 This is TWIS, this week in Science episode number 633. Recorded on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2017. Science gets expansive. Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki, and tonight on This Week in Science, we are going to fill your heads with climatia, diamonds, and the expanse, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. It happens only ever so often. The moments when we gather together on mass and look to the skies, the occasional comet, the seasonal meteor shower, the offhand lunar or solar eclipse, and while millions marvel this week at the spherical nature of heavenly bodies and be held a totally awesome sight as they fell within the shadow of the moon, there are others who rarely avert their attention from the skies, those who have been in monitoring events on Mars, reporting news from Neptune, those who have been watching the stars beyond our galaxy, watching for telltale shadows to dance across far distant stars, discover new planets, new solar systems, new galaxies. There are always eyes on this planet looking up, looking out, and wherever and whenever they find something worth marveling at, you'll find it too by looking no further than This Week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind I can't get enough. I wanna learn everything, I wanna fill it all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I wanna know what's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. What's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. Science to you, Kiki and Blair. And good science to you too, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome to another show, another episode of This Week in Science. We are back yet again to talk about all the science that is fit to go in this podcast. And you know what we did that was super sciency this week? Or maybe, you know, you don't even have to take the science tack, but since this is a science show, we kinda do the eclipse. Oh my gosh, Blair, wasn't it amazing? Oh my God, it got dark during the day. I also felt about this big. I felt like teeny tiny little insignificant speck. Yeah, it was amazing. The temperature dropped, the sky went dark. It was 360 degrees, sunset, stars came out, planets came out that you normally only see at night. We were in the path of totality in Independence, Oregon. And that little town put on a very good little festival. For the moon and the sun doing their celestial dance. Yes, there was a juggling physicist one day. He was great. He was excellent. He was excellent, yes. And fireworks, there's science in the fireworks, massive, wonderful fireworks display. But the big, big climax to the show, the eclipse, it did not disappoint. No, no clouds. It was amazing. So anyone out there, I'm gonna tell you right now, people said before the eclipse, if you have never seen a total eclipse, you should see it. It's not the same as a 99% eclipse. It's just not the same. And I went, ha ha ha ha, okay, sure, whatever. It's not the same. It's entirely different. It's also nothing like the pictures. You've seen pictures and pictures and pictures of the total eclipse, I'm sure. But being there, it is an indescribable feeling. Absolutely. And seriously, we're talking about what animals were doing during the eclipse. Do you know that millions of people migrated for this eclipse? It's true. Talk about animal behavior. That's pretty awesome. It only took me a cool 20 hours to get home. Yeah, only four hours to take a normally one and a half hour trip. Oh dear, yeah. Anyway, it was wonderful and we're looking forward to the next eclipse to grace the planet. I'm an eclipse chaser now. It happened. In 2020, you can go to Chile, right? Oh, no problem. Buy my ticket now. All right, on this week's show, we have a whole lot of science ahead for you. We have stories about space. I've got some space news talking about the moon because we've had the eclipse. I'm bringing that up. I've also got some news about bacteria and climatia, that ever terrible disease that we have given this planet of ours. Justin, what do you have? Hydrothermal Mars. Diamonds on Neptune. And this week in Mind Your Dosage. All right, and Blair, what is coming up in the animal corner? This is an all seafood buffet this week in Blair's Animal Corner. I have a story about sequential hermaphroditic fish. I have another story about climatia as relates to fish and I have new fishy dental technology. Oh, great. All right, I'm glad I like fish. I like fish, fish are great. Okay, and we have an interview today with the authors of the expanse, the nom de plume, James S.A. Corey. It's really two authors, Daniel, Abraham, and Ty Frank. And they will be speaking with us in just a few moments about their book series. But first we're gonna jump into our favorite segment of the show. And I wanna remind everyone that they can subscribe to the Twist podcast on iTunes in the Google Play podcast portal. Stitcher, Spreaker and TuneIn and you can find us on YouTube and Facebook by looking for this week in science or you can just visit twist.org where there are links for everything. But now it is time for what has science done for me lately? This letter is from our minion, Teddy. Teddy writes, hello all. First off, I'm a newer listener. I have started listening to the podcast while doing some mindless tasks at my internship. Science has always been a common theme in my life and I was brought up by a mother with a biology degree and a passion for instilling a love for learning and reading in younger generations. I'm going into my final semester of my bachelor's in industrial chemistry technology. And while chemistry is my main love, I do enjoy all other aspects of science. My two things that science has done for me most recently are these, one, my sister. When she was in kindergarten, she was diagnosed with juvenile type one diabetes and without the medical advances made in using insulin, she wouldn't most likely be around. And while my younger self may have liked the idea of not being the middle child, I have grown fond of her over the years. She's now becoming a fine young lady who is interested in biotechnology for when she graduates high school. And on a less serious note, while driving home tonight for my internship, I forgot that I needed to get gas and was cutting it very close by the time I got to my exit. I live in a rural part of Michigan where there can be stretches of highway without gas stations. Thankfully, the car I was driving is a hybrid and I was able to pad my 10 miles till empty by driving so that the car was using the electric engine. So thank you to the scientists and engineers that worked so hard on that technology, making it so I didn't have to walk a few miles to get gas. Thank you guys for creating a medium in which I can learn new things every day, even though I am not in classes right now. Teddy, thank you so much for writing in. We do appreciate those two points in your life where science has been an important influence, especially when it relates to your sister. That, and hopefully someday medications will be a thing of the past and we will be implanting stem cells or doing genetic, we'll be using genes to... Reconvigate. Reconfigure. Yes, we've lost the word. Reconvigation. Yeah. Genetic reconvigation. Something, something, CRISPR, something, something. Yes. Yes, exactly. Yes, to be able to completely get past diabetes, especially type one diabetes that impacts people when they're very young. So everyone out there, remember, make sure your gas has a full, your tank is full of gas if you're in rural areas or that you have an electric engine. Also remember that we need you to write in. That's a matter. You gotta write in to let us know what science has done for you lately because I need stories from you. I wanna fill this part of the show with stories from everyone in our audience about how science affects their life each and every day, your life, each and every day. What does science do for you lately? Leave us a message on our Facebook page, facebook.com slash this week in science. We wanna do this, so we need you. And without further ado, we're gonna roll right into our interview. I would like to introduce our wonderful guests who go by the name of James S.A. Corey when they write together, but it's a pen name of fantasy author Daniel Abraham and Ty Frank who write the Expanse novels. The Expanse novels are a sci-fi series, initially books, now picked up by the sci-fi channel, and they are currently in production on their third season and the seventh novel in the series is in process at the moment. They both live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Is that still true? Well, Ty has a house in Albuquerque, New Mexico that he sometimes stops by and visits. I still, I'm here when I'm not someplace else. And right now, Ty is on Eastern Time and he's looking, for those of you who might be listening to the podcast at a later date, he's already a little tired. Welcome both of you to the show. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having us. Yeah. So to get started, I don't wanna give away too many spoilers for people who haven't seen the show or who haven't read your novels. I hope that through this interview, what we'll be able to do is get people excited and interested in what you're writing about by talking about the science that you've incorporated into it. So can you give just a really brief cliff note summary of what is your, what is the expanse about? Hmm. Cliffs notes. After you write the first million words, it gets hard to summarize. Million and a half at this point. Yeah. Well, it's science fiction set. The whole series is going from a kind of late Apollo 13 to eventually a kind of early Buck Rogers place. But starting off with a colonized solar system where we have Earth and Mars and a bunch of stations out of the belt. And, you know, it's trying to be a fairly rigorous, I mean, compared to rigorous, we don't have any artificial gravity, that kind of rigorous universe. And then there's a girl that goes missing and a ship that gets blown up and intrigue happens and then like a million and a half words later, there's some other things happen. One of the things, and you've soft pedaled it there a bit, you've attacked a science fiction scenario as a hard sci-fi, like using hard science through a lot of it. You didn't just go with, well, the tiles or the carpeting on ships has gravity in it. And that's what keeps people walking about upright no matter what ship they're in. You've gone to that extra step of really trying to, in difficultly, I mean, it creates difficult scenarios that you have to think through. What happens when you get a crack in the face mask and you're walking about on the outside of a ship? What happens inside of a ship that doesn't have gravity? What does that look like? What does that affect? It's funny because when we were first developing the show with the writers that eventually went on to write the show with us, they viewed all of that stuff as an impediment and were very resistant to things like light delay in communication and the fact that if the ship isn't accelerating or you're not on something that's spinning or you're not on a large body, you don't have gravity or you have microgravity. And there was a lot of early pushback and then what happened was there was this moment and you could see it happen where these Hollywood writers have been dealing with problems like the fact that cell phones have destroyed the thriller that now that everybody has a cell phone at any point in a thriller movie, somebody can call somebody else and go, the bomb is under the table and then everybody just runs out of the room and all this is done. So you wind up with all the artificial stuff like, oh no, we don't have cell coverage here. Now we have to go drive to find some place with cell coverage. So you wind up with that sort of stuff. They were looking at it and then all of a sudden one of them said, light delay, cell phones don't exist anymore. Like I know something you need to know, I'm calling you to tell you, but you're 49 minutes away across the solar system. So all of a sudden all the cool thriller plots that are based on people not being able to tell each other what's going on, come back and battles in space by the time a general on earth issues orders to the fleets outside of Jupiter, half an hour has gone and the battle that they're issuing orders for is probably already over. So all of a sudden all these cool, new problems and new thriller kind of mechanics come back that had been wiped out by modern technology. So all the resistance is gone now and everybody's just excited to like find the ways in which are sticking with realistic physics actually makes the story more fun. Yeah, and was that something that you were thinking about? Like the light delay, as you're writing the story, was that something that came into mind? And you're like, okay, so since it's gonna take this long for a message to get from the asteroid belt into earth or Mars, these things, these other plot plot points can't happen until you get to that point or were you just writing the story as it went? The sort of immutability of light speed as the speed of causality is actually baked right into the world building because spoilers are sort of alien MacGuffin is based on the idea that another civilization might try to colonize the galaxy by sending these slower than light colony machines because you can't just travel faster than light. If you want to set up someplace else you have to shoot something over there that is going to go much, much slower than light speed. And so since it was sort of baked in right from the beginning, the fact that communication and travel takes time that we're not used to seeing inside by has always just been part of the plots and it's never really been a problem. Yeah. It was kind of fun to have in the writer's room for the show, we have posters up that we've made saying, here are the three different kinds of gravity. We've got spin gravity with acceleration grab we have normal gravity, just so there was something like in the classroom for everybody to refer to. I love there's a Nerdist post that talks about the fact that you're so committed that they're so committed in the series to gravity and making sure that it's either thrust gravity or spin gravity or the right kind of gravity that you've color coded the scripts according to the kind of gravity. I've heard of that story. I don't know if I've seen that script. Yeah, that is a story that's going around that I think somebody misinterpreted because so when you issue pages, when you issue script pages and then you issue additional script pages later those pages come out on different colored paper. So you don't get them confused. So yeah, so you don't get them confused and so I'll talk about we're issuing yellows or we're issuing greens and that's just different iterations of script revisions. And I think somebody probably saw a script with some blue pages and some yellow pages and some green pages in it and decided that that's what it meant but it doesn't actually do that. Now what we do though is in the slug lines which is like, if you're looking at a script it'll say like exterior earth night that sort of that line that begins each section. On our slug lines we do say whether it's microgravity or zero gravity or not. So that is built into the slug line for each scene but it's not on different colored pages now. I liked that urban legend though. I think we shouldn't lie. Perpetuate it, yeah. Yeah, there you go. But we're not going to tell people not to listen to this podcast so you can perpetuate the myth. I don't know, I got to fake science news here. I did have to do a double take when there was a ship that exploded with no sound. I was like, wait, what? I just did it. Oh, make a sound. Oh, that's beautiful. Well, we do totally do sound in space and when people say why is there sound in space, I go, did you ever ask why there's a soundtrack in space? Or a camera? There's only space coming from the same place that the soundtrack is coming from. Right, there you go. Can make it happen. So in terms of what when you're writing, so Ty, you've been responsible for kind of the large overarching story arcs. When you guys work together on things, when you're thinking about the science and how the science is gonna play into creating this believable universe, is does the science kind of, does it help lead the story arc at all? Or is it really when it gets into the little details of kind of the chapters and the sub chapters of actually writing the story? Yeah, we always start with story and story and characters and then let the world building sort of, influence or inform the things that are happening, but our books and stories are never primarily treatises on science because neither of us are trained scientists. So we have to just use our minimal knowledge of science to make the world seem more plausible, but we're never trying to lecture the audience on any particular thing in science. Right, one thing I do love though about science fiction in general is the ability of authors like yourselves to be able to take an idea and then creatively run with it and kind of take it to this next nth degree of where could it go, the potential of it. And do you work together and have brainstorming sessions at all on any kinds of like, what if, so let's talk about this protomolecule. How could this work and what would this thing happen? I can imagine were there brainstorming sessions or did you just kind of click together? There weren't any formal brainstorming sessions, but there was a lot of playing left for dead and talking that kind of bringing, where Ty was bringing me up to speed and I was interpreting what he was saying through the filters that I have and it goes back and forth pretty well and I think it comes out with some kind of interesting things. One of the things that's really nice in writing is having a good set of obstacles and trying to get that kind of plausibility makes some really awesome obstacles. Yeah, I mean, to be fair, Daniel does have a biology degree, so whenever we have something we wanna do that involving biology will have a conversation and I'll say, how would that work? And then he kind of comes up with the sort of biology stuff. Yeah, so let's get a lot of that biology stuff too and especially the Belters character. Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. Let's jump off to the humans, humans colonizing the solar system and the different races of people that end up in different places and they're differing physiologies. Well, one of the things that's really nice about that is we don't have any data to work from, so anything we come up with that sounds good, pretty much flies. Until we actually start raising babies in microgravity, our theory is as good as anybody else's. Yeah, and just to be totally honest, we're not the first people to play with that. I mean, that's been sort of a topic that has been covered by a number of different sides. Larry Niven did a bunch of work with asteroid belt people and people in microgravity or much greatly reduced gravity, having different physiologies, specifically like, it's not Ringworld, it's the other one about the smoke ring. Integral trees, the integral trees, he had people who had gotten very long because they were being raised in microgravity. So, and I think even all the way back to Alfred Bester, he was talking about changed physiology by growing up in those different environments. So, we're not the first ones to do it, but it is a fun topic to explore because it lets us talk about racism without using actual races that have actually been the victims of racism. So, we're not co-opting someone else's lived experience to write entertainment, which we're trying not to do. Yeah, there was one point where one of the Martians, we're talking about the Martian Marines and it said in one episode that the Martians train at 1G to be ready to have combat on Earth. Would that training take place like on a gravity thruster ship traveling, thrusting through space, or would that be a spin drive on something? How would you imagine them training for 1G? Yeah, I mean, you would probably, I mean, the Martians probably have some military satellites, some military stations in orbit that they spin up like a centrifuge to create a perceived 1G in the ring, in the habitat ring so that they can go up there and train. And then the other thing that we sort of talk about but don't get into much detail on is various pharma that encourages bone density growth and muscle growth and all of that stuff, which you would assume people. So it's sort of futuristic steroids that you would assume people who are training to increase their muscle mass for a higher gravity would be taking those things. So, no, they can get bulked up enough to handle it well. All right, I wanna know what's in the juice. So the big, I read a thing once that I found very compelling. I don't know if it's actually true or not, but said the biggest danger to extended high G is stroke, is arterial failure. And I've found that a very compelling argument. And so the primary thing the juice does is maintain arterial elasticity under stress and discourage embolism and stroke. So that's mostly that. Now as a physiologist, I'm gonna go back to my research. Try and figure out how to do that. It's future stuff. Yeah, it is future stuff, for sure. I mean, that's definitely, it's the literary license of it's in the future and you've got this future that's what, 300 years? We never say, in that ballpark. Ballpark, you never said, we never say. Of course, I mean the future is also basically cured cancer. So we got a lot of future medicine. Yeah, so there's a lot of good future medicine. You've got, you can repair limbs for say the ice haulers who have their limbs amputated because they've gotten crushed under blocks of ice, but then you still have the human frailties of alcoholism, depression. You've still got these kind of psychological issues in your characters. And I love the interplay of this advancement of the science, but yet it's not so advanced that people are that different from people. There's still that underlying humanity there. Well, part of the theory that we're working from is that all of the kind of social problems and arguments that we've been getting into since we were monkeys, we will continue having on into the future in space. The dangers that we find in the planets and in the stars are mostly going to be the ones we packed with us. Yeah. And it doesn't mean there isn't a cure if somebody just doesn't want to take it. That's right. Exactly. We had some questions from Twitter. People had some questions they wanted to ask. Albert Epstein from Twitter wanted to know how much time and what references does the team use to research the science that goes into the storytelling? Yeah, if he's talking about the books, it's basically stuff that Daniel and I know. And occasionally we'll reach out to outside experts on things. I think that's happened a couple of times when we had really tricky problems we were trying to figure out, but not very often. And then in the writing room, it's basically me and our shell writer, Noreen Shankar, who is actually a PhD. He's got a PhD in believe engineering, but he had a heavy background in physics and nuclear physics and other stuff. So he and I get in a lot of arguments about how things would work. And I is with great pride that I say I win about half of those arguments. And considering I have no PhD in anything, I feel like I'm scoring pretty well. Like science stands on the shoulders of giants, so much sci-fi writers because there's other sci-fi writers who did have these arguments and figured out a way to get it through. And that's perhaps what you're bouncing on. The tricky thing is that so much of this stuff isn't complicated, it's just non-intuitive. That when you start explaining how things work, it just takes a while for the person to sort of shift to their frame of reference and go, oh, you're right, that is how that would work. But the thing is we've been poorly trained by a hundred years of sci-fi TV and sci-fi movies in all the wrong ways. In most sci-fi TV and movies, spaceships bank like airplanes and they're laid out like cruise ships with the decks running horizontal to the keel of a ship rather than stacked the other direction like an office building, which is how they would actually be built. And so once you get your head out of the wrong way, people don't explode when they're in vacuum, even though 30 years of movies and TV have told us that's what happens. So you just sort of get people to start thinking about it without all the, you get them to unlearn the bad things that they've been taught. And then all of a sudden they go, oh, you're right. It is, you know, you're right. Being in vacuum is one atmosphere pressure difference. Divers do that all the time. They don't explode. That's right. Once you sort of get past all the misinformation, then people catch on but it takes a while to get people to sort of unlearn what they've been taught. And one of the cunning tricks I think that writers get to do, and I think that we did with this project, when it comes to research is you write the story about stuff that you're already really excited about and have already done a bunch of reading on just because you're kind of a nerd. And then you don't have to do any extra research because you already did it just for the fun. Right, it's already in your head. You're already, you've got this information in there and these ideas that add on themselves. Let's see, Paul M. on Twitter asks, a lot of the G-free or gravity-free body shapes from the books have been budgeted out for TV. Any chance of adding digitized weird bodies in future seasons? We've had a number of actors that we've cast specifically because they were very tall and very thin. The issue is that, one, that it is expensive if you want to stretch people, but two, it actually messes with performance. It's not even so much a cost issue as it is... You're just adding a difficulty onto an actor who's already doing a difficult job. Right, and when you put them on the rack and actually physically stretch them, they're not really happy to work anymore. Yeah, Saggett acts well crowned on that. Yeah, but they should shut up and do their jobs as well, I think. You're being paid to act, to get to work. So yeah, we're gonna need you to drop 20 pounds for this role. Oh yeah, and also, we're gonna have to stretch you about six inches. So I have a question. I have perhaps a silly question or maybe a question you can't answer, but in the first couple episodes, I noticed what might have been some sort of nod to Star Trek. Is that in there? The distress signal sounded a lot like my triple alarm clock off of my phone. Oh, did it? Yeah. Yeah, I don't think that was super. Really? Oh my gosh, I thought I was so convinced it was a triple I started searching for my phone. I thought it was going off. But speaking of Star Trek, I actually have a real question. So Star Trek obviously a very important show in the history of science fiction. And it actually, we've seen it kind of inspire a lot of inventions that we see today. So out of all of the kind of gadgets and gizmos in your novels and in your TV show, is there anything in particular you'd really like to see come to fruition? I like the cure for cancer. I like that the casual can easy destruction of all cancers, that's awesome. We should do that. Yeah, the pill that you take that makes cancer go away is awesome. Yeah, that's a good choice. I think a lot of people would probably give that a thumbs up. And also sort of trivial fusion power, that would solve a lot of problems. Yeah, in terms of, yeah, trivial. It wouldn't be so trivial if we had it. Well, but I mean, just everywhere and it's easy to do. Yeah, no big deal. I like that the iPhone is still around. Yes. We actually had a lot of conversations early on about people in the production who was thinking maybe we could make it futuristic by making things implanted or wearable or stuff. And Ty's argument, and he has convinced me, is that those things never work. I mean, the most successful wearable technology ever was wrist watches. And as soon as we got iPhones, we stopped using them. Yeah, and I think also just for the theatrical portion of it, it's hard to see that somebody's doing thing with an ocular implant without getting to terminate her with it. I also just really like you can tell who's irresponsible because they have a cracked phone. I noticed that right away. Oh my god, I'm sorry. I appreciate the cracked phone. By the insurance. Now, what we have, though, with our devices is we have incredibly sophisticated user observation and learning programs so that the device almost seems to psychically interpret what your intention is and what your desire is and then react to that, which we assume we would have much, much better machine learning where the device is very aware of how its user uses it and becomes much better at reacting to their actions so that we have the very casual gesture-based input, which you assume each machine is tracking its user and knows what that gesture means coming from that person. Hey, this is the conversation we were just having before the show started. Yeah, but that's advertising tracking that behavior. It's the same metrics, right? One of the things that we get called on a lot of people ask us why there aren't any artificial intelligences or robots. And what we always say is there are. I mean, the Rasenate is essentially a robot. The system of the Rasenate is essentially, if not full on passing its Turing test, artificial intelligence, it's smart enough to do that kind of predictive behavior and do the work that we don't have to see any of the humans doing. Yeah, it's uncommented. What we don't have is humanoid-shaped robots having conversations with people and drawing a lot of attention to themselves, because I don't know that we're ever going to build those things. I mean, we have tons of robots right now, and most of them are like a welder on a manipulating arm or some kind of grabber manipulator thing. Or in the case of a Tesla car, it's a robot. It's just shaped like a car. And when you press a little button, it knows how to park itself. It knows how to parallel park itself, and it does that for you. That's the kind of thing that I think you see. One of the scenes that we have that passes very quickly in the first season, in episode four of the first season when they're escaping from the big battleship, the Donager, and the point defense cannons have extended and are firing around, the pilot misjudges the ship and slams it into a wall where one of those point defense cannons would have been crushed. And it happens really fast, but that gun sucks itself into the ship when that happens and then pops back out as soon as the ship moves away. Nobody told it to do that. It's just the ship knows it should protect itself. It knows if it would be damaged if it ran in it. So it makes the decision to do that for the operators. That's the sort of uncommented artificial intelligence and robotics we like to have. It's just nobody talks about it because in the same way that we don't talk about how our Prius works, we just get it in. It's part of the universe at that point in time. I think it's also sort of implied that humanity went that direction with AI, androids walking about and then realized that was gonna end badly and went away from it somewhere in that 300 years between now and when the show takes place. Like how are we, how are we, now we're just done. I don't think that's gonna be the thing where we look at it and say, oh, this is gonna go badly, we should stop. I think we're just gonna be one of those things that kind of falls out of fashion and it's kind of creepy. Add turns out and we don't really enjoy it so we stop doing it. Yeah, Japan's definitely gonna make them. Japan's already 80% there. They're making them, for sure. Yeah, but the people who seem to be wanting to make them, the most insistent on making them seem to wanna have sex with them. I don't know that they're- Because they're not with each other. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know that that's a great long-term plan. You're right, yeah, it'll fizzle out real quick. Whole PSA on why you shouldn't have sex with robots. That's kind of very good. It is a very interesting point you bring up that the negative population growth countries maybe are most interested in this. Don't have another baby. Just head on over to the robot bay and- Well, you're gonna die someday. I guess do what you need to in the meantime, baby. All right, well, I know you both need to get out. It's late on the East Coast for you. I don't wanna keep you too much longer but I'm having a wonderful time talking with you both. Final question, I know you've stated that you've kind of had the end of this series in mind since book number two. And you have the ability to have the series go where you want it to through the novel series and through that universe. But Battlestar Galactica, it was kind of hamstrung by a writer's strike and I feel like the show didn't end up going and ending where it could have. Do you have concerns about where the TV expanse is going to go and whether it'll match up with your ideas for the end of the show? Not so much. I mean, the showrunner who really ultimately has the decision-making power on that. He and I work together a lot. He and Daniel work together a lot. He seems very committed to telling our version of the story and we've talked to him about what the end is and he always acts like, yeah, that'd be a great ending. And to be fair to Battlestar Galactica, I think part of the problem that they were dealing with there, Ron Moore who created the show is a very good writer. Part of the problem though is that bad ending is baked into the world building and the world building is not his. That comes from the original series, this idea that there's this war between the robots and the people and that the people are looking for Earth. The problem that you have is either you find Earth or you don't and once you do that, what then? So he really was fighting just some sort of flawed world building that wasn't his fault and trying to come up with a compelling, interesting ending for that world building. That's tough to do, especially when it's not your stuff to begin with. Whether or not you think it was successful, he was trying to do something with it. Yeah, I mean, I loved the series. I just, it was at the very end, I went, no. That wouldn't be tough though, because what do you do? I mean, so you, if you never find Earth, then the series just sort of peters out. Then the last episode as well, we never found Earth, but gosh darn it, we'll keep looking. Or the series ends with you find Earth and then what is that? I remember the briefly lived Battlestar Galactica sequel in like 1980 where they find Earth and it's like our modern Earth and then the people from Battlestar Galactica come down to Earth and have adventures. Right, right, right, the motorcycle. Because there's not a lot you can do with that. So you really are sort of painted into a corner with that particular mythology and I don't know how you get out of that corner. Well, we did it by not having that mythology. Yeah, our people are not looking for Earth. Yeah, I mean, you've got a political, you've got political upheaval in the solar system and a potential alien invasion. What's going to happen? It's going to get much worse. Oh, I can't hear you. It'll get worse before it gets better. Sure, yeah. No, it's just really, really bad and then it stops. There we go. Yeah, no spoilers. Okay, thank you so much, both of you, for your time today. For each of you, where can people find you online and is there anything else that you'd like to get off your chest while you've got a captive audience? Well, you can find me on Twitter at Abraham Hanover and we have a blog that we should go look at someday. It's over at, I think, www.DanielAbraham.com and www.JamesS.A.Cory.com or v-expans.com. I think they all go to one or two of the same places. And then there is a James S.A.Cory Twitter feed, which we maintain and Ty usually is the one who's dealing with that. Yeah, oh, there it is, look. Look at that, I can screen share. Yeah. Here, I'll show you your blog if you haven't been there. I haven't. Oh, look, there I am and the same post is right behind me. And Ty is showing off his luxurious locks. Yeah, you can find me nowhere on the internet. I do not have Facebook, I do not have Twitter, I do not have any of those things. My internet footprint is small. It's like the JD Salinger of the internet age. I barely remember to carry a phone. Quick question, how'd you come up with the idea of doing a pen name as opposed to just putting both of your names on their work? How did that arise? Well, there's a couple of things. I have a strong opinion about what it takes to succeed as a novelist and it kind of boiled down in the very short version to you succeed by meeting people's expectations. And the most powerful thing you can do to meet people's expectations is set them and who wrote a book? The name of the authors, that's the expectations. I've written under three different names. Daniel Abraham writes Epic Fantasy, MLN Hanover writes Urban Fantasy with the kind of Buffy-esque vampires and werewolf stuff. And James S.A. Corey writes the Space Opera. And by going into the bookstore and picking up a book with that name on it, you know what you're getting. Because even the very best Epic Fantasy is really crap Space Opera. Right. Yeah. Okay, so it's a branding thing. I kind of get it then. So it's you're picking the flavor of what you're gonna read and you know kind of in advance what you're getting. And if people know you, if people know you as a fantasy author and they see that you've written a sci-fi book, they're gonna be like, really? Is that gonna be okay? The other thing, there is another thing, which is I had a few books in print before we started doing this. And there's this thing that has happened in the industry where an established author partners with somebody whose name you haven't heard before. And then the impression is that that's the guy who actually wrote the book. And then you put the more established person's name on the top in order to get sales, which I was never in close to the league where that would have made any financial sense. But it would have looked weird and that we didn't wanna mislead people that way. I don't know. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I hope people enjoyed this interview. And if any of you out there have not taken a look at the Expanse novels or at the sci-fi series, they are available. You can find them in bookstores on Amazon and the Expanse is also available on the television series on Amazon. I think some of our books are on sale on Nook right now. Great. And I'm reading them and love them and watching the series and love it. I'm so excited. I've always been a big fan of noir detectives going back to the Sam Spade Philip Marlowe stuff. Yeah, you gotta be loving Miller, right, Justin? I love it and he's got a fedora. It's like, ah, it's perfect. All right. Thank you both so much for joining us and have a wonderful night. And we hope that we hope you have all the success with the rest of the writing of the series and can't wait to see what happens next and where you take it. Thank you very much. Thanks for the good science. And we've got more science coming up. We've got a whole rest of a show, a whole lot of a show left with tons more science. Are we going to a break, Kiki? We are going to go to a break right now. That is the truth. This is This Week in Science. Stay tuned for more science. All the science news is coming up next. Stay tuned. That was fun. I'll have to send them a thank you letter. That was wonderful. I hope everybody is enjoying This Week in Science. I hope you enjoyed the interview and I do hope that you continue listening to Twist because we have a lot more coming up. We also have merchandise available for those of you who have a penchant for wearing things with logos on them and stuff like that. You can head on over to twist.org, which is our website. It's the portal for all things twists. And if you head over to twist.org, you can click on our Zazzle store link. Zazzle is the place where you find all of the items with the twist logo on it with art from Blair's Animal Corners Science. This Week in Science yearly calendar from the last two years. There is a new calendar in the works, by the way. Get ready, everybody. We're gonna put pre-orders, make pre-ordering available on the website very soon. 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This miracle cure leaves no permanent pain. We would have skeptic eye-in. I can't believe you believe in that plan. We disagree, but I still give a damn. Your astral projections are coming along. Your chakra and chi are both growing less strong. Your cold disappeared after just nine short days, all thanks to the words on the whole earth displays. Now due to the juices and pills and the creams, the body's lost toxins, whatever that means. And we're back with more this week in science. Oh, we are. We are, we are, we are. Kiki, Kiki, Kiki. What? Kick us off. What you got? I know, I was just gonna do that. I just had a moment though where I had some weird feedback in my headphones and I didn't really know if you could hear me. So I was like looking around, like figure out whether I needed to press a button. You exist. We all exist. Science exists. Let's hear it. What you got? I got science news. What do you got? What science you got? All right. So I'm gonna start us off with the, what science news and then move up to more exciting and happy stuff. So a new study in IOP science, which is an open access journal, assessing the ExxonMobil Corporation's information policy related to climate change in the past. And so what they did is they looked at climate change communications from ExxonMobil, 107 different documents. Some were peer reviewed and non peer reviewed publications. There were internal company documents and then there were paid editorial style advertisements. And so there are three, like two to three different kinds of communications that ExxonMobil was engaged in since the 60s or 70s to the present day. And these climate change documents kind of look at all of them and characterize them. And what they find is that when it came to the science of climate change academically, ExxonMobil really actually helped the field of climate science along. Their scientists did a lot of research and published peer reviewed papers that support the hypothesis that climate change is anthropogenically caused by increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and that warming would occur, extensive warming would occur over time. However, because- Wow, that is amazing. So Exxon Corporation contributed to the knowledge that global warming was taking place and contributed the finance scientists who were making these findings and publishing them. I had no idea that they were such good people. Great, but that's at the end of the story. Yeah, I knew there was more. There's a more, there was my butt that I wanted to get to the butt part. Gotta get to the butt. So there's a discrepancy though when between the information as it's produced by the researchers and then it kind of moves internally to the company and internal documents in the company also acknowledge and say, okay, this is what our scientists are saying. And then there are the paid advertorials which were these advertisement stories that go like on big pages in the New York Times for instance, all the advertorials they looked at were from the New York Times because the New York Times has a database that was accessible for them. They know that Exxon Mobile published advertorials in at least six other major newspapers over the years. What they found. So here's the accounting for expressions of reasonable doubt, 83% of peer reviewed papers and 80% of internal documents acknowledge climate change is real and human caused. Only 12% of advertorials do. With 81% of the advertorials expressing doubt. So what happened is the marketing department got a hold of those statements in the research papers where the researchers say, but there is doubt about the accuracy of these models as to how high the temperatures will go and when these temperature increases might be perceived. There's, they saw those sentences and they said, we're gonna take those sentences as opposed to the major conclusion of the paper which is humans are causing climate change. They took the butts of the research papers and made those the emphasis of the advertorials. So what you're trying to tell me is that Exxon is full of butts. Exxon is full of butts. You heard it here. Wait, what do you call it though, when you take the body of information and you refocus away from all the parts that are true. I believe that's called misdirection. Mr. A. Lying. Lying, that's the word I'm looking for, lying. Misinformation, spin. They took. It's called lying. Spin is a misdirection from the word lying. That's what that is also. It's called lying. They lied to people. Yeah, so it's a very interesting open access paper. The documents, yeah, Gordon McLeod says cherry picking. Exactly. They, the researchers outline ExxonMobile's strategic approach to climate change research and communication, which helps to contextualize the findings of their paper and allow them to come to this conclusion that ExxonMobile misled the public. Right, well, and the thing is, they're not releasing articles. They're releasing advertorials, which means they could put literally anything they want because it's essentially ad space that they bought. Is it though? Is that completely above board? Because if you say that your product will help you lose weight, but all of your research says that the product makes you gain weight, that's false advertising. So an advertorial is, it is actually ad space. That's what it is. And it is written in the style of a journalistic article. So an editorial. Right, and so that's exactly what it is. Is it something to make it look like a page in the magazine you're reading so that you can flip the page and you just continue reading this, you know, peer reviewed, thought out, edited thing. You're still reading, reading, reading. You don't realize until you get to the fine print at the bottom, if at all, that it is not a page in the magazine you're reading, it is an ad. Exactly. So they could put whatever they want in it. Depending on how they word it, they could put it whatever they want, absolutely. No, you can't put whatever you want and be lying. That's called lying. It's called false advertising and it is a legal issue. But it's also, you can say. It is something that the cigarette industry was. Right, but there's high cigarettes. So you can say, for example, that camels are healthier than moral bros, but that doesn't mean that they're healthy. It's all about the exact wording that you use, right? And so if they found in a very tiny percentage of these cases, this one piece of data that indicates that warming is not occurring, if they're putting that in an advertorial since they found that in a scientific study, even if it was statistically insignificant, they're technically not lying. No, I don't think that's true. I think that's technically wrong. That's the way advertising works. This pill, you can lose 30 pounds in two weeks if you don't eat anything else. That's how advertising works. Oh my goodness. You shouldn't understand this more than anyone else in this country. Why would I understand this more than anyone else in the world? Because you sell things, sell things. That's a big bag of assumptions. That's a big bag of assumptions, right? I'm not trying to accuse you of anything. All I'm saying is that... You are painting with a very specific product. Let me just finish. I had one thing. Let me not make it myself sound like a monster accusing Justin of things. All I'm saying is that if you are in the business of sales, I come from salesmen. Both of my parents are salesmen. I understand this. You use information to your advantage to make your product sound great because maybe your product is great, but you're also going to pick the items that will make it sound that way. When your product is great, you don't have to pick and choose your data. See, you're proving that point. Okay, never mind. What were you going to say? Well, I just want to sell you guys. Since we're talking about selling, I want to move on from this Exxon mobile selling of lies. I want to sell you on alternative energy. I want to sell you on wind and solar right now. Let's hear it. I want the wind and solar. Right now, we are to the order of billions of dollars subsidizing the wind and solar industries. The alternative energy industry is subsidized in order to run because it is in its infancy and in order to get that jumpstart and be successful, it's needed a little kickstart, right? Got to get the federal government in there, adding some money and getting companies going and getting infrastructure in place. Infrastructure. Infrastructure is very important and very expensive. So, it's a question. Do we need to be spending all this money subsidizing this alternative energy? When we know that gas and coal produce energy so well for us, do we really need to be subsidizing these other industries? Yes, well, let me just say a new paper if you're just coming, looking for a reason. Yeah, paper and nature energy this week. Estimates is trying to estimate the economic benefit of wind and solar power across the entire United States. Berkeley environmental engineer, Deb Milstein and colleagues have taken a look at the air quality in local regions with the addition of solar and wind and looked at this across the entire United States. So you might look at this and go, well, how would you do this? It's actually very complicated because in some regions like California, we don't have a lot of coal burning power plants and we've got a lot of solar already. So adding new solar doesn't really have much of an influence on stuff, but in areas like Virginia where they are burning a lot of coal, adding wind or solar can actually have a major impact on air quality. What they find, they estimate that between 3,000 to 12,700 premature deaths were averted because of improvements to air quality over about the last decade. And this, the aversion of these deaths has benefited us economically between 30 to $113 billion, which works out to be a little bit more than the subsidies themselves. That's great, we're in the black. Right, so the benefits from wind work out to be about seven cents per kilowatt hour and that's actually more than unsubsidized wind costs. So there's the subsidies that are going in. They're not just helping this infant industry or I mean, it's not infant anymore but this growing industry. It's actually helping public health by cleaning the air and removing the health problems that are related to air pollution. In the United States, air pollution was responsible for about 200,000 premature deaths a year. And the CDC reports that the third biggest killer is respiratory disease at 155,000 deaths. So estimates like this are really going to let us know really what the interesting interplay of factors at work by implementing solar and wind, we aren't just using an energy that isn't gas or coal. We are actually cleaning the environment and improving the health of people which is benefiting the country economically. So this is the thing that drives me nuts is that. So did I sell it? You sold it so well, but this is exactly it is that people feel like either it's too far away. It's a bunch of generations away. It's not going to affect us right now or it's just about those darn trees and those penguins and those polar bears who cares. Or it's about. You're talking to, you've got this impression of people. I'm finding. Justin, I think you're forgetting that I read about two research papers a week on public perception of climate change. So this is what people think. They think they are separated from the issue. It's not affecting them today. This is not affecting their individual selves or their loved ones. But more and more we are seeing time and time again that climate change and dirty energy is affecting us today right now. And even if it's something, if you don't want to be a proponent for the environment, if you don't want to hang out with those darn hippies, whatever, it's still a public health issue right now. I agree. But I think that across the political spectrum people are doing things like putting solar panels on the roofs for the economic benefits, the immediate benefits. And if that's how we appeal to that group, by all means, let's continue. I'm glad that that is your perception, Justin. That's great. You probably have a really good outlook on how things are. But I think that this is a big part of the debate that is being shied away from in the, as you're saying, in the political spectrum. People are not going to this individual part of the conversation as often as they should be, which is the current present public health issues. Yep. Absolutely. Help me, alternative energy, you're my only hope. Yeah. Hey, Justin, what you got? Published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Planet's new discovery on Mars by Curiosity rover hints an act of hydrothermal history, suggesting habitable conditions, which is historically here on Earth, led to life. Zinc and germanium enrichments discovered in sedimentary rock in the Gale crater on Mars by the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer on Curiosity. I wonder if it's little robot arms. It's got this little lab. Zinc and germanium tend to cluster together in high temperature fluids and often occur together on Earth in hydrothermal deposits containing sulfur. Concentrations of 10 to 100 times the zinc and a hundred times the germanium levels in sedimentary rock in the Gale crater compared to the typical Martian crust. Why is this crater so significantly different than the rest of Mars' crust? So it can, the elevated concentrations of zinc and germanium can potentially be explained by hydrothermal activity that occurred in the region according to lead author Jeff Berger, geologist at the University of Guilf in Ontario, Canada. Quoty voice, you have heat and you have chemicals and basically food for life. Berger said Gale crater formed 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago from a meteor impact early in Mars' history. Previous research has shown that Gale crater held freshwater lakes or was a freshwater lake some millions of years ago. Extreme thermal environments on Earth are home to a diverse array of microbial life adapted to these conditions. And these organisms may have been some of the first to evolve here on Earth. So is it possible the potential? Is did Mars have the same ingredients that we had here on Earth? So researchers don't think this is the site of hydrothermal activity that it didn't take place right here but rather it was transported from another location. The elements could have been concentrated by volcanic activity or some sort of other activity that occurred before the crater was formed and those sediments would have been carried by rivers that wound up in the Gale crater. Unless Mars had water when Gale crater was formed by meteorite impact. Energy of the impact could have heated the planet's crust, caused the fluids to circulate in a hydrothermal fashion which could have also concentrated zinc and germanium according to Berger. So also odd things, germanium tends to cluster near silicon and rocks on Mars and a predictable ratio of germanium to silicon. The new study found germanium and martian rocks that was not in its typical cluster with silicon and did not show the standard germanium silicon ratio. So very different this crater than what they're finding elsewhere on the martian environment. This is also, yeah. So this is Ashwin Vasavada. She's a curiosity mission project scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California but not part of this study. She says the potential presence of hydrothermal systems during Mars's ancient history adds to a whole variety of conditions that might all fall under the umbrella of being habitable. Right, yeah, hydrothermal, that's water, that's geothermal stuff, it's warm water, that's possibly life. I mean, that's yes, but I love the caveats in this. It's like, well, you know, this could have been hydrothermal-like. So what I'm hearing is hot tubs on Mars. Yeah, at one point, at another point. The question is, were they around long enough to really support life? Right. They were there, but were they there long enough to make life happen? Well, you know, you have a freshwater lake right there, but not necessarily that hydrothermic activities in that lake. So there's still more to look at, but broadening that brush of where, what could be in that history. Genies, we're familiar with genies. Gens, you rub the lamp, the thing pops out. Yes. Grants you three wishes. But these wish granters are fickle folk. They can be sometimes. I don't want to come wash, they don't want to come clean my house. I mean, I try. Yeah, and they might, but they can be a little too literal. You might wash your house with a wave of a tsunami that hits Portland every several hundred years. Sorry, Portland. So caution when wishing is always advised. For instance, if you wish that it would rain diamonds for a thousand years, poof, you might just find yourself transported to the core of Neptune. Because when it rains on Neptune, it sometimes rains diamonds all the way down to the core of the planet. And for thousands of years at a time, the interior of planets like Neptune or Uranus consists of solid core covered by thick layers of air quotes, ice, which is mostly made up of hydrocarbons, water, and ammonia. For a long time, astrophysicists have been speculating that extreme pressure that rains more than 10,000 kilometers beneath the surface of these planets splits the hydrocarbons causing diamonds to form, which then sink deeper and deeper into the planet's interior. Using ultra-strong X-ray lasers and other facilities at Stanford Lumiere Accelerator Center in California, research has simulated conditions inside the cosmic giants at pressures of 150 gigapascals. And for those not familiar with gigapascals, 150 gigapascals is about the equivalent to 150 billion pascals. And temperatures of 5,000 Celsius or 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit-ish, they compressed some tiny bits of plastic polystyrene and forced shock waves through them. Hody voice, the first smaller slower wave is overtaken by another stronger second wave and they're talking about the shock waves. Dresden researcher Dominic Krauss explains, most diamonds form the moment both waves overlap and since this process only takes a fraction of the second, researchers used ultra-fast X-ray diffraction to take snapshots of the diamond's creation and the chemical process involved. Our experiments show that nearly all of the carbon atoms compact into nanometer-sized diamonds. So not something that would look very good on a ring in their experimentation, but based on the results, the authors of the study assumed that the diamonds on Neptune and Uranus are much larger structures and likely sink down to the planet core over a period of thousands of years. So somewhere in the core of these planets are probably giant diamonds that future sci-fi writers will be mining, no doubt. Based on these results, the authors say their experiments are also providing with better insights into the structure of the exoplanets. Researchers can measure two main metrics in these cosmic giants outside of our solar system. First one is mass based on positional changes of the mother star and the other is its radius derived from the shadow that it casts as the planet passes the star. Oh wait, that's, yeah. So the relation between these two metrics offers clues about the planet's chemical makeup. For instance, whether it consists of light or heavy elements. In addition to astrophysical insights, the experiments also have potential for some down here on earthy practical applications. Like making diamond showers. They're making diamonds. Yeah, diamonds that can be used in electronic instruments, medical procedures, cutting materials and industrial production. Currently, the production methods are done by blasting some sort of creating lots of things. But this is laser based production might mean cleaner, more controllable process. You get the diamond you want instead of the one you just end up with. Yeah. Space diamonds. Space diamonds. There are, this has been hypothesized. This is experimental evidence of it. So sci-fi writers have already been writing diamonds into their planets. Diamonds have already existed. Diamond, whole diamond planets. Doctor, who did that? The diamond planet? Doctor, it's always on the cutting edge. Always, always. Moving on from diamonds. I'm gonna take us back to zinc. I'm gonna take us, well, actually I'm gonna- You don't say, Kiki, need some zinc? I'm gonna take us back. Yeah, I'm gonna take us back to, looking at zinc on rocks, but not rocks from Mars, not trying to figure out what's going on on Mars, but trying to figure out what's happening on the moon. There was some recent evidence from a paper in Nature Geoscience, scientist at Brown University, analyzed glass deposits found on the moon's surface. And from the analysis, they were able to determine that they're, or they concluded that there's water in the deposits suggesting that the interior of the moon is wet as opposed to being dry. But this kind of goes against the idea of, this goes against the idea of the lunar formation. And the idea is that the moon actually formed in a very hot process, that it was in an impact of another body with Earth that ejected the moon in a mass of magma and hotness, and it blurbled around and then coalesced. And it was very hot. This was not a, oh, it's cool and nice, and we're gonna preserve all our water on the inside of the moon kind of a moment. It's very hard to understand how the inside of the moon could actually be, quote unquote, wet, unless that water is tied up somehow in molecularly. And researchers this week, publishing in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they are questioning this recent discovery because they are looking at a rock. It's called the Rusty Rock and it was collected from the moon's surface during the Apollo 16 mission in 1972. And there was this Rusty Rock. It looks like there are rust deposits on it. And one of the researchers on this study, James Day, who's a geochemist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He's the leading author of the study. He says, it's the only rock from the moon that came back with what appeared to be rust on its outer surfaces. And people have been kind of like, all right, so water, that could make rust, right? You have water and oxidation processes that lead to the formation of rust, but how did that really happen? And so they did some chemical analyses and they found that the rock's composition is actually not really consistent with the wet interior hypothesis, but actually dry interior. And he says, it's a bit of a paradox. It's a wet rock that comes from a very dry interior part of the moon. The rust itself is actually made up of lighter isotopes of zinc. And that means that it's probably the byproduct of zinc condensation on the moon's surface after it evaporated during the moon's formation. And so you have the heavier, drier isotopes of zinc that are still inside the moon. And this kind of floated to the top during this rock floated to the top from that interior and it was layered with this light evaporated zinc that condensed on the surface of the rock to make it look like rust. Day says, zinc is a volatile element, so it behaves a bit like water under conditions of moon formation. It's something like clouds forming from the ocean. The clouds are rich in light oxygen isotopes and the ocean is rich in heavy oxygen isotopes. And that's very similar to the way the interior of the moon is enriched in these heavy isotopes and has been depleted in light and volatile elements. And so he thinks that there's really not much water on the inside of the moon. And this is going to be a big problem for people who want to go and live on the moon and survive off the water that they think might be there because there's not gonna be any water there. See, but this is why the moon has so much effect on the tides. It's so thirsty. It's so thirsty. No, it's so thirsty. That's, there we go Blair, that's good. One of his graduate students, Terry McIntosh, is working on the glass beads that the Brown University group had published their wet moon interior results based on. And so, and she's also comparing it to the composition of the zinc deposits as well. And so Day says, it seems like that's the next logical step to try and solve this problem. Do the comparison and find out why this one result says, wet and theirs says dry. So I love it. Science in action. Wet V dry. Yes. And the best thing is that it's indirect. It's like, oh, we're using these rocks that were taken from the moon. We're not actually on the moon. Yeah, let's just drill down in there, right? Yeah, let's just get up there. That's rocks. Do some drill and find out what's really going on. Yeah, and Twit Refugee says it doesn't matter. Technologists are really only talking about utilizing surface ice that's accessible on the moon. And there is that, there is thought to be a lot of surface ice hidden in the shadows of the crater's ice that never melts that could be harvested. And so that's one idea, but wouldn't it be great if there were water on the moon in the moon? But there's not. That's why there's so many holes. It's like a sponge. Like a sponge, yeah. I'm doing the science. Justin, I'm so excited right now. All right, this week in Mind Your Dosage, where sometimes too much of a good thing stops being a good thing, like how drinking in moderation can reduce stroke risk and trends towards long-term cognitive health, yet hardcore heavy drinking leads to an early grave. This week in Mind Your Dosage is about vitamin B. Recent research suggests long-term high dose supplementation where vitamins B6 and B12 is associated with a two to four-fold increase and lung cancer risk in men relative to non-users. And if you smoke, it's even worse. At 20 milligrams of B6 or 55 micrograms of B12 a day for 10 years, male smokers taking B6 at this dose were three times more likely to develop lung cancer. Male smokers taking B12 at such doses were approximately four times more likely to develop the disease compared to non-users. And I do have to question a little bit in the study already because they went from two to four-fold to two to four times, three times. Well, I guess the three times is right. Times and fold are different. I'm still trying to sort this out. Anyways, they analyzed data for more than 77,000 participants in the vitamins and lifestyle cohort study, long-term prospective observational study designed to evaluate vitamin and other mineral supplements in relation to cancer risk. All participants were aged 50 to 76, were recruited in the state of Washington between years 2000, 2002. Upon enrolling the study, participants reported information to researchers about the vitamin usage of the past 10 years and this included the actual dosage information. So researchers used statistical techniques to adjust for numerous factors, including personal smoking history, age, race, education, body size, alcohol consumption, personal history of cancer, or chronic lung disease, family history of lung cancer and the use of anti-inflammatory drugs. Quoting voice from Theodore Barski PhD, Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center. This sets all of these other influencing factors as equal. So we are left with a less confounded effect, the long-term B6 and B12 super supplementation. Our data shows that taking high doses of B6 and B12 over a very long period of time could contribute to lung cancer incidences, incidence rates in male smokers. This is certainly a concern worthy of further evaluation. This is the first study to look at the effects of long-term high dose B6, B12 supplement use and lung cancer. Supplements have been broadly thought previously to reduce cancer risk. So more studies underway. One, to see if they can replicate the data. Two, another study looking deeper into the current finding which of all the elevated risk factors here for men, no elevated risks were found in the women who participated in the study. So something about men and high doses of vitamin B induces lung cancer. So they've now found this correlation, but they don't have any kind of, they haven't come up with what it is. What kind of interaction is making that happen? Yep, they don't know the mechanism. They just see an alarming spike in the data. And only in men, which is also interesting. I think the second study where they're gonna look at why they didn't find it in women, they're gonna also focus on menopausal state-type conditions because the ages I think that are grouped into what they've been looking at, like maybe that's that, maybe it's a hormonal thing, like it's maybe it's tied to a testosterone, they don't know. But that's what they now have to look for. They got a big exclamation point saying, aha, something, let's delve deeper. Also to be noted, the rate at which people were taking these B vitamins were many, many times higher than what you will find in your daily multivitamin. Yeah, so high dose means really high dose. Yeah, these people were, yeah. Maybe overdoing it a little. Well, according to this shot, but you don't know. You have three of those sublingual vitamin B pills under their tongue all the time. Yeah, kind of seems like it would have to be. Because even your regular multivitamins sometimes will be at 200 or 400 or 500%. But this was, this is even beyond that. These were, these are considered high dose, high high dosage supplementation. So they were looking for a wonder cure in their B vitamins and may have found the opposite. So again, that's been this weekend. Mind your dosage, people. And if you just tuned in, this is This Week in Science and we are going to be moving on with the show. Do you know what time it is, you guys? What time is it? I think so. Yeah, it's time for Blair's Animal Corner. Suspicion, oh yeah, I was right. My pet, little pet, don't pet at all. Wanna hear about his animal? She's your girl. Except for giant pandas. Let's go. Pet at all, go, go, go. What you got, Blair? I got something that tastes real fishy. I have- Fish. Fish. I have a fish that, first, it's kind of tastes like a male fish. And then it turns into tasting more like a female fish. But it's the same fish. That's because there are over 400 species of fish that are sequential hermaphrodites. I've talked about them a little bit on the show before, like clownfish, right? Start as males, turn into females. That's what sequential means. It starts as one turns into another. It's not parallel. It's not both at the same time. Sequential hermaphrodite as opposed to, like, original hermaphrodite. Yeah. You know, standard hermaphrodite. No, no, no. Sequential. Which means one and then the other. And maybe a particular order, maybe not. Which means that Nemo's dad probably really did turn into his mom. Correct. Once his mom died. Yeah. He wouldn't have stayed as a dad. That would have been such a different story. It is indeed. Anywho, scientists from the UK wanted to take one of the first looks at a particular element of sex change in fish. The particular element they wanted to look at is if they go from male to female, as in clownfish, fish, or if they go from female to male, as in California sheep head, if you've ever seen those. They all start female. One, the one biggest one turns male. And then when the male dies, the biggest female again turns male. Species that change from male to female are called protandress. And one changing from female to male are called protogenus. So those two different types, I won't repeat those. I'll just say male to female or female to male because everyone will have to rewind several times to remember which is which. But the study was particularly looking at the differences in life history and if there was a pro or con to ending up female versus ending up male. This research is looking at what happens to the population size and the reproductive success through these changes. So regardless when they change, their reproductive success is expected to increase. But their fitness advantage can increase more rapidly for one of the strategies than the other. So in protandress, that's where you end up female. I studied and still, yep, okay. Female, it's better to be large females. This is why they go in this direction because they produce more eggs. Bigger females make more eggs. In fish ecology, we talk about big adult, female, fecund fish, baffs. And so the larger you are, the more eggs you make. So smaller individuals are better off being males because they're using their time being tiny as being a male. But when they're protogenus, when they end up as males, they start female and males. Small males cannot compete with the larger ones. So there's more selection involved. There's more competition between males. So in that case, it's better for them to be females first and then spend all of their big time being males because the males are dominant. This is a question of chicken or egg though. So for example, with clownfish, the females are definitely in charge. They're the larger, they are the end of the life cycle. But in the California sheep head, I was talking about earlier, there's a single male that's dominant with a bunch of females. And so the question is, is the male dominant because that's the larger sex or is the larger sex male because males are dominant? So we still don't know the answer to that. But what they did do in this research project is they measured offspring production based on the number of eggs and sperm produced every year over a lifetime. And then they use the diversity of genes transferred to the next generation as a proxy for reproductive success. This is a lot of the stuff we talked about before to see who reproduces the most. Both methods found that regardless of the direction of sex change, the individuals have the same strategy producing more offspring as the second sex. So whatever they end up as when they're larger, when they're older, that's when they have the most reproductive success. So sex change in both cases is the successful strategy. But what they found was the big difference was that population numbers are smaller when they're male terminus, when they end up as males after being females, population numbers drop. So populations are less resilient if they're female first and they end up male. So this doesn't tell us too much because again, this is correlative. We don't know if in this specific case, this species would do better if their population size was larger. We don't know that. We just know that by the numbers, the ones that end up male have smaller population sizes. So that's really the next step is to see if this is affecting their overall fitness as a species. If there's something that could be tweaked that would change this experimentally. So that's really the question here. The main takeaway is that all sequential hermaphrodites are not created equal. They really need to be separated out into these two groups, into male first and female first. For female first, yeah. Because it is a completely different reproductive strategy. That has different effects on the population at large. Yes. And so their next step actually that you receive UK, their next step is to focus on the effect of overfishing on these species. Because also a lot of fish populations, you're allowed to take certain genders at certain times. And the more we know about reproductive history of species, the better we can fish sustainably. So very interesting kind of the tip of the iceberg here but fish sex much more complicated than we thought. Much more interesting. Yeah. So fascinating. It's just I'm gonna be a female. No, no, I'm gonna be a male. No, okay, let's change this up a little bit. You know, there comes a time in every young fish's life that it's time to trade in one set for another. That's right. I'll just learn about what 200 species you said 400. Yeah, 400 species. Yeah. So the other thing that fish are changing for besides reproductive success, climate change. Climate change is changing fish. Why? Because of warmer waters. We've talked about climate change, changing mammal sizes on land. Do you remember what was happening? They were getting tinier. Specifically mountain and hilltop animals were getting smaller because they were getting pushed to areas of less oxygen and less space. A very similar thing is happening in our oceans. University of British Columbia looked at fish size as compared to ocean temperatures. And they found that fish are expected to shrink by 20 to 30% if ocean temperatures continue to climb due to climate change. Since fish are cold-blooded animals and they cannot regulate their own body temperatures when the waters get warmer, that means that their metabolism goes up. When metabolism goes up, that means you need more oxygen. Imagine the fish are panting. So as that happens, they need more oxygen. At the exact same time, we have to remember that gills and gill surface area is not exactly proportionate to body size. So for example, a fish like cod, they increase, if you increase their weight by 100%, their gills surface area only grow by 80%. So when these fish end up being large and they need more oxygen, an increase in size will not increase their oxygen intake. So instead what happens, they have to shrink in size to meet the oxygen demand. They've got to match the gills. Where they are, absolutely. And what's more on top of that, warmer waters carry less oxygen. We've talked about this on the show before, turbidity. The temperature of water increases nutrients and oxygen as temperature drops. Cold water is rich water. So as waters get warmer, it causes their metabolism to go into overdrive. They need more oxygen, they shrink. On top of that, there's less oxygen in that water. So all of this together, fish are going to be shrinking. Which if you think about it, some of our main food fish like tuna, they're fast moving. They require more energy and oxygen than the cod they were studying. They are going to shrink even faster. So this could affect. Absolutely. Tuna is like one of my three food groups today. I love tuna and I love salmon. But you got to fish sustainably and got to cut down those emissions. That's what we're learning today. Last but not least. There was a study this last week that suggested that aquaculture, that if it were well planned, we could potentially cover all of our seafood needs just with aquaculture. That's right, I did see that. So as we learn more about the ocean and how to fish sustainably, we're also learning how to do, how to refine some of our fishing practices. So for example, we have all these turtle excluders now in a lot of our traps so turtles can get out, right? But also there's some fish that historically farming has been terrible, so farmed salmon. Historically, terrible for the environment. But as we learn more about the environment and how we can do these things more sustainably, suddenly certain salmon farms are not quite as bad. And as they keep going, they're learning more and more ways to grow these fish without hurting the environment or the stock. So yeah, absolutely. This is something we should be looking at because if done right, fish can be a very integral protein source, especially if we're running out of space to graze cattle. So last, I wanted to bring a real quick story about the ocean giving back to us. Some kind of some good news from the ocean. And that has to do with bivalves and your teeth. So Justin, do you have fillings? No. You don't have any fillings. Kiki, do you have fillings? I have fillings. Yeah, I have fillings too. I have soft teeth. I think I still have some silver amalgams in there. Oh my goodness. Well, it's interesting you should say that because on average, dental restoration lasts about five to 10 years before needing replacement. The exact timeframe depends on the type of restoration you get, whether it's the silver or if it's the composite material, the type of the care that you give to your own teeth, the type of teeth you have, whether they're soft teeth, they're damaged easily. And the continual chewing, acidic and hard foods, how much coffee do you drink, poor hygiene, nighttime tooth grinding, all these things can have a lot of impact on your dental restoration. And then before you know it, you have to replace it. The main reason that restorations fall out or crack is due to brittle failure of bond with the surrounding tooth. So apparently all dental composites, I didn't know this, have micro particles that increase the rigidity and prevent the shrinkage of curing. So the trade-off is that when the composite gets harder, it gets more brittle. And then through pressure or wear or tear, cracks form in between the composite and your tooth. And then that creates a space for things to grow and expand until eventually it pops off or it starts to crack to the point where it needs to be replaced. So where do the bivalves come in? You see Santa Barbara researchers have developed a new type of dental composite that is from muscles. Because muscles, if you go to any shipyard, any pier or even look at any boat that's been in the water for any length of time, there are barnacles and muscles stuck to it all over it and they are hard to get off. Yes, muscles can hold on to nearly anything. They have a really interesting series of bissel threads which really do kind of look like hair that affix to surfaces that kind of becomes intertwined in the card coating, the kind of glue material that they secrete. And so the threads mixed with this glue create durability and flexibility that make them almost impossible to pull off. So the key mechanism that they wanna replace, they don't wanna put bissel threads in your mouth, which is what I first thought and I was like gross. Because I don't know if any of you have ever been in a biology class where you've had to look at this kind of stuff, I thought of bissel threads and I don't want that in my mouth. But the key to the mechanism is what the scientists are calling dynamic or sacrificial bonding. So instead of a single strong bond, which is what we do with our tooth restoration now, it is several weaker bonds. So these bissel threads, they make reversible weak bonds in a sub-nanoscopic molecular level that can dissipate energy without compromising overall adhesion. So essentially it's light as a feather, light as a board. You and your friends are using all of your little pinky fingers to lift your friend up off the floor instead of one person, just try to pick them up with their arms. So instead of one breaking point, you have many, many, many light touch breaking points. You'd have to sever them all in order to pull the muscle off of the ship. So the new study shows that using a catecholic coupling agent instead of the conventional sign lane coupling agent provides 10 times higher adhesion and a 50% increase in toughness compared to current dental restorative resin composites. That is pretty impressive. And this is just a proof of concept, so they haven't actually done dental fillings yet in anyone, but that is the supposed next step, is that we will start testing this material on some dental fillings to see how it all works out. I'm assuming in cadavers or not real mouths at first, but that would be great. They could practice on me. I've got, I have a couple of cavities and they're on those, what do you call them? Wisdom teeth, which are just fine, but they're like, hey, you got cavities, we could fill them, but they're wisdom teeth. We normally take them out and I'm torn between, do I keep them, do I fill them? I still haven't made a decision. Hey, practice on those. It doesn't work out, I'll just check them out. Yeah, so as we get older, I think that teeth, that's something that we're really going to need to look very closely at, because as people get closer and closer to living to a hundred on a regular basis, the teeth are gonna be a limiting factor and I don't wanna be eating puree to everything when I get to be older, so I want some nice teeth. We only have teeth. Well, especially going into it with those teeth, Blair, of course, you've put a lot of work into those teeth. They're gorgeous, they're perfect, yeah. I wanna keep them, I don't want fake ones. I'll take some bissel threads in my mouth. You'll take them if you have to, it'll work. It tastes like mussels. Bull. I'm sure it wouldn't taste like mussels forever, even if at all. Yeah, it wouldn't, technology's amazing. They'd get rid of that fishy flavor. Thanks, mussels. Forever. Technology is amazing, and this last week at the American Chemistry Society, meeting American Chemical Society, meeting in, I don't know where they are, Washington, Washington this year. Yes, in Washington, researchers reported, it's Jonathan Scheiman, reported on his study, which is involving taking the poop from elite athletes to find out what makes them special. Science. So the eventual goal is to characterize the microbial population of the guts of elite athletes to discover if there's something in their guts that makes them more efficient or makes them better at harnessing the energy in their food, or what is it? Is there something? Or a reverse, right, the reverse like, what effect does this much physical activity have on the system? Is it something that you can see across all athletes, or is it something specific to everyone? Right, and so Scheiman says, we are more bacteria than we are human. The bugs in our gut affect our energy metabolism, making it easier to break down carbohydrates, protein, and fiber. They're also involved in inflammation and neurological function. So perhaps the microbiome could be relevant for applications in endurance recovery and maybe even mental toughness. They have already identified some bacteria that are really good at breaking down lactic acid in the population of marathoners that they took fecal samples from. And lactic acid is produced by the body during physical activity. So maybe the breakdown of lactic acid helps to reduce muscle fatigue or helps in that energy metabolism somehow. That would kind of make sense, maybe. And again, creating all this lactic acid, so maybe you're just feeding that which would then continue to be present, right? Exactly, we don't know for sure. And so what they are doing now is they are taking the bacteria and giving them to mice to measure the effects of the bacteria on lactic acid levels and fatigue in mice to see what happens. They're also comparing bacteria from ultramarathoners with bacteria taken from rowers that are training for the Olympics. They found bacteria in ultramarathoners that can break down carbohydrates and fiber that's not present in the rowers. And they suggest that because they're seeing these differences between athletes that different sports might foster different microbiomes. There might be niches produced by particular kinds or intensities of activity. Yeah, so at the end goal, though, this isn't all just free science love that the researchers are giving out. The goal is to start a company. They're calling it Fit Biomics and they'd like to create a probiotic to market that would be basically taking the bacteria from elite athletes and creating a cocktail that could be given in a pill or drink form to individuals. Which is really too bad because when you go into any sort of bit of science with the idea that you're going to get a result that you can use for a specific purpose, especially in dealing with something like the microbiome, the bias and the ability to color your results in a direction become magnetotally increased. But still an interesting study, although it doesn't mean that anybody should trust the product that comes out of it. Right, so hopefully we'll see what comes of this. This was research presented at a conference. There are still papers to be published. We do know that the evidence for probiotics is still and for transplants and that kind of stuff is things are still scant and scarce in the research world and the evidence is not- Scant and scat. Scant and scat and scarce. Yes, it is. And we need studies like this and further from this to really help us understand more about our microbiomes and how they work. We really still don't even know to what extent probiotics, bacterial cocktails that we take to help our own microflora, to what extent they help or harm. We really don't know that. No, not the dangerous because it could be like, I could take this probiotic that they develop from this which is really good at devouring lactic acid. And yet in my sedentary lifestyle, I don't produce enough. Suddenly I find myself in the middle of the day for no apparent reason, running 10 miles. Because my microbiome was like, no, you got to produce lactic acid. Run, run, move, move, jump over something. And I end up running myself, rag it all over town for no apparent reason, just to satisfy my microbiome. So be careful people. It's a whole new layer of you have no idea how much you're actually controlled by your guy that you're in store for if you take these. Yep. Animals don't know what's in store for them when it comes to animal research. Researchers publishing nature methods have published their device called Fremo VR. It's a VR arena for animals. Researchers spend a lot of time trying to come up with physical environments in which to test animals. They build boxes and containment units for fruit flies and mice and snails and all sorts of organisms, fish in the hopes that they can alter certain characteristics and figure out a little bit more about animal behavior. But what if it were really easy to alter those characteristics? What if you didn't have to build whole new boxes? What if you didn't have to have components that you had to send grad students and interns in and out of the room to swap out and change? What if you could just at the click of a button change the environment and the mouse or the fruit fly would behave right along with it in virtual reality. And so what they have created is an arena, the walls or floors or computer displays each screen depicting photorealistic images that create the animal's perspective for walking, flying or swimming. There are up to 10 high-speed cameras monitoring the precise 3D positions of the animals. And then Fremovr updates its video imagery within milliseconds of the movements that the animals make to create the 3D illusion that they're moving in the environments that changed in response to their actions. The researchers compare the Fremovr to the holodeck from Star Trek, which is a computer-controlled virtual world for humans. But in this case, it's for fruit flies. Just make sure the holodeck doesn't turn evil and sends Abraham Lincoln out on the fishes. And if you're a writer, do not allow every fifth episode to take place on the holodeck. Okay, come on people. Think outside of the box, not in that. Outside of joking though, this is great because you can control your variables. You can control them to the very instant certain things happen and you can replicate it exactly the same. It's the perfect tool for behavioral scientists. It could be, it's probably more expensive than the bootstrapping that many grad students do to put together their behavioral experiments, but it is still the idea that virtual reality could be available for animal researchers and their experiments is intriguing. Now, just to get the VR goggles on the fish. Right. They keep slipping off. It's not goggles. This is an arena. This is a holodeck. No goggles involved. No goggles. These aren't Google goggles. This is freemo VR. All right, everybody. I hope some of you got the chance to at least see some of the eclipse this past Monday. If you did not see the eclipse, I recommend NASA as a resource. And we will put a link. NASA has some wonderful images from satellite taken by satellites around our planet and around our solar system. There are a couple of animations, some beautiful images of the moon passing in front of the sun from various perspectives. So, science, y'all. It never ends and it's beautiful. It is so beautiful bringing people together is, have we done it? We did it. We did it. Come to an end of another exceptionally good couple of hours of this week in science. Couple of hours. We did it. We made it through. Thanks, everybody, for watching. And I want to take this moment to, and also thanks to our guests, Daniel Abraham and Ty Frank from the Writers for the Expanse, otherwise known as James S.A. Corey. They work with the Writers for the TV show, the Expanse. They wrote the initial novels. It was a wonderful interview we had earlier today. And I would also like to take this moment to thank our Patreon sponsors, of which we have many and the list is growing. And maybe my internet will help you. I can't even load. There's so many of them. Thank you, Patreon sponsors. Paul Disney, G. Burton, Lattermore, John Ratnaswamy, Richard Onimus, Byron Lee, E. O. Kevin Parichand, Jacqueline Boyster, Tyrone Fong, Andy Gro, Keith Corsale, Jake Jones, Gerald Sorrells, Chris Clark, Richard Hendricks, Charlie Henry, Brian Hendrick, John Gridley, Steve Bickel, Kevin Railsback, Lissy's Adkins, Dave Freidel, James Randall, Bob Carlyer, Calder, Mark Mazaros, Edward Dyer, Turner, Erdie Four, Laila Merle, Marshall Clark, Larry Garcia, Man with Zucca, Tony Steele, Jenner, La la la la la la la la. Stop. Rewind. La la la la la la la la la. La la la la la la la la. La la la la la la la la la. La la la la la la la. 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But the time it got to 10, I was thinking, wow, actually it's pretty good. 10 names in a row. Now that list, I don't even know how many people that was. It seemed like 150,000. It did seem that way. It's wonderful. It's a growing list. And I do love reading the names. Thank you, everyone, for your support on Patreon. And if you are interested in supporting us, you can find information at Patreon.com slash This Week in Science. And remember, you can also help us out simply by telling your friends, family, co-workers about twists. Let them know. We had a great interview today. On next week's show, once again, we will be broadcasting live online at 8 p.m. Pacific Time on Wednesday on twist.org slash live. And you can join live, watch the show, join our chat room. But if you can't make it, don't worry. You can find past episodes at twist.org slash YouTube, Facebook.com slash This Week in Science or just twist.org. Thank you for enjoying the show. Twizz is also available as a podcast. Just Google This Week in Science in your iTunes directory. Or if you have a mobile-type device, you can look up Twizz, the number four droid app in the Android Marketplace. Of course, you can always look for This Week in Science in anything Apple Marketplace-y. For more information on anything you've heard here today, share notes will be available on our website. That's at www.twist.org, where you can also make comments and start conversations with the hosts or other listeners. Yes, or you can contact us directly. Email Kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinsecience.com or justinattwizzminion at gmail.com or Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org. Just be sure to put twist TWS somewhere in the subject line or your email will be spam-filtered into oblivion. You can also hit us up on the Twitter where we are at TwizzScience, at Dr. Kiki, at Jacksonfly, and at Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback. 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The changes I seek when I can only set up shop. One Week in Science is coming your way. Listen to what we say. And if you learn anything from the words of. This Week in Science. Science. Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Science. Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. What's the after show? It is the after show. Stay tuned for after show. Stay with us for after show. We like the after show. Don't you like the after show? You like the after show. It is the after show. Now can I remember that and do that again next time? Yeah, right. Do it every time Kiki, it's your new song. You love the after show. It's the after show. That's what I remember. It's the after show. So we totally forgot to ask them to put, write us into an episode of The Expanse. I'm very disappointed myself. We forgot to ask. That's right. But maybe I can email them. Maybe I'll email them or maybe I'll tweet to them. Visible rib cage and would be totally well suited to being a belter. It's something to fill my legs. I have a long torso and I can show ribs. I'm like super skinny. But I have short legs so they can only fill me from the waist up, which would be fine. Oh, my goodness. I'm really tired. Somewhere in the show. Somewhere in the two hours of the show. You got sleepy. Somewhere in the two hours. And I forgot, it's because I forgot water and I didn't have a break to go get water. And so that's why. And I don't have water. I get tired. Yeah, that makes sense. I drink three quarters of a liter. I usually go through a very large glass of water. And I'm still thirsty after the show. So to not have it and be talking, I need so much water. I need water. All right then. If you all need to go to sleep, I'm here. I could go do a different thing. Oh, my goodness. I really love you. Janiske says that in the expanse, I would be a bird woman who flies in space. Oh, that's what I forgot to ask him too. What was that show? And where's Dave Freidl? What's that? They also did. Those guys also did cowboys and aliens. And you know how there's that bird that keeps appearing and bluttering outside the window? That was sort of a sequence in cowboys and aliens. It was like a while in the custody of aliens sort of a delusional dream about what one of the characters was having about what was really going on. And there was a hummingbird fluttering around in it. And so it tied those two together through having a bird flutter around in a scene. I think that looks a lot better. Yeah, the expanse bird. There's also a sort of fluttery bird that kind of appears in cowboys and aliens, which I kind of like the concept of that, not necessarily because cowboys and aliens just sound cool. But the idea that like aliens show up and we have all this technology to confirm that they're there and send stuff sort of generally in interaction, even if it sort of fails, we can just show up earlier and we have like no technology. What I figure we should do is raise a posse and run out to where the alien mother ship is hovering high above the earth. So I have to say, so I'm just I'm almost done with season one. And the thing about it that I mean, I've looked up a little bit about it. So I know some spoilers. But the thing about at least season one that I really enjoyed and I was surprised by time after time was that there were so many opportunities for them to be like, yeah, it's robots or yeah, it's aliens. But it it's really just about people. It's about people. Yeah. And that is fascinating to me. And I actually disagree slightly with you. A big character is Justin disagrees with me slightly. That's what's unusual is I'm only slightly disagreeing. There's something that they do to great effect, which and Lars Ventures Kingdom, which is a whole sort of soap opera type of thing that takes place in a hospital. They're these beautiful, wonderful long shots of like in a hallway in an abandoned part of the hospital with an elevator in it or some some bit of like, you know, just sort of technology that's being utilized in the hospital, some artifact that has to be hospital or just some room or area of the hospital. And it's like a long shot. I mean, a long time of the shot. They sustain on it for a while and it builds this character that is the hospital that that is this sort of overarching aspect of the story. And they do a really good job, at least in the filming of this of making space and the places that you're at here and the, you know, the different environments a part of the story outside of it, just being humans in space. And we're going to have a room where some people are talking. We're going to go to another room where people are talking. There's portions of it that are just focused on the environment. Yeah, yeah. No, no, no. But but you understand what I'm saying that it's not. They're like, yes, I read a whole thing about how space is one of the characters in the expanse. It's very interesting. But but they have many opportunities where they could very easily pivot to aliens or to robots. And it wouldn't even be a pivot. It would be a normal progression in a science fiction trope. But they didn't pick the trope, and I found that very cool. Except that that's where they're going. Well, yeah, I understand. But they go a whole season without using aliens. It's you know, I know what happens, though. I told you, I looked it up. It's I still I maintain what I'm saying that it's like, especially, you know, the very first time that you see the Martians and the very first time that you see this unknown attacker and all this stuff, it's always humans. And there's a part of me in the back of my head that I was like, oh, God, this is when the aliens are going to show up. And and they went so far with it just being humans in political strife in this new expanse. Too bad they didn't stick around because I got more things I want to say that's flattering. Like like, I love how the black ops. This is maybe what they send out. Somebody sends out a black ops hit squad to go take somebody else down. And when the black ops hit squad shows up, you don't immediately identify it because they seem so normal in background. They're not like jeered up ninjas that are showing up to create havoc. They they've blended into sort of pedestrians in the background for a bit of it until until somebody figures out the fixes in and then all the shooting starts. Yeah, well, it's just it makes it a very interesting different type of show in that there is everybody's other and everybody's same, like at the same time. So which other are you are you looking out for in this moment? Yeah, I like that about it. And and that the that one of the lead characters wears a fedora. It's I have to say, though, here's where I disagree with you because that is not a fedora. That is like that is like a Justin Timberlake like foe Dora. Like it's not an actual detective fedora. It needs to be it needs to the brim needs to be like another inch wide. No, it doesn't. No, no, no. You don't know. It's one of those jerky little tiny fedoras that. Yeah, the fedora looks like it's not. Watch the the exact detectives that you were quoting earlier, Sam Spade. Those fedoras are very different. No, they're not. They're not like they're not like the shadow with his giant brimmed fedora and I love that they have a throwaway comment. And it's like, so what's up with the hat that keeps the rain off my head? Like they just throw a throwaway line and explain, yeah, I'm going to wear this hat. Shut up. Yeah, except it doesn't actually keep the rain off his head because the fedora is not big enough. It's a but that's what you know, it's not. That's not a door. Yes, it is. Oh, my God. You're thinking of a Panama hat. No, I'm not. Here's Sam Spade, the exact person you were talking about here. I'm going to screen share right now. Look at that. That is a much different hat. That's a that's a that's a pretty big fedora. That's a fedora. No, that's what a fedora is. No, but to be fair, Humphrey Bogart has a giant head. Oh, my God. You're really going to argue with me about this for real. OK, I think it looked good on the actor Miller. It had to. I mean, it wouldn't have looked good if it were different. Well, and I feel like that's part of it, too, that he's like he's very it's the the the style needs to be a little bit futuristic and different and all that kind of stuff. But I am just taking issue with Justin calling it the detective fedora because it's not it's the pop star foe Dora. That's what it is. You're hilarious, foe Dora. Yeah, my God. Wow. But if you look up fedora on Google, Google search comes back with all sorts of shapes. Yeah, that's true. A fedora is not just the one. Yeah, fedora are all the same. Yeah, most of them are not fedoras. Yeah, thank Google. That's true. Yeah, but the thing about the trope or whatever, you know, what what he he alluded at one point to the use of the protomolecule and the alien as a MacGuffin. And a MacGuffin is a tool to move the plot along that you don't ever really actually learn anything about it until much later. You may never actually learn anything about it. Chatroom. Chatroom is totally great player. Yeah, see. Yeah, yeah. I will acquiesce for what? Good. This is a fedora. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. There you in D war of the door. MacGuffin, an object or device in a movie or book that serves merely as a trigger for the plot. Oh, yeah. And they do the fun stuff with the technology and I get what they were. What they were saying about how the devices that they carry around sort of are intuitively understanding what they're going to do with them. Actually, I had to play a little catch up in watching. You know, at one point, one of the characters is using it as a voice simulator and you don't get that immediately until the it does its task and you get, oh, that's what it's doing. I get what's going on now. But initially, he doesn't say utilize voice simulation through a range of like they don't telegraph because, of course, the person's been using their device all this time, they don't have to go through these extra steps to tell it what they want it to do. So it just does it flipping an image from one device to another or downloading it happens with these little mild gestures. It's pretty seamless and it's pretty fun to watch because they do maybe telegraph as Star Trek did how technology will operate in the future. Look at this. The hat is called a Trilby hat. It is indeed. I learned something today. A Trilby hat. Yeah. Thank you, Brandon Burr. Narrow brimmed. Folded at the back. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. That's cool. That's funny. Identity four says the important spacey plot object is made out of something called doesn't matter. Funny from two inch brim to larger. Fatty says MacGuffin is his writing name. Stargate SG one. Episode 200 getting meta. Going meta. So the other thing is they have. I believe and now it's another not here to defend themselves. I believe they have a faster than light drive. Not faster than light, but very fast. It's called the Epstein drive and we were not able to talk about it. But it's it's a we didn't talk about it because we didn't have time. But it basically is probably again, another one of those things that's allowed the story to be told in the way that they told it. Otherwise, you have to go from going. Yeah, going from going from places so quickly, you know, it makes the belt actually really valuable to earth. So earth actually is caring about what goes on out there. And so the Epstein drive is what allows humans to travel through our solar system very quickly. I don't believe it's faster than light, though. It's just very, very quickly. And they do explain it in one of the episodes. It's also explained in the book. Or at least the discovery of it is explained. And how it changed everything. The Epstein drive is a modified fusion drive inverted by Solomon Epstein 150 years before the start of Leviathan Wakes. Travel from earth to interplanets and colonize asterbump and out of planets. The drive utilizes magnetic clay and exhaust acceleration to increase drive efficiency, which enables spaceships to sustain thrust. Throughout the entire voyage ship with the efficient Epstein drive is able to run the drive continuously for acceleration to its goal. And then after flipping it at about the halfway point is able to run drive continuously during the deceleration of previous engine designs. It's propelled less efficiently, could not be run long enough to achieve high velocities that Epstein drive permitted. It has a million newtons of thrust. All the thrusts. It's got all the thrusts. All of them. All of them. But it seems like you could just outfit like maybe one of their personal devices to communicate over long distances. But that's okay. It's nice to have that. I'm glad you guys are watching the expanse now. I like it. I'm telling you. That's so good. I got you hooked. It's interesting too because so they're not, they don't kill people off willy nilly like, you know, like some shows. Which I keep thinking they're going to. But they do occasionally kill people. So it keeps it interesting. It's it's the perfect middle zone. Like you don't want to know that all of the main characters are always safe. Right. Yeah. That kind of ruins it. But you also don't want to just deal with bloodbaths every other week. It's not. It's not George RR Martin. Yeah. Incidentally, the thing that I love is that Ty Frank has been or is. I don't know. I don't think he still is. But George RR Martin's assistant. No. Yeah. So that. Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones. This is like, I don't watch. Game of Thrones. I'm like that last person who hasn't. Oh, I'm just six seasons behind. So. But but this is what I always hear from the people who are fans but don't want spoilers. Like don't tell me who died. Don't tell me who died. Don't tell me who died because they're going to always kill somebody. They always kill George RR Martin kills everybody. Everybody dies. Your favorite characters. Die. Yeah. There's nobody who's safe. It is the extreme. Yeah. So I think expanse does it nicely. We're not everybody. Not everybody's going to die, but not everybody's safe either. Yeah. I like that. Good. Oh, identity four also has not. Seen. Game of Thrones. Okay. So we're the last two. I told you I'm six seasons behind. Yeah. I'm how many seasons are there? Seven. I'm seven seasons. Yeah. So I'm still not on the bandwagon either. Just because the more time elapses, then it's like more work that I have in front of me. So it's harder for me to get started. I can actually get into and binge just about anything. As I did with the expanse is I did with, I watched the Battlestar Galactica on Netflix in a week. Like the whole thing. Yeah. I can get into and heavy delve and do a show. And there's, I've only seen maybe, maybe I'm, I'm. Maybe, uh, maybe I'm not the lack, because I have seen one scene from Game of Thrones, which I really liked. But, but other than that, I, I haven't watched any of it. And I think I, I think, oh, I think I have access to it somehow. But it's still like, oh, yeah. There's another, what's the other thing I started watching? I started watching some other thing. That I got through a bunch of episodes on. What the heck was it? This crew. They don't know. They can't remember why they are there. Yeah. They wake up. I saw a couple of seasons that show and then stop watching it for some reason. I started. Yeah. I don't know what it's called, but I really liked it. I like to totally forgot. I've forgotten. I think you robbed the sparkly. Yeah. Dark matter. Dark matter. I love the noir aspect of it is like, okay, you're thrust into a situation. You don't know how you got there. React. And this crew wakes up on a spaceship. They don't have any memory of how they got there. But like something was like, oh, I know how these systems work. I don't know why I know this is how we get the life support back to maximum. I know that we've got a problem in sanitation. I'm just going to start doing it. And then they have a choice to be heroes or kind of villainous. They're robots. And they find out that they're villains. But then they kind of want to be heroes because the heck. Why not? And I haven't yet. I haven't seen preacher yet. And I've been told that there's things about that show that I will like. I've been told that there's things about that show that I just won't be able to buy into enough to watch it through. So I haven't seen that. Also, I have young children. So I end up. Like ask me anything about a. Tinkerbell. Any of the fairy stories. And I know all those by heart now. Yeah, right. With the, with your daughters. Yeah. I'm all on the knowledge about Tinkerbell. Tinkerbell was an engineer. And brave. Do you watch wildcats? Not so much. We actually like this boomer foods. But they get the wildcats. The animated where they have like two powers. It's like it. The show itself is to ADD for my kids. That's hilarious. Yeah. The fact that it switches its attention span. But. But yeah, when the, when the boomer food, when the tiger shows up and wants to, you know. Pop basketballs that gets full attention. Right. When the real animals are there. The cartoon. Yeah. Just another cartoon. The other. Oh, they're huge fans though. I can, I can put on. There's three shows my girls left. Beakman's world. Beakman. How are you? How do you have your hands on that? It's on the Netflix. It's on Netflix. Yep. All of it. Get the heck out of town. I gotta go. Yeah. No, they love Beakman. Followed by Bill Nye. And me and my eldest. So the youngest one have gone through pretty much all of brain games. Oh, brain games. You should check out the white rabbit project. White rabbit project are the three sidekicks from myth busters. Right. Harry and Grant and. Risi. Tori. Tori. Tori. Tori. Yeah. Right. Right. Kai loves white rabbit project. Love it. The Elvis, the boy, he loved the myth. Yeah. Yeah. I still watch the reruns of myth busters. I watch it in our hotel room. Wait, how come nobody knows Beakman is on Netflix? Yeah. I know. I know. I've watched it. I've tried. I've gotten kind of watch it. He likes it. With the giant rat and the 90s chick. The 80s chick. She's no 90s. No, she's a 90s chick for sure. She's totally 80s New Jersey. Stop. No, the 80s came to New Jersey in the 90s, Justin. No, they weren't ahead of the world. No, they were behind. They were behind. It may have been filmed in the 90s, but she was still from the 80s. Yeah. That's what I said. Oh, okay. The 80s came to New Jersey in the 90s is what I said. Oh, yeah. We've watched all the Beakmans. Totally. Totally love that show. Jessica. Voltron is cool. Yeah. Voltron is also cool. Voltron is also cool. It's on Netflix. The new Voltron cartoon. Wait. Is maybe Beakmans no longer. Like I haven't, I don't know that we've. There's a way for me to settle this. Let me just open up Netflix. We weren't, we weren't, we were watching, we've been watching that pretty recently. Well, okay. So, but for example, Hot Rod has Canadian Netflix and Canadian Netflix is totally different. Could it be that different? Yeah, it is. It has a bunch of stuff that we don't and has a bunch. It doesn't have stuff that we have. Yeah. For sure. Yeah, we don't have. They have the last two seasons of X-Men, the animated series. Oh, is that all? We don't have that. I don't care. Well. Oh my gosh. Look at young Bill Nye. Okay. Hold on. I got a screen share this. Are we, am I going to get in trouble for screen sharing Netflix? No. Yeah. Just, no, just a, just the browsing screen. Not the browsing screen. Okay, great. It wasn't going to be video. I just wanted to show you. Yeah, no video. Bill Nye's face right here. Look at that. Yeah. I think more his hair. It looks like a young MacGyver. Yeah. Although, Beekman is not on here. Oh no. He's gone. He's gone. Oh, he's not there anymore. He's been there for, they must have just. Available on DVD only. Wow. Maybe they took it out. Hang on. Maybe you're Amazoning it. No, we were definitely Netflixing it, but, but, maybe he is on Amazon now. It could be on Amazon. Guys, can we just make all the things available? It's not, I'm not even asking for it to be free because I pay for these services. You know, we've all gone the cord cutting because we were sick and tired of cable. And now I'm like, I know. My house that places that have TV. I'm like, ooh, let me surf the channels. Well, that's the thing. I don't want to surf the channels. I only want like a few. Options, but I want all the things that I want in those few options. Yeah. Beekman's world has gone dark. Yeah. And I don't, I don't want to have to be stuck to cables. Like we're giving you this show at this particular time. As opposed to I'm going to watch it when I want to watch it. You know, you know what I like stuff around that my local library. You just kind of have to have some. But you can have like 20 DVDs out at one time. You can have them for like two or three weeks. And you don't even necessarily have to do DVD. Well, maybe just DVDs, but I mean they do have stuff that's electronic as well. That's available on the internet. Like you can read ebooks. Yeah. Yeah. I have an app through my, through the SFPL. So I can listen to a lot of music for free. It's pretty cool. And books on tape. Yep. Oh, I'm very disappointed Beekman's world has gone. It might be time to order some DVDs. It's a great show. Yeah. Identity for it. We just want what we want when we want it. And we want to pay a small fee for it. Yeah. Which it's not so small anymore because I got my Netflix and I got my Hulu's and I got my Amazon Prime. And then when you got your HBO and then you add all that up, it's like the same as cable anyway. So just give me all the things. But if you're doing it, you're getting exactly what you want when you want it as opposed to being like forced into cables. Except for when I want to watch Beekman's world apparently. Except, except then. But cable wouldn't have it either at this point. I bet you. No, they absolutely wouldn't have it. Oh, it's on. It's on the, it is on the local station. That's that's the last place we watch it. It's on a local or cable. Like retro station. It's got all the. It's got like Perry Mason and. Alfred Hitchcock presents. It's also got Beekman's world on that. Rob the sparklier. Right. But we went through and watched every episode on the Netflix. Yeah. Good job. While you. Disney's going to go away too. Disney's going to start their own dysflex. Yeah. I can't watch Milana every day anymore. Nope. That's fine with me. Cool with that. What? Wow. I don't watch it every day. Oh, but does Disney do Lego? Wow. Yeah. Wow. I'm lucky. I have a six year old boy. He's not so, not so singing. About Moana anyway. I'm tired. I have to go. All right. See you next week. Same time. Same channel. Great. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night, kiki. Good night. Good night Blair. Good night Blair. Good night Justine. Good night. Hey, thanks everyone for watching. We'll back next week. We hope you have a wonderful. Sciencey week until next time. No, wait. Wait, did I do the right thing? 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