argue about the pros and cons of that to any length but that does seem to be something that's rather unique here which is an any other governmental system of education and what the people can and can't believe I don't I don't know but but my point and the internet is an example of that but my point was that there is now a way to find thousands of people that will corroborate literally anything right at the at the tap of a mouse so I'm not I'm not even you know I'm not trying to condemn anything I'm just saying that it does complicate things when there are stakes at understanding the truth yeah and I'm not cheerleading the idea that it's great that anybody can believe what they want just based on what they want to believe it complicates things when you're just versus you know when you're the person standing in Central Park saying this or that versus you have a community of people it's just different it's very different and the internet has allowed this uh this kind of different type of of fact finding right and the internet's birth was as science communication so so um yeah I don't know I don't know it somebody who is I can't I don't even know where I got this idea it's an writer who wrote the who wrote a book recently that was talking about Trump and this is how like this is the ultimate conclusion of what America in a way created is people who can define everything around them based on their own terms of what they believe it to be I can't believe it people should keep most of their opinions to themselves you can be wrong and I think that's something we need to get better at I think people need to get better at being wrong I think being wrong about something needs to carry less weight than it does now I think that's a little that's that's one of the obstacles to progress and communication isn't it people well and I and I I would argue that agreed that they were wrong about something that you know 30 years ago if you had a disagreement with someone you'd talk about it you'd have a debate you'd bring up you know things to try to support your argument but we all have these computers in our back pockets and so instead of having to think critically from what you have in your brain you can very easily pull out your phone google a phrase and get a support for literally anything so it changes the way that we argue it changes the way we debate and it changes the way we are right or wrong so I can be pointing at one source that says that cephalopods or aliens and you can be pointing at another source that says that they're actually related to snails and reached a stalemate the journal science and yours is bright but I don't care I don't care I have this phrase right here I have a source right and I feel like I won and you feel like you won exactly yes that's that's my point is it's changed it's changed the way we debate things you can always be right I guess I guess it's a little bit of national pride that feeds into my desire to really look at the America this way which is that yeah I know I get why there's so much ignorant belief in America because it comes with the freedom to seek out your own knowledge yeah is is is it's it's going to be you know and and I'm in any comparison to any other nation on the planet they're going to be as ignorant as they're told to be we just have the right to be as ignorant as we want to be that is exactly the difference and the fact and the fact that we might you know beat the ignorance out ignorant other nations on some issues just comes down to freedom it's a hard thing to settle and my I don't want my people to be ignorant like pride freedom I'm free do what I want any old time you are free to buy probiotics that have not been tested based on their mechanisms you're free you can do it you can spend all your money on that however it's illegal to buy on pasteurized milk in some places you too can buy not a dr jackson's poop pills that it's dr jackson dr justin's not a real doctor not a real dr poop pills it's in parentheses though so maybe he is a real doctor you don't know because it's in parentheses not a real doctor parentheses my parenthetical doctor doctor doctor all right is it bedtime it is bedtime we will we will see you all next week I I'm glad we had a little after the after show no I need an after the after you need an after the after but uh secrets hey say good night Blair good night Blair say good night Justin good night Justin good night we're not saying doctor she's a doctor she's a doctor you're not going to say doctor let's try it again Blair one more time from the doctor good night doctor good night good night doctor kiki good night everyone thank you for joining us again and we look forward to seeing you again next week have fun on the interwebs not as much fun as dead crews though