 Oh, too bright. Now I have to wait until I get the okey-dokey. Okey-dokey? Do I get the okey-dokey? Are we live? Are we live? I think that we might be... We are. We're live. I can hear us. You know! So let's pause those things that are playing so they don't get annoying. And let's start a show in three, two, this is Twist. This week in Science Episode... Let me start that over because obviously I cannot speak this evening once again. Three, two, this is Twist. This week in Science Episode Number 698, recorded on Wednesday, December 5th, 2018. How do people make babies? Hey everyone! I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on the show we are going to fill your heads with a uterus, not a dolphin and a trace, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Humans! They're pretty much everywhere. The following program is geared towards humans. Humans make up most of the listening audience. The stories are mostly retold by humans based on scientific work done by other humans. There are humans helping record, edit and rebroadcast the show. There are humans who support the financial needs of the show. There are even humans who visit the show from time to time. But oddly, the actual content of the show is rarely directly about humans. One of the wonderful things about science, unlike most anything else we humans talk about, science allows us to focus our minds on things not human. And as it turns out, there's a lot more going on in the universe than just us. We're going to talk about it here on This Week in Science, coming up next. Every day of the week, there's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to 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, Kiki. And a good science to you too, Justin and Trace. Because Blair is not here this evening. Good science to everyone out there. Welcome to this week's episode of This Week in Science. We are back again to fill your heads with all the science goodness that we found to talk about. And like I said, we're missing a Blair and we hope that she's having a fabulous vacation. But we've gained a Trace. Hi, Trace. Hi, hi. That's me. Welcome to the show. And a good word of warning to any co-host who decides they have better things to do than participate in their entourage show. You can be replaced. Anyway, Trace is a science reporting nerd just like we are. And you might know him from places online like Seeker and DNews, Revision 3. And we are excited to have his brand of science reportage here with us this evening. So Trace, this is exciting. You decided to join us. We've talked about this. We talked about it once, ages and ages ago. So long ago. So long ago. And we finally made it happen. I'm so happy. I'm finally on the show. It's weird to be on the side of the headphones. I mean, the headphones are the same, but I don't know. But it's different. It is. And you're not dead, which is good. Yeah. You're healing up from a cold. I'm like the worst flu of my life. I don't know what happened. I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't do anything. I was just sweaty all the time. It was really hot. Really, really uncomfortable and hot. I'm glad you healed up. And the timing worked out perfectly for the show. Hopefully no sweatiness during the program. Well, luckily it's audio mostly. That's right. We'll keep moving on. All right, everybody on this week's show. I've got so much science news. We all brought a bunch of stuff. I brought stories about, well, a CRISPR update and. Some placenta is in a dish. Also some other stuff. Justin, what do you have? Oh my gosh. I've got some. What ancient mystery. Hominins that are that were somewhat discovered. 229 new species. Of creatures that are now on the planet. As well as a few ever want to see Greenland. Maybe do it. Pretty, pretty soon. That might be. That might be one of the more pressing destinations. What if you want to see Greenland while it's still. Not really green. Now's the time. If you want to see it at all. Oh, and a warm blooded marine reptile. That. Yeah, it's going to be interesting. Interesting show. All right. And Trace, did you bring us some science? I brought some science. A deceased woman's uterus birthed a baby. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be cool. And then also general relativity has been confirmed yet again. But I think this is a pretty cool way that we confirmed it because it started with a horrible, horrible mistake. That's the best science. Right. I love that. I can't wait to hear that story. I'm so excited. All right, everyone, as we jump into the show, I want to remind you that you can subscribe to the twist podcast on iTunes in the Google Play podcast portal. Where else in Spotify, Stitcher, Spreaker, tune in. And soon we're going to be in the Pandora podcast directory when they release that. That'll be awesome. Yeah. You can also find us on YouTube and Facebook, all these places. You know, you can look for us by searching for this week in science. You can also go directly to twist.org at twist.org. You can find information about our 2019 twist Blair's Animal Corner calendar, which she did all the art for. She hand drew everything. She's the artist in the house, but not in the house tonight, obviously. But now it's time for CRISPR, baby's update. So we talked last week about CRISPR and the gene editing of human embryos that were allowed to go to full term pregnancy, birth, healthy twin girls. The gene edited was a CCR5 gene. There is a naturally mutated version of this gene that seems to confer HIV resistance on people. And apparently the researcher decided that he was going to do research in the goal of helping people become resistant to HIV in an area in which HIV is a growing problem. However, there's other treatments that are cheaper, better possibly than going into this gene editing role. And hey, two new things came up in the last week that I thought might tell us something about this story. First thing turns out from researchers, particularly a paper that came out in 2016 reporting on CCR5's role in learning and memory. There are other papers that suggest that this CCR5 gene is not just an entry point for HIV into the immune system. It also communicates with neurons involved with learning and memory and is involved in the process of neurodegeneration and dementia that can occur in HIV patients. So blocking or having a mutated version of CCR5 was shown to improve memory in mice as well as humans. And so the doctor, he said, no, no, I'm just trying to help people with HIV. Could it be there's a secondary intent by choosing this gene? Well, this is going to be really frustrating if so because then there's going to be a pair of twins who are winning every spelling bee and they keep going. Like they think there's never a word that comes across to these two that they can't spell because their memories are so good. And so the spelling bee goes like late, late into the night on into the next day. It's going to become an endurance sport for these two. Make it a suffering. Yeah. It's going to cause for everyone. My goodness. Super suffering. Everyone having to listen to all those words. No, I like words and spelling. But the question is really, really, this is one of those moments. Second point on this, the update here. The researcher, Dr. He has gone missing. Yay. What do you mean by missing? What are we talking missing? What did the hill? No, no. Abducted. Nobody is saying he was he was under investigation by his institution and by the Chinese government. And suddenly he's gone. Not replying to emails. Nobody can find him and the government's not saying anything. Oh, that's terrible. What is this investigation that's happening? So not only is this a fascinating, ethical conundrum that we have found ourselves in suddenly, but it's also turning into kind of a fun mystery story. Okay. So fun topic. What's the bigger ethical conundrum? Gene editing when the world maybe doesn't want you to or disappearing a scientist because you disagree with their research. Yeah. I still think gene editing. I don't. It's rare that I come down on the same side as potentially the Chinese government. But as a human, I always freak out when bad things happen to humans. And therefore, you know, if anything ill has befallen this scientist, I feel doubly bad for him because it's a soft spot for science. Doubly bad for him. And then, you know, what if ill things befall these gene edited babies? That's what I was thinking. Yeah, they didn't get to choose whether or not they were going to be gene edited. Did you? But I mean, like did you get like nobody chooses their parents? That's true. But my parents are. They gave you were you had no say in it. This is just how this works. Yeah. But, you know, my parents were still just Tom and Kathy, not Tom, Kathy and the government of China. So let's move on from the CRISPR update. This is an ongoing story that we will continue to highlight and to bring into our conversations. So, Trace, you brought the uterus story. I brought the uterus story also. But I would love you to tell me a story about a deceased woman's uterus. Oh, man. That's just something I've always wanted somebody to tell me to ask me to do. Right. Thanks. Thanks, Kiki. You're welcome. So, excuse me. So this was a story that on the surface seems kind of. I mean, it's on the surface seems very exciting just on its surface, right? It's a previously infertile woman who has been given a uterus from an organ donation and then from that was able to give birth. That in itself, super exciting. Yeah. However, it has these little added bonuses of fun and interest, right? The uterus came from a woman who had been who was had a stroke and so she was deceased when she donated the organ. It wasn't like I'm done with my uterus. Here, you may have it and use it to birth many children. It was she, you know, was an organ donor and so it was one of the organs harvested after she'd had her stroke similar to kidneys and other organs that any organ donor is going to give, which is one just opens up a whole new world of potential donors for this organ. But I think I'm jumping ahead a little bit because it's also the first time it has ever been done, ever with a person who was born infertile with this specific syndrome called MRKH syndrome, which is a string of four different names that I don't remember off the top of my head. I didn't write them down. But the MRKH syndrome essentially is, it's an affliction that the embryo gets and it doesn't form one of the ducts that goes on to form the birth canal. So it's a genetic condition that happens to many, many people and they don't end up forming the uterus. What they do end up forming is their ovaries and much of the rest of their body completely normally. So she's been infertile her whole life. But a deceased donor's uterus was transplanted into her and even though she never had a birth canal but she did have ovaries, she was able to then undergo IVF about seven months after the transplant surgery once they deemed everything was safe. And then she was basically birthing a baby that was one of her own eggs, which is just incredible. Fantastic story, yeah. Right? And just one human gestation period later, she had a six-pound baby via C-section. So awesome. And the first time a deceased donor uterus has produced a successful birth in Latin America and the first time ever worldwide, a person with MRKH syndrome has used a donated uterus to give birth. Super exciting. Yeah. That's a fantastic story. Yeah, because it's like, really, this is just opening up the pick-and-pull aspect of a human body once we're done with it. The idea that somebody else could prolong their life or bring new life onto the planet. And what a good argument also for gene editing. And it would be if we could foretell that this was going to be a problem and prevent it. But yeah, what a fantastic story. Yeah, I looked up a little bit of stats too. The CDC says in the U.S. alone over seven million women have used infertility services. So this could potentially be one of the ways to make seven, a little over seven million women in the U.S. find a way to give birth on their own with their own body and with the help of, you could say, another woman, which is super interesting. Yeah, but let's just talk about what you're doing when you're undergoing this process. So the benefit here is you're not taking a working functioning uterus from a living person causing somebody else to go under an invasive procedure that could have complications. A single person is within this situation choosing to undergo this themselves and it's not going to be detrimental to anybody else. The person donating is already deceased and has offered everything they have to whoever can take it. And so this is a good situation because it's minimizing what's going to affect other people. But you're still having an invasive procedure that could have massive complications for yourself. You're going to then have immunosuppressive drugs after the procedure to maintain the uterus during the healing process. And then you're going to be taking those immunosuppressive drugs during the pregnancy, which to me seems like a really interesting point about what would be circulating in your body during that period of gestation for a child. It's probably fine. There have been other people who have had these transplants and pregnancies. Pretty much any kind. You'll have to take that. And six pounds is exceedingly light, is it not? Yeah. This is premature and by C-section. But here's the thing that I would throw out there as the caveat of before you even dare to ask your own ethical question on any of this, this is this family's chance at a next generation. And any chance if you are against these odds, regardless, if you're the last people on the planet, we'd all say, yes, you must. You have no choice but to. But even if you're not, you're the last people of your people from your perspective. Right. So, yeah, nobody is ever allowed to cast any shadow of ethics at all anywhere in these people's direction. I will cast some, I mean, I'm not judging. I'm going to bring up points that will probably be used to debate this in the future, if at all. It's not only suggesting the dangers to the woman for the surgery. There's also the question of passing those genetic anomalies on to the offspring without Jeanette. If you don't use Jeanette, it is. Yeah, I like that. We're potentially passing these problems on to the next generation to be, you know. Technology. Absolutely. The way to avoid that is to allow Jeanette. Exactly. There we go. Not the problem. And then finally is cost. And so this is probably not going to be an inexpensive procedure. How often is this going to be covered by insurance? Is this something that most everybody will have available to them who wants to have that child that will be the last of their line? Or is this only going to be something that will be available to those with the funds to afford it, as most things in healthcare are these days? And in everything else too. I'm just putting the points out. There's a whole lot of things that I would like to have that are nicer, that have nothing to do with healthcare, and I don't have them, but that's just a different story. But yeah, so okay. So then the ethics too is like, what if the child didn't make it, or doesn't make it far, or if the mother had died? Again, I would take this down to not, which I always thought was never liked the idea of we were making an argument for a woman's right to have the choice about her body. I don't think that's a relevant argument. I think the relevant argument is nobody else should have the decision making for somebody else's body regardless. That's like, you know. So these decisions aren't ours to make or to even decide upon in any way. This is not the sort of thing that any human being has the right to decide for another human being. And we should just leave it there in that field and hope nobody walks in. Let the doctors do the science. Yeah. I do have, like I did think of, it's funny because it almost reminds me of the gene editing story in that there's a psychological connection almost or like a psychological issue here too. Organ transplantation in general has a lot of psychological problems, not problems, but like trip ups that can happen. People feeling like this part is not part of me or this part is someone else's body part. And that can cause people to feel unfamiliar with their own body like dysmorphic type issues as well as anxieties just about their own internal and external parts. And with something like a uterus, even the doctor in one of the write ups on it in the New York Times, they were talking about a quote from the doctor who I'm not going to say the quote exactly, but essentially saying, we don't actually know how people are going to feel about the uterus as a transplanted organ. Like we're pretty familiar with people feel how people feel about getting a kidney, but a uterus, do they think of it like a kidney or a hand? And I thought that's interesting. Like the kidney just does its job, right? Let me just tell you about my uterus. Yeah. This is where I was hoping to get with this show. No, it is something that as a woman you grow up with. It is a part of you. It's a part of affecting you on a monthly basis. It is, you know, it's, it is a hormone secreting organ. It is, it's something that sometimes you can tell it. So, you know, you can, you know, it's there and it is like a hand. It's not like a kidney that just sits in your back. It is, it is as a woman. It is a part of you. Okay. But here's my question. Are they leaving it in? I don't know. No. So are they taking it like, oh, it's done. That's what they did with this study. So for this, this study, they, it's a study. And so they, they put the uterus in and she had the baby. And then in the C-section, they took the uterus out. Okay. That makes way more sense because you don't need it. And it's the, get off the immunosuppressives and. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. Thanks. On top of that, I started thinking like the, the uterus is donor was a mother of three. They said in the write up as well. So that uterus carried three other babies. Right. So even though there's no genetic connection between the fourth baby coming out of that uterus, would they feel some kind of kinship? If they know, I went and looked up some studies about people who had come out of surrogates because that's kind of the closest thing we've studied more heavily. And most people, they actually did a study in the UK and they found people who were born of surrogacy, completely identified with the parents that they grew up with in terms of their happiness levels for the most part. I mean, within common, you know, like normal, normal terms, but they said that they didn't feel like, oh, I was born from a surrogate. Therefore you're not my parents. It was more like, especially if they were more open with the kid, which I thought was really interesting. So I imagine it would be something like that. But the best part is we don't really know. And so this is all new, all new science now. So we get to do all these psychological studies and understand the psychosocial interactions and make sure that the family is doing well. It's going to be really cool to see kind of like the first test tube babies, you know, they didn't know if they were going to get all weird because they were grown in a different way. And it's just like, this is kind of the same. Really neat. And it is just the beginning and we will see where the science takes us and how successful it is. Yeah. The therapy. Yeah. In other news related to reproduction, researchers have developed placentas in a dish, which I thought fit right in with this. So we've got gene editing of babies and we've got, we've got transplanting uteruses for mothers to have babies. But what about the placenta? The placenta is so integral, integral to the baby's health and the ability of pregnancy to go full term. And the placenta comes from is instigated by the fetus, right? So the placenta is this, is this organ that mixes the blood supply between the mother and the child. However, it started by the child. So we're getting all the way to the level of the child researchers. And it's a virus like DNA. It's a little parasitic. Just a little, but like a friendly parasite. Interesting point about immunosuppressed organ transplant patient, you know, with the uterus to have a baby, the immunosuppression, does it actually, does it help the placenta in the uterine transplantation? It's a big question. Here, researchers though, they're in England. They obtained first trimester placentas from women who had normal pregnancies, but decided to abort their pregnancies. They took that placental tissue and grew the cells in Petri dishes, you know, just put them in the lab to see if they could grow them. And within a week they were able to get them to grow into organoids, which means they're multi-cellular, multi-layered, little balls of cells that are a version of the real thing. And people are using, scientists are using organoids in all sorts of instances right now to be able to figure out how genes and disease affect the development of various organ systems around the body, but no one had been able to do this with placentas yet. And so researchers now have these placentas, placental organoids in a dish, which they are hoping they'll be able to develop out into a platform for looking into things like preeclampsia, fetal growth restrictions, stillbirths, miscarriages that occur based on problems of development of the placenta. So this is exciting. Nice new tool. Placentas are so neat. They're like ugly octopuses though. I've never seen one in real life, only in pictures and videos. Oh, no, they're really cute. Yeah, they're really like you just, they grow on you. They grow in you if you're a woman. I guess that's true. Yes. It's sort of like, like if you've ever seen the movie Blob, it's sort of like how the Blob started, like baby Blob. That's kind of cute. Baby Blob. Yeah, so anyway, these placentas, they're not only multicellular, they are excreting all of the chemical factors and hormones and all the things they're acting like little mini placentas in the dish. So that's exciting for scientists. But would a famous pop star eat them? That is the question of the evening. Famous television family, perhaps. I don't. So I have done that. You have? Yeah. In a not like sushi form. It was like a cooked and dried and in a pill. But yeah, that was before though. I had learned how cannibalistic it was in terms, like this was actually eating DNA of the child that creates it. It was like, oh, that's weird now. I mean, not that it wasn't weird to begin with, but it got weirder after. It's not so much. The placenta was weird. That's fine. I've been in the neighborhood. It was more. It was the DNA in the placenta. I just devoured my child into some sort of weird Greekian mythology sort of thing that could take. That was very odd. Cannibalism that could maybe affect you a little bit. But before we get into that subject too deeply, let's change it and talk about something else. Justin, what did you bring? Oh, yeah, I should bring a story to change the venue of my conversation to something completely different. Beginning more than actually 1.5 million years ago. Early humans made stone hand axes. This was like pretty much our Gerber tool for everything. We had any sort of thing that needed to be done. We had some kind of a stone axe that we would apply to it. And I can't pronounce it quite, but I think Ashulean is the name of this type of tool. And it's actually the longest lasting toolmaking tradition in the history of Planet Earth. Here is this very particular style of stone axe. So new research led by Max Planck Institute for Science of Human History and the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage has discovered that this particular tool was in the Arabian Peninsula dating to less than 190,000 years ago. So 1.5 million years ago, there are more around there. This is the oldest one of these we found. The most recent one we now have discovered is 190,000 years, which my math isn't the best, but that's like 1.3 million years of using the same tool for everything. It's particularly interesting because this kind of makes it the end of that tool, that specific type of hand axe because that's the most recent one that we can find going back. And also interesting, it kind of fits nicely to when modern humans began showing up and dispersing through that region. So while they sort of refer to this as early human tool use, it's most likely that this was a tool that was used for that large span of time by some sort of evolutionary cousin to the modern human. And our arrival seems to end its existence. So they don't know because they haven't found, they've found lots of these tools. They haven't found any hominin bones to go with them that indicate that this was a different hominin from modern humans. This is a mystery hominin now. It could be some sort of monkey cat that was fashioning these tools, but that's much less likely. Yeah, so they found over 500 stone tools in this one site. Hand axes, other artifacts, they call cleavers. One of the stone flakes that was used to make the hand axes was in like mint condition. Like they had been making axes on this site. They weren't carried there. They were made in this site. So a quotey voice for Dr. Eleanor Skerry of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. It's not surprising that early humans came here to make stone tools. The spot was both a source of raw material as well as a prime location to survey a landscape that back then sat between two major river systems. It was a pretty tough spot. There was wet seasons and then really dry seasons. It would kind of go to a greening and then a very arid time. So whatever hominins were living there, were really able to survive in a pretty diverse ecology. And they sort of point out in this study too that while the tools were considered primitive by most other tool forms that have come after, the people who used them really survived much longer than modern humans have been on the planet through a diverse environment successfully. And then the humans came. And then right after the humans show up, parties over with. How do we keep doing this? Over and over again. Every human show up. The parties over as soon as we show up. That's how it works. It's terrible. I didn't know aliens have come down for all of these parties we have. We have a party every year. Happy New Year. Please everyone come on. They've seen our history. They watched all of human history. Not those ones. We have a party. Well, you hurt people hurt others. Nope. But serious. So these these hand axes have been called early human early human tools and they're not human. They're not. Well, I mean. So there's sort of this gray area between what's an early human and it's and it's partly because we for the longest time thought there was a linear transition of the first upright ape into the modern man. It's a very deep rated stream of experimental hominins that went on for a very long time. So early hominers early human is sort of a carry over from that linear progression. But yes, as essentially the tools were assumed to be human for a very long time. And now it kind of looks like not so much. Actually kind of there might be evidence that says we ended the use of these tools by the people who use them. Whatever we do that that whether it's interbreeding or warfare and there's conversations in both directions, we're really good at it. I think I particularly like the idea that we're just we're just the most attractive hominins that have ever been and we just out we interbreed and breed out the other the other species. That could be it. So so so there's been a lot of other humans that look like humans. Here's a question. If it looks like a dolphin walks like a dolphin, which would be weird and it might even talk like a dolphin. We have no idea. It might it turns out still not be a dolphin. There is an ancient extinct marine reptile that really does look like a dolphin. This is according to an international team of researchers that include scientists from North Carolina University and Sweden's Lund University. That it's a molecular and micro micro structural analysis of a hundred and eighty million year old ichthyosaur from the Jurassic. And it turns out that these marine reptiles are most likely warm-blooded had insulating blubber had no tails gave live birth and use two toned dark light coloration as camouflage from predators. Pretty much exactly as do modern dolphins. So this is like a like really big example of convergent evolution then because if you looked at the ichthyosaur and said gosh it looks like has all these features in common with this is the ancestor of the modern dolphin. But apparently they are not related and these would be completely divergent path for the dolphin to come into existence. There's a lot of the traits however that belong to dolphin but also sharks. There's that dark and light coloring on the top of the bottom because they're predators and so there's certain ways that you know they look they look better seen from below. Right camouflage you look up with the brighter above and then if you're looking down and they're darker with the darker yes. Right and so that that coloring that makes sense as a very good tactic that would be successful. But the interesting difference here is really the the warm-blooded what you would expect to be cold-blooded. How? What? So weird. I love these kind of discoveries it's just so fun to like you said about convergent evolution. Just close my mind every time. We got so many more designs why we got to copy our own. Because they're the best one. Because it's so exciting. This way that they were able to do this. So they've got this specimen. This was they found this in the holes maiden quarry in Germany which apparently has given up a lot of really nice fully intact fossils. And it was so well preserved they say they could actually observe cellular layers within the skin. I think this is an unimaginable type of so so they identified micro structures that held pigment organelles which is how they could tell that there was the skin differences. They found traces of an internal organ that they believed to be the liver. And and they did this where is the part where they explain what they what they did with the science stuff. They did science stuff. I love science stuff. I'm just going to put it like this. They did some science. So this is Schweitzer. This is from Mary Schweitzer. North Carolina state researchers and her research assistant Weng Xia Zheng extracted soft tissues from the samples and performed multiple high resolution immunohistochemical analyses. This is quotey voice. We developed a panel of antibodies that we applied to all of the samples and saw differential binding meaning the antibodies for a particular protein like keratin or hemoglobin only bound to particular areas. This is Schweitzer. This demonstrates the specificity of these antibodies and is a strong evidence that different proteins persist in different tissues even through the fossil record. This is crazy. You wouldn't expect to find keratin in liver for example but you would expect to find hemoglobin. And that's what we saw in the responses of these samples to different antibodies and other chemical tools that they applied to different parts of the fossil. So they could actually start to differentiate and they differentiated and through this technique the fact that these creatures were covered in blubber which is one of those things that we see in warm blooded and not creatures who are not able to you know, thermally control themselves. As you're talking about this though remembering some studies that we have discussed previously where it is questionable as to the cold blood bloodedness of dinosaurs. Researchers have been finding evidence over the last several years that really suggest that no, dinosaurs were not cold blooded like lizards or snakes that have to hang out on rocks all the time to get warmer. And this is evidence that the ichthyosaur was definitely warm blooded. Yeah. Thermoregulation is a hot topic right now on my mind. This is that pun intended. I'm actually thinking about doing my video about it this week because as a person who have just come off of having a flu my temperature went from 100 to 103 throughout the day multiple times and I was just like what is happening with my thermoregulation right now and how is this working and what is changing it all the time. I've looked into this for other things in the past and it's so fascinating that you just keep all that on board so you'd think that it makes sense that something as large as a dinosaur would be warm blooded when you really think about it. You have to be able to cool off all of that muscle movement. Otherwise you've got so much muscle mass, you're so big and dense, you're just going to burn up from the inside. Figure out how to get rid of it. Or if you're little like me and you get cold hands and a cold head, you wear a hat in your basement while you're doing your podcast. I was going to ask about the hat. It's very nice. It's very cool. You look very warm. Oh my gosh. Is that it for that story Justin? Did you have anything else to mention about it? I keep talking forever about any subject but we could move on certainly. Fantastic. You know anyone if you just tuned in this is this week in Science with Dr. Kiki, Justin Jackson and Trace Dominguez. Anyway, don't forget to go to twist.org to get your 2019 twist calendar today. That insure it arrives before Christmas right? We have them. We have them. I can mail them. It's so exciting. All right. Now it is time to ask Trace questions and I don't mean three questions. I mean, I'm going to ask Trace, hey I'd love to ask you since we've got you here about yourself. I see you there with the I'm not going to ask three questions. I like that. That's funny. Trace questions. That's good. I haven't read that one before. I'm sure you haven't. I really haven't. That's a new one. Okay. Well, enough of my terrible name joke. I'm proud of you. Because we had this just for the audience. We had this pre-show conversation about is there any sort of usage of your name that hasn't played out and we kind of figured out that like it's all been covered. Yeah, Kiki, well done. Kiki, you found the little dark corner of my name joke. What are your hopes, aspirations in on about life, liberty, the producers of happiness in the planet? How did you get started talking about science? Well, I've always loved science and like always when I was 11, I would go I'm from Michigan and I would travel on a short bus to the Science Saturdays program at the University of Michigan and like learn physics and like all, you know, with actual college students and stuff. And I've always just been super into it. And I worked at a historic site for a long time and I learned to like history as well from doing that. But I always tried to find like the sciencey angles. So when people would come in and be like, oh, so what was the 1880s like? I'm like, well, they had Hershey bars, Heinz ketchup and you could make a phone call across the United States if you wanted. And they were like, I wasn't meaning like that. And I was like, oh, okay, well, I'm going to try that. I'm trying to be relatable. Okay. So I was getting my master's degree in communication from American University in DC. And I met this recruiter for the Discovery Channel and she was like, who are you? And I said, I would like to work there, please. And she said, okay. And then I saw her again two or three times over the next week and kept giving her my resume until she said yes. So I got an internship there. So the lesson for people is persistence pays off. True. There was actually, funnily enough, the museum I worked at as called Fort Mackinaw and one of the governors of Fort Michelin Mackinaw which was an older fort that was there named Patrick Sinclair had a quote, persistence wears down resistance. You took it to heart and I did. So I ended up making videos for what became the news which many people on the internet who watch science videos know which is now called Seeker still exists and I worked there for many years and then recently I left on my own and I'm doing my own thing. What is your... And now you're part of TWIS. Now I'm doing... Sorry Blair, we were talking on the side. We really like TWIS. I don't think we're giving them up. I hope you find... Whatever the vacation you took, I hope you find something to do. Good luck, everybody. My own thing is called Uno Dose of Trace. Awesome. Wait, okay. So you have been to the... Yes. Uno Dose of Trace is a show about science and education but I like to just keep it to the learning content because I'm trying to make stuff that I find curiosities out in the world and I'll go and try and find interesting stuff about them. Things like the sounds that your modem made if you are old enough to use a modem what the modems were saying to each other which was a super fun story to research. Really interesting. So I have always assumed that somebody somewhere decided you know what, let's make a sci-fi sound and the modem will make the sci-fi... It's completely meaningless but we're just going to make it make a sound so the human knows that we're working because it's going to take like 5 minutes or 10 minutes before we can connect. So let's create a fake... And I suspect, oh my gosh the 3D printer we have at work makes the most amazing 1980s sci-fi sounds. It is just fantastic in the noises it makes and I've got this this cell counting machine that makes these sounds that I'm convinced there's nothing, no mechanism in there that requires these sounds to be made. So I'm always wondering is there like some sort of sound theater taking place that is completely removed a function? So what was it with the modem? Is it actually a sound that means something or is it just to entertain us while we're waiting? I was totally with you on that. I thought that it was something like, oh well it's just covering up whatever's actually happening. When you hear those videos where they say, oh this is the sound of space and I'm like, well no it's not, it's like one hertz and then they did all sorts of stuff. These are actually the modems talking to each other so they're using these frequencies that we have to use because that's how phone lines were designed. So they had to use hearable frequencies because the phone lines that was where they would work the best. That's how the phone systems would work because they would actually put handsets on to like the original modems were literal phone couplers, right? You'd take like in people like Ferris Bueller's and the war games movies, you know, you just take the handset and put it on to something. So they had to use that phone system in the same way that our voices would. And they're essentially saying things like, hey how fast modem are you? Are you a modem at all? Like what are you going to, what can you, do you have echo cancellation? Because I got echo cancellation, if you want to cancel that echo, that'd be great. Like so all sorts of... I love this whole conversation going on. Yeah, but okay, but is it fair to say though that there's still a little bit of theater involved in the fact that it was playing through our speakers when it could have not been? No, I totally agree with that. I feel like I wondered, and I ended up, you know, I assumed this is no longer the case that they don't have to make noise, right? Which is why we don't hear them anymore. They can do all of this digitally outside of our hearing range, right? But I guess my guess is that they let you hear it just in case something did go wrong, or like your mom picked up the phone, are you going to hear that? I'm trying to call Cindy. You know how many times that happened? Yeah, all the time. Mom! My mom is in Canada, and I are talking. Oh, the golden days of the internet with dial-ups. So now I'm curious, what's the theater sound of a high-speed gig connection? Like, why don't I get to hear it? Why am I being left out of the conversation? Someone out there who makes those videos about the sounds of space should do that same kind of process and move like, I think somebody did for an art project and I looked it up for this. I'll try and find it and send it to you. But somebody made Wi-Fi into a hearable, he could hear Wi-Fi because of a prosthesis, I think. I'm remembering it, I might be getting details wrong. He could hear the Wi-Fi signals and he made a thing and it sounded kind of like pips and pops. It wasn't like tones, but it was like kind of weird sounds. I love anything like visualizations of how Wi-Fi is flowing through your house or how electronic things that we can't see, how we can make them visible, some of my favorite things. So I'm definitely going to make those kind of videos once I get off the ground. Right? And then how those invisible things that we can't see can make us visible. There are all those stories about Wi-Fi being used as a way to see through walls, almost like a radar picking up signals and if you can detect the shadows made by certain things within the frequency band or the span of the Wi-Fi then you can, somebody could potentially figure out where you are in your house. Somebody could see through the garage door that there's a form centered in one side of the garage or they could actually just change the show and see like full video and audio. Yeah, I get it. What is your favorite thing about what you do? I love learning new things. Just in general it like drives me even just now when we were talking about one of the stories that Justin brought up with the scanning I was looking up how they were doing the scanning for the axe one, the stone tools one. They used a scanning system called infrared radio fluorescence and so I was looking that up to try and understand what it is. Only because a lot of these ancient tools they would go carbon date them, right? But carbon dating is going away so it's nice that they're coming up with new scanning. Like, you know, we're getting less chance but... Max Plikes Institute has been doing amazing things in this field. Yeah, so I just, as soon as it was brought up I had this like need to go and find out what is that? I want to learn about that and so just getting to do that and then tell other people about it I can't believe that that's... I can't believe it's a career to say, hey are you curious about stuff? Just go find it out. Go find out and tell people. Yeah. That is one of the biggest things that when I was in college this was not a thing that you could go make into your career and now it is an option and it's pretty amazing. How many tabs do you usually have open on your window? Right now I'm doing a podcast and I got 10. I have an app just to manage all my tabs. A tab app. So many tabs. Although I'm a compulsive tab closer. I do close them a lot. I end up reopening them way more than I should. It's a problem. I'm like, oh I don't need all these and I'm like, oh crap I need it. I did need that. I needed to learn that thing. I want to know. I'm the fear of closing the tab person. I'm like, no if I close it then I can't go back to it. I did that to an Excel sheet that apparently was the source of all the data that I had in all of the other Excel sheets and so I close this. I got deleted it because I'm like, I don't need this. And then all of my data went to zero everywhere else. I flowed down to like 100. Oh no. How do I undo this? Yeah, I totally did what you just said. Even though I did a disclaimer about the fact that there's much more interesting things in the world than humans and we've talked about nothing but humans the most. Where most of the show. I get to the I've done this so long that I get so bored with anything that is the same thing that I've seen or heard or is just redundant within our human society and there needs to be after a while it's like a fix. It's like you become a junkie to learn the new edge of beyond the stuff that already got figured out and it only seems to be interesting at some point that we've known before. And it's a in the fact that there's so many unknowns or oft unasked or not asked enough questions out there that there's so much territory to delve into it's like limitless. Yeah. I mean when we were working with DNews and Seeker we ran into a problem after a while we made about 3600 videos in the span of six years with it we had various hosts and writers coming in all the time and it was just a constant flow of new knowledge and for years it was so exciting and new every time and after a while we would all be like oh this is so cool oh this is so cool oh this is so cool man we did that you did that oh no you know so after a while you do craves like okay well how can we take that and find a new way to look at it which sometimes is really fun so even though it's kind of like getting scooped you just scooped yourself a year ago or two years ago trying to figure out how to make that story like fun and interesting again and that's I don't know it's less satisfying in my heart obviously because it's not new knowledge all the time but it's just a different challenge to try and make those stories still interesting Yeah I mean slow progression of the accumulation of information yet we live in this information cycle age where it has to be fast and furious but that's not really the way science is except for every once in a while with these big jumps that you weren't expecting and you're never and they're big jumps but they're also they're also like we get to skip around right we get to DJ this thing up or browse or what is the thing when you channel surf channel surf science so it may be that we didn't actually talk about some sort of geological thing that might be a life form for five years but we talked about a thousand other things in between and then next time there's somebody like after ten years under the ice digging tunnels to excavate what might be microbes under an ancient seabed we finally have a little bit of new evidence and we get to like roll with it like what's happening out of nowhere bam! New science oh my god we just discovered it it wasn't at all a bunch of people's jobs for literally most of their lives yeah no we are we are getting to have these conversations with thousands of people putting a lot of effort into you know into the incremental steps that go in between sometimes unnoticed yeah well put and on that note I'm gonna say thank you Trace we're so glad you are here tonight and we're not done with you yet yay we have a whole second coming that's right so everyone I would love you to stay tuned because we have more science ahead Justin is going to be missing Greenland and I've got no heart stem cells Trace has a GPS system somewhere back in just a few moments with more this week in science coming up stay tuned put on a pair of goggles and go looking for the things I couldn't see all right everybody I am so glad that you are here with us this evening because the calendars are here in my hands that's right I have the 2019 Blair's Animal Corner Twist calendars and they are available for you so you need to get to twist.org where you can order one of your calendars and if you order them soon I'll get them in the mail hopefully soon I'm gonna spend a big old long day addressing and mailing calendars to people and you'll get this beautiful artwork from Blair for you lots of science holidays and reminders about twist whenever there's a twist episode so twist.org is where you can find that twist.org also has amazing resources for you other ways that you can help twist out are by going to twist.org where you can find our Zazzle store that's right if you head over to twist.org you can click on the Zazzle store link the Zazzle store link will take you to our Zazzle store where you can find all sorts of twist products with logos and pictures from previous Blair's Animal Corner catalogs so that you can get them in time for the holidays it looks like there's a bunch of discounts going on there right now but a portion of the proceeds does go to support twist 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will really help us out by bringing more people into our community so that we can all enjoy science together so I would really like to say as I finish up this message here happy holidays thank you for being a part of twist we really could not do any of this without you Merry Twistmas everybody and the show is still going and we are and we're back with more This Week in Science yes we are we are back and now it is the time of the show that we like to call this week in what has science done for me lately lately thank you we're going to go the other direction yeah that's a good idea come on everybody I'm much more manageable if I take it down lower this letter comes in from long time listener Eric and A.K. in the chat room hi everyone what has science done for me lately well on November 30th 2018 my home Anchorage, Alaska oh yeah was hit by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake the epicenter was 7 miles from town in other places an earthquake that big and that close has been devastating and deadly however Alaska is earthquake country we have a large percentage of the world's earthquakes so we have some history on March 27th 1964 Anchorage and south central Alaska suffered a mind boggling magnitude 9.2 quake this quake known as the good Friday earthquake for the day it happened caused significant damage and a large loss of life in 1964 after the arrival of relief workers and disaster supplies came scientists they studied the ground that had been moved by the quake they looked at buildings they talked with eyewitnesses and in the end they came away with a better understanding of earthquakes the ground movement offered confirmation of the then new theory of plate tectonics damage assessments led to tough new building codes used throughout earthquake prone regions and the rescue and relief operations led to new and updated procedures to react to such a quake so what has science done for me lately because of the scientific work done in the aftermath of the 1964 good Friday earthquake my home of Anchorage just rode through a potentially devastating 7.0 earthquake with some but not a lot of damage no fatalities and only a few injuries thank you science and on a personal note the quake was a wild ride Eric, thank you so much for writing in with your story I heard about the Alaska quake and looking at the pictures it looks devastating roads are torn in 25 pieces there's just cracks that I can't understand how they came to be and it's amazing that there are no fatalities Alaska is still undergoing lots of aftershocks I guess to right now there's something like 1800 aftershocks that have happened yeah but also there is the silver lining thing that you can now point to in any earthquake is that it happened on land in the epicenter if it was at sea then you get the tsunami thing which creates yeah they didn't have to deal with the tsunami which is fantastic but it's wonderful that science was able to lead to the protections that have allowed so many to be okay and ride it out hopefully Portland has also done this this is on that whole no Portland has had some past ginormous earthquakes that were crazy we got volcanoes earthquakes and you know everybody earthquake preparedness kit it's always good to be prepared with a bit of water and some food stashed away and some other supplies and so we're going to have a really good moment science can only go so far but Eric thank you so much for writing in really appreciate it and I'm really glad you're okay and if anybody else out there has awesome stories of how science has done something for them lately please leave us a message on our facebook page or send me an email Kirsten at thisweekinscience.com all right Justin I've got some holiday greetings. Seven spiders spinning, four wiggly eels, three sneaky sharks, two water bears, a sea horse and a liver wart plant. Wow, that was well done. What are you talking about? I tried. Okay, so this is researchers at the, oh, our people, California Academy of Sciences. They have people who apparently added 229 new plant and animal species to understanding of life on planet Earth. These new species include 120 wasps, 34 sea slugs, 28 ant species, 19 fish, seven flowering plants, seven spiders spinning, the four wiggly eels, three sneaky sharks, two water bear, one frog, one snake, one sea horse, one moss, and of course, one liver wart plant. Scientists made their finds over five continents, three oceans, venturing into river-carved canyons, diving to extreme ocean depths, scouring misty forests, crawling into creepy crevasses, sweating and squinting under blazing bright desert sun and frantically foraging ahead through freezing frozen tundras in search of unfamiliar life forms. Biodiversity scientists estimate that less than 10% of species on Earth have been discovered. This is Dr. Shannon Bennett, Academy Chief of Science. Academy scientists tirelessly explore near and far. I assume that they actually get tired once in a while. I don't believe that they're completely tireless. Not possible based on what we've just learned. From familiar forests to our backyards, to remote locations as deep as 500 feet beneath the ocean surface, each species' discovery may hold the key to groundbreaking innovations in science, technology or society and help us better understand the diversity of life that makes up thriving ecosystems. These new discoveries also highlight the critical role we play as stewards of our one precious planet. I think it's well said. Highlights include a swarm of spider eating wasps. Yes, these are wasps that- I don't like spiders. And Blair brought one of these, the spiders that they lay an egg on top of a spider and then they wasp larvae hatches and eats the spider. Why did the spider allow that to be? Okay, there's a seahorse. Seahorse the size of a jelly bean that they discovered. These species blends perfectly into algae-covered reefs of Southeast Japan where it cleans tightly via its tail to soft corals and feeds on passing plankton. Japa pigu, aka Japan pig, is the only seahorse in the world with a bony ridge running down its back. Why did they name it Japan pig? Okay, so according to Graham Short, who is a research associate, he says we wanted to name it the flying pig, but no dice. And the reason they did is because it's got these, a pair of wing-like protrusions on its neck. Yeah, that's weird looking, right? Cool, kind of a funky thing. Sea slugs, they found a bunch of sea slugs and a bunch of mimic algae and sometimes each other. They pretend to be different sea slugs for some reason. And so, oh, this is somebody we need to reach out to, by the way. This is Academy Curator of Invertebrate Zoology, Dr. Terry Ghostliner. Ghostliner has discovered 1,000 sea slugs and added another 34 in this round. So if you want, if we want a twist something, a Dr. Kiki, whatever it is. Like this guy's finding sea slugs all over the place. If you want something named after a loved one, go pay this guy some money. He also looks amazing. Doesn't really, I Googled him and he's got a picture of him with a sea slug and he's in a bag and he's like, yeah! I'm an incredibly handsome man and I collect sea slugs. What's not to love? They found some lost sharks. This is, they found a dwarf false cat shark that swims some 3,000 feet beneath the ocean surface. I like the way they find. So this is also a caveat to discovering new species. This was found in Sri Lanka on the east coast of Sri Lanka where fishermen with some frequency catch this deep water shark, but it's not really tasty so they always throw it back. And so there was some photograph of this shark. And so the researchers went there and they were like, hey, has anybody seen this? And they're like, oh, come back tomorrow. And they came back to the next day and there was one lying on the beach that they caught. And they're like, yeah, that's it. So sometimes discovering a species doesn't mean that it's the first time humans have encountered it, but it's the first time it's been cataloged in a scientific manner. There's a three-foot coral snake that has a bright orange tail, which is barely weird because all of its relatives have blue tails. So maybe orange is the new blue. There's a pair of water bears, AKA tardigrades that were discovered. Some eels, spiders, they found a spider that can turn around quicker than any other spider that's ever been able to turn them around on its axis. Fast, fast moving spiders. Bishes with different colors. Ants, 28 species of ants were found all on the island of Madagascar. Most of these are carpenter ants, which can apparently infiltrate and exist anywhere on the planet. And this is sort of an interesting thing. Other than humans, ants are the creature that has been able to put down colonies on all of the major continents. Ants are so successful. I want to believe, I'm thinking, I want to start a new question series called, what do you call success? And my new definition of success is ants. And also in Madagascar, well, in Madagascar, you can always take the spider away. Your definition of success, ants. There's also a lot of spiders that they discovered that mimic, that pretend to look like ants in Madagascar. And they don't know if it's too, because ants are an annoying thing, like if you go down and like, I'm going to eat ants, and then all the other ants like swarm you and be like, no, you can't eat, just one of us will all eat you back. If the spiders are pretending to be ants, because it's easier to avoid getting preyed upon, or if it's because it's easier to snuggle up next to an ant and eat it, they don't really know yet, so they've got some more research that they get to do. Very chicken or egg question there. More research is needed. No, no, no, it's always the egg. There were eggs before there were chickens, so it's always the egg. There were eggs and dinosaurs. The first chicken that popped out of an egg was the first chicken. Yeah. But there were eggs, eggs were a thing. Fish egg. I mean that a chicken laid that egg. It was just a guy. The chickens very close relative laid that egg. Egg obviously came before chickens. But which came first? Ants or spiders? I don't know. I have no idea. Study or ants or spiders that look like ants. Somebody knows that, like right off the tip. They're just like, oh, it's obvious, but it's none of us here. Yeah, exactly. I think the big thing for this story though, I mean we are in the middle of a species loss period on our planet. Humans are the cause of massive extinction around our planet. It is this little burst of joy and hope to see new species catalogued and to be able to increase the numbers of certain kinds of species. But it's always with that other side of the coin that we should look at it and say the amazing world we live in, how can we help preserve it? Yeah, I think it's gonna be tough because as I kind of started off the show, humans also led to the extinction of other humans. Like this is kind of a thing that we do and we're really good at. And it's like our one, like what's your definition of success? Eliminating other species, apparently, if you're human. This is what we really excel at. We're so good at it. Even if they're other hominids. Yeah, but then again, you know, yeah. Is this what it is? As a human, I'm very human centric. You're pro-human. All right, well. I'm very pro-human. So I kind of at the end of the day go, well, if it's just humans. So the next story I've got. It's not all spiders all the way down. No, it's not all spiders all the way down. Potentially artificial intelligence is supported by completely synthetic neural architecture. Researchers are constantly trying to figure out how they can they build a brain like nature built it? How can they make a brain that acts like neurons that we find in the brain? How can they have those multiple connections and instead of the way that computers work where they can computers can kind of process and then store, but they can't do both at the same time in the same circuits, neurons can. And so how can we make something that is really actually equal to the brain in so many ways? Do you guys know what a memrister is? Oh, this sounds familiar. Is this something to do with magnets and non-polar, polar, diapolar. Nope. Tri-polar. Is it the computer that you turn off but it remembers everything because it's frozen in that state until you turn it on again? Wait, what is memrister? Yes, there we go. That's it, okay. Well, so it's not the computer that does it but it is a component of electrical circuits that was hypothesized. I think it was back in the 70s and then it was like a few years back that IBM researchers actually said, hey, we figured out that it is real and we can do this. And it's a component that according to whatis.com defines it as it limits or regulates the flow of electrical current in a circuit and remembers the amount of charge that has previously flowed through it. And so they're non-volatile. The idea being that instead of going through the whole power down, power up process on our computers, you could have instant on, instant off because the memrister, if a memrister, if memrister components were used in the circuits of our circuit boards, they would remember exactly what their last state was before being turned off to go back to that again when turned on. And they've been suggested to be the thing that we need to be able to create what are going to be called neuromorphic synapses. Basically these synapses that are just like regular synapses, but not. And so researchers have been trying to do this, but they've had problems with the memrister's voltage capacity and them burning out and how do they get them to work altogether? Well, these researchers in Europe, Germany and Italy, they have just published a paper in Nature Communications. In Nature Communications about their latest single memrister study and in this single memrister study, they basically showed that they have the beginnings of what could potentially be a neuromorphic chip, a circuit that connects two electrodes that could allow a current to flow between the electrodes instead of using calcium ions like are used in neurons. In this particular case, they would use silver and other components. So there would be other metals that would be used in the current flow. So these are little tiny nano wires that were created from zinc oxide and they were produced from the Polytechnic University in Turin. They are approximately one 10 thousandth of a millimeter in size. Oh, that's huge. Huge. Exactly, exactly. It's a thousand times smaller than a human hair. Oh, that's small. Yeah, it's huge. Well, I mean, if you're looking from these perspective of tiny things, that's pretty big. But what's fascinating to me about this is that I think perhaps the first story I remember you bringing when I became a member of TWIST may have been memristers. And it was at that point. Years ago, yeah. Like we're at 698, it was like you'd actually have to go negative like 30 or 40 shows to get to the just pure radio broadcast version of the show when we were talking about this. But it was all about not having to wait for a computer to power up and had nothing to do with now the fact that AI will be based off of this. So when we talk about these incremental steps, this is the, this is a brilliant example of something we talked about 14 years ago, right? Right. And now, new update. Here's how AI is gonna work. There's this thing, it's called a memrister. We talked about it 14 years ago when it was just to make it so you didn't have to wait for the memory to load in your computer. But now, actually it's gonna power all of AI to create synthetic brain power. That's awesome. Okay. Yeah. Yay. Yeah, and their analysis of this memrister system is it's only a single nanowire unit that they were looking at. They weren't looking at a connected network. And so that's what they're going to be leveling up to later is trying to create networks of these single nanowire memristers to see if they can get them to connect and act as neuron connections actually act. But from what they have seen of this nanowire model system, they've got, what they've got is self-assembly. So they basically have to set up the system in the right way and put current in the right place and the nanowires form and the memristers form. They've got self-limited devices that can grow from the bottom up. And they're saying that they really think this is the solution. So we will see where it goes. And they say it's very inexpensive as well. So it's not something that would be expensive to produce, which is always exciting when we're talking about technology as far as who's gonna be able to use it. And well, wait, who's gonna be able to use it? It will use it because by the time we get into like the thing running for a few months, it will take over the planet, which is fantastic because somebody really needs to take charge of this thing. Like this has been an unmanned ship for a very long time. We have nobody at the wheel. It's about time some form of intelligence starts steering this. I think the main thing we just need to not teach it all the secrets of removing species from the planet. Cause like we're really good at that. We don't want to teach them how to do that. We need to stay at best at something. My fear is that it's gonna figure out, actually we could preserve, I could preserve almost every species on the planet if I just eliminate one. Sharks, right? That sucks, that sucks for now. Can you help us find our way out of this murky mess, Trace? So the GPS system is up next, actually not our GPS system though. This is something that I think a lot of people don't know. There are multiple GPS systems. What we call GPS is the United States GPS system. It's managed by the Department of the Air Force. And it's a constellation of satellites that our phones and devices listen to signals from. We're not like communicating with them back and forth. We're just picking up the signals, right? So the Europeans wanted to launch their own GPS system without getting into too many of the reasons. Mainly it was because they wanted everyone who used the GPS system to have access to the entire bandwidth available on GPS. All of the channels, as much resolution as is possible. Whereas the US, because it's a military-based system, doesn't always feel that way. They say, wait a second, I'm gonna ask for a slight clarification. Military wants to keep some things to themselves. Yeah, well, but I mean, okay. So that system that allows a somewhat autonomous tractor to use every square inch of a field as it turns back and forth and does the rows, it is not the same system that's available for the farmer in France as it is the farmer in... No, GPS is global. Our GPS system is global. India has, this is from memory, but India, I believe, has their own GPS system that just works in India. You can buy a phone in India, get the Indian GPS system. And if you took it to China or Pakistan or England, it would not GPS. So this is something I had no idea. I have always assumed that the GPS system is like, okay, this is a planetary thing. We have just enough satellites up there to triangulate your location. If it's pinging down to you, you can pick up the signal and that's it, and there you go. I didn't realize that there were multiples of this. That's crazy. It's really cool, right? So this is the Galileo system. And the Galileo systems fairly new. The Europeans have been launching the satellites for a while. So each of the satellites in all GPS contain atomic clocks. The Galileo's contain four atomic clocks specifically. So when they launched their satellites, they were launching Galileo's five and six in 2014 on a Soyuz. Some crap went south. They did not end up getting to the orbit that they needed. The Soyuz failed to achieve the orbit and the satellites were in dire straits. The Europeans were likely quite chuffed. Oh no, what's the opposite of chuffed? I don't know. But I was reaching for a dire straits reference and I realized I don't have a single one and none. I don't know. They were worried, well, I got it. They were worried about spending money for nothing. That's it. There you go. There you go. Okay. I got there. The thing about GPS satellites is they have been used for a long time because they have these very precise clocks on them to determine time dilation and to study it. Because since we're all familiar with time dilation, it's, you know, if you're moving further away from a gravitational body and you're moving at a high rate of speed, your perception of time is gonna change for the person or device that's closer to that massive object. So- All of our GPS has to take this into account. Otherwise, they give you horrible directions. You end up showing up your map overlay is wrong. You pin a point and it ends up over here because the satellite was going that way at the speed in relation to the, yeah. Yeah. So essentially it in the signal sent from every one of the satellites, the satellites telling your phone the satellite's name and its current location and the exact precise time with this atomic clock that's on board. And your phone uses all of these different GPS satellites to say, okay, this is where I am specifically. So when the gallows got screwed up, luckily the engineers at the ESA were able to stabilize their orbits, but they were not in the orbit that could make them useful for GPS satellites. They were really not sure what to do because they were in this highly elliptical orbit which would cause them to fall and crest at a delta of about 8,500 kilometers. So it would go way up and then come all way back down and go way back up again. Come way back up. Which by the way, just for some of the audience that might not be familiar with kilometers. 8,500 kilometers is approximately 8,500,000 meters. Nice. Approximately the same. And then they had on board, of course, the atomic clocks and they also had other things like laser retroreflector so they could determine precise distances and things like that. So these engineers figured out, hey, wait a minute. That means that their time dilation because of their orbit is gonna be very predictable at different heights. So they're gonna be really high and so they'll get this interesting time dilation. Then they'll be low and they'll get a different time dilation. So they started to study their signals at the peak and at the trough of their orbits and then ended up after three years of taking all this data, tested time dilation theory from Einstein's theory of relativity down to four picoseconds in one of the satellites where they could predict here's how fast time is gonna be moving on that satellite. Which I just think is so cool. Also fun like end to the story a little bit is that the engineers did manage to use all of these gravitational movements that they were like, not gravitational but like orbital movements to incorporate the black sheep to the Galileo family back into the network. So now they are actually giving GPS. They were able to like use some orbital mechanics to get them up to where they needed to be. So they got to do this study and they still get to have the GPS satellites for the world. So yay Galileo. That's a double whammy. Right. All right, do science and fix, use your results also to figure out how to fix it and then go, hey satellites, go where you need to go. Yeah. So now Galileo apparently it's gonna be working and everybody will be able to use it. Yeah, you could actually, I think it's working now. I don't know, I think I read into this more because of the, this is sort of a mashup of two interests of mine in that I find any relativity story super interesting but also working with DNews back in the day. We actually got to talk to the Air Force about the GPS system for a while and talk about all the different satellites they've launched and it was so crazy because I didn't know that much about it. So when I went and looked up some of the problems they were having launching these new satellites and one of them was the frequencies they're using are different. The Galileo uses a different frequency than the GPS system on purpose so that if the US military wants to come in and black out a region they can do it with their GPS system but Galileo is like, yeah, but we can still, they can still Galileo they want because free for everyone, yo. Nice. Yo. And your end and the clicks for free. That's right. Ah. Ah. All right, all right, all right, let's go. Okay. Hey. Hey. Off the charts. That's how Sarah Doss, a glaciologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution describes the melting across Greenland's mile thick ice sheet. From a historical perspective, this is quite a voice. Today's melt rates are off the charts and this study provides the evidence to prove this, says Sarah Doss. We found a 50% increase in total ice sheet melt water runoff versus the start of the industrial era and a 30% increase just since the 20th century alone. And this is a different quotey voice but it's gonna sound very much the same. Melting off the Greenland ice sheet has gone into overdrive. As a result, Greenland and Melt is adding to sea level more than any time during the last three and a half centuries. Centuries, by the way, typically represent hundred year periods of planetary existence. If not thousands of years, said Luke Prusall. A glaciologist at Rowan's University School and Earthen Environment and former postdoctoral school at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution lead author to study. An increasing melt began around the same time as we started altering the atmosphere in the mid 1800s. Ice loss from Greenland is one of the key drivers of global sea rise. So you have icebergs, big chunks of ice, things break off, chunks fall into the ocean from the edges of those glaciers. But that's only one of the components of water re-entering the ocean. More than half of the ice sheet water entering the ocean comes from runoff just from regular old melted ice and snow. The study suggests that if Greenland ice sheet melting continues at unprecedented, codey air, codey things, unprecedented rates, which the researchers attribute to warmer summers, it could accelerate the already fast pace of sea level rise. Rather than increasing steadily as climate warms, Greenland will melt increasingly more and more for every degree of warming. The melting and sea level rise we observed already will be dwarfed by what we may expect in the future as climate continues to warm, says Trusel. Even very small change in temperature caused an exponential increase in melting in recent years. So the ice sheets response to human caused warming has been non-linear. Warming means more today than it has at any point in the past. So they were able to go back to the 17th century by doing ice cores and looking at what was ice melts in the past versus what it is today. And it's kind of determined that we're on a runaway, exponential, awful, horrible thing. So that's the scientific story. It's going to get, it's bad now, it's only gonna get worse. But- Thanks, science. Yeah, to be able to answer what my next happened to Greenland, we need to understand how Greenland has already responded to climate change and what they say is what our ice core show is that Greenland is now at a state where it's much more sensitive to further increases in temperature than it was even 50 years ago and 50 years ago, it was really bad. Hence, and so my endpoint of this is while we humans, who are far flung from Greenland are going to be impacted eventually and en masse by this melting, we tend to ignore the humans who were already there. The Inuit of Greenland who happened to be among the most salt of the earth folks you could ever hope to meet, their world, their livelihoods, their history, their future, their very ability to exist on planet earth is an immediate danger. Right. As we watch them wash into the sea through no fault of their own, through no benefit they have taken from this planet, as we take no action to prevent it from happening. We will be bearing witness to a foreshadowing of our own eventual demise, which will follow if no action is taken with a cruel certainty and an icy indifference to our complaining about it when it takes place. You know, like we talk about this on this show quite a bit about human ability to survive in inhospitable climates and do all these sort of things that humans have done to survive. One of the things that has occurred to me is the reason that humans have gone everywhere on this planet has to do with getting away from other humans, which is part of the Inuit story of Greenland as well. Some people who are running away from other humans who helped populate that. But this is really the, if we could ask for a canary in the mind, if we could hope to have some sort of thing by which we can register and calibrate and take some sort of measurement of what's the affect of global warming. Greenland is it. And the evidence that we're getting, the information we're getting from Greenland is that it is accelerating and it's much worse than we had anticipated. So for anybody out there who still is undecided in any way about what the next issue that we're going to have to rally around as if it was a world war, as if it was a global economic collapse. If anybody's curious and wants to get in on the ground floor of trying to find solutions for the next big problem that will face humanity, this is it. Yep, and right now this is a very timely message as there is a international meeting on climate, currently ongoing in Copenhagen. And people are talking all about these issues. In fact, there's a wonderful young lady on who is, I think she's from Denmark, I might be wrong, but she's a young lady who just spoke at the meeting and said to paraphrase all the old people who aren't doing anything about it, just get out of the way, do something, either do something or get out of the way because the next generation is coming to take care of it. So it might be too late, unfortunately, but I am so glad that there are young people who are excited about helping this world because we need to do it. And I think you're right to say that Greenland is a canary, they're not the only canary. There are countries who are losing the islands that they live on due to sea level rise. Rapa Nui and others are examples of that. So you can look around the globe for these examples, but yeah, it's happening and it's going faster, it's exponential. I think a report just came out today also that compared to the 1.7% increase in carbon emissions, globally it's going to be doubled for 2019 is the estimate that whatever, whatever everybody says the hand waving of how we're changing our global emission habits, it's not really happening. So you're not doing it right. Yeah. This is a real downer. But it's only a downer if- Good news, I meant that as good news. Do people think it's a downer? I'm sorry. No, I think it's a good kick in the pants to be like, gotta do something about it. Also, it's only a downer if you think, man, gonna have to do some stuff now when you could think of it like, wow, we get to try all of these new technologies. We get to build a whole new economy. We get to change like these things in a positive way. Not only are they gonna make the world a better place, but you know what? I really love that coal plant that we built in 1950. Let's build some power plants in 2012 and 2020. Like let's build some new ones then too. It's like, let's keep it going. Let's build new stuff and try and find different ways to store energy and to build energy. And I didn't bring the story, but the global warming seems to be reducing wind in output globally, which means solar plants are being able to produce about 30% lessened energy than they used to because somehow global warming is affecting the amount of wind that is being produced on this planet. Who are we? Solar panels? No, wind turbines. Yeah, I think you mean wind turbines, but yeah. Wind turbines, but I got what you meant. What did I say? I said solar. So. Oh, no, I said solar. I'm sorry. Yeah, no, wind turbines. I'm sorry. Wind turbines are down 30%. Yeah, it'd be weird if the wind affected the solar now. Yeah. It blows the sun out of the way. That's how the... But there is like this, like I read one report was like, India has seen about 30% reduction. And then I read this other study that was like in the Midwest, there's been this interesting decline. And it turns out like all of these different observations were connected and somehow global warming is reducing the amount of wind energy that is getting transferred into the turbine. Or is it? So. So. That's really done. No. We'll make up for it. It's all right. We can do this. Eater? Yes, we can. But you know, and Eater, Eater's coming along. There was just a report of them testing some stuff at Eater and it looked very positive. So that big money boondoggle is coming along nicely. There's some other plasma machines that we've talked about also, the Stellarator and others that are looking pretty exciting. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But you know, something that is not related to energy, well it related to energy production but on a physiological stick scale is the human heart, right? We've got a heart that pumps, pumped blood to keep us going, to move the oxygen through our veins. And our brains. And our brains, yes, to keep us moving and grooving and doing all our stuff. Well, when you have a heart attack, a myocardial infarction, cells die in your heart. They are starved of oxygen for a moment. There's damage in the heart. And in the repair process, scar tissue is formed, fibroblasts in the heart tissue replace the heart muscle that was there before. And so now instead of having this area of pumping active cells, you lose that and you've got just the scar tissue that's there. And so your heart can't pump as well after a heart attack as it did before. So people have been super excited about the idea of cardiac stem cells. The idea that we've got stem cells all over our bodies. We've got stem cells in our skin. We've got stem cells in our bones. We've got stem, we've got to have them in our heart. And that has been the working hypothesis for a really long time, but it's been controversial because some researchers have found evidence of cardiac stem cells, but then they haven't been replicated. People haven't been able to do the work over again, which pretty much means it probably isn't true. And so there have been a few reports out recently pushing more and more in the not true direction. And so a group of researchers from Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht, the Amsterdam University Medical Center École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, and the Francis Crick Institute in London, led by Hans Clevers. They tried to basically create a cell by cell map of the dividing cells in a heart after heart attack. They took mice, they gave them myocardial infarctions, and then they looked to see what was dividing because the definition of a stem cell at this point in time is the ability of a cell to replace lost tissue by cell division. And so they went looking for those dividing cells to see what they were, and they went to see what they turned into. And all they found were blood vessels and immune cells and those fiber blasts that had turned into the scar tissue. No new heart muscle. So this study is one among many that is establishing that there may not be a cardiac stem cell. And the study is in mouse hearts, the murine heart, as opposed to the human heart. So maybe we're special, maybe we have the cardiac stem cells but it's pretty likely that if some of our closest relatives don't have these cardiac stem cells that we probably don't have them either. So this study additionally gets rid of what those false leads were where when stem cell researchers said they saw dividing cells and they must be cardiac stem cells, they were really looking at these precursors to new blood vessels and immune cells, which would be very important to recovering the health of that area of the heart. Whereas the muscle itself would not necessarily be the important part of recovering the health to the heart. And in fact, they determined that in those cells where in the hearts of the mice where the fibroblasts were allowed to turn into scar tissue, that actually that scar tissue, as much as we don't like it is necessary because without that scar tissue, the hearts were not really able to function. When it's blocked, the mice had acute cardiac rupture. Their hearts exploded. Yeah, so that scar formation is very important even though it does diminish our heart's ability to beat and pump that blood. But right now we may not be looking at heart stem cells that can be brought into action in the heart after cardiac arrest. Maybe we're gonna be looking at other regenerative therapies like heart patches where they bring in cells from other areas, where they try and patch that damaged area and get the cells on either side of the scar tissue to communicate with each other to allow that conduction that occurs between heart cells in the heart. I think those carry heavy ethical issues with him. Much better just genetically edit somebody not to have a heart condition. Back to where we started. That's right. And to go through all of these really ethically troubling type of procedures in order to preserve human life longer. That's right. We're back to where we started. Back to the gene editing. I'm not gonna say anything this time. I'm gonna take a different, I'm gonna just... But by not saying something, you just totally like laid down a declarative statement that said I solidly and affirmatively have staked out some ground, which I'm not gonna tell you what it is, but I definitely later can revert back to this point and say yes. Remember when I didn't say, this is what it was. That's right. Very well done. I got two really quick stories for the end of the show. Really fast, really fast. We've got Osiris Rex at Bennu. And no, I'm not speaking the foreign language. This is exciting. NASA's Osiris Rex mission arrived at the asteroid called Bennu this week and is preparing, this is, I'm gonna use a technical term. Boop. The chunk of space gravel to grab a piece of it and bring it back to Earth. Right now it's actually testing the surface with lasers, trying to actually map the surface of the asteroid so they can find a good spot for the boopage. That sounds... And I'm, you know, it sounds funny. Yeah. It's, it's, I'm convinced like everything audio is just performative. It has nothing to do with reality. But this is also like, this is one of those things about, but we have learned in encountering asteroids is that there are these big gravelly things. It's not like a giant chunk of rock. It's a giant chunk of pebbles. Yeah. Congealed. And Bennu is, it looks like a pretty big chunk of pebbles. It's, it looks very, like it has a very gravelly surface. We will see a little bit more to find out more about the history of our part of the solar system because this guy isn't even really that far away from us. I mean, it is, but it isn't. We picked a relatively close target for our asteroid visitation this time around. Moving on to the other quick story of the evening, LIGO Virgo, our favorite gravitational wave observatories. They, these teams have released a full catalog of observations which contain four additional black hole mergers based on a deeper analysis of their data. So they have increased the number of observations that are available to us. And they've found some even bigger observations than what they observed before that they just, they had missed it previously. And so it's very more, more, more black holes. Yeah. And one of them is even a more specific triangulation because it's LIGO Virgo, which puts a collaboration, which puts three detectors detecting something at the same time. It's even a more specific triangulation in space as to the location of one of these big black hole mergers. Like it's quite exciting. And then finally on this, the next. We should have somebody from LIGO on to the show. We have some point. Did. And we just do that before the thing that we could ask them the question about this thing, which is why we need to have them back. That's right. Well, their next observation season begins in spring, 2019. So I think that means there's gonna be a lot more stuff to ask them about coming into summer and fall of next year. And on this note, final note, the LHC is closing for two years for maintenance and improvements. This is something that I'm never excited about when the LHC closes, but it's better for science because it's gonna let them do better science. Yeah, better for science because better science. That's right. Exactly. It's a motto for us all. All right, have we done it? We have. Yay, we've done it. Yay. We've made it to the end of another show and I would like to remind everyone that they can head to twist.org to find information about our 2019 Blair's Animal Corner Twist Catalog with all specially made art by Blair. It's animals. You like animals. And science. If you remember when she was part of this show, through this calendar. Through these calendars. All right, I would love to give shout outs for the end of the show. Trace, thank you for joining us. Thank you so much. This was fun. Thank you for inviting me. This was super fun. Yay, I'm glad you enjoyed it. I hope you can come back again sometime. But in the meantime, where can people find you? I am at Trace Dominguez on all the social medias that matter. So Instagram and Twitter and Facebook, I guess. And also on YouTube, you can find me, youtube.com slash Trace Dominguez where our UNODOS of Trace publishes every week. Although this week with the flu, I'm gonna have to maybe publish a truncated video but I'm still gonna get out there and try and learn something that I can share in the next few days. You're an inspiration. You are fantastic. Thanks. I really appreciate what you do. Thanks. Thank you. And to others who help us every week. Fada, thank you so much for helping us with our social media and our show descriptions. Couldn't do this without you. Identity four, thank you for helping to record the show. Gord McCloud, thank you for monitoring our chat room. It's nice. I have nice chat rooms. It's good to have people on the scene. Everyone who is live in the chat room, our twist.org slash live chat room and our YouTube chat room, thank you for joining us and being part of the conversation. And it's time now for me to thank our Patreon sponsors, which of course I didn't put it up. So I'm gonna sit here for one second. Well, web pages load because I didn't put it up. Internet speeds. Bring the phones out. Here, here, here. Okay, got it. I got it. Okay. Thank you. Thank you too. 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And if any of you are interested in supporting us on Patreon, you can find information at patreon.com slash this week in science, or just click the Patreon link at twist.org. And remember, you can always help us out simply by telling your friends about twists. On next week's show, we will be back again, broadcasting live online at 8 p.m. Pacific Time on twist.org slash live, when it's going to be Justin and Blair's birthday episode. I can't believe it, it's my birthday too. It is, it's birthday season. We've got the double birthdays next week. So, we're gonna be seeing in happy birthday, twisty birthday, and if anyone has any birthday messages for Justin and Blair, please send them to them or send them to me and I can read them to them on the show. It'd be fun and I don't know, maybe they might like it. So, get in on the birthday action next week on the show. 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This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Like that's like my favorite part. Like I wish I had a button that I could hit that would make that gong sound occasionally through the show. Like somebody just said something like of epic importance and they just said it really casually but I'm going to make a big bong sound behind it. So everybody realizes that was an important thing. Oh, we made it through another episode. We did it. There was so much science. I always say that as if there was some question that we would not eventually stop talking. With you, Justin. Okay, okay, but I do recognize that there is something that wasn't part of the show when we began. Trace? Yeah, I mean, I was here when we began today. Yeah. Okay, which, yes. There's a thing that you learn only after being a mother for a while. You have the ability now to shoot a look which you didn't before. I think you threw the look before but it wasn't the grammar of the look that hadn't been formed yet. But you now have the ability to throw a look that says simply consequences. And I think early on in the producering of the show, you would throw a look and I'd be like, what does that look mean? I'm not really sure what that look means. Does that mean keep talking or stop talking? I'm going to keep talking just in case it's keep talking because I wouldn't want to stop talking if it meant keep talking. But now that the look has narrowed its laser focus to the point of meaning consequences. And I really believe like this is a look that can only be thrown once you have been a mother for some period of time. It might be. I feel like I've seen this look from Keegi. Yeah, everyone saw it. It's a scary look. It's intimidating. I've ever thrown new that look, Trace. When we were way back when we were in studio together, there would have been a shin kick. Right, that's Pam's bringing that up. Pam's bringing it up in the chat room. Dr. Keegi just used to kick Jackson Fly in the shins. Yeah, because there wasn't like, I couldn't see it in the eyes yet. There wasn't this telegraph communication that hadn't been articulated yet. But now I've noticed over the last, I don't know, maybe like a year and a half or so. Like you can throw a look that's just like, oh, there's consequences. Don't know what they are. Have no idea. But I know that I don't want consequences because those are things you want to try to avoid. That's how operant conditioning works, right? You make somebody get them to just do a behavior and I didn't have to give them a reward or a punishment. They just do it. Yeah. You paired that look with a kick to the shin and now he's just like, I fear the look. Thank you, look. Finally getting to that level of communication where we don't need shin kicks or speech at all. I can just see it in the eyes. Just an icy stare. I can see that icy stare. And I can know, oh, I should stop earlier with my words talking. But I have so much kindness in my eyes. I need to go back over this episode though and just find the point where I was like, because there's a lack of wind, solar panels aren't working. Like, this is... We knew what you meant. We knew what you meant. But I was in my head being like, did he actually mean solar panels? And so how would that work? The heating corner thing? Is it dust? We weren't aware of dust? What do we got? There's a lot of dust. I think even Mars, they'd be like, there's not that much dust. I get how there is a part of my brain which is like wind and solar are linked as a dynamic duo against other forms of energy. But yeah, that was fantastic because in real time I was like, did I say that? Like, I don't know. Are they both wrong? Probably not. Okay, so I did say the wrong thing. Yeah, but anyway, thank you chat room for always being there chatting alongside us. It was nice. Yeah. I like peeking into the chat room and seeing what they're talking about. Sometimes they're like so into what we're talking about and they're having a separate conversation about it. And I'm like, oh, what are you talking about? And other times they're like talking about something entirely different, like some of something else they're thinking about. And I'm like, what do you guys, how do I wanna be on that conversation? Distracting, but awesome. Yeah, I think eventually when the day comes, which it comes for all of us when I retire from this show, I think we're gonna go hang out in the chat room. That's a good crowd. It seems like a place to me. That's a good bunch of folks. I mean, you can probably be on the show. Should I be like, are we on the show? Be like, I don't know. Can I have a good hair? Let's hang in the chat room. Yeah. I feel like, I feel like the older I get, the more these cycles are on the sun that take place. The more I'm like, I'm really doing more than I really need to at once. I could step way back from being on Planet Earth. Like, I don't need to be disinvolved. And even my own life, like I could take a break from my own life for like a long time, be like, you know, decisions I've made, it's not like they were like instrumental or part, like it were my, you know what my life reminds me of? My life reminds me of Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Whoa. In that- How? It's Mel T. I'm gonna go with Mel T. In that, regardless of all the suffering that Indy went through and the beatings he took and the fights he went through and all of the things that went on in that movie, if Indiana Jones' character wasn't in that movie, the Nazis still get the Ark and they still take it to the place where they like open up the Ark and they still all die. And so like, really, all of what Indy did in that movie is absolutely meaningless to how it ends. Like, if he didn't do any of it, the end is still the same. There's nothing that changes. And it's like one of the greatest adventure movies of all time and yet the adventurer didn't have to be part of it. And the movie's- Nay, Justin. Nay. Why? Why was the adventure? Why? Yes. There we go. Yes. Yes. It is. But Indy was like hurt everywhere. And getting punched is less, less, you know. He could have been drinking beers and a brothel and a country of El Repute. And the movie still would have ended the same. He could have had nothing to do with it. And so this is how I view my life. It's very much my life was very much Raiders of the Lost Ark. I had to encounter snakes, which I'm not a fan of. Did a guy named Jacques bring them? Or was it just like in general? I feel like I've always wanted to know a guy named Jacques who works with snakes. Always, like my whole life, if it ever happens, I will let you know. But I don't actually hate snakes, but I'll still say the line. Somebody's gotta reach out to you. It's like, hey, I'm actually that don't really, I don't have that much familiarity with snakes, but my name is Jacques and- You just need somebody to facilitate. I can do the work. I'm happy to show up so you can tell me you hate snakes and fulfill your lifelong dream. That's, you know what that, if that Jacques is out there, call me. Oh, now you've been invited adventure into your life. Are we now, is this officially the after show? I didn't actually say it, but yes, we are in the after show. So what was the quote? Terribly long because I've been fighting a cold. Okay, that's right. I just have to follow up on one thing that's been egging at me this whole time. The previous governor who had a quote about something about persistence overcoming something- Yeah, yeah. Persistence wears down resistance. Okay, so that is also, by the way, like the worst possible consent protocol. We're also telegramming. No, it's terrible. Like if somebody's like, no, I'm not into that, is you should never bring it up again ever in the history of knowing this person, wearing down somebody's resistance to a thing that you are interested in, but they aren't, is an anti-consent sort of a scenario. So I just wanted to throw that out there because from hearing that throughout the entire show, it's been the back of my head going, it's like, that's not really a good strategy to feed to the young people. That's the best part about that. So there was this guy named, he was Lieutenant, he was a, I can't remember if it was a Lieutenant Campton or Lieutenant Carl. Patrick Sinclair is his name and he had a bar on Mackinac Island where this was called Patrick Sinclair's Irish Pub and all of the young like attractive female servers and bartenders had to wear a shirt that said persistence wears down resistance. And they all needed it. Are you serious? And, but the best part was it was an Irish Pub and Patrick Sinclair is Scottish. So it was just like all sorts of great. Well, you know, if it's not Scottish, it's crap. I just, I just, I just said consequence size. You did. I saw it too. I'll be quiet for the rest of the life. No, I'm starting to turn into a pumpkin guy. Grace, thank you so much for joining us tonight. We'll see you next week. Also, as your first role as a new member of TWIST, you have to be the one who explains to Blair that she's no longer part of the show. Okay, just give me your number. I'll give her a call. No, no, no, we wouldn't do that to you. We wouldn't make it like a personal thing where your voice is involved. We just want to expect you to post it somewhere on the internet that she might find. Got it. So I tweet it. Oh, yeah. Good night. There'll be like, what, Kiki? Yeah, but this will take me like, what's going on? Thank you for having me. It was wonderful. Thank you for joining us. And I learned a lot, which is nice. Yay, I did too. Thanks for great conversation and bringing your wonderful perspective to the show. Thanks. I'll come back anytime. You let me know. Yay, awesome. We'll have to do it again for sure. Everyone out there, calendars. And we're almost at the end of the year. So top 11 science, hashtag top 11 science or you can send me what you think are your top stories for 2018. We're coming down to that pretty soon. Yeah, but that's about it. Justin, thank you. Of course. Nice that you meet you. Yeah. Introductions. It's good to have introductions. All right, everybody. Have a wonderful evening. Have a science-filled week and we will see you yet again. When? When? Next Wednesday. We'll be back. We'll be back next Wednesday. Thanks for watching.