 if I were it would. I didn't delete anything. No, no, no, it's not in there. It's all the show. We are live, everyone. Welcome to all the end of year episode of This Week in Science, in which we count down the top stories of the past year. And as usual, it's a difficult distinction as to what will become the top 11 stories. We're actually debating them currently. As we go to print. There's no debate. He's like, this is how it's going to be. And I'm like, well, why is it like this? She's like, that's just how it is. It's just how it is because there was no there was no other debating at the time when I was looking for debating. And then then I copied and pasted and now it is it is what it is. It is what it was, what it shall be, what we shall let you know on this show. Oh, my goodness, we did it. OK, we figured it out and it's time to start the show. So we should do that, right? Are you all ready? Uh huh. For better or worse, it's time to go. For better or for worse. Good science to everyone. So we're starting in a three. A two. This is twist this week in science episode number eight hundred fifty six recorded on Wednesday, December twenty ninth, twenty twenty one, the top eleven science stories of twenty twenty one. Hey, everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight we will fill your heads with the top science from the past year. But first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. As we end the year, the planet has lost one point eight million people to the I'm sorry, that was last year's disclaimer. As we end the year, there we go. The end of another fantastic and wonderful year full of fantastic science. And beyond that, it was somewhat terrible in twenty twenty one. As we ended the year, the planet lost an additional three point six million lives to the one point eight million we had lost the year before. We have continued to fail to take a virus seriously. And we are, as we were this time last year at the peak of transmission and death just as a new variant offers a more contagious acceleration of infection. Twenty twenty one, so contagious was the year. That even as it leaves, it is passing along the virus to the following year. Twenty twenty one, the year that showed again how well ignored. And maybe it will go away. Strategies fair when dealing with actual threats. Twenty twenty one year. We didn't learn from history and repeated it immediately. While there is some desire, even now to not look back, we pause for a moment to look back and see what we've learned. This week in science, top eleven year in review coming up next. I've got the kind of mind I can't get enough. I want to learn everything new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. Good science to you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you, too, Justin, Blair and everyone out there. We wish you. Mary holidays, Mary, Twistmas, Mary, all the things, and now we're here. We have made it all the way to the end of the year. We started in January and we thought, look at all this time ahead of us. And yeah, Justin, we decided to immediately forget things that we had learned. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, it's just, you know, oh, 2021, you left us feeling like it was still 2020. And I don't know what happened. A lot of stuff happened. Yeah, many people, many, we've lost many people, unfortunately. And we look forward, though, to the next year. And as we start looking forward, we're going to start looking forward. Looking forward, we do look back to see where we've been. Because sometimes, even though we may have only been in our basements for the past year, not experiencing as many things as we would prefer, sometimes you got to keep track of the advancements that are going on around you to know that progress is being made. So I would love to ask you normally at this point, what you got? What are we going to talk about? But that I mean, really, it's just the countdown. That's what we have, right, Blair? Yeah, I'm going to talk about numbers 11 through 1. Wait a minute. Why top 11? What? People who normally come to a countdown show, they say the top 10, right? It's always a nice round number. Why the heck are we doing top 11? Because there's always something that gets left off, left behind. Of course, then there's that thing that would have been 12 that you're leaving. And then there'd be and then there'd be 14. And then so we have to cut it. We have to cut it somewhere. So we cut it at 11. That is it. It's the 10 plus one more than, you know, fabulous. It's one more science, isn't it? It's one more science. It's great. And I'm waiting. We have we have lost Justin. So for I'd like to do this just like a nice roll in show. But at this point, I think we're going to have to cut some things out because Justin keeps kind of popping in and popping out. Just as torso, which is interesting. Yeah, I just we just had a nice shot of Justin's torso back in the green room. What's happening out there? Oh, Justin, come back to us. It's time to do the show. It's Y2K. Oh, no, wait, that's not. That was 21 years ago. Twenty two years ago. Sheesh. Yeah. How how bonkers is that? 1981 was 40 years ago. No, thank you. No, thank you. I don't want it. Take it back. Take back your math and that. I know all the ideas about aging. I can't with that. It's like when someone from Generation Z says, oh, that was back in the 1900s. Oh, you young whipper snappers born after the 2000s. I will say I've started calling the early 2000s the Aughts since that's a bit I feel like that's appropriate now. Right. So I can say, oh, back in ought to. And it makes it sound classy and old like you live, I don't know, back in the dangerous Wild West. Yeah, back in ought to. I had pants wider than yours, but they were low riders. So you had to pull them up all day. That was the difference now. They're very wide, but they're also they go up to just below the boot. So it's it's it's not the same. Yes, not the same at all. Plus the wider pants. They used to have the the the strap for your hammer, you know, in case you took that to high school with you. It's which, of course, yeah, dead. No, I didn't. Yeah. Yeah. I did like running around with my plastic bonk hammer. I bet you did that tracks, actually. Monk. Yeah, I believe it. It does track, doesn't it? Oh, everyone. Yeah, we lost Blair for a couple of weeks there. Well, not a couple of weeks, just for the the Holiday Twistmas show. Yeah. Yeah. Did you have a good break? I did. Yeah, it was really nice. That's fantastic. Yeah. That's wonderful. I I'm I we missed you. We had a good time, but we missed you. We did a lot of animal stories because you weren't there. Yeah, I saw that. That's OK. It's all right. I'm not jealous. The animal science still happens, even when I'm not here. So I appreciate that it still in the world to cover. Yeah. I'm keeping an eye on things. Where is Justin? He's gone. He's left. He was so angry about the top 11. I want to bring my back on. Oh, hello, everyone out there. We've got our Twitch Watchers. We got some Garche Gamer, Gord Arnlor, J.R. Illinois. Who else do we have there? Shoebrew, all of you, Twitchers. Then we've got the people on YouTube. There's Anthony, Paul, Disney, Gary, L, people of Earth. I have come from Year 2121. Please, please watch and learn from this episode of Twists. I hope that we can get to this episode of Twists so that people can watch and learn. Well, you know, we can talk about while we're waiting is the announcement from the CDC this morning. Oh, do you want to? Yeah, let's chat about that. Just, you know, we're not talking about current news this week anyway. So we can have five days now. That's all you need is five days. All you need is five days, but also without symptoms. Right. Yeah, so just you take a home test at the end of the five days. But the concern I have is that there are many employers that will hear that and just say, it's been five days. You have to come back. Yeah. And they won't accept like, oh, but I don't feel 100 percent or, oh, but, you know, I can't find an at-home test or my at-home test, you know, was, you know, I got one positive and one negative. You know, there's a lot of I think there's so there's going to be a lot of pressure from some employers to do your five days and come back. Yeah. And I do think that part of it is not just employers, it's also trying to reduce the amount of time that kids are missing school so that without the 10 days, it makes it easier on teachers, on on students. And yeah, I think I mean, they're saying it's all sort of things. They're saying it's students, they're saying it's flight attendants. I think honestly, they don't want to scare people, but I think it's the medical fields. I think that's really what it's about. That because there's that as well, because there's such a nursing and health care shortage right now that these people aren't allowed to come back to work and they've been exposed within. You know, it's like, oh, you're exposed. You have to stay home for 10 days, regardless. Well, I mean, if you're if you're exposed in the hospital, usually that if you're vaccinated, that doesn't matter. What matters is if you get a positive test. Yes, because you're exposed every day if you're working in the hospital. So you should basically assume that you're swimming in it. Swimming in a sea of all the diseases. Yeah. So it's yeah, it's it's an interesting move. I think it's definitely the opposite of the direction I expected. I on Monday going into work, I kind of expected another pack up your stuff and go home, but that's not what happened. Yeah, people are still working in offices right now. And I honestly don't fully understand why like it's it's bad. And sure, you know, people who are vaccinated are doing OK. But it's bad enough in the transition is quick enough. I'm kind of surprised that they weren't just like, all right, it's the slow season anyway for a lot of jobs. Just go home. Just go home for a few weeks, work from home. We'll see. Yeah, yeah. Part of it also is that with Omicron, it's a different timeline. And because of the timeline of how it progresses, it's kind of like, OK, I'm going to get in there a bit quicker. We're going to have it and then kind of get over it a little bit. Everything's a little bit faster because it's so much more virulent. Right. It's like 72 hours, right? Instead of up to two weeks. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's much, much faster in most cases. And then what they're also seeing is that because of vaccination, it's or previous exposure, it's much more mild. Right. So people are walking around with a run of nose. They think it's just because it's winter and then they're getting people sick. So so I'm here. Well, I'm testing everyone. I'm here broadcasting from Denmark. Denmark didn't have as bad a go as the rest of the world did. So I got here up here off and on throughout this thing, malls full of people, no masks. Like, no, like, it's such as not a big problem. You know, it's a thing for the rest of the world. Denmark right now is doubling their Omicron cases every other day. Yeah, I heard it wasn't very good over there. There are more cases now, daily cases now than at any point previous, and they're just now starting to, you know, while I when I got here, I think they just a month ago, they just reinstated the having to wear masks when you go into public places, I think. And and people aren't completely following it. No, of course not. Where are they? Nowhere. And I'm like, yeah, I'm like, suddenly I'm in the hot spot for Omicron. Yeah. So yeah. So you're having a great time. And I've been going out, not been going out a lot. Yeah, that is a good idea. OK, shall we have a show? Yeah. And I apologize for the technical difficulties. It turns out that's my for some reason that either the camera that I normally use or the port for it has has died. And so it kept I kept this is what is I kept trying to get the camera to come back on. And then it would flip to the other camera and then it would recognize the other camera and flip back to the one that wasn't working. So now it seems like this will be sufficient to do the rest of the show. Yeah. It is sufficient, the camera. Yes. All right. So anyway, we explained why we do 11 and all that good stuff. Well, yeah, because you have to not leave everybody wondering. Yeah. What was the one thing that just barely didn't make the list? Yeah, but I don't know. I wonder what was there. There is a lot that I can tell you. I can tell you for sure. I can tell you what that thing is. All the things, there's so many things. There's not just one thing that was left off. Did not make this one thing that got left off, but that ended up making the top 11 list. And that would be you can't wait. But I just want to let people know before we jump in. And yeah, yeah, yeah. You want to hear. They're here. They know. Our stuff as we jump into our show here, I do want to remind you at this year's end that it would be a great gift to us. If you did, subscribe to the Twist podcast. You can find us on your favorite podcast platforms or you can find us on YouTube, Facebook or Twitch for live streaming and for video on demand. And additionally, we are on Twitter and Instagram. But you can always find us at twist.org. All right. Now it's time for the science countdown. Well, let's do the drum roll for. Number 11 11 11 11 11 11. Number 11 is one of those things that never would have made the list before. We got we got our newest member, Blair, on board a decade ago. Decade in review of Blair being part of the show. Animal intelligence. What animals are intelligent? You didn't say. Yeah, it turns out. And so these are not stories I'm most familiar with. But I got I got some stories here. It says, let me hear your monkey talk. Are monkeys talking? Yeah, the story you brought, Justin. Yeah, I brought this. Yeah, this is all about how marmosets eavesdrop on one another. You got to know what the other monkeys are talking about. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. To the other monkeys. But I remember that study was really cool because of the researchers' use of, like, facial recognition in for red scanning. They did like really they did scanning of faces to see how different monkeys were responding facially to monkey calls through thermal imaging of their faces. Yeah, so they could see heat changes in their face to indicate kind of emotional responses. Very cool. Yeah. It was a very cool stage because they didn't have to wire into monkey brain or anything to do it. They could just the monkeys were were were largely unharmed from don't you hate it when you spend hours slaving over a hot monkey brain? You could just use some facial recognition. Yeah, we'll just scan your face. Oh, monkey's happy. That's great. And then as I recall, we flipped the script and we're scanning human faces to find out if humans when humans were lying. Yeah, I think we did that as well. Oh, yeah, that's right. I remember that now. And that's the one that they're like, yeah, we're going to get this to the point where we can just go look through archival footage of people talking and tell whether or not they're lying. Yeah, but this is a huge problem with that study because of the efficacy of lie detector tests. But that was a whole nother conversation. That's a whole nother level. Yeah, lying, you know, if an animal can lie, it does it does prove a bit of intelligence, right? So good job, humans. Good job, monkeys for eavesdropping. Is there anybody else who's intelligent out there? And then I don't know what this line means. It says, can a cuttlefish say chubby bunny with a marshmallow? This is mine. This is a cuttlefish can pass the marshmallow test. So do you remember the marshmallow test? Yeah, but that's also, by the way, that's a contentious study in that it's delayed gratification and not proper survival strategy for lower income children. This is this is that test is also like one of the most misunderstood studies of the past. But still, it does get at if it is delayed gratification and also survival skills, cuttlefish are in there and they're thinking about survival. Yeah, so those that wait the longest also do better in learning tests. And so they this is the first time that they found a link between self control and intelligence in an animal other than humans and chimps. So especially one with like tentacles. Yes, without, you know, a normal brain. Yeah, I still have to clarify in humans. That test, the children who have failed that test tend to be lower income, tend to have less food security than the children who do better. And that's the determining factor, not intelligence, not planning. The better life outcomes that when they track those children might also have to do with the income of the household and whether or not they had food security as a child might be connected to a poverty situation. So that's not what we're talking about with animal intelligent. Yeah, let's move on to the next animal intelligent story. Don't like that study at all. But the original one, the original one. Sorry, not that not the cuttlefish are wonderful. Cockatoos know how to use tools. Now, I don't never. Cockatoos is a cockatoo that you're going to have to help me with this. Cockatoo is not one of those one of those shape identifying talking birds. Is it? Yes. OK, so this is already a smart bird. So we know they use tools. This study was new because they were able to use three different tools in sequence deliberately to achieve a specific goal. So the idea is that's like broadcast planning, right? So they could plan an attack for a problem, plan out how they could use these tools in sequence and then do it. Order of operation. That is key to being able to do any successful experiment. And then I know. Oh, here's it. We have video of a cockatoo. Looks like it is. What is it doing? It's using a tool to eat a sweet fruit that is very difficult to get to the sweetness normally. Different kinds of tools to access the fruit. Dun, dun, dun. And the final one we're recapping here for animal intelligence is an orangutan, a orangutan. A orangutan. Yes. Drawing. Mm hmm. Yeah. So this one was later in the year is actually a pretty recent one where they were able to look at different orangutan drawings from different individuals, identify which individual did them. So there are specific style and then they can also identify different stylistic changes in an individual over time. And they they also saw that some of them had a preference over drawing to other. So there's this idea that it is a recreational activity, that there is personal preference among orangutans for drawing and that they have their own personal style that can be reflected by emotion, potentially, it's very potentially. Yeah. Because if I'm recalling, right, maybe I'm not, there was one orangutan that was specifically they were like, we could actually throw out the rest of the study. Just that one was very impressive compared to the rest. So so that one was impressive compared to the rest, but it showed a differentiation. This orangutan like to draw more than the other orangutans. Yeah. So there were some people like to draw more than other people. And there's others, some with an artistic eye and others who don't, individual differences do matter. And if you're, you know, you're having a small sample set, you're going to end up with those differences in your animals. But so fascinating. That's what makes me question my intelligence, because I'm still saying a orangutan. I don't know why I learned the proper way to pronounce that word. Well, we had to learn also how to how to say Neanderthal. Yes. For the German Neanderthal, as opposed to Neanderthal, which is the Americanization. Yes. Tell your friends, there's no G on the end of the word orangutan. Orangutan. All right. Everybody knows. Everybody knows that that was animal intelligence. There's lots of other studies, but that was a good drawing of the studies from that category. Blair, you want to give us number 10. 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10. Is all about cloning. Cloning. Cloning. So cloning is a story that has kind of come in and out, I think, of the scientific limelight over the past probably 30 years now. When was Dolly? That was like 90 to eight, probably. I'm going to look it up now. It was before before Gen Z was born. Yes, it was definitely before Gen Z was born. But Dolly was a while ago. Anyway, point being there's been lots of kind of excitement about cloning. And then it's like, oh, it's probably never going to. Oh, wait, we have the oh, no, it's probably never going to happen. Well, there are a couple of really cool things that happened this year related to cloning. So one is that they were able to clone black footed ferrets enough that they think they might actually be able to reestablish their efficacy in their environment. So this is an animal that is critically endangered, that there was like, I didn't catch the exact number when I was looking back at these again. But, you know, there was a very small number of these guys left. And there's 650 today. But there was this teeny tiny population, less than 100 that they found in 1981 after they thought they were extinct. And so this larger population is due to, in part, this idea of cloning. And so they rolled a copy, some black footed ferrets. And they oh, 96 was Dolly. There we go. And so this is through a surrogate mother. And this will allow them to diversify the population because this was from some genetic material from ferrets that are gone. So the idea is it'll kind of reduce a bottleneck. So this is this is a combination of actually a few cloning techniques that we had our eyes on, saving endangered species that have reduced genetic population and then also taking frozen or preserved genetic material and inseminating a current animal in order to bring that fetus to viability. So all very cool stuff. And then the other one can do it for everything. Yes. Let's save everything. Yeah. Was it was was it 2020 that they were doing rhino cloning? Yes. Yeah, I think so. I think that's the highest and best use. I think they need to focus on rhino cloning for a long time because rhinos, as I learned this year, are the sweetest, cutest, cuddliest giant puppies. I think you just described in black. I got to watch the live rhino cams from I can't remember the site, but to explore something. Oh, explore.org. Yeah. Explore.org. They have live cams. You can see the rhinos when they snuggle down. There's like six of them snuggle down to bed every night. They're like puppies. They're just so cute. Five thousand pound puppies. He's so playful. I can have cloned, horned puppies. Are you sure, Justin, you wouldn't rather clone a mammoth? Can you? Are you on board? No, absolutely not. He's not on board, but I'm just I'm a professional. I'm a professional, so I will record the story that Kiki put in the run sheet for me. And that includes this company that was backed to launch a 15 million dollar mammoth cloning endeavor. So 15 million dollars this year to help get that going. From George Church. Anyway, we talked about how in reality, this is probably this is kind of the poster child for this research. And this research will actually probably get used for current species that are endangered and will help in other ways, fingers crossed. But who knows, we might see some mammoths, too, to my chagrin. And would that really be a bad thing? Yes. But ultimately, I will tell you so it's on the record. If there is ever a cloned mammoth and I can visit it, you better believe I will. OK, OK, see now we're winning over hearts and minds. Do I agree with it? No. Will I pet a mammoth? You bet your bippy. And yeah, this is. And this is this is it's not going to be a mammoth mammoth, right? It's going to be a hybrid. Of course, with an elephant, most likely, it's going to be a mix. It's not going to be full mammoth. Yes. But the thing is, we can't keep elephants alive right now, either. So it's a strange choice to use elephants to clone mammoths when the elephants are actually critically endangered. But it's all it's fine, whatever cloning. There were things this year moving on. Cloning, it's exciting. It has potential. I wish that companies wouldn't use sensationalist sensationalist tactics to drum up support for their efforts, which could potentially have good results. But at the same time, you know, things are done for the wrong reasons. How are we? Yeah, I think I think there needs to be more more balance in how these things done. But that's not our system. And you got to articulate, I'm so sorry. You have to articulate that a little bit further for me. I didn't understand what's being done for the wrong reason. Well, the idea behind this company that got funding and through George Church and other investors is that they are going to be developing basically like a mammoth theme park. It's part of like the whole the whole thing in Russia for Siberia, where I take this land, we'll create a theme park and people come visit. You know, maybe the money they're going to get the funding because of this sensationalist perspective of like, oh, come to our mammoth theme park, pet a mammoth. You know, that'll make the money. But then the side projects are probably the more valuable, where the results of their research and the work that they do will benefit rhino conservation. It could have good environmental consequences if applied correctly. But we don't even know that yet. So there are all sorts of points. So there's a there's a thread in what they're doing that does have some scientific backing. Maybe it does some not everybody maybe agree on it, but it has to do with having a creature like this who's stomping down. Maybe it's can preserve some permafrost. Maybe it can reintroduce plant life and just to be possibly. But they'd have to have a whole bunch of them and it would have to be, you know, massive. Why don't I mean, let's bring back the giant land sloths. Let's do, you know, they probably have fecal matter and all sorts of effects on the biomes as well. I'm going to go ahead and try to prevent poaching of mammoths. Also, I have a cloning. Oh, no, number 10, it's still controversial. OK, let's move on to number nine. Number nine. Number nine. Oh, we first heard about these guys in 2020 and there were actually a couple of stories in 2021 about the Xenobots. These were the self organizing, self reproducing bio bots made from embryonic frog stem cells in which this most recently in the beginning of December, the researchers published work in which they suggested a whole new form of reproduction in which they reproduced kinematically and these these little frog cells would bump into each other and go, you're mine. And then bump into another one, go, you're mine, too. And eventually they would all glom together and turn into little Pac-Man shapes. Yeah, so talk about stories that we had problems with. I had a big problem with this story and calling it reproduction. It's not reproduction, but that's fine. It was not reproduction. It was very neat. Not reproduction in any way, not recombination of DNA, not splitting of nucleus, none of it. It's not reproduction. Sorry, you also had a problem. I remember with the definition of these being called a biological robot. Yes, but ridiculous. We're like, no, these are not robots. It's a blob of cells. Yeah, I mean, it's a blob of cells that happen to do a particular thing through emergent the emergent properties of complexity, right? It's kind of a these they have certain traits and all those traits when they come together into a swarm can have a can have a certain output. And so if you know what that output is and what you want, you can, you know, choose certain traits in such a way that it's quote unquote programmable. You have input and that leads to output. Is a slinky a robot? No, yes. So then this isn't either is my point. It is programmed quote unquote to move a specific way when pushed in a specific way down a set of stairs. That's it's not a robot. It's not a robot. And maybe if you have enough slinkies together on the stairs, they can sweep my stairs of all the cat hair, right? And that would, would that be robotic action? No. Okay, so now what you're starting to talk about is determinism versus free will. And as a proponent for artificial intelligence and Android equality, I got to tell you, there's not a whole lot of difference between programming and what you would call your instinct or what a baby's born with and knows how to do already without somebody telling it to do is not that far off from what a robot can do with basic programming. Well, what I'm saying is this is like physics basically and that's all. Yeah, it's the, it brings biology and physics together. Let me just explain something real quick. And they're cute. Biology has always relied on physics. Yeah, for sure. That's fine. Okay, that's okay. I'm just saying that like. I've never been without physics. It's a ball rolling down a hill is not a robot. This is my point is just external physical momentum does not make a robot. So for 2022, we will have to bring in the researchers on this and get them to explain to us how these are robots. Yes, please. So that we can understand. And I would just throw them in the last qualification. I have a qualification for life, for intelligent life. Excuse me. Being intelligent life requires humor. So until it has humor, I wouldn't consider it intelligent anyway. Whether it's whether it's a, it's a ball rolling down a hill or somebody explain. What if it's a funny ball rolling down a hill? Somebody explained to me the tax code. Neither one of those in my mind is considered intelligent life. Okay. Okay. All right. I hear you here. Let's move on from the Xenobots to who's up next. Oh, it's me. Number eight. Number eight. Number eight, number eight, number eight, number eight. Regeneration. It was a big year for regeneration. I didn't really realize that. I picked a couple of stories about this. And then once we looked at all of the stories we picked, wow, it was a big year for it. So two of the kits called Asidians, they were able to be chopped into three pieces and regroup into three organisms. That's crazy. They're like, I don't need to just be chopped in three. I can be three of me. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. So they perform a very simple regeneration in order to reproduce. They have a colonial lifestyle, but in this case they were able to chop them into three and they were able to regenerate organs and everything they needed to survive. So. And it's amazing because it's like what they, this is not the tuna kits. This is cordata. This is organs with a dorsal cord. So you would think if you've got a dorsal cord it is organization beyond just like a mushy amoeba-like body plan, how could you be chopped into three and then regrow that easily? And specifically how it relates to us and our desire to regrow limbs is that, that means that they're missing body systems, the blueprints are maintained. So that I think is the thing that's crazy is that normally we can't regrow things because our body doesn't know how to do that. It doesn't know unless we can take stem cells and manipulate them in a special way to then do a specific thing. And we're still trying to figure out how that works, but that's kind of the gap is that they don't know how to do it, which brings me to the other one. The next study is about axolotls, salamanders and specifically axolotls are famous for regrowing things. And so what they found was that based on how axolotls regrow limbs, they're, it looks like the key to us doing that is maintained through the evolutionary lineage. So looking through that, they say that humans have an untapped potential for, excuse me, for a generation. So the, we have scar formation, but axolotls don't scar. Right. And that's the thing that's partly in the way of regeneration. Right, it is. Once there's a scar, it's done. Yeah, absolutely. And so of course, axolotls are almost extinct in the wild. So like, that's a problem. We're trying to figure this out. Well, we can help the axolotls by growing an amazing laboratory collection. Yeah, but so they saw similarities between what axolotls do to regenerate and what mammalian embryos can do in the womb. It's the same processes. And the axolotl is known for, it's very particular look, which is based on the fact that they look young forever. So these gills that are so kind of charismatic on their face that look like fuzzy antlers, I guess. They don't get wrinkles. Yeah, so they, yeah. And they don't get wrinkles. The salamanders have those gills when they're babies, but axolotls keep them. And so one of the ideas is that the axolotls have maintained a lot of youthful aspects, including their ability for regeneration. And so they think that it's likely that adult mammals have the genetic code for a generation. It just needs to be unlocked somehow. So this is an exciting discovery related to that. Yeah. We also this year saw a blind patient recover partial vision with optogenetics. So that was a big deal. Allowing the blind to see again is pretty. Yeah, let's just stick some molecules for light reception into your eye and put them in, then they're working. Yeah. Yeah, so that is a big, big deal. And then the last one is that sea slugs who severed their own heads could regenerate brand new bodies from that head. So if their body was sick in some way, they would just chop themselves at the neck and regrow a new body. I don't need that old body. I want a new one. I don't like this one. I want another one. Yes, please. Wow. And that's an amazing ability, just the idea that they, from the head down, get rid of all of it. You don't need your heart. Start over. You can start over. Yeah. I mean, slugs aren't people though. No, no. Also they eat photosynthetic algae and so that algae can photosynthesize for them when they no longer have a stomach. So that also helps. Head of bridge. They have a life support system. That, yeah. Oh God, look at that head. Look at that head, just go. The little head's like, what happened to my body? What's going on there? We thought that it would die soon without a heart and other important organs, but we were surprised again to find that it regenerated the whole body. Yeah, that's pretty impressive. That's not me anymore. Gotta let that dead weight go. Yeah, epigenetics is probably a huge part of that. The little packets of cellular material, exomes that get passed around. There's been a lot of talk about exomes over the last couple of years. But now Justin, where are we now? We are now at number seven. Seven, seven, seven, seven. Synthetic biology. Hey, you know my babies are born? Why or how? Why? Because they run out of womb. Oh, right. Oh, there we go. Researchers grew mice, embryos without wombs. They grew them in a jar. Well, it's probably not just a typical jar. It's probably a pretty fancy jar. Yeah, looks like they were having mice grown outside of another animal. Yeah, so this is like a tiny lamb bag, right? Right, yeah. To be able to have from the very beginning, then the lamb bags were like an IVF later. It was like, oh, we'll take the 20 week fetus and put it in the lamb bag after the point when really it's almost at the point where it could be alive on its own but we'll give it all that support. We'll do this fake womb later. And the idea of the lamb bag is that it would be a potential for premies to be able to help babies who are born significantly premature. But with this, the idea is really the beginning, right? You have the cells put them together, stick them in a jar, organism. Yeah, and this has fantastic potential for anybody who wants to have offspring but doesn't have a womb for it in their lives. No womb. No womb for being pregnant. It's also really good news for cloning actually. Yeah, this is how we're gonna see all those cloned ferrets, right? Yeah, you don't need a surrogate then. Or we get really big bags and then we can fit the mastodons in. Right, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, right now they're talking about this as just for research to be able to observe crucial phases of mammalian development in smaller organisms like mice. But if they get good at it, this is really a potential, like you said, to be able to move past the need for circuits. And that could be huge, but we're not there yet, everybody. But just a note, scientists are getting a lot better. Putting cells in jars. Certainly. I don't know what this one is. This is the Irish crying eyes. What is this story about? Did you ever know what this one is? Right, so the researchers, this is what I brought to the show, researchers brought, they put tear glands, or they put a bunch of cells, basically an organoid for tear glands and they grew them in dishes. But then they didn't just go so far as to successfully make a tear gland. They made them cry. So they were tear glands that could produce tears. Sure, sure. That's creepy as heck. It is a little bit creepy, but at the same time it's also very interesting because it can help us get at the root cause of things like dry eyes and can help us figure out more about how the tear glands work and where they go wrong when they do. Well, and our ability to grow any functioning part of a body and have it function independently from the body is great science for the future, I think. It'll help with healthcare in the future for sure. It will, yeah, it absolutely will. So maybe they'll figure out how to induce tears in people more readily. For movies, right? Is that, no. Just sad movies, the sad rom, not romcoms, things like the English patient. It's gonna be used to make robots cry. Yeah, basically. No, thank you. Like, you know, robot that cried? Two terrible results. Tin Man. He got really sad about something, started crying, he'd rust up. Yep. So it happened. Such a sentimental. Tin Man. Rusted. Yes. Synthetic life made some news. Scientists crafted a single-celled synthetic organism that was able to divide and multiply. Yeah, and it was like the smallest, I guess, number of genes that they needed to date to be able to produce this. 492. Yeah. See, this is reproduction, if I may. Is it? Yeah. Yeah. I think it is. But if you don't end at some point, have a, no, maybe not, I don't know. I feel like at some point you need to, maybe you don't, maybe you don't. Researchers in China kind of succeeded making a monkey human. Okay, Maric Embryo. Right, they actually went about creating lab-grown monkey human chimera mixes and some people say it was a success, but others aren't really as like gung-ho about the results because the embryos didn't last very long and then they also did not have a lot of human cells in them so that the mix of monkey to human, it didn't work out the way that you would hope. So... Well, they're not allowed to have them alive for very long anyway, right? It's in China though. So who's allowing what there is also kind of a gray area. So this is the story that like some U.S. researchers got maybe some hot water because they may have contributed in some way. They weren't maybe supposed to. Yeah, there's a, so he's not, he wasn't, no. So the researcher is Juan Carlos Espizua Belmonte. He's at the Salk Institute here in the United States and he worked with his, with Chinese colleagues to do this research. And he's been working on chimeric research for a while injecting human stem cells into pig embryos and with the pigs, they were able to get like one in 100,000 of the cells that were human. But in this study with the monkeys, these sinomologous monkeys, they inserted 25 human embryonic pluripotent stem cells into 132 monkey embryos and then reared the chimeras in dishes for 20 days. They didn't let them go into organismal size. It was still just very cellular. And they say that after 13 days, they were able to count human cells in about one third of the chimeras and they had seemed to integrate and begun to specialize into cell types for various organs. So there are differences in what was turned on and what wasn't turned on. They weren't necessarily meshing really well though. Right, so they sounded kind of not viable in the end. Yeah. And if you're at all horrified by the idea of a human monkey hybrid, really that's just trying a somewhat similar, evolutionary compatriot to humans in order to do this. What you really want is a human slime mold oxalotl. There we go, yes. That's how you get to the regeneration is you need some of that. And you also have some of that slime mold intelligence too. Well, I'm gonna throw a turtle in there because they live over a really long time. How do you breathe again? But anyway, the hybrid's interesting because a lot of the food that we eat is hybrids of multiple plants and could probably be considered something. No, no, no, no, hybrid genetic hybrids are different than chimeras. You're right, none of it's like chimera yet. Yeah, so yeah, when you have a hybrid, the genomes put different genes in different things. You're right, but I bet a chimera vegetable is coming. Maybe we will see them soon on a shelf near you in a grocery store. You tomato. Yeah. And then I don't know, what is that? Okay, so then we have a human brain. There's a big brain thing in the synthetic bio. How does big brains get into synthetic biology? Yeah, that was brain organoids that researchers were looking at different neurons and organoids between different organisms. So humans versus apes versus chimpanzees. So gorilla and looking at these stem cells. So they looking at from the stem cell point of view how the organoids develop, they determined that there were some very specific parts of brain development in which the neurons were developed that led to the larger sizes and bigger brains that humans have. And there was a difference, I think, in cellular multiplication rates where human brain cells were like, let's go. And it was much slower for the other animal organoids. And then there's always the thing that you've got a question. You can't help but question. Is that what comes first is you've got the brain and humans that can build out and expand and expand. But you have to have the skull that's big enough for it already. Otherwise you're building all of this brain that's got nowhere to go. You would, but you know, we did it at one point. We changed the way that we build our brains we changed the actual cell shape. Yeah, the cells of humans have much more of like a conical shape at a different time than other eights. So there's this like transition that human cells have this different. And that was probably based on a molecular change of it. You know, there's the molecular change, genetic change, all these things kind of happened. Huh? So a lot of this is getting into this. Alana is going to also seems to be talking about tissue intelligence or sort of like we assume that there's this top down design. It's like, okay, the brain's going to be this big. So go build this much brain. But there must be localized tissue that's making sort of decisions or reactions. Same thing with the scarring versus the regeneration. You're talking about tissues in that region that are sort of getting to make calls that tissues elsewhere. There's a lot of tissue activity going on that isn't in the blueprint. That isn't necessarily in the DNA. It's like that latent thing that we've got. Somehow the tissue is being given different instructions. But if we can get the tissues, the local tissues, there's a little bit different game plan we might be able to reach out. And then hearing, oh, we did some synthetic organoids that could lead to new treatments for hearing loss. Yeah, new cochlear. And also we're looking at eyes. So there was the hearing loss cochlear organoids. And then there's also the brain organoids that grew eyes. Do you remember that one? Like, oh, look, we have brain organoids. And they have eyes that are, okay, that's creepy. Yeah, I think it's the next, I don't know how long, 10 years probably. I feel like we're actually getting very close to potential alleviations for blindness and deafness. For those that are pursuing it, they might get a chance to see in here, which is wild and awesome. And then we can go a step further and get B eyes. Or get some of those bird eyes that can see magnetic fields. How about can I just get some more cones so I can see colors? There, we'd just like to see more colors. Yeah, I mean, there's, yeah. I just like inject my eyeballs with some cones. That's awesome. That would be great. Okay, should we move to number six? Yeah, number six. Number six? Number six? Number six. Yeah, number six. Artificial intelligence protein folding. So there were a couple of stories that came out on this past year and they were earlier in the year, like mid year, July-ish. And there's one group we've actually talked with the people working in the Baker Lab out of the University of Washington at the Institute of Protein Design about their work not on this stuff but on other aspects of their protein work. But they had an open access, open source AI for determining protein structure. Could take 10 minutes running only on a gaming computer. So just straight out of the box, off the rack, not needing any specialized equipment, gaming computer in 10 minutes to solve the puzzles of protein folding. So, I mean, these results were on par with results from 2020 from Alpha Fold, which is Google's DeepMind AI. And then just the next day, basically, Google's Alpha Fold announced the release of there. They did, they dropped it. It was like, we reported on one week and then it was like, oh, the next day. Rosetta too, it was their open source protein sequencer. And that was announced to just completely release a massive database of proteins that it had already sequenced. And it made its code public, which I was not expecting Google to do, which the fact that the code was public is really the part that's going to open up research into protein structure, which will allow us to start addressing therapeutics, right? We can start really addressing root causes of diseases because once you know why a protein folds a particular way, if you can, oh, if I change this here, change that there, the structure changes, suddenly you have potential ways to lock and key things together and create therapeutics for diseases that many people are suffering from. So yeah, and what they did was they got like 97, 98% of the proteins to make up the human body. Yeah, but I mean, they did, they've got like all of those, but at the same time, like talking to some of the researchers who are interested in the results of all these protein folding computer games, they're saying, you know, maybe a small percentage, 40 to 50% of the database is actually usable and the rest, it still has bugs in it and there's a lot of unknowns, but at least it's in the database. And so if you start somewhere, it can only get better, but. Well, I don't know what that means, but some of that though was thousands of the proteins, apparently that they, you know, maybe even 10,000 or something like this. It's an incredible number. Are ones that we were having great difficulty in defining and seeing how they were constructed and how they were folded. And a lot of these are for that disease that yeah, maybe you had a third cousin who had this or maybe it was a different disease. You don't remember, because the disease is so rare, it affects so few people that there's not a big research push behind it with dollars. There's not, you may not know many people, you might not know the name of the disease because it's such a small percentage of the population. And so things like this go untreated by the medical, you know, scientific population because it's just not enough emphasis on it. Now, if you can start with already seeing the proteins that are being folded in one way versus another in these cases, you can streamline the therapeutic for something that we would not still be talking about a cure on the horizon for a hundred years. Yeah, absolutely. I think in general, we see a lot of good signs of moving towards kind of bespoke health care in a way that I think will completely change the game. We'll know your microbiome, we'll be able to sequence proteins related to illnesses immediately, like we'll be able to do all sorts of things to be, you know, scan your brain related to certain things, be able to just kind of like, okay, I'm not gonna diagnose you based on other people. Let's just figure out exactly what's going on in your body right now. Yeah, I think one of the big points that with this protein folding is that while there are many proteins that do have a very distinct structure that belies their function and those are probably the ones that are higher in the confidence estimates for DeepMind and the work that AlphaFold has been doing, they say that the final counts about 98.5% of expected proteins in the genome that they've looked at, they've attempted to predict, but they only have a high confidence of about 40% of those human proteins. There's a lot of proteins that have flexible structure in which there are enzymes that come into play that change the structure once, twice, three times, maybe because of pH or other things. So the structure of these proteins changes and because it does, they lack definition. So to speak, that makes the confidence and defining them a bit harder, but. It does, and in a lot of those cases too. But like all your points in that. Oh yeah, but in a lot of those cases too, they have, in some of their, what you might call misses or the low certainty, they actually might have two or three versions of that protein that they've predicted. Which then you can at least take those three into research. And if one is working more than the other under a condition, then this is the one to target. So there's still, even in the low confidence ones, there's still a great deal of potential for streamlining a therapeutic or working with that protein in some advantageous way. And that brings us to the end of, oh wait, we've only gone through the 11 to six. We're halfway there. Yeah, but we're halfway there-ish. Almost a little over halfway, everyone. This is This Week in Science. We do hope that you are enjoying our 2021 countdown show. If you want to support TWIS and help us out, best thing you can do is tell a friend today. All right, let's come on back with number five. Five, five, five, five, five, five, five, five, five. Mars, Mars was big this year. Because I mean, not just, you know, it's a planet that we all like looking at in the night sky because it's that red glow to it, the hue that we can, well, not all of us can make out in the starry night sky. But Mars, we like it. We have lots of robots on it. We like watching those robots do robot things on the planet and then finding out what those robots tell us about that distant planet that some people think we should live on someday. Who would want to do that? Anyway, Mars, we had in February, the landing of the Perseverance rover and Perseverance landed and the helicopter ingenuity reported in and they immediately began to send back images with video and their first audio from Mars. So we actually had sound from the Martian soundscape. We had video. We had beautiful pictures of the Martian surface. And then they had the Mars copter make many successful flights over what from April until now. Like they had a little bit of a speed bump here and there, but that ingenuity, it's ingenious. We've got helicopters, drone, like little helicopters, real control helicopter flying on another planet. This is amazing. Yes. I love the picture of it. I like to think about the little helicopter buzzing around Mars. It's great. It's absolutely fabulous. Yeah, and let's see. We had in the crater, they're now in Gerizo crater where the Mars copter flew. They are now calling it Wright Brothers Field, which makes sense for the first flight on a distant unit. That is cute. And then Perseverance also has moxie. Oh, I love moxie. I love moxie. Got to have moxie. Moxie is one of my favorite instruments on Perseverance because it's for producing oxygen, which is one of the coolest things. It's like I'm going to take carbon dioxide and make oxygen. What are you, a tree? Oh, I'm moxie, the Mars oxygen in-situ resource utilization experiment, right? But moxie is the proof of concept that will maybe one day create oxygen for a colony. Right? We go there, we land, maybe we can, you know, not grow potatoes, I guess, to eat, make, I don't know, whatever that book and the Martian they did. Anyway, anyway, they didn't make, moxie didn't make very much at first, but, you know, it's doing its job. I'm watching you, moxie. I'm watching you. Yeah, see, what else do we have on Mars? We had Perseverance digging and digging. And I think, Justin, you had some story about it, the cores it was trying to get crumbling to dust. Yeah, you were missing, they went there, they did, they took the core and then they looked in the thing and it wasn't there. Way to go! They were looking around, did we drop it? What happened to it? So yeah, there was a couple of hiccups in the first couple shots, but they got it sorted. Yeah, so we were finally able to get chunks of rock and from those chunks of rock, we started getting more evidence about water on Mars. It looks like it, it was the thing. Yeah, it looks like there's at least times when there has been standing water. And maybe with the soil in it, they do it. Lakes, right? That there were possibly lakes and floods, multiple floods. I mean, this is some serious water running down my thermostat, my heater just came on in the background. It's my own perseverance rover. No, it's not. It's just my heater in the background. Does it sing happy birthday to itself? It does. But we also got Mars quakes. And so they had the first measurements of geologic activity on Mars, little Mars quakes, which were like, what's going on there? Yeah, lots of interesting questions about Martian soil and where we will be, but we're still on Mars as we run into number four. Ooh, number four. Number four. Four, four, four, four. Space exploration. We set the controls for the heart of the sun. The heart of the sun. Set the controls for the heart of the sun. Parker Solar Probe entered the atmosphere of the sun and took some readings. You learned about it, huh? Yeah, it was really hot there at the surface. And next step is to dive down further into the sun where it will cool off a little bit. But yeah, this is- I've always thought that's one of the weirdest things that it's like, yes, it's like a candle where the heat is at highest furthest out, but it's you, when you think about the sun, you're like, no, you're going into the sun, it's gonna get hotter. But the solar probe has already been through the worst part. Yeah, I'm with you though, because if you think about a campfire, right? The embers are the hottest part. Inside. Inside, no. But it's, yeah, mm-hmm. No, you can burn that marshmallow by holding it up above. You don't just have to stick it in the embers. Let's see, I guess there was a telescope naming controversy, did I miss this one? Yeah, this is your off-week, I think. This was the big controversy about that. Basically, I just made a suggestion that we stop naming things after people and name them things like perseverance and curiosity and keep doing that because it turns out that especially if you name things after white men from the past, a lot of the time, they did something bad. And so, yeah, James Webb was part of the purple scare. So it was the red scare was the communist thing and then the purple scare was the kind of the homophobia in government where they were kicking people out of government for maybe being gay and he was a proponent of that. So. Yeah, yeah, it might be weird. And also, this is going to happen, not a scientist? Yes, also not a scientist. Also not a scientist is the director of a thing. It should not make you get the, he's not an astronomer. But after, I mean, maybe now we can just get rid of calling it the James Webb Space Telescope and just call it the JWST and just let the acronym be the name because I mean, since like 2005, it's been called the Juist, Juist, since like 2005 or before. Regardless of what we do, NASA cannot lie to us anymore. I am done hearing about how a bunch of school kids got together and picked out the name Moxie because they didn't, because they definitely didn't because they 100% didn't come up with perseverance. No, no, fifth graders did not come up with Pearson. You would have had Spacey McSpace, Space Pro Bot. Exactly. Hey, it would have been something fun. You had adults choose the name from among the submissions from the children. And here's three, it's, right, yeah. No, stop lying to us, NASA, stop lying to the kids. The worst thing is the kids know you lied to them. They know they didn't get to come up with the name. They know, now they know you're a liar. But I would actually let the kids come up with the name. Just let it, whatever the fifth graders come up with, that's what we're stuck with. And if it is Spacey McSpaceface, free, then that's what we roll with. Let's just do it. But what's happening with Spacey McSpaceface now? I mean, Spacey McSpaceface that was like not gonna launch and was delayed every announcement, the entire- A gosh darn clip broke. And then it was like, oh, it goes six more months. No, we're gonna delay it and delay it. I was like, oh, this is the long tail. It's just never gonna actually cross the, reach the asymptote, right? It's like getting closer and closer to zero, but never actually getting there. Oh man. Okay, I'm not impressed. Can I just tell you I'm not impressed. I'm not the least bit impressed by this. Not the least bit. Look, this is a thing that has 50 articulations which are all high risk in order just to open once it's out there. Let alone all of the other aspects of the thing that have to go right, 300, 400 of them, for the thing to work. Yeah, so what they've done so far is they've launched something and put it into space. They have. It's now out past the moon. Yes, and as of 12 PM Eastern, it has today, it has started unfurling. It's sun shields. Okay, it's got 50 articulations. I don't know how many down that is. But let's, I will be impressed, very impressed. I think this will be a next year's thing that happened, big story, is that it opened. Because all the building of it, everything that they've done- It's going to get where it's going and start giving us pictures. We're gonna- Not impressed. When we get the pictures, when we start getting the data, which is what's gonna be the big story this next year. 2022. It's a 2022 story. Yes. I think it's a big 2022 story. Hopefully, it'll be all we talk about. Well, spoiler for the prediction show next week. Prediction show next week. It's gonna be my, I'll take that prediction next week. It's gonna be huge year, or we're gonna go, oh gosh. Yeah, there's too many articulations. But I think it's a nice story. There's like 300 or something particular actions that need places that could go wrong. All the work is still ahead of this telescope operating. Just getting something into space is something that we've proven NASA can do if it was a block of ice. It's as impressive as getting this thing out there and sending it on the way. Open. But we know- Give me a picture. Come on, come on. We've launched things- Do your job. We actually gotten them to Mars and had the seven minutes of terror a couple of times now. Like, we're getting good at things. Come on. Come on, NASA, you can do this. It's gonna be great. Been going up, woo, oh, and it's made it. Okay, great. It's got the big work on this thing as it's opening. That's the real nail biter. The rocket science is just rocket science. Yeah, yeah. Speaking of just rocket science. Uh-huh. I don't even think this is, I wouldn't even put this as a stop anything story. Billionaires proved that instead of paying taxes- Yeah, yeah. They could take their friends to near space low earth orbit. Yeah. In penis rockets. Yeah, yeah, it's- SpaceX and Blue Origin. I think it's an important thing to mention because I do think- Well, so I think you should though because of exactly what you said. It's important to keep an eye on this thing because space exploration should be for science and not for wasting money that should be going to people on Earth. Part of the sun, we're checking the magnificent sun. We're going out, we've got the telescope going up. Where we- Oh, and the one we haven't even talked about, the one I totally missed is the dart system. Oh, what does that say? Yeah, dart is gonna be, that's our asteroid deflection system. Double asteroid redirection test. Yeah. This is the thing that's gonna land on asteroid and push it out the way. That's its goal. It's found an asteroid out there. Hit that asteroid, push it out the way. By the way, my favorite show, maybe ever now, just absolutely loving it if you haven't. Don't look up. I haven't seen it yet, but don't spoil it. Okay, I won't tell you, if you haven't seen it, I won't tell you. Yeah. It's too bad he haven't. Spoiler alert is really- No. I think it's- Okay, all right. No spoilers. That's my spoiler. But the dart, so the dart system's gonna be, I can't wait to see what happens with that. It's gonna go boop on a little moonlit around an asteroid and see if it can just change that little moonlit's orbit around its little asteroid and we'll see. All right, we've just gotten a correction from Patrick. Actually, I believe it was a contract for NASA at one point. It's not orbit. The billionaires didn't even go into an orbit. Yes, I'm sorry. Low Earth orbit, yes. They just went up and came down again. They didn't orbit the Earth. So the thing that I'm gonna say about both of these, it's not just the big names are SpaceX and Blue Origin at the moment in the big public lexicon. There are other companies involved in what is known as the whole new space field and there are companies that are testing equipment that has gone up to the International Space Station for testing to see how their parts will work in orbit and how different things will work. And all this stuff is kind of going on behind the scenes of us going to space. And we've gotten to the point now where it's not just NASA launching. We have SpaceX and Blue Origin launches all the time now and we're kind of getting used to them. It's like, oh, great. SpaceX now landed a bigger rocket on its platform. Great, okay. Watching them go through all of the learning pains and the issues of getting up to space. And the question now is, will we become a space faring civilization or will we become space faring for only those who can afford it? And what's gonna happen there? Is it going to be because corporations, the International Space Station is going to be de-orbited in about four to five years. And when that happens, we're not gonna have anything up there unless the corporations build it. And so there is a multinational corporate community right now. Blue Origin is very, very involved in making sure that there will be a space station in the future that will be there for business, for tourism, for all sorts of purposes, that bring value to humanity. I don't know. We're sitting at a, we're sitting at the cusp of really big questions. Like what's gonna happen? I don't think space should be a for-profit sector. It concerns me. Look at commercial flights. It's just, it does concern me turning space into a for-profit. Wait, look at commercial, like airlines? Airlines. What were the airlines? Do they take good care of people, generally speaking? I think so. I think so. I think it's the passengers who are horrible. That's what's gonna prevent people from being in space. It's the people. Oh, sounds like you've had some very good flights and I'm happy for you. Yeah, I've had tremendously good flights. We're not gonna get into, whether or not we agree with capitalism is the best economic model for moving forward for a healthy humanity. But we can talk about how the things that we do love are stuff like the DART project. DART mission is gonna let us know whether we have a future on this planet. Yeah, if we can avoid asteroids, that would be great. Speaking of whether we have a future on this planet, none gets to the next one. Three, number three. Three, three, three, three. Hey, guess what? I'm gonna talk about climate change. Oh, surprise. The surprise twist. Blair wants to talk about climate change. Unfortunately, I don't have a perfectly framed happy message with well-thought-out solutions for you today. I'm just gonna kind of review some of the news from this year. First of all, climate change may make us infertile before we die from climate change. Also, sea level rise, NASA researchers determined that thanks to the moon's wobble and sea level rise, coastal cities will experience significantly more flooding in the 2030s, but the good news, Texas might be starting capture carbon. We talked about that in July. When is, yeah, I won't believe that. I know, I know. Also the IPCC released a report that was on the whole, terrifying. Also, we found out Russia was melting. Also, Australia made a strange global methane pledge. It didn't really mean anything. Also, people have had to start picking between clean water and food. Also, hurricanes are the new normal in a lot of the United States, where they weren't before. Also, there's been lots of extreme weather, lots and lots and lots and lots of extreme weather. It was raining buckets today in California. And in Houston and Florida, it was over 80 degrees since December 29th. So things are strange out there. It's not looking great. Also, fish are leaving the equator, which means they're leaving the nutrients that they pee on coral reefs away from the equator. That's a problem. Also, allergies are getting worse because of climate change. And food webs are collapsing. That one's been changing for a while. It's like, oh, more pollen's being produced. More pollen leads to more allergies. And we're like, why are allergies getting worse? I think that's one of the things. It's like, oh, well, because climate change. Uh-huh. And because the plants are releasing it at strange times when your body's not used to it. Suddenly, you're allergic all year round. I think it's, is it now possible to say that weather is climate change and climate change is weather? No, so if I may, this is a vocabulary issue. Weather is short-term climate is long-term. So you're talking about long-term trends. So when you talk about extreme weather, that is what's happening today. When you talk about climate change, you talk about overall temperature and trends. But Justin, to your point, there is, because we've had so much weather trending that is, you know, we have now evidence that particular weather events are more likely because of climate change. So extreme weather event frequency could be part of climate change, right? So the climate of your region could change to have more extreme weather events. But those individual events are still weather, which is where like people get, this is actually part of the reason that some people say climate change isn't real is they confuse those two terms and then they think about the short-term versus the long-term and but it's good now or it wasn't good, whatever, right? This year was better, XYZ, right? Anyway, climate change was real bad this year. But, you know, there were a couple things that were good, I guess. We found out that protecting the ocean protects ecosystems throughout the planet. I mean, we found out, we definitely knew that before. But that's important information to have because when you're picking your cost-benefit analysis for what to protect, the ocean's really important. And so if we can focus on that, that actually could help everyone. Yeah, I think the UK is trying to get to net zero. No, they're not. Kind of. No, they're not. No, a banking commission has been set up to get their financial sector to, at some point, put in place a plan to get to net zero within the finance industry and they're going to hire a bunch of people from the finance industry to determine what those goals should be. That's all. That's- Sure. Nothing. So they've indicated that they want to start talking about maybe having a conversation about it later. I got you. They're going to put it in the hands of the people who could care less. Yeah, and I was about to say, like, hey, there's been a really big push in American politics for some climate infrastructure. Oh, wait. Oh, nope. We seem to be held back on that front. I will say, if I can try to polish this unpleasant experience a little bit, I will say that even four years ago, this conversation wouldn't have happened in Congress at all. And so I recognize it's not happening fast enough. It needs to happen faster. This is a huge disappointment. And I was very, very, very sad when I found those things removed from the bill that now might not even pass. But in 2016, climate change wasn't even mentioned in the presidential debates. Yeah. So in a short amount of time, we have pushed this to the front of the conversation. So keep fighting, keep pushing, tell your representatives you want this taken care of. And beyond the COP26 summit this year, which brought a bunch of people together, was disappointing. Again, we didn't see enough action by people on the global level either. At the same time, we have seen some news coverage coming out places where there hadn't been news coverage previously, or at least not prominent enough news coverage. We're talking front page kind of stuff. So now, yeah, the conversation is becoming more prominent because more people are pushing for it. Yeah. Yeah. Meanwhile, climate change has been on our top 11 for, I think, a decade at least. At least a decade, if no longer. So we've been shouting, but at least other people have started shouting. Yeah. There's that. Yeah, we can go back and look at how many times climate change has been on our list at the end of a year. I think it's been there since the beginning of this show. So that's probably accurate. Yeah. Well, unfortunately, it's not rosy, but there was something I do want to just have a quick moment for a statement where somebody said so many people are worried about going back in time because they're afraid of the massive effects that a single change might happen if they were to go back in time and just mess up one little thing. But they're not worried about the effects that their little decisions, little actions will make on the future from today. So not in a negative sense. It's more in a consider how little actions on your part can have impact in the future. Think of yourself as a time traveler who's in the past, and how could you change the present to make our future better? Yeah, that's a good one. Moving on forward. And encourage somebody to listen to twists so that they can be up to date on climate change news. That's something you could do. Yes. You immediately want to become a Patreon of this show. Obviously, what will save the future? No, but really talking about climate change is one of the best things you can do for climate change. It's exactly the point, right? So it was a tongue-in-cheek answer, but it was real. Number two, two, two, two, two. This one oddly doesn't have a headline for what number two is. Oh, because we were arguing about what the headline was. That's why. What do you want? Human evolution. Is it hominid evolution? Number two is just blanket things Justin is interested in. Yeah, I called it bipedal hairless apes is what I called it. Yeah. The braided stream. Some of the oldest symbols. Well, I don't know. Yeah, some of the oldest symbols, but they're actually the oldest story perhaps was discovered. This is actually, this is a different story that's linked here than the one I'm thinking about. But there is, oh gosh, in Indonesia, they found a depiction of one pig angrily talking to two other pigs. Oh, that's great. And it's so, they think this is like the first illustrated story in the human record now. Story book. It's a story. Yeah. And what's the very first story that humankind occurred to stone or however the heck this thing was made? Three little pigs. There you go. That's the first story. One that looks like I'm not going to. It's an old story. Bricks and one holding straw. That's my question. I think so. And were they all playing the violin? That's the other important question. There's also a mystery archaic human or two. There's a few of them out there. Gosh, it was such a busy year. The big one, though, I think was the dragon man. This is the one. It was discovered like 80 years ago. Somebody dropped it down a well. Oh, there's the pigs. Oh, you found the picture of the Sulawesi cave art. Yeah, look at the little pig. So that's the one pig. And then there's two others that should be in there as well somewhere. But yeah, the skull, the guy was afraid. He was afraid that somebody would take the skull because this was in China and they were under a Japanese occupation. So he threw it down a well. He didn't ever tell his kids about it. And on his dying day, he tells his grandchildren, oh, look at the bottom of this well. I wrapped up a thing, a skull, and I threw it down. I go to have it checked out. And then he died. So the kids eventually, yeah, where was grandpa talking about, ah, something about a well. Go look at the bottom of the well. Ooh, well, let's go see what it is. And they found, they found. Not little to me, but. One of the best specimens, one of the most intact skulls in the fossil record for an archaic human. Now, what's wild about this archaic human? We don't know what it is. We know it's over 140,000 years old. Could be as much as 340,000 years old. And morphologically, we don't have DNA from this thing, but morphologically, what's fascinating about it is it's closer related to modern humans than it is to Neanderthals at 146,000 years ago. And there's a chance that it's actually a Denisovan, because it has some of the characteristics that we know Denisovans has. It has one tooth. And that tooth has three, count them three roots, which is also interestingly something we found from the Denisovan jaw in Tibet, had three roots. Three roots is most of us are running around. We got, for most of our teeth, we got two roots. There's some people that have additional teeth that have three roots. It happens about 3.5% of the population in the West. And in and around China and Mongolia, it can be as high as 40%. So it's a very regional thing, right? So this, but this, it has cheekbones that look very much like a modern human. It has a very large brain case like a modern human. It has a brow ridge that actually kind of looks to me a little bit more like a Neanderthal. So the thing is morphologically, they're having a very difficult time placing it. And when they run their morphological simulations, it's closer to modern humans than it is to a Neanderthal, which is weird because if it isn't Denisovan, Denisovans are supposed to be closer to Neanderthals. We're supposed to be close to Neanderthals than we are to Denisovans. So the whole thing is all mixed up. Yeah. Why don't we just name it a new species? So they have, and it's homolongi right now. There's also about five or six other skulls that are in contention for being species in China right now for being ancient humans of some sort. They may all actually sort of fit into this field of Denisovan. Here's the crazy thing about it. Again, we have no idea what it is at this point, but it could just be hybridization. Because now we know the created stream, everything is part of everything else. When you're saying we got a little bit of DNA from a place far away in Siberia of a Denisovan, from that little finger bone, but now if Denisovans turn out to be much more like a modern human, if this is a Denisovan, if this is a good sample of a Denisovan, and that turns out to be very similar to modern humans, then it changes a lot of things. Yeah. Then it changes a whole lot of things about human evolution, human origin stories, and everything else. Because now we have one of our big hot points for the origins of human evolution taking place much earlier in Asia. Yeah. In the out of Africa scenario loan. So I think all of the human origin stories you're gonna hear about coming forward may be coming out of Southeast Asia and Dragon Man region. Why is he called Dragon Man? Because he was found, thought it was pulled out of the Dragon River. Oh, okay. That's a good reason. I like that. That makes sense. That doesn't have weird teeth or like a muzzle. We think he breathed fire. Ooh. Interesting traits for ancient humans. Yes. Yeah. The other one that I thought was the most fascinating to me was of course the footprints in the Americas. Yeah, that one was cool. So you take the footprints in the Americas and you combine it with a couple of things. So the footprints in America we find footprints in New Mexico dating to about 23,000 years ago. Crazy thing about that is. They're not supposed to be there yet. Well, they are and they aren't. So it depends on what you're looking at. So you combine this, we found there was some evidence of people 20,000 years ago in the Yukon, but that was pushed off to the side. That was John Mars, Jacques Mars, pushed off the side because oh, that's too early. Clovis, that's 12,000. That would have pushed it back to 12,500. Clovis, man. Yes, yes, but not before that. And then there's all these sites in South America showing up at 13, 14, 15, 16,000 years. And so, oh, well, it's how did they get their dates and all this, there's all this discussion about it because it keeps things keep not quite fitting in a scenario that had originally been laid out. There's a cave in Mexico that earlier, I think last year, 30,000 years old, they found evidence of humans. Oh, but that can't be right because that would be during the early parts of the Ice Age before the big ice walls. So that can't, right? Or the earlier part of that, that can't be right. Now these footprints, 23,000 years, height, peak of the glacial age or the big ice bridge that they were. Yeah, so they definitely could have walked over. No, no, they could not have walked over. No, no, no. No, they've been there. What it means is they've been there. Yeah. So what I find a fun about this story too is then we got the Terram Basin mummies, whose strongest genetic link currently on the planet is Native Americans. Now, the whole idea is there's these Siberian people that were in Northeast Siberia, which is now Russia, I guess, who aren't there anymore. They're people of the North. Aren't there anymore? They disappeared. They were replaced. And they were thought to have contributed to Native Americans and to these people. The problem is every time you keep looking at this, the hits genetically and the dates are going the wrong direction. This missing people that they think everybody is originated from is less than 23,000 years ago. The problem is the map, all of the arrows are pointing in the wrong direction. Now you have if Denisovan or an offset, if you have these early modern humans, 156 to 300,000 years ago in China already, why not in the Americas already? And so then when you're talking about the native, the crossing into the bank, there may have been people there already. You may be talking about a much older populating of America and some contribution back. One of the fascinating ones is another study where they found a link between Australian indigenous people and a specific tribe of people living in the Amazon Brazilian region. Oh, what is it? Well, there was this link. They kept finding like, what is this genetic link? And as they kind of figured it out, it's like, well, it's not that specific, but it's less populated against amongst people along the coastal region than these interior Amazonian folks. How could that be? It could be ancestral linkage from much further back, not a traveling across the ocean thing. That would have had too big of a signal. So this has to have been a combined ancestor who could, I'm just speculating, could already have been in the Americas. And the reason I'm speculating is because the data doesn't now show a clear arrow of direction in our timeline. And we've biased it on this information. Well, it could have been 7,000, only 9,000 years ago. And then it keeps getting pushed back and pushed back. Anyway, once I think the bias is removed from the straight out of Africa story and the straight land bridge story, we may get a much clearer picture of human origin and distribution around the planet. I love also, there was a study that was from earlier in last year, I thought, that was based only on genetic evidence where they looked at modern humans. And they said, oh, look, the genomes all line up and we've got a mystery Denisovan, right? Didn't they like put things together? And they're like, oh, so now we know about just because of DNA and the history that lies within modern human DNA, they're able to get suggestions of interbreeding and these braided streams. And so there's a certain point at which it's like, they don't even need to have the old fossils as just have modern humans, kind of fossil humans that we can get some DNA out of and then we can kind of make up the rest. So the whole story is changing as well. You can get a lot of that to not. But the big thing you want to get though is you want to get more samples of that DNA from different places and different ages. And one of the great examples is my wife is Danish and very Danish and the family is deep rooted Danish. There's nobody who hasn't been Danish, I don't think. Maybe a Norwegian. Maybe, yes. But she did that one of those genetic tests and got a big hit for British. Now, if you know your history, maybe some of those British genes are actually donated from Viking origins. Exactly, yeah. From way back. Right, so when also when you're looking at, this is what we're calling Denisovan DNA right now, might be a hybrid of things as it is. The entire definition of Denisovan and Neanderthal in Asia might be incoherent. Nothing's going to fit neatly into boxes. And I think that's what we're gonna have to also be ready for is that none of this, but already we have an out of Africa modern looking human. Well, before we, the sort of Levant trek into the Caucasus and into Europe, long before that took place. Yeah. Very exciting. Very exciting. So exciting. Are we ready for number the top? Are we ready? Is it time? Number one, three, four. Five, four, three, two, one. Whoa! Cue the fireworks. Number one for 2021 is vaccines. And not just the COVID vaccines which have been distributed in across continents around the globe to billions of people at this point in time. Unfortunately, there are still billions who remain unvaccinated for a variety of reasons. But vaccines aren't just the thing that has allowed us to combat this particular pandemic. Vaccines are also going to allow us to defeat other viruses that we are currently combating. So this year, we saw a malaria vaccine go from clinical trials to full acceptance, green light from the World Health Organization in Africa. 400,000 people die every year from malaria. And that's the recent years. That's the reason is if you go back, if you go back a decade, I think even, it's twice that. And the antimalarials aren't working as well as they used to. Now it's combating mosquitoes. It's using bug nets. It's using pesticides to try and kill the insects. We haven't really had a success for a long time in fighting this, actually parasite, right? It's the malaria parasite that infects us. And this is a hope for the future. They had evidence from phase two trial early in the year that the vaccine was 74 to 77% effective after one year in preventing malaria infection in children. And they had more, and boosters were required to rejuvenate that response. And then another vaccine, the one that was green lighted was over 87% effective preventing infection in patients at the highest level of doses. China has also eliminated malaria. They've had three years with zero indigenous cases. Yeah, so there's good news on some fronts. Vaccines are hopefully going to help us out. Vaccines, they come in multiple flavors as well. We have vaccines made of adenoviruses. We have vaccines that use lipids to help mRNA get into our system. This year, of course, we're so thankful for those mRNA vaccines. The Pfizer and the Moderna vaccines are doing great here in the United States. And we see the potential for the future of mRNA vaccines. Unfortunately, it didn't have some great results with the mRNA HIV vaccine from Moderna. That one didn't work out as well as they hoped, but every virus is different and we have to keep trying. The fact is mRNA allows for a much easier formulation once you have a genetic sequence, you can create the RNA, the mRNA that's required. And early this year, there was published in Science, BioNTech successfully used mRNA to deliver autoantigens into lymphoid dendritic cells. Those are immune cells in mice to result in a population of T cells that suppressed auto-reactivity. This treatment delayed onset and reduced severity of a mouse model of multiple sclerosis. Amazing. mRNA could lead to a treatment for multiple sclerosis, which has previously devastated people's lives. For decades, for years, we've had these autoimmune problems, not just multiple sclerosis. Maybe it could affect rheumatoid arthritis. Maybe mRNA is going to give us the next COVID slash flu vaccination. So we don't have to get multiple shots. Maybe we'll get single. Maybe we will have an mRNA broad spectrum flu vaccine or broad spectrum coronavirus vaccine so that we will get rid of that common cold. Oh, I would love it. We have potential vaccines and our ability to fight those invading antigens. Antigens. It's growing and there's great potential in vaccines in the future. Get vaccinated, everybody, for all of it. Get vaccinated. Yeah. Lots of misinformation about vaccines. That's for sure. I'm not a big fan. No, it was a big year for science miscommunication too, so. Was it miscommunication? Yeah, it was intentional miscommunication. I think that's called propaganda. Sure, yeah. But misinformation is another one. Yeah, but before we jump into that, that's something that we can get into very briefly now that we are heading into the very end of the show. But we do have, you know, a few more minutes here to talk about some little stories that could, that titillated and interested and sparked curiosity and wonder in those of us, even if it was wonder that, what the heck? Yeah, that kind of wonder. This is This Week in Science. We hope that you've been enjoying our 2021 science countdown of the top 11 science stories for the year. All right, Blair, did you have some best of shows? Yes, I have what was clearly the choice for number one in the top 11. But, you know, Kiki, I have to disagree with you here. You pushed it out of the way for the vaccines. I did. We got our very first perfectly preserved dinosaur sphincter this year. Oh, what a year. This is at the beginning of the year. This is in January. The first dinosaur Anus ever discovered shed's lights on, quote, unquote, where the sun don't shine for dinosaurs. And so they, and of course, dinosaurs don't have a normal Anus. They have a cloaca. They have an all in one hole. That's where the reproductive organs are and where they have urine and feces come out and it's all in one place. So the eggs come out. And so, yeah, we got to get up close, personal with dinosaur cloacas this year and I'm thankful, that's all I have to say. So that's my number one story. No, I mean, was it the dinanus? Yeah, the dinanus. The dinanus, pretty much. Yeah, so then in other just kind of fun headlines that happened this year, we found out that children, humans are basically not even humans anymore because they burn so much energy that they are classified metabolically. They could be classified as a different species. That's crazy. Yeah, which is, that's the whole story. I don't really need to go further into it. They just process so much energy that they're basically a different species. So that's why when you see a kid running around, running around and then crashes and needs a nap, it's because they're a different species, man. Just let it happen. And then the last thing that I wanted to mention was the full moon crazies. So we discovered this year, also in January actually, that on nights before leading up to an on a full moon, people generally go to bed later and sleep less. Their circadian rhythms are somehow impacted by the moon despite the fact that we live indoors these days. And that can impact their sleep patterns, that can impact their kind of overall emotional state. And I like to think that this maybe explains, this is a scientific reasoning behind the full moon crazies because as someone who's married to someone in the emergency medical field, this is a real thing that when it's a full moon, people are crazy. So it's good to know there's actually a scientific reason that isn't kind of like extra woo. It really is that your body doesn't let you sleep as much. And so it drives you a little bit insane. People are just up a little bit more. Yeah, yeah. Oh my gosh, Blair. Thank you for those reminders of the fun. I love that. Yeah. I wanted to add some weird stories from the last year. There was a story that you brought up, Blair, that I thought was just fabulous. You know, talk about solutions for climate change. Toilet training cows. Yes, I love this story. Where they train the cows to walk down and poop on, go to the bathroom on a little... No pee on this grate that would channel the nitrogen rich urine away from the ground. Yeah, you go to the bathroom here, we're gonna take that and we're gonna do this different and then they could manage the nitrogen, yeah, the carbon, the things go from, instead of going into the soil, could be taken care of. Oh my goodness, Blair, seriously, I think it was a lot of your stories that were what I considered the weird for the year. Yeah, the tracks, for sure. Yeah, for sure. Warm milk. Oh yes, the warm milk. Yes, I loved that story. Warm mothers creating this milk and milking themselves to death. Yeah, they basically disintegrate their innards into concentrated delicious milk for their babies. It's not delicious, it's called warm milk. It's warm milk. I hear worms like it, have you tried it? It's a lot sweeter than you'd expect. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Googly-eyed bird deterrents. Oh yes, yes. There were buoys, the buoys that they've used googly eyes on buoys to keep seabirds from going to the bathroom on these, or no, from keeping away from fishnets, actually. Right, because they get stuck. The seabirds come down because they smell everything that's coming from the fish and the phytoplankton in the area that these nets are catching and then the buoys have these googly-eyed deterrents Yes, the seabirds don't like them. I forgot about the story, I love it. It's a great story. I mean, if something so simple can deter animals from a fate of death, then googly eyes for science. This is the best. Absolutely, call Johnny and Heather. Are you guys watching? Googly eyes, it's science. Oh my goodness, what was, there was a duck that learned how to talk. Oh, that was yours, and I did not like it. You didn't like it? Right, it was the weird, it was a weird quack. It was, you bloody fool, you bloody fool. Oh yeah, I hated that song. I was reading out words and saying, yeah, anyway, you bloody fool. That was the talking duck. And we had mice made to bond with each other at the push of a button because they'd push a button and it would release oxytocin or something or dopamine and then it into the brain. And it was a microchip that was implanted into their brains, but yeah, we can make you be friends with other mice. I don't remember that one. I don't remember this, oh wow. Yeah, an implanted wireless, wireless, battery-less brain implant harnessing optogenetics to manipulate social interactions in mice. Yeah, fun stuff, what we're doing with mice these days, eh? Yeah, but anyway, lots of fun there. There was also the science that, the science that wasn't, the things that, or what we could also call wishful thinking or also further evidence that people really don't understand science. And that would be UFOs, hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, just about any other woo-woo treatment for whatever disease. I don't know, there was so much of the, that doesn't really work. The evidence is not there and people just wanting to- So the best part is that they will, with the same breath, say, there isn't enough evidence. I'm gonna do my own research. So I don't feel, this vaccine, it's too new. And then in the same breath, they're going to take a horse dewormer for something that it's not for, with no data. With no data. All I can say is if you're doing your own research, it better be in a lab and not just on Dr. Google, okay? First of all, by doing their own research, they've listened to a talk show or a news report. And I'm gonna say, if anybody comes to me and says, I listened to twists, I do my own research, I listen to twists, I'm gonna go no, no, no. Yeah, did you click on the links and read the links? Because that's doing the research. Go deeper, go deeper. Click on our show notes. Oh no, I think actually if somebody listens to this show, they're fine. Oh, it's totally fine. Yeah, so, wait, I can, because this is- I want people to be skeptical of the things we say also. We are a point for the sparking of curiosity. This is a place where you can literally relax that part of your brain for the duration of the show. There's active, when we're talking about people who've done their own research, like people didn't spontaneously decide come to, you know, yeah, thousands of people did research and all of their independent studies came up with Ivor Mekton is the best way to go. Now that nobody did that, that's not what happened. People were told to do this. People were misled and misinformed intentionally. This might not, I mean, 2021 could also have been like the year that science started to realize, really realize a lot of its problems, you know, with publishing and with transparency and with science communication and with, you know, how it's perceived by the public and trust and the trust. You have to watch it tonight. You have to watch it tonight. I know it's like- Up to the night. You have to watch, don't look up tonight because I feel like that show watched our show for two years and went, okay, let's just make it- Now let's do a movie. Let's make a show about it, yeah. Well, if anybody in our Discord wants to hang out and watch it tomorrow night, maybe I can do it tomorrow night. Yeah. Yeah. Let me know. We could do a Netflix party. Yeah. Yeah. I definitely feel like, watch that show and was like, did you just watch Twists for a couple of years and go, oh, I've got a great idea to make a whole movie out of this? Because this is what it felt like. I mean, it's based on everything that's going on perfectly, but they really did it themselves. Well, so I wanna say too about this topic that it's been tough because there's been further muddying of the waters of who a trusted source is because I feel also like there's a lot of mixed messages about what messages from the government are scientifically accurate and which ones are not. And so I think that is another issue. I don't have a perfect answer, but there's lots of people out there that I know that are very scientifically-minded people who have a deep mistrust of the CDC after how the last two years have gone. And I can understand it, right? And so I think that that needs to be resolved in some way because simultaneously, there are people who are science-minded and wanna do the right thing, who are not going to do their own research. Instead, they are stuck with either following what the government tells them or not because of a mistrust in that government. So I think I don't have an answer to this question, but I think that this experience in the last year in particular with all the vaccines, 2021 has really exposed a lot of the complications and problems that we have in science and government and our communications. Yeah, absolutely. So I can give you a little bit of a parallel and it's the same problem. In Denmark, Danes trust their government like to a ridiculous degree. The government says, stay home, everybody stays home. The government says, wear a mask. Pretty much everybody's wearing a mask. You don't have this big pushback that you see in the United States and all this making a political issue. The government says, do it, Danes do it. Problem is, they did that the first time around and they didn't do it again as things started to get out of hand again in time. They didn't do it. So you need it to be proactive as well. You need it to be taking action. You need to listen to the government when they're giving you these health instructions, but they also, the government has to like not be weighing the need for commerce and a reelection against loss of life on a dramatic scale. The fact that we lost, what was the number of 3.6 million people this year? Ridiculous. Yeah, but the problem is you can't leave each individual human on this planet to sit down, weigh their opportunities and their costs and their risks and the benefits and make their own decisions. There has to be, that's what you're getting at, right? Is like the government said, do this thing and people are like, I don't know. So I think this needs to be figured out. The pipeline of information for public health and health science needs to be figured out before the next pandemic. So that we can get through the next pandemic. We're still in one. I know, but we have to be planning now for the next one. I know. It's all the time. Ooh. If we wait till this is over, we'll learn and change, we'll never change because it's so important. But oh my goodness. But oh my goodness. The learning and the changing, just going back to, yeah, you're disclaimer at the beginning of the show, Justin. Hopefully we can learn and change and not repeat our mistakes again. And hopefully we will go into 2022, better prepared for ending the pandemic or at least living with it more easily and facing the next challenge because there will be another one. We need to face that reality. We also need to face the reality that we're in worse shape going into this year than we were last year going into this year, if I said that right. We're in a worse place, trajectory-wise. 2020, what is it? Two? Is that what's happening? 2022 is gonna be a lot worse than 2021, which is a lot worse than 2020. So just be ready for that. I can't wait for the end of year rundown for 2022. Geez. If there's anyone out there who knows how to make toilet paper, please contact us. We have found all of the gold. They will give it to you. If there's anyone out there. Is there anyone out there? Yes, I'm still going to work five days a week, but now I'm wearing a pepper suit every day. No traffic. There's one thing you got to say. There's no traffic anymore. No, the traffic's back. Oh, there's lots of traffic, and there's traffic everywhere. I thought we were pretending this was 2022. Justin, you're depressing everybody at the end of the show. Come on. Yeah, it's you. You did it. I was trying to end the show on a positive note, and here you go. Well, but you were also saying we shouldn't lie to people, and now I'm trying not to. Listen, whatever 2022 brings, we'll be here. We'll be here to report science. Hopefully. We will talk through it with all of you. I really hope to. We will shake our fists at the ceiling when things get rough, and we will jump up and down when things are good. We'll be here. Yeah, that's a New Year's resolution that I hope we can. Dart hoarding now. Then it's not hoarding, then it's just having supplies. Just do it now. Do it right now. Well. The sound's coming. I might be starting the fireworks a little bit early, but it's time for us to end this show. We have come to the end. Oh, this was the after show. Oh, yeah, we're having to get out of here. We've come to the end of another show. We've come to the end of another year. We've come to the end of another countdown. Thank you all of you for being with us this year, for finding us, for joining us on this scientific journey of curiosity and appreciation. And we hope that you'll be with us again next year. Thank you so much for listening, for watching, and hope you enjoyed this show. Time for some shout outs. Shout outs to Fada for your help with social media and show notes. Always so wonderful. Gord, thank you for manning the chat, kind of keeping an open eye there to keep things above board. Identity four, thank you for recording the show week after week after week. So appreciate that. Rachel, thank you for your assistance, for your editing. I have more work for you next year. That's for sure. I would also like to thank our Patreon sponsors for their generous support of twists. Thank you to Richard Badge, Kent Northcote, Pierre Velazar, Ralphie Figueroa, John Ratnaswamy, Carl Kornfeldt, Karen Tauzy, Woody M.S., Andre Bissette, Chris Wozniak, Dave Bunnie, Beggar Chefstead, Hal Schneider, Donathan Styles, A.K.A. Don Stilo, John Lee, Allie Koff and Maddie Perrin, Gaurav Sharma, Don Mundus, Stephen Albarone, Darryl Meishak, Stu Pollack, Andrew Swanson, Fredas104, Sky Luke, Paul Roenevich, Kevin Reardon, Noodles Jack, Karen Bryan, Carrington, Matt Bass, Shana Neenalam, John McKee, Greg Reilly, Mark Hessemflow, Jean Tellier, Steve Leesman, A.K.A. Zima, Ken Hayes, Howard Tan, Christopher Wrappen, Dana Pearson, Richard, Brendan Minnish, Johnny Gridley, Kevin Railsback, Rami Day, Flying Out, Christopher Dreyer, Artyom, Greg Briggs, John Atwood, KairaZona, Support Aaron Lieberman for Governor, Rudy Garcia, Dave Wilkinson, Rodney Lewis, Paul Mallorystutter, Phillip Shane, Kurt Larson, Craig Landon, Mountain Sloth, Jim Drupal, Sarah Chavez, Sue Doster, Jason Oldes, Dave Neighbor, Eric Knapp, E.O. Kevin Parachan, Aaron Luthan, Steve DeBell, Bob Calder, Marjorie, Paul Disney, David Simmerly, Patrick Pecorar, Tony Steele, Laces Hadkins, and Jason Roberts. Thank you for all of your support of TWIS. And if you would like to support TWIS on Patreon, head over to twist.org and click on that Patreon link. We also, what's going on next week? We're gonna be back here next week, prognosticating for 2022. Also, we're going to make predictions. Yes, it's our annual prediction show next week. This week is the look back at the year before, to next week is the look ahead at the year to come, and into our scientific crystal balls. What will we see? And that's always a pretty fun show. Yeah, don't miss it. Some of our predictions, some of our predictions are pretty amazing. Spot on, you meant. I don't know about the accuracy, but they're pretty good. So when are we gonna do that, Justin? That will be 8 p.m. Pacific Time, or 5 a.m. Central. Oh, there's a different day, so that's the right day. 8 p.m. Pacific Time Wednesday, or 5 a.m. Central European Time Thursday, next week. We will be broadcasting live from our YouTube and our Facebook channels, as well as from twist.org slash live. Hey, do you want to listen to us as a podcast? You can listen to all this amazing countdown we did today while you wash some dishes, fold some laundry, draw some pictures, drive in your cars. Be great. Just search for This Week in Science or our podcasts are found. If you enjoyed the show, you can get your friends to subscribe as well. For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes and links to the stories will be available on our website, www.twist.org. And if you're in the mood for such a thing, you can sign up for a newsletter, which will be mailed to you. Yeah, also while you're there, since it's about to be January 1st, you should order a calendar if you haven't already. Anyway, yeah. You can also contact us directly, email Kirsten at kirstenthesweekinscience.com, Justin at twistminion and gmail.com, or me Blair at BlairBaz at twist.org. Just be sure to put twist, T-W-I-S in the starting line or your email will be spam filtered into a jar of Horstie warmer, I guess. I don't know. You can also hit us up on the Twitter, which is the thing. We have Twitter addresses, which are at twist science, at Dr. Kiki, at Jackson Fly, and at Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback. If there's a topic you'd like us to cover or address, a suggestion for an interview. Haiku, that comes due in the night. Please let us know. We'll be back here next week with those predictions, and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news. Join us, join us, join us. And if you've learned anything from the show, remember. It's all in your head. Next year. We can science, this week in science. This week in science, this week in science is the end of the world. So I'm setting up shop, got my banner on Pearl. It says the scientist is in. I'm gonna sell my advice, show them how to stop the robots with a simple device. I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand, and all it'll cost you is a couple of grand. This week, science is coming your way. So everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientific method for all that it's worth, and I'll broadcast my opinion all over the air. Cause it's this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science, science. This week in science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science, science, science. I've got one disclaimer, and it shouldn't be news, that what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations, and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science, you may just then understand. And we're out. Those fireworks are going off. Happy! We're celebrating. New year. It's almost there. Let's see, let me get rid of, let me get something a little less dynamic. That'll do it. Christmas lights. Look, oh wait, I have, this is our new year's background. Oh, nice. Fun. That one, do I like that one? Oh, this is the part of the show where I get to sit. And this is the exciting part of the show for Blair. There we go, put the lights in the background. That's what I'll do. Thank you everyone for joining us for another year of science. Clink our glasses of science together and sip from the fountain of knowledge. Do you have a cup of knowledge, please? Would that be nice? I'm not good. Knowledge. It's good. Oof, that voice is tough. A little creepy. You're welcome. You're welcome. No, no, unsubscribe. It was fun to talk about all those stories. Yeah, yeah. Where'd Justin go? But seriously, the end of the show is like, let me drop the depression palm on you. Ah. Oh, Arendelle, are you making a clip show? That would be cool. That would be very cool. Clip show. Of what? Good night, Father. Thank you. Thank you very much. It was good science thing. They will not fade out. We will only fade away. Oh, of me? Of Blair. Oh, that's fun. Yeah. Because your 10-year anniversary is coming up. Yeah, after the predictions, I started the next show. Mm-hmm. It's coming. Yeah. Oh, Blair's almost 10 years old. Almost 10 years old. Almost 10 years old. So great. Yeah, Arendelle, I remember you said you wanted to do that. That would be so cool. It would be pretty fun. Yeah. Ah, Paul, thank you for enjoying the science with us. Yeah, I know she barely. I don't think she'd know. She's a year after. I don't. Yeah, he was almost a year old when I started. Yeah. Yeah, I had taken time off and then I was coming back and I was like, oh, I need help. And Blair was going to be, she was just going to help and be an intern and do some things. And I'm like, well, I'll just keep doing the stuff. And she's awesome. Yeah. So I got my hooks in. I did. You really did. I know tracking time is hard generally. I have a, it's every year I get to the end of the show and it's like, did we really cover all those stories this last year? Yeah. There's so much, it's neat to go back and kind of have a marker for how much, how much knowledge was gained over, you know, in lots of different subjects. Blair has been a great addition. I was going to mention at one point and I forgot like, I voiced concern at the start of 2021. Yeah. About publications. I was very worried. Yeah. We wouldn't have as many stories. Like that at the beginning, we'd be okay because people were processing data and like writing papers on stuff that happened a year ago or maybe a little less. But I was worried that right around the halfway point, right around summer, there's be a huge drop in publications because people weren't going out to the field and labs were shut down and I was going to say, but people worked through. They figured it out. You made me gone. I'm sorry. That means you love me. Yeah. We learned that on this show. We're connected. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Shnago sometimes those interns just hang around forever. Goodness. I love watching the chat. I don't know where Justin went and I'm hoping he comes back because I think we after showed it out in the show. Feeling like. Oh yeah. Yeah. No, I agree. Oh my God. Elon Musk's Twitter is insane. I can't. Why are you reading Elon Musk's Twitter right now? I was looking at my notifications from my, my show tweet earlier. Yeah. But he always gets pushed to the top of my feed. Cause you know. Cause he's famous. He's famous. Yeah. And people interact with him. So just he tweets the weirdest stuff. I don't even know what he's trying to say most of the time. Like what's what side are you on? I can't. I honestly can't tell. I have no idea. He's pushing all the buttons. That's what he's doing. That's up there. It's the Justin. He's back. Hello. Hello. I'm yawning again. Oh my goodness. Yes. I kept all my yawns to myself all show. And now they built up. Let them out. Oh, I know. Paul. Oh my goodness. About Elon. He's insane. Flung a car into space for. For Lowe's. True. One of the things that I wanted to put on the list. I really forgot about it. I wanted to put just masks. As a top story. Oh, yeah. There was lots of science this year. There was a lot of mask science. And I thought it was also interesting because it was it was. There's been this effort to teach people about the science behind COVID and everything else. You know, what's a virus? How do you prevent getting it? And all the all this sort of stuff, all these new term things that people are getting to. To out there in the. General public. But masks. You know, anybody who's worked in a lab. This is just, this is part of your personal protection. Working in a lab. With live organisms. Right. It's just a, it's just a normal thing. And having, having the whole general public have to get trained on basic safety thing. And the pushback from it. I've also been finding is. Is sort of. You know. Some of it was good, right? Like some of the mask science was important. Like the fact that we figured out real quick, like, oh, shoot, you shouldn't be wearing gators. That turns out is not going to work. Don't wear handkerchiefs. Also a scarf isn't going to cut it. Like, so some of the mask science was really helpful. Yeah. So, but I felt like a lot of it. Was just, please wear a mask. How many times do you have to say, wear a mask? It works. Please wear a mask. This science says, please wear a mask. Please wear a mask. Like. And, and I think one of my, one of my. A little bit of peeves about the coverage of it was that. We talked a lot about the mask science. All the time. It's like almost every show. Yeah. But I didn't hear it in mainstream media other than you should be wearing a mask. That's kind of like they just left it there. Right. And I, you know, I think that humans in general. Want more information. They just do. And that's, and that's partly why like I have this. I have this sort of spot in my heart for the people who are. You know, believing in UFOs and. Evermectin and whatever and doing their own research. That's not their research that somebody's telling them information. It's because they're trying. They want desperately to connect dots. And if you don't have. An education or if you don't have a good source of information. It doesn't stop you. That part of your brain that wants to figure things out. That part of your brain is still going. If you're a human. You're one of the most intelligent life forms of not the most intelligent life form. The planet is ever known. All of everything humans have done is because of human brain power. And, and. People without an education. Or, or a link in their. Their, their biosphere to good information. Are still going to try to figure everything out. They're still going to try to connect dots. They're still trying to figure out a best plan for themselves. They're still going to try to have a picture in their brain of what's taking place in the world. What's taking place with the. So that the necessity of giving people all of the information. And in a digestible way is extremely important. And just leaving it at you should wear a mask. Because we tell you to. Because that's what the recommendation is. Is not going to be enough. Especially when you have misinformation. It's going to give a bunch of garbage details that people are going to soak up like a sponge, because it's the only thing that they are being exposed to. So what, what social science tells us about quote unquote. Controversial topics. Right. Which for some reason this is. Is that like. What you're saying is true, but also there is a point at which more information doesn't help. So the, so it's both. So yeah, I think it's really at the beginning. Right. Giving them more information is better because that gives them a basis to build an opinion. The problem is once an opinion is formed. Just information on its own does not change opinions. Unfortunately, you have to make calls to shared values. You have to find a way to make it line up to other beliefs that they hold and to ask questions of them so that you can figure out how to kind of change that opinion. And so unfortunately when you're dealing with mass. Misinformation like this and mass kind of. Oh gosh, just kind of like a wayward thought. It's hard because you can't. You can't as a like a public health representative. Taylor your messaging to every person watching the TV in that moment. So I think that's, that's where this gets really complicated is that you're totally right. You can't just tell people to do a thing because I said so at the out at the start. Right. But then unfortunately at a certain point. It only matters who the messenger is. It doesn't matter what the message is. So right. Who's telling you that thing and how are they talking to you about it? Yeah. This is like, this is the whole thing about like communication, right? Is that you can't throw facts at people to change their mind about climate change because their mind is already made. So the only way to change their mind is to find a way to appeal to things that they care about and things that they believe and to leverage that info. Like you can give them information, but you have to leverage and frame that information in a way that it is acceptable to them because if you just throw data. The average person is like, no man, I'm, that's your data. I have my data. We're good. Okay. What's really interesting about there also is the exact thing that's being utilized to get people angry about masks and to redirect them into political. Right. So the problem is like everybody who wants to push the conversation a particular way is using. Emotional angles is using emotional framing is finding that way to communicate their message. That becomes the battlefield. That becomes the battle. That's how the human brain works is the problem to an extent. It's an extent. I agree. But I, I, I think, I think that the, there wasn't a very strong attempt at doing the, here's all of the facts. Like I, So one of the problems is though, Justin, one of the, it's not that it's not the attempt to give all the facts. It's like different. So the, the first part where the CDC said wear masks, but not in 95s. Those don't work. They say they're going back now and going, well, there really wasn't that much evidence saying that they're really worked. And the studies were limited at that point in time. A lot more studies did come out after the pandemic actually started that dug it that we reported on that dug into all that stuff. But what they were really doing is putting a message across that wasn't fact-based. It was fear-based because they were afraid they weren't going to have enough masks for the public health workers. And so instead of saying then 95s are the best, you got to wear a mask, but please don't use N95s because our healthcare workers need them. And if they don't have them, then we're totally screwed. Instead of saying that true message, the message that came out was don't worry about masks. That's okay. It's not a problem. And so people heard that and then they didn't, they didn't get the full message. They didn't get the real message. They were being lied to about the real reasoning. And then after that it was like, oh, but masks. Yeah, you should wear masks. And then everybody went around making their own masks and their cloth masks and everything. And then we find out later, oh, those don't work that great. You need to have a better filter. You have to have multiple layers. You can't just have that buff. You have to have something that filters better. You know, and then it was, then it was the scientific process, which is slow. And it doesn't have all the information. And part of it also was the definition of an aerosolized virus. The world health organization just a couple of weeks ago made the first oblique statement that COVID-19, the SARS-CoV-2 virus is an aris, is past transmitted as an aerosol just this month. And that is like, and they're still not putting it in their official wording because of the fact that aerosol has a very specific meaning within the hospital environment. But for everybody else, it's, it's these little tiny air particles, little aerosols. You need to protect yourself from that. We reported on that, by the way. Yeah, we have, but it's held back at masking, ventilation and so many things. And so, yeah. But we reported on that. We reported on that. The fact that it was aerosolized and that it hung in the air in March of 2020. So again, if you're getting your information from this show, you're fine. You don't need to be skeptical. I don't know why nobody watches us. We need more people watching us. I don't want more people watching us. I think viewers are the best. I think, I mean, but to both of your points, I think that the people delivering these messages were not appropriately strategic in how they did it. They needed to give the right information in a truthful way, but in a way that was easy to digest and repeat. Because of the other problem, right? Is that one family member watches the news and tells everyone else in their household what they saw on the news. And so if you, if you are saying, okay, quarantine for five days, but only if you're asymptomatic and on the fifth day, take a home test. And if it's inconclusive, take another test in two days and then go back to work, but only if you still have no symptoms, that's not repeatable, right? What's repeatable is if you have a positive test, you need to spend two weeks at home. Yeah. And I think that is the issue that is that in an effort to be thorough, this is the push-pull, right? You need to be thorough. You need to give up-to-date information, but it needs to be message for public consumption. This is the struggle. And people in government sometimes are really good at that. Two societies detriment sometimes. Sometimes they're not. People in science sometimes are really good at it. Sometimes they're not. And so it's really difficult. You know, people in public health sometimes good at it. Sometimes not. How do you create a filter to make sure that public messaging is packaged in a way that will do public good? Yeah, it's tough because you want to be truthful. You want to give as much information as you can, but you can't just kind of word bomb it because they pick words they want to hear and that's all they hear and that's it. Oh, the CDC told me I could go back to work. Yep. So I'm going to go back to work. Yeah. Well, okay. So on that point, I think there is a certain argument that can be made for making it illegal to shout fire in a crowded movie theater when there is no fire. I think there should be a law that says if you are broadcasting that you don't make calls to action that are going to hurt people. Yeah. Yep. And I think what we have also, I have a hard time thinking that putting all the blame on the people receiving intentionally bad information I think with a government putting out word vomit or too much information or whatever and that alone being the messaging, I think it would have been fine. I think we would have avoided this with that poor. Here's too much data. Here's facts. Here's our recommendations. And that's it. I think we would have been fine. I think this whole thing would have been avoided. The problem is we have a segment, especially in the United States, that propagandized for political reasons. Yeah. They're the groups that are propagandizing and there are people who are, I think there's also at issue is just who we are as Americans, United States citizens is that spirit of independence, right? Freedom. Freedom. I am free to be dumb. I am free to do what I want. I am free to, you know, there is, that is baked in our blood, right? There is the, I'm going to go do what I want to do. I, you know, people came to the United States to do what they wanted to do, not to be told what to do. So that in itself like sets us up for mistrust of the government from day one. But there's a correlation between level of education and buying into these conspiracy theories. There, I know there is a climate change. So, right. Yeah. And we've seen, and we've also seen that there is a political spectrum bias, political spectrum bias. There's a where you're getting your, your news from bias. Well, in the way the internet works, wherever you get your news from, your search analytics. Yes. Absolutely. And completely changes the information so that you only see one's kind of information. You're not getting a balanced view of the information that exists. I don't know. I don't know. I guess, I guess a part of me feels like there is what you would almost expect from a wartime propaganda machine at play. That's demonizing anything. Yeah. And basically calling one political side, the enemy to the point where they'll let people die. Yeah. I was going to, I was going to bring that up. Yeah. They're playing the short game so hard. I think it's really funny. They have no long game here because the short game is to make everyone mad and engage to go vote the way that they want them to vote. But in the long game, you're losing constituents. Yeah. You're losing them. This is probably why this is this way. And with COVID and with everything else, it's just going to be reducing more dramatically. Populations. Y'all, y'all, y'all, this last week, there was a whole political thing where the rump man, he came out and said, I'm vaccinated. There's nothing wrong with a vaccine. And the conservative right that has been demonizing vaccines, suddenly there, you know, Trump, he went on a talk show with Candace Owens and said, no, the vaccine's great. It's wonderful. I was behind developing the vaccine, blah, blah, blah. You know, he's like taking credit and, you know, they're now promoting the vaccine. And it's probably because the short game worked too well. By the way, I will actually give credit where credit is due. It turns out a good strategy is to fund the science and get out of the way. Just fund the science. That worked. Right. Turns out that worked. They gave money to the science and it worked. I want somebody who doesn't agree, doesn't believe, doesn't think, if they fund the science and get out of the way, good things happen. And that's what it's pretty nice. Yeah. It's like you can be, you can get things. What is it? You can get things done. Well, fast. Good. What is, what is the, Oh, fast, good and cheap. You get two of the three and you get two of the three. Right. And so adding the money gets rid of the cheap. And so you have fast and good because you've added the money. Yeah. So adding money, make sure that it happens quickly and it's still good. And that's what happened with the vaccines. Is that, That's a, Who is it? Where is it? My, my, my grandmother or her brother used to say, money doesn't buy happiness, but it pays misery to go away. Like nothing else. You shoot. You shoot the misery away. Oh dear. That's because you can afford a bottle of obon. What? My whiskey aficionados will get the joke. Oh boy. The world we live in today. But seriously, if we can watch, go watch that. I could watch that. The modern. Idiocracy. Don't look up. Gotta watch. Don't look up. It's my new favorite movie ever. Non-profit. Yes. I've been looking at it and I've been trying to watch it for several days. And every time I want to watch it, Marshall says, No, I think it's going to make me angry. Yeah. Okay. So the thing is, it's not that movie. Yeah. What it is, is it's comedy. It's hilarious. And it's, it kind of laugh. Yeah. You're like, oh, this is terrible. And it's making me laugh for the right reasons. To put, if you don't know, David Sarota is at least one of the writers on the show. For the thing. And if you're familiar with his stuff, he has that ability to make you laugh at something that's just awful and go like, oh yeah, there's some real truth to why I'm laughing. Even though I'm laughing. This is awful. And I'm just belly laughing through this thing. And it's one of those kind of an experience. Anyway. There's some a lot of good, a lot of comedians who do that these days. Stand ups. Yeah. Carrie L. Fast, good and cheap describes you. Fantastic. What are you doing there, Blair? Yawning? She's yawning. She has, she has to work. She has to get up early and commute in the Bay Area traffic to work. And the rain, so fun. Nobody knows how to drive in the rain around here. No. And we don't keep our freeways maintained. So they look terrible in the rain. Can't see where the rain is. Well up here it's just icy and frozen. Oh, great. Stay off the roads, people. Anyway, just, you should be staying home anyway. Omicron. It's all over the place. People are catching it. I know. What's, why? So I understand the answer is capitalism, but I'm still going to ask why, why, why haven't office workers been sent home again? I don't understand it. Nobody cares anymore. Nobody cares anymore. Meanwhile, I'm not wearing like three masks at work. Cause I'm like, uh, it's, I'm either going to get it or I'm going to give it to somebody because I live with someone who works in the ER and his ER is filling up. I mean, that's what people are ignoring. It's like, why am I here? I don't see the ERs filling up, whatever, that they're going to have the issues when they have, you know, a splinter and go in and then they have to lose their arm because they were there for three days and got gangrene. Oh geez, what? I'm just going to a terrible example to let people know that the ERs are getting crowded or they are crowded. And if you have a little health complaint, you are not going to get in for something like a broken bone or a heart attack. Even there's going to be. Here's a question. You left out again. Why are we not? It's not okay. I mean, like I could talk about this for an hour, but like, I know why do you not take a rapid test when you check in for a doctor's appointment? First thing. First thing. You're in a medical facility. It takes 15 minutes. First thing. You have to arrive at your doctor's appointment 15 minutes early to take a rapid test end of story. Yep. You have to reduce exposure on healthcare workers. How about anybody arriving at the ER for any reason? Take a rapid test. This is a great question. Why aren't we using rapid tests all over the place? Like, sure, they're not perfect, but they're certainly better than what we're doing now, which is nothing. They're better than nothing. You can catch the positives for sure. Every American should be receiving 30 rapid tests at the start of each month and they should be testing every day before they go to work. Really, that's what should be happening. Yeah. But I will settle for taking a rapid test when you go to the doctor. Can I? I've got a suggestion. A suggestion. Yeah. But maybe. Yeah, I saw that in the run sheet and I enjoyed it. This might be something worth considering as we head into year two of a pandemic that is looking like it's going to be a year three pandemic at least. Mm-hmm. Two months. Mm-hmm. I know. Two months. Everybody stay home. We call it a mullion two month holiday. Oh, but it would have affected the economy. Yeah. How's the economy now? Oh, the poor economy. Oh, it would have been terrible if we'd taken two months away from peak productivity. It's, if we haven't learned, if we have listened to me and I never say this, these words have never come out of my mouth before. If we had listened to me years ago, we'd be in a better place than we are now. Never have I said that before. This time, this time it's true. You're right, Eric. Justin, you did start out at like three weeks and now you're up to six because that's what the science says. No, I'm at eight. Now I'm at eight. Yeah, that was eight weeks. And the last two, the last two are punitive. The last two are just because you didn't listen to me when I said three weeks. And you didn't listen. Because you didn't listen, we're going to do eight weeks now. You know why we're not going to do it? Because that'd actually be fun for a lot of us. It's really, it wouldn't be that bad. No, it'd be fine. I'm just trying to tell people it's going to be okay. The beginning of the pandemic was scary because we had no idea if it was going to be two weeks or eight weeks or 50 weeks. We had no idea. And that's why it was so scary. If you know it's going to be eight weeks, that's fine. Now we know it's been two years and is about to get much worse. Can we now take two months, everybody? Yeah. Well, and the other thing is like, I saw, I'm sure we've talked about it on the show, but I saw a tweet where I, it's so upsetting. They were like, you know, everyone's talking about how they have job openings and nobody wants to work anymore, but really have we considered the fact that about a million people can't work because they're dead? A million? That's more than that. Globally, it's 5.4 million. No, no. In the U.S., you know, in the U.S., they're saying there's like a job shortage or whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, we're, some people are saying like, well, that's because you need to pay more than unemployment for your job. I'm sorry. You do. But also the other issue is we lost a million workers. Well, it's not a million workers because there were a higher proportion of retired people who would be or older people, but there's a significant number of, yeah, primal life, middle aged, whatever. Yeah, and it's usually lower socioeconomic status, entry level jobs, which are the jobs that are currently trying to find people right now. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So it's, yes. Anyway, yeah, all very frustrating and dumb, I have to say. Eight weeks. This is dumb. It doesn't need to still be happening. Eight weeks. Especially like we were doing okay. Things are okay. They weren't great. They were okay. Medium at best. Yeah. It was just kind of like, is this our new normal? It sucks, but at least like, people aren't dying as fast anymore and people are protected. But I'm sorry. When a variant comes by, this transmissible, shut it down. For instance, like over a hundred thousand cases in one day. Yeah. Like, like, I don't know. 60 something. Yeah. I don't think it's hit the US quite at the number. Like the US was, I read something that US was expecting Omercan to take over by June. And then like three days later, they updated that to January. Yeah. That's how fast this thing is. I was talking to Brian about this. Omercan is in terms of, if you look at it like a parasite, right? It's a better virus. Because it's not as deadly. Yeah. And it's more transmissible. So it's actually doing exactly what COVID wants. So hold up a second. Because we don't know that it's not as deadly. I don't think that's true. So you are 80% less likely to be in a, be hospitalized if you get infected with Omicron. But I think it's partly because a lot of the people who are getting. No, that's vaccinated. No. So vaccinated is 60 to 70%. Okay. But symptomatic Omicron overall, I do believe is about 80% less likely to end up in the hospital. It is a, it is a less deadly version. Which it's doing its job. So this is what Brian was asking me. And he was like, why would, why would a virus mutate to be less deadly? I was like, actually it's better for it. Cause it can spread more if it doesn't kill you. And it's not that. And again, it's not because it would want to, it's because that's what's going to spread. It's the one that doesn't kill you. If this was, if this was Mars. So people are saying, yeah. So that's the weird question. I think the problem is, so okay. Reuters has a story out from December 21st. Omicron infections appear no less severe than Delta. Yes. Oh, interesting. Yes. Yeah, but the, but the. It is biased on vaccinated versus unvaccinated. Who's getting into the hospital and also the age groups. That are ending up in the hospital. So overall. It's NPR. This is where I heard it. Yeah. See. Yeah. So overall it's not less severe, but that comes with the caveats of all of the other aspects of age and vaccination status and. So one of the, one of the things that is happening also, Denmark has probably got the, the hotspot for the world, but it's also actually testing for variants, which not everywhere is doing. It's doing frequent constant testing up. They're the most tested by a population that is also looking for the specific variant and not just saying COVID positive or negative. Right. So it may be as bad elsewhere. But one of the things is the majority of the people who are getting this have been at least partially vaccinated. They may not have gotten the booster. They might have only gotten the two shots. But hopefully all of them have gotten the, at least the first, not both. Well, the majority have gotten our, our vaccinated. So you're also talking about how things comes to outcomes that are largely showing this trend amongst vaccinated people. Right. Sperm quality is impaired for months for some people after recovery from COVID-19. Researchers have found. That's no good. Okay. So that's one of the things that I found. This is from yesterday. And it says, now I lost, oh, there it is. So in a couple of different studies in one, those infected by Omicron are 15 to 20% less likely to go to an emergency room and 40% less likely to be hospitalized overnight compared to Delta. And then another one. No, it's across the board. That's the board. Okay. And then this one of the noise then in the, in this one, about from Houston Methodist hospital system, 15% of symptomatic individuals ended up hospitalized about a 70% reduction compared to those infected by Delta. So that's 70% less. So that's, that's closer to what I heard. And that's from yesterday. A study from Britain found that people infected with Omicron were almost 60% less likely to enter the hospital than those infected with Delta. So, I mean, yes, it's still new. The sample sizes are not as large as probably our Delta sample sizes. So, yeah. But that is also the one worse than the initial, right? Right. So then we, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you're comparing against out the original Alpha screen. Yeah. Alpha. Yeah. It's a great question. I don't know. But yeah, so that, that was the, those were the factors I had heard yesterday. It's still a question. So, I mean, that's the problem is like, I think there are people hearing that going like screw it, bring them into work. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. Also though this is keeping people out of the hospital, but if people get sick, they still can't, can't come into work or shouldn't rather. And it spreads so quickly. You're going to say, no, no, no come into work and you're going to lose your entire workforce overnight. Yeah. I read that. Oh God, I just closed it. It said something like 20% of public service personnel in New York City called out sick on Tuesday. Whoa. I have to find that now. And that's not just being tired from the holidays. No. Oh. Okay. So thousands of NYPD, FDNY members out sick as COVID cases soar. Roughly 6,600 NYPD employees called out sick on Tuesday, about 20% of the department's workforce of those 3,000 or officers with flu-like symptoms and about 1,500 were positive for COVID. Oh my God. That's crazy. Don't look at people. Don't look up. As of Wednesday, Fire Department New York, 30% of EMS workers and 17% of firefighters were on medical leave. During the height of the pandemic in 2020, FDNY had about 25% of EMS out on medical leave. Oh my God. Crazy. Don't look up. Yeah. The flu season is ramping up too. Yay. I'm just going to stay home. I'm just staying home. Yeah. And wake me up in the springtime. Unfortunately, I can't do that. I know. Oh, my son's going to go back to school again. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's, I mean, that's the other one. Why aren't kids getting tested daily when they arrive at school with rapid tests? They need to be. And the, what they've got set up here in Portland is they've got these once weekly PCR tests and it takes three days to get the results back from those. So you don't find out whether a kid was positive until now because of the timeline of Omicron. It's going to be too late. The rapid test needs to be done at the door before the kids are allowed in the school. 100%. Well, and I keep getting, I keep getting these notifications at work that say like on such and such date, you were on premises with someone who had COVID. And it was like 10 days ago. Yeah. Because once somebody is positive, then they count backwards and do contact tracing for every day that you could have been around them. And it's like, at that, yeah, exactly. At that point is too late. It's yeah. So question real quick. Yeah. If the chance of the severity of hospitalization is down 60%, you're saying? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 60, 70, 80 somewhere in there. Okay. But if it's four times as transmissible. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So that's why the hospitals are filling up. Yeah. So that's the problem is if you only care about yourself, this is part of the problem. Yes. If you only care about yourself. Good news. You're tempted to go about your everyday life like that's enough to change because the Omicron variant is not as deadly. So you're like, That's not going to bother you. I can do whatever I want. But if you think about, you know, society, then it's a numbers game and it's a problem. Yeah. Yeah. It's a strange reality we're living in. It's very strange. It's just like, okay, we'll just not pay attention to any of this and just like, it's just, we shut down. And then that was it. Just a slow escalation back to normalcy and you keep saying, don't look up. It's also don't look back. We're not moving backwards at no point. Does anyone want to push restrictions back down? Unacceptable. Unacceptable. Yeah. I mean, data from South Africa and other places, I mean, if Omicron is a quick burn, it's going to happen faster and hopefully the majority over the impact over faster. It's going to be not fun, but hopefully be over sooner. Yeah. I don't know. We'll see. Be careful where you're at 95s. And stay home when you can. So I just want to point out globally. Ooh, iron law, your math. That's awesome. There you go. If you look at, if you look at, there's a world ometers.info coronavirus slash coronavirus slash worldwide dash graphs, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Look at this up. If you look at the daily death count, pretty consistent averaging around 7,500. Uh, globally, globally, like every day. This is probably about the average. Uh, we did have, it was about twice that. Uh, throughout the spring and summer. If you go back, if I go back to the last time this year, it's a little bit higher. The deaths were a little bit higher this time last year. The daily death rate by about a thousand. To some of the days. Oh, actually this, this exact time was twice as bad last year. Twice as many deaths were taking place. But it's got this consistent, like it's staying strong at around 7,000, 8,000 a day. Uh, we don't seem to be, and we're just getting more cases now. Uh, this hasn't swept the U.S. Yeah, we're not, we're gonna, we're not done. Oh no, no, no, we're just getting started. We're just getting started. Start the new year at home for two months. Absolutely, buddy. I'd love to play some video games, bake some bread. This whack-a-mole, this whack-a-mole is getting old. Shut it all down. That's what's happening. Um, Greg Gonzalez on Twitter says. Oh, he's fantastic. The United States has made a decision to accept a massive amount of death and suffering as a trade-off for quote-unquote getting back to normal. Yep. Yes, it's true. Bunker. He's great. I highly recommend following him on Twitter. He's a, he's, he's on it when it comes to the science. Yeah, yeah. Scientists on Twitter have been an interesting, that might have been worth mentioning in the show. Scientists have done a bang-up job on Twitter this year, I have to say. They've done a really good job. Well, also writing op-eds and, you know, doing work to put out information. It's been, it's, it's, it's really heartening to see it taken so seriously by the scientific community. Unfortunately, we have, you know, still have misinformation and all the stuff that we've been discussing. All this stuff. I just looked at Twitter and. Don't do it. It's a trap. Hey, no, I hadn't looked. I did. I turned off. I just didn't do social media for like a week. Yeah. It was really, really nice. And I'm like, ooh, the candy. I can't say no to candy. But anyway, I hope that our science is like candy for people. Like that wonderful treat in the stalking. Oh yeah. Also, Aaron Lord, nobody quote me on that four times is infectious. That's just number I pulled out of the. Yeah. It's likely much higher than that. Yeah. Whatever the, it's as infectious as the measles. Oh boy. Which is very, very infectious. And actually there was a recommendation. I don't know where it was where I heard this. But, but so it's not good information at that point, but it was from one of those sources of information I trust when I looked at it. At least even though I don't remember what it was. More than twice as quickly as, as delta is what I'm finding. Sorry, go ahead. There's a recommendation of like literally what you were, one of you had mentioned wearing two masks is actually a recommendation that might be worth doing if you go out somewhere. So the other thing that Brian keeps telling me over and over is like, and 95s are great. But if you're not fit tested, then they're not as effective as the science says. If you're not fit tested, then you're not getting the full effect of the 95. So if you can't get fit tested, that's great. But try to make sure that your 95 fits properly on your face. I'm going to run for office somewhere. I'm just going to run on two months. Yeah. Just two, two months. I'm going to take two months off. I'm going to end this pandemic vote for me. I'm going to make everybody take two months off. That's just going to be it. We'll be done. And then you can, I'll quit. As soon as it's over, I'll quit and you can hire somebody else for the job. I'm going to make everybody take, is there a president of the world yet? Do we have one? No. Because that's what needs to take place. Eight weeks. And then we can have a planet back. By the way, has anybody else noticed? The end of the world. Has anybody else noticed? I feel fine. This virus seems specifically to be killing humans. Yes. That's correct. Specifically. Because we're very densely populated. Because you think at the end of the world, you think asteroid, comet, meteorite kind of a thing, you think nuclear war in all life is gone from the planet. Or, you know, something like that. No, this one's just going to get rid of all the people. Yeah. So there's a couple things. So we're densely populated. But the other thing is we don't isolate when we're sick. Something that we talk about. Hey, and remember, wasn't there like a study that you brought Justin where it was like mice that get sick and they want to spend time alone? But we're like, hey, I still have to go to work. Yeah. It's I was thinking about how the time that if I did ever have COVID, the time that I had it was in January of 2020. I was sick for like six weeks. And back then you went to work if you were sick. You followed through with engagements if you were sick. Like the expectation was like pop a suit of that and go. And I was thinking about all of the things that I did over those six weeks. But remember, I did sketch fest with you guys when I was sick. Do you remember that? I had my hot tea and my horse. And I was on suit of that. Yeah. I was very ill at sketch fest last year in January 2020. And you had COVID. Oh my God. I could have had COVID. It's certainly possible. No. But I think about it all the time because like, first of all, you know, I may eat my words later, but I feel like if I'm ever sick and I have to go to work after all this crap is done, I will wear a mask. Yeah. You'll wear a mask, right? I will wear a mask if I'm not feeling a hundred percent moving forward, which I, you know, I may or may not have had COVID, but I can tell you when I catch colds, I'm sick for a very long time. I'm sick for like two to six weeks. And I think that's the big point Blair is though the, the mask wearing, it's not just about protecting you. It's about you protecting others. If you are a little under the weather, if you have something and you're wearing a good fitted mask, you're not going to be breathing those particles, those droplets or aerosols all over somebody. Yeah. Well, when I was a zookeeper, if you had any symptoms of any cold at all, oh, sorry. You had to wear a mask. If you were working with primates, because a lot of rhino viruses and other stuff can jump to primates. And so that was to protect the primates. It was not for me. It was to protect the animals. Speaking of animals, wasn't it, was it Ohio? Where is it? There was like deer that testing positive for COVID now. Oh gosh, I got to look this up. I got to make sure I didn't just dream that one. Nope. A third of Ohio deer test positive for COVID-19. Oh boy. Yeah. Did I crack off? Did I have a sense of taste and smell? I don't know about that. I saw a funny tweet the other day when it was like, I was, I was passing by a banging holiday party and I overheard someone say, Oh, do you smell that? It smells great. And somebody said, I don't smell anything. I don't smell anything. What are you talking about? They're like, there it is. That's something this year also, uh, somebody did the, uh, comments, reviews of the stinky holiday candles on Amazon. And there are all these reviews popping up right now around the holidays that are like, this candle doesn't smell like anything. And it's kind of peeking in this holiday. Yeah. I see you. Just these negative reviews in which the user can't smell the normally very stinky candles seems to coincide with the COVID spread. Oh my God. Oh. Yeah. Gosh. Well, I sure hope all of 2022 isn't this. Well, not even all of 2021 was this. So, I mean, 2021, we had some good times then we, the Delta came out and you know, it's like we had the ups and downs and it was a very dynamic year. It was. In terms of hopes and disappointments. Yeah. You know, all the things, but you know, Blair, we got to go to your wedding. That's true. I'm so happy that's over. In person. It was right in between things, you know, like right in there, right in there. Oh my God. Yeah. I mean, there are, there are good things that have been happening and, you know, we've gotten to do this show week after week and hang out with everybody and talk about science and hopefully get people to listen. Or not. Yeah. 2022 is on the way. It will not be the same as this. Nothing is, it's never the same. Everything always changes. You have to find comfort in our uncertainty of what the future will hold. But I'm sure certain that we will be predicting the future next Wednesday. That is true. It is true. Hopefully all of you will be there to join us. We don't have a gigantic audience like some of these big mainstream channels and networks. That's because we're not, we're not, we're not blowing smoke up people's butts. I think if we really wanted a big audience, we'd be like, okay, that's not where I was going. I was going to go like this angle is because we have such a small audience. Each one of you is precious. Each one of us, each one of you means tremendous amount to us and we want nothing bad to happen to you. Yes. So please wear your masks and avoid the people and get the shots. You've already, you're already doing that. We know you are. We know you're there. We know you're there. But we need nothing bad to happen. We can't lose any of you. That's what our plan is. So keep tuning in. We're going to, next week's show is going to be a lot of, this week's show, we had to deal with some of the stuff, but next week's show, nothing but fun. Nothing but good news as we predict. For predictions? We wanted to come back next week. Next week is nothing but good news. Don't come for the predictions. Come for the, um, the report back on our predictions from last year. Cause I think that'll be pretty funny. And also, uh, we're each going to bring probably one also science news story, right? Yes. And we will all bring a science news story because we have to start getting into the science news. We need to catch up on three weeks of science news next week. Yeah. There'll be something to talk about for sure. But yes, it's not just predicting. It's also looking at our predictions from last year and seeing. Tallying how we did. What did we predict correctly? I don't remember what I predicted. That's what happens every year. It's like, I don't remember what I predicted. I just know that I've been getting worse. I think I was optimistic. I think I've been getting worse at my predictions. I think, I think it was easier. I don't know. This is just my perspective is like in the last 10 years, I feel like, um, it was easier to predict certain things because science moved a little slower. But like technology has taken such great strides that a lot of areas of science that you could be like, oh, like they got really close with this one thing. They're probably going to figure it out next year. No, it happens. Science moves much faster now. So I feel like it's, we never could have guessed that in 2021 they'd grow a mini brain with eyes on it. But I think, you know, those sorts of things might have been telegraphed previously when technology moves slower. So I don't, I don't know. That's just my opinion. But it does feel like you could kind of make educated guesses before on your predictions. And now I feel like I can't at all. We're getting into the place of science fiction. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like once upon a time I was an optimistic person. And I'm perhaps more of a realist now. You can be both is the thing. I can be both. That's okay. You can definitely be both. Yeah. But I do think also it's time for us to. Bit it to 2021. It is part of that. The number of scientists worldwide. This year reached 8.8 million. So that's a good number of scientists. So that might also be part of why there's so much of this science happening. Yeah. Yeah. That's why we have job security. 8.8 million people generating stories. Yeah. Pretty good number. Go science. Produce the knowledge for the people who don't necessarily know how to use it. Okay. Processing data and sitting in a lab pipetting. So I don't have to thank you so much. Yes. Yay. Yeah. I don't know the stat on the overall knowledge generation Gord, but that is absolutely true. It's at an ever increasing rate. I think additionally. Also every 10 years, every 10 years, we consume as much oil as we did in all the years combined. And we shouldn't do that anymore. We should stop that. That's what we need to know. We're not supposed to do that for a while, but we are like, oh, I'm just sneaking a cookie from the cookie jar. Sneaking an entire flat of cookies. Yeah. Okay. I need to go to sleep. Alrighty. I need to put this here and myself to bed. Good night, Blair. Say good night, Justin. Say good morning, Justin. Morning, Justin. There we go. Good night. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Yeah. Happy New Year. Happy Year of Science. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Old Lang Syne would be forgot. Don't forget about twists. Oh, experience be forgot and for God's sakes, wear your mask. And pants. Pants. I don't know. And a mask. Yeah. In public. But anyway, we will be back with our prediction show next week. And thank you so much. Maybe we don't quite understand the dynamics. Portland's probably got a problem. People wearing pants in public. Everybody being online with no pants. Come on. Yeah. Everybody's hopefully, never mind. Anyway, the new year's coming. We can't stop it. Time keeps going, but we can keep doing this together. Thank you so much for an amazing year. Thank you for joining us for a great 2021 review. And we look forward to seeing you next year. See you in 2021. Stay well. Yeah. Stay healthy. And stay well. And we will see you next Wednesday.