What Do Aliens Know Anyway?

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is Twists This Week in Science, episode number ten
thirty four, recorded on Wednesday, October twenty second, twenty twenty five.
Aliens know anyway. Hey everyone, I'm doctor Keek, and tonight
on the show we will fill your heads with Jupiter,

(00:20):
some limits, and panda microbs. But first, thanks to our
amazing Patreon sponsors for their generous support of Twists. You
can become a part of the Patreon community at patreon
dot com. Slash This Week in Science dasclaimer disclaimer disclaimer.

(00:45):
We don't know what's going on. How could aliens know
what's going on. I don't even know what a gold
standard is anymore. They put the words and things in
the government, and that's what's supposed to determine what things are.
I don't know anything anymore. I'd like to know things,
so let's talk about them here on This Week in Science.

(01:05):
Coming up next.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
I've got the kind of mind I can't get enough.
I want to learn everything. I want to fill it
all up with new discoveries. It happened every day of
a week. There's only one place to go to find
a knowledge. I think I want to.

Speaker 3 (01:26):
Know what has happened. What's happened What's happened this week
in Science? It's happened, happened has happened this week in science.

Speaker 1 (01:44):
Good science to you, Kiki, and a good science to
you too, Blair, Daniel and everyone out there. Welcome to
another episode of This Week in Science. We have hello. Yes,
Justin's voice is not Daniel's voice. We are not pretending here.

(02:05):
We have a different person joining the show who I'll
introduce in just a minute. Welcome to the show everyone,
Thanks for joining us. We have a fantastic, fantastic show
lined up ahead. I've got tons of science news. I mean,
first off, I referred to the gold standard, which refers

(02:25):
to gold standard science. And there is a wonderful opinion
piece in Science magazine this last week related to this topic,
in which the researcher who published it goes through historical
aspects of attempts use Trojan language in legislation to lead

(02:53):
to an attack on science. And according to this article
by Stefan Lewandowski, at the very very end he gets
to the point and he says the introduction of a
chimerical gold standard is thus best understood as yet another
of at least three hundred and eighteen actions against science

(03:13):
that the second Trump administration has taken since the president
took office in January twenty twenty five, three hundred and
eighteen against attacking.

Speaker 4 (03:27):
That sounds low. I think we're lumping some together.

Speaker 5 (03:32):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (03:34):
But what I like to think is that as things
get broken, sometimes you have an opportunity to fix them.
Sometimes you have an opportunity to build them better. Sometimes
you have an opportunity to create good out of the
seeds of a crisis. So that's why I like talking

(03:56):
about things here on this show. I've got stories tonight. Yeah,
I'm blaming Jupiter for our planet. You gotta do that sometimes. Additionally,
I've got some metabolic stories, ultra marathonors, and you know
the rest of animal life. And I have a whole
bunch of stories about brains, mini brains, flatworm brains, human brains,

(04:24):
lead filled brains. I don't know so many brain stories.
It's going to be fantastic, Blair, what's in the animal corner?

Speaker 4 (04:30):
Oh, I have a very abbreviated animal corner. This week.
I just brought a story about panda poop, just staying
right on brand with my usual I haven't talked about
pandas in a while, I think, so it's time. Yeah,
I have.

Speaker 1 (04:47):
Actually heard people recently commenting that are not you? Who
are not you commenting on condors and pandas, how.

Speaker 4 (04:57):
Are they even? Yeah, well the condor is not to
get on a whole tangent. But they're actually doing pretty good,
except for.

Speaker 1 (05:09):
The ones that like knocked as made off a cliff.

Speaker 4 (05:11):
But oh sure, I mean there are always mistakes. You
have to scramble, you have to break a few eggs
to make an omelet or knock a few condors off
a cliff to.

Speaker 1 (05:24):
Anyway getting here in silence because soon too soon.

Speaker 4 (05:32):
But no, they're doing really well. So strangely, there's a
few species that we have pulled back from the you know,
literal brink of extinction, and it looks like the condors
might you know, in fifty years we might look back
at them as another example of you know, the sea
otter or or some other individuals that have really been

(05:54):
down to like you know, the cheetah been down to
like fifty individuals, and you know the condor was down
to I think twelve. So it's just it's wild. So anyway,
it's amazing.

Speaker 1 (06:05):
Yeah, we do good. We tried, we try to help
sometimes and we we do, and I think that's great.
So we should think about these good things. All right, Daniel,
what'd you bring for the show tonight?

Speaker 4 (06:17):
Now?

Speaker 1 (06:17):
Okay, everyone, I would love now to introduce our guest
for the evening, Daniel Whitson. He is a professor of
physics at UC Irvine and co author of We Have
No Idea. There were two versions to two versions of
that book, frequently asked questions about the universe, and now

(06:41):
a third book, Do Aliens Speak? Thanks?

Speaker 5 (06:50):
Thank you very much for having me. Very excited to
be here, and unexpectedly I do have a poop connection,
but it's not alien poop.

Speaker 1 (06:59):
I can't. This is gonna be fantastic.

Speaker 5 (07:05):
Well, my wife is a microbiologist here you see Irvine.
So I have bags in the freezer I've been told
not to.

Speaker 4 (07:12):
Open, and oh, don't want to open them.

Speaker 5 (07:17):
Not that amazing, but I'm not that curious. So yeah,
I've left those bags untouched.

Speaker 4 (07:24):
Well, I spent many years as a zookeeper, and part
of my job was to pick up poop and put
it in freezers and label it very carefully to send
to universities. So I understand that is wild it all.

Speaker 1 (07:38):
What goes around comes around, Everyone connected by poop in freezers. Okay,
all right, this is this Week in Science And in
case you are not yet subscribed to the show, wherever
you're watching us live Wednesdays eight pm Pacific time, YouTube, Facebook,
or Twitch, you can subscribe to our channel this Week

(07:59):
in Science. That's where we are. You can also find
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If you want show notes, links to past stories, I

(08:19):
don't know, just to peruse things like click the link
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(08:40):
But right now, share it with a friend, make sure
that someone else is listening or watching this show with you,
and you know, because science is always better when you
share it with somebody. So are we ready for the show?
You ready, Blair?

Speaker 4 (08:54):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (08:55):
Yeah, Daniel's nodding his head.

Speaker 5 (08:57):
Like, yes, let's do this.

Speaker 1 (09:01):
All right. So I really do want to blame it
all on Jupiter, as there are some other researchers in
the galaxy that also would like to blame everything on Jupiter.
And the fact that Jupiter basically started the accretion of
like the first planetissimals, so planeticiples. Planetissimals formed about zero

(09:26):
point five to one million years after the Solar System
kind of started being dusty and accumulating around the Sun.
And then there was something that that happened. There were
chondrite forming parent that, there were chondrict parent bodies, different things.
Those are asteroids that we find all over the place.

(09:46):
Those were two to three million years later. Nobody really
knows exactly what happened there. And so they went back
in time, No, they did not. They did simulations, numerical
simulations to show that the early formation of Jupiter reshaped

(10:07):
the natal protoplanetary disc for the entire Solar System. So
the abstract of the story Science Advances is where it's
published this week. Jupid's wrap. Jupiter's rapid growth depleted the
inner disc gas and generated pressure bumps and dust traps
that manifested as rings. These structures caused dust to accumulate

(10:31):
and led to a second generation planetisimal population with ages
matching those of non carbonaceous chondrites. Meanwhile, the evolving gas
structures suppressed terrestrial embryos inward migration, preventing them from reaching
the innermost regions. And so Jupiter was likely the culprit

(10:55):
in shaping or allowing the inner Solar System to evolve
as the rocky bodies that it did, and to basically
protect it to jumpstart the whole ecosystem, the environment in
which those rings could form the planets that we now
know as Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.

Speaker 4 (11:19):
So this is an update of the meme of the
like first quadruped who came up onto land and it said, like,
you know, millions of years ago some fish decided to
walk on land, and now I have to go to work, right,
So this is millions of years ago. Jupiter did what

(11:43):
it did and now I have to go to my
nine to five. Thanks a lot, Jupiter.

Speaker 1 (11:49):
It's pretty much it. Yes, it is the update. There
have been previous simulations where they looked at gravitational forces
and have simulated the movement of different bodies into the
inner Solar System and then back out again. And I'm
just saying these things because I've read about them over

(12:10):
the years. But Daniel, have you ever done any of
these numerical simulations.

Speaker 5 (12:16):
These are amazing simulations and they tell us so much
about the nature of the Solar System. And I think
the big takeaway message for me is that the Solar
system is chaotic, like it seems steady on our time scales,
like Jupiter is Jupiter, and people have been looking at
Jupiter for tens of thousands of years or whatever, but
if you look at like millions or billions of years,

(12:36):
crazy stuff has happened in our Solar system. And simulations
suggests that, as you say, Jupiter moved into the inner
Solar System as well as Saturn, and then maybe another
gas giant pulled it back out and was ejected from
the Solar system. So we think that the Solar system
was formed with more planets than it has now.

Speaker 1 (12:54):
But that's not even considering the hypothetical Niburu that's out
there in the dark. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (13:04):
Yeah, that means that one of ours, there might be
additional planets in the Solar System we haven't detected, but
they are also very likely planets that formed with Jupiter
and Mars and Earth and all those other planets that
are now lost. In fact, we think there are billions
of rogue planets out there in the Solar System traveling
through the galaxy without the benefit of a star, that
were ejected from their families. What it's crazy, right, You

(13:31):
see them through these amazing micro eclipses. They pass in
front of a distant star and very briefly eclipse it,
and you can tell that it's a planet because of
the shape. It's just like how we detect exoplanets. In fact,
they recently saw one where it has a moon, so
they could see the eclipse happening, and then as time
went on they could see the eclips changing because the

(13:53):
moon was making its own many eclipse on top of it.
So it's an exo moon on a rogue planet. Science
is crazy, y'all.

Speaker 1 (14:02):
But okay, so like we have j Whist, now we've
had the Hubble for ages, we've got these amazing ground
based telescopes that are looking out at the universe. Like,
how is it possible that we wouldn't know all the
planets in our Solar System?

Speaker 4 (14:18):
No?

Speaker 5 (14:19):
I mean, yeah, well, it's a great question. It's one
reason is that we just don't have enough eyeballs, Like, yeah,
we have JWST, but everybody wants to point it in
a different place. So probably if you dedicated it to
like hunting for deep dark planets that are out there
in the in the in the you know, dim reaches

(14:39):
of the Solar System, it would find one. But there
are other studies that people want to do about, like
super distant galaxies in the early universe, that take priority.
So what we need is more space telescopes. Think about
all the photons that come to Earth. A tiny fraction
them get actually have their information extracted for science. Most
of them just like splash on sidewalks or on a

(15:01):
tree somewhere. There's so much information about the universe coming
to us all the time that we're ignoring. I like
to fantasize about not a Dyson sphere where you're like
gobbling energy from the Sun, but like a sphere of
space telescope surrounding the Earth looking out into the cosmos.
Think about everything we could learn, right.

Speaker 1 (15:18):
I like that better than the starlink satellites that are
getting launched up there.

Speaker 4 (15:24):
And they're pointing down at us instead of out, which
is what we really want.

Speaker 5 (15:28):
Yeah, and so much money is spent on like you know,
so somebody can stream a cat video while they're camping
and compare that to the amount of money we're spending
on science. Oh, it's just it's shocking, you know, because
the knowledge is out there. We could just buy it.
If we just spent the money, we would know these
things about the universe. There's literally nothing preventing us from
doing it. We're just deciding not to. We're like in

(15:50):
a candy store. Our pockets are bulging with cash and
we're just walking out and not buying anything.

Speaker 4 (15:56):
Well, not our pockets.

Speaker 5 (15:58):
To be clear, exactly humanity's pocket. So I love that
Jupiter study. It's amazing to hear about the early Solar
system and how it formed. And it's incredible that we
can figure this stuff out just given like what we're
looking at now, hardly ever, having left the planet, we
can deduce this stuff. As my thirteen year old sums
up science, she says, science is like we looked at

(16:18):
stuff and we figured out how it got there. Is
that it I was like, yeah, that's pretty much science.
That's good.

Speaker 1 (16:26):
But we try and figure out how it got there
with the highest degree of certainty possible by getting rid
of alternative explanations. Right, it's like that law of parsimony
and weeding through things that doesn't work, that doesn't work,
that doesn't work, and then you learn something new and
you go, oh, I have a new tool. I can
ask a new question. Now the field got bigger again. Okay,

(16:49):
that doesn't work, that doesn't work, that doesn't work. But
because of that, you're getting improved resolution on the whole story.
So we can't ever get rid of the human bio,
but we can try the best we can, right to Yeah,
to be as impartial as possible. It's really good. I
love that Jupiter story too. And you mentioned the data

(17:12):
aspect of things. And I do know that one of
the things you do, Daniel is work with You're interested
in machine learning, and you've worked on the Atlas instrument
at CERN and we all know that large Hadron Collider
and Atlas and all the things that there's so much data.
So and this is not the telescope data. This is

(17:33):
Adam Smasher data, right, So okay, are we going to
get like what are we doing with this data? Are
we all putting it on googled like g drive or
is it like, how are we managing it?

Speaker 5 (17:47):
You're right, it's an overwhelming amount of data. Every twenty
five ninoseconds we collect data one hundreds of millions of channels.
So it's just an onslaught a petabites and pedabites of data.
Most of it it we throw away because the when
you smatch two protons together, usually what happens is two
protons come out, and so it's kind of boring, but

(18:08):
the interesting stuff is rare, and so what we do
is we filter through the ordinary, everyday collisions for the
interesting bits with something new and weird popped up and
try to save just those. So we have this system
it's called a trigger system that makes it very fast.
Keep it or kill a decision, and it's important because
if you kill it, it's gone forever and there's no like, hey,
let's go look through the trash. Do we empty the desktop?

(18:30):
It's gone And that's scary, but we're pretty good at
it by now, and so we filter out the good stuff.
But you know, only we know what we're looking for,
so there could be like weird, unexpected stuff in the trash. Unfortunately,
because it's just too much data to keep all of it.

Speaker 4 (18:46):
When you say we we through it, do you mean
there's a there's an algorithm that's scanning it for you.

Speaker 5 (18:53):
Absolutely?

Speaker 1 (18:54):
Yeah. How does that worry?

Speaker 5 (18:55):
Yeah, it's not like a committee or anything. It has
to happen every twenty five nano seconds. Yeah. And so
we have super fast machine learning that operates actually on hardware,
that makes really fast decisions keep it or kill it.
And we have its multi steps, so the first one
makes a simple, fast decision, the second one has a
lower rate, so it has a little bit more time

(19:15):
to make a more complex decision. Then there's a third level,
and if it passes that, it gets stored to tape
and then we eventually analyze it and hope to discover
something mind blowing. But yeah, it's all done algorithmically for sure.

Speaker 4 (19:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:28):
Yeah, And have you discovered something mind blowing?

Speaker 5 (19:33):
I signed an NDA, so I can't tell you.

Speaker 1 (19:35):
Oh, come on, I mean that was years ago, but
come on.

Speaker 5 (19:40):
Well, we discovered Higgs boson, but that was about ten
years ago. That was very exciting ago, I know more
than that actually, and since then we haven't found anything new.
We've measured the particles we know about super duper precisely
looking for deviations, like the theorists tell us this particle
will have this property, and we go, we measure it,

(20:00):
and so far everything lines up exactly the way we expected.
No evidence of anything new so far, but you know,
that's research. You never know when you turn on a
new telescope or land on a new planet, are you
going to be inundated and crazy discoveries or is it
going to be dust and rubble and nothing interesting. That's research,
and nobody never looked at these particles before, and so

(20:20):
we didn't find anything. But we don't know what's.

Speaker 1 (20:22):
Around the corner, are I mean, aside from other little
sub atomic particles that maybe you haven't isolated entirely yet
within the noise, you know, the energy spectra that you
look at. Have we almost gotten all the Standard model particles? Like,

(20:42):
have we done that?

Speaker 5 (20:44):
Yeah? We have all the particles that are predicted. We
found them, and so that's cool. We have like six leptons,
we have six quarks. We have a particle for each
of the forces except gravity. Nobody understands the gravity. So
the Standard model is what we call complete, but it's
also we know it's not the final story. You know,
it's like looking at the periodic table and say, do

(21:05):
we have all the elements? Yeah, well, but there's more
to it, right, You want to explain the patterns of behavior.
And we now know the patterns and the periodic table
come from the way the electron orbitals feel. Right, So
there are patterns and the fundamental particles that we don't understand,
and we suspect they're due to the way the tiny
little particles inside them click together and interact and do something,

(21:25):
but we haven't been able to see inside. So we're
still at the level of like looking at those patterns
among the fundamental particles and wondering what does it all mean?
And in a hundred years is everybody to think we're
stupid for not having seen it because it seems so obvious.
But you know, here we are in the forefront of knowledge.
We don't know it's clueless, right. Science seems so easy
in hindsight, but when you're in the middle of it,

(21:47):
you know, you're like, I don't know what this means, right?

Speaker 1 (21:50):
How do I test that the best way? Do we
have the tools exactly get there? Does this really mean
what I think it means? Or is there something unplugged, Blair,
did you want to talk about animals or anything?

Speaker 4 (22:06):
Oh, yes, yes, I have a very I have a
very quick story. It's just a couple sentences here. But
I think you know, in the honor of bringing both
pandas and squirrels today, this is the perfect opportunity. But
just you know, groundbreaking study ha ha ha in where

(22:27):
squirrels like to bury their food. Yes, and so this
is just a study looking at where in urban environments
they're gray squirrels, where they like to bury their food,
and where they like to forage. And overall they found
that consistent road noise is actually a predictor of a

(22:52):
higher level of squirrel behavior than they would expect. And
so it looks like they're actually using that as an
opportunity to create cover to protect them from predators. So
if there's a lot of road noise, that means there's
a lot of traffic, that means there's less likelihood for
there to be cats or coyotes or birds of prey

(23:15):
or whatever it is that are trying to grab and
eat squirrels. And so there's actually kind of a funny
bell curve where you actually get an increase in squirrel
activity with some road noise versus you know, you'd think
more people less activity from squirrels. Of coral Squirrels are
kind of a special case because they are very easily

(23:37):
not fully imprinted upon, but like habituate, habituated to human activity,
almost to the point where they're insistent upon receiving food
from humans. We actually have had a couple of cases
in northern California up here of squirrels attacking people because
they just they're not rabbit or anything like that. They
just have been fed by humans, and so they're so

(23:58):
used to being fed by us that when a human
is not feeding them, they go, hey, give me that,
and it gets violent. But so squirrels are are an
interesting case here. I don't think this isn't across the
board situation. You would need to kind of repeat this
study with a lot of different wild animals species that
are found in urban environments to see if those other

(24:21):
species have a similar reaction to road noise. But I
would I would wager that squirrels are kind of special
in that case.

Speaker 1 (24:29):
So squirrels definitely are special. That's that's sure.

Speaker 5 (24:36):
It's amazing how much cuter squirrels are than rats, and
I think it's just the fluffy tail and the.

Speaker 1 (24:42):
Little ears and some trust it squirrel ears with the
fuff on the top. Yeah, yes, well.

Speaker 4 (24:50):
But they're also so much more bold because they know
they're cute and they can be out and they could
be right in your face and you don't go like
you do for a rat, and so they get you know,
I get too old.

Speaker 1 (25:02):
I don't do that for rats either. Yeah, I like rats.

Speaker 5 (25:05):
I had a soft spot for rats, but still squirrels
are cuter.

Speaker 4 (25:09):
Well, and which would be more welcome on your front
porch if you were not expecting it? A squirrel or
a rat? And why is that?

Speaker 5 (25:17):
I'm not sure exactly why?

Speaker 4 (25:19):
Yeah, yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 5 (25:22):
I guess squirrels don't eat garbage as much.

Speaker 4 (25:25):
Yeah, I don't know about into your house. Yeah, less
less likely to have hauntavirus.

Speaker 1 (25:32):
Nice and bowls, I know.

Speaker 4 (25:35):
I know, but uh, yeah, I don't know. I think
that there is an expectation because of the plague and everything, right,
that like rats bring disease and pestilence and plague. But
it's in my experienced squirrels are more of a nuisance.

Speaker 1 (25:55):
This is why pandas and squirrels. When we talk about
the animals that Blair takes issue with the squirrels anti panda.

Speaker 4 (26:07):
Yeah, we're going to get into it. But yes, the
squirrels are a particular case because I worked at the
zoo for a really long time and they got so
bold that they got they were a problem. And there
were a couple of times where they didn't quite attack me,
but we'll just say they pushed some limits that I

(26:28):
did not forgive. So anyway, the squirrels.

Speaker 1 (26:34):
Also, I think the road noise issue is very interesting
because we know that and I think interesting also that
they're digging right, so that in itself is going to
make noise. So the sound of the road, the cars
on the road is going to cover any digging noise
that they're making. The vibration would be able to also
cover any animals that are going to be looking for

(26:56):
disruption and the vibrational surface. And then we also have
birds we've seen over and over again rooks, crows, ravens,
uh jas that drop their their welks, their nuts into
roadways in the way of cars. And so far, it like,

(27:17):
I don't think there have been enough studies to really
really say that certain you know, some birds do that's
on purpose. But the evidence is pointing that direction. So yeah,
there seems that the birds are using the cars as
tools to crack us.

Speaker 4 (27:35):
But you need to set up some some some laboratory
testing for that. You need to like get some crows,
you need to put mesh over the top of a speedway,
and then you need to get some cars on the speedway.
Then offer them up some different tool options to open
their their nuts, and then okay, yes, they're definitely using
the cars.

Speaker 5 (27:58):
Squirrel study a.

Speaker 4 (28:00):
Hammer, yeah, have given I mean, they'll make their own hammer.
They're self sufficient, It's true.

Speaker 1 (28:10):
Speaking of things that you make that you want to eat,
or if you want to eat, how much do you eat?
How much energy do you burn every day or any
day for that matter. Researchers have been trying to figure
out for a while if there are any rules to metabolism,
basically to see if there are rules to how temperature,

(28:34):
how performance is related to the act not just internal
but also external forces. They just published a study in
the public Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The
work actually shows that there is seems to be some
serious constraint when it comes to species ability to optimize

(29:00):
within certain temperature ranges. This also has to do with metabolism,
how much heat you produce, how much heat you can lose.
There's physics involved here, thermodynamics. It's great exact. Yeah. Anyway,
the researchers, with respect for all living things, we're saying

(29:23):
that this study and that they're putting forward is they're
calling a universal thermal performance curve. It seems to apply
to all species and dictates responses to temperature change, and
it doesn't seem like any species has broken free of
those constraints. Go from that into another study just published

(29:45):
in Current Biology this week, researchers looked at cohort of
ultra endurance athletes. These are people who train and compete
at very very extreme levels. So if they had fourteen
highly trained elite world class ultra endurance athletes, these are

(30:07):
people who were doing ultra marathons fifty one hundred hundred
and fifty miles of running at any given time and
who are using a lot of calories. So they compared
bas on metabolic rate to the maximum metabolic rate that
the individuals used over time, and they were able to

(30:30):
apply a particular measure to be able to be able
to look at how much how much energy these people
were using at any particular time, and basically things had
to balance out. So if they used ten thousand calories

(30:52):
on a given day or over the course of a competition,
that had to be balanced out over time with changes
in behavior. And they actually found that these individuals seemed
to have behavior modifications that kept them from fidgeting, that
had them like sitting still and napping more often, so

(31:13):
that each individual or the average for all the individuals
is there was only a two point five multiple of
the basal metabolic rate over about twenty eight weeks. So
there's what they're saying, a ceiling to our maximum metabolic rate.

(31:33):
You can exceed it, but not for long periods of time,
and there is a consequence your body will start eating
itself and breaking down. If you have to go seven thousand,
eight thousand calories a day for extended periods of time,
your body will not adjust to that.

Speaker 4 (31:54):
So no matter how much you eat, no matter how
much you try to fuel that higher metabolic knee, you're
the factory can't stay open longer. Like we've made all
the energy, we can't folks, it's we're at capacity.

Speaker 1 (32:08):
That's wild yep, yep. So they say that there may
be because they they're sample size was like fourteen people,
So of course there might be exceptional individuals who can
exceed what seems to be this ceiling. But for this
small sample, it gives a it gives a basis for
looking looking forward to find out if humans can exceed.

(32:34):
They're metabolic, they're based on metal metabolic rate and what
the ceiling actually is.

Speaker 4 (32:41):
And you said this is all youth.

Speaker 1 (32:43):
No, no, no, not these are They're not youth. They're
they're just highly trained, elite and world class athletes.

Speaker 4 (32:51):
So they're probably I thought, I thought you said student athletes.

Speaker 1 (32:54):
Okay, no, no, no, no, they're ultra endurance athletes.

Speaker 4 (32:57):
That's also okay. So that's the other thing I'm wondering
is this is obviously the beginning of a lot of
different kind of metabolic limits studies that could happen. But
I'd be curious to see what the multiplayer was at
different stages of life, Like if I'm a teenager, can
I push it to four times versus two and a half?
When I'm forty, can I only push it to two?

Speaker 5 (33:20):
Like?

Speaker 4 (33:20):
You know what I mean, is there is there a
difference in flexibility or capacity or is it constant throughout
your life? Right? That's I think that'd be interesting to
find out.

Speaker 1 (33:32):
I think that's a fascinating question. I mean, we know
that a lot of youth are athletes, and that I
mean a lot of a lot of competition occurs at
a very very advanced endurance level at a very young age.
And we know that there are trade offs for it
changes your hormone levels, you have different you know, and

(33:54):
there are injuries that occur at certain at certain places,
and so there's management that needs to happen to ensure
that that individuals, you know, can actually continue to compete
at the high level that they do. So the question
is how do you do that? How do you and
I think this kind of study if you work for
an athlete, for somebody who's interested in this, I think

(34:15):
that is going to be some of the you know,
the next best questioning is how do you take this
information and use it to optimize your performance over time?
Do you run daniel or cycle? Or are you an
ultra marathonor.

Speaker 5 (34:32):
I'm not, But bizarrely my son turned out to be
an athlete. He's a long distance runner and across country competitor,
and he broke the school record for you know, the
three mile and up on the wall in the gym,
which astounded me because I'm no kind of athlete. Neither
was my wife, and so I don't know if that's
proof of like you know, cosmic ray mutation or something,

(34:55):
but he definitely got some athletic genes and now he's
off running in college, so it was it was very exciting,
and I've definitely seen what you're talking about. He runs
at a very high level and he's constantly working. He's
at the edge of like is this an injury or
is it just pain?

Speaker 1 (35:09):
And you know, some pain is fine, it's good for you.

Speaker 5 (35:16):
If you're doing it right, it hurts, but also if
you're doing it wrong, it hurts differently. And yes, knowing
the difference is important.

Speaker 1 (35:24):
It's crucial.

Speaker 5 (35:28):
And do you think that this kind of thing is
common across species? I mean, here, we did a study
in humans, but like you know, there, I've also heard
the humans are unique in their endurance capacity, Like other
animals can run fast or you know, climb or whatever,
but humans, I like the best endurance on earth. Is
there anything else? That approaches that.

Speaker 1 (35:49):
No, not that, not that we know of, especially for
the running or walking right humans are That is why
we have people who go and do these ultra marathons.
We have the old story of oh Am I going
to talk about, was it Greece, Rome, Greece, the Olympics? Right?
For the UH it was the messengers who would run

(36:11):
basically a marathon to be able to send messages back
and forth. But I think what we are seeing is
that there are certain individuals that they have adaptations that
allow their muscles to make use of oxygen better, to
metabolize more sustainably. That there there are variations and it's

(36:33):
not just something you can I mean, you can train
and do better, but if you don't have the adaptations
and the genes to allow you to do it, then
you're you know. So I think this stuff is really
fascinating moving Well.

Speaker 4 (36:44):
It's we're such a strange animal in so many ways,
and that like we have in many cases unlimited, unbridled
access to nutrients, right, and so like now it's it.
I think it's really hard to compare and contrast to
wild animals in a lot of cases, because you know,

(37:05):
there are animals that do crazy feats metabolically. There are
you know, sea lions and elephant seals that can dive.
Elephant seals can dive for like over an hour without breathing,
and their metabolism slows down to almost nothing while they're
doing that, and then they come back up. Other animals
will haul out for months and barely eat even though

(37:27):
they're mammals, you know. And so there's there's all sorts
of different crazy extreme versions of this where availability of
nutrients don't match metabolic output. Metabolic output will tank or
will skyrocket over a short amount of time, Like animals
that migrate that are you know, swimming or flying or

(37:48):
running NonStop for days or weeks, right, And so I
think that we we're so we're so different because we
have our constant availability of nutrients, we have ability to rest,
we're not running from predators, we're not hunting for food,
and so it's like we have all of these kind
of constants, and so when we are pushing ourselves metabolically,

(38:12):
we are doing so often out of choice, and so
it is a completely different context.

Speaker 2 (38:19):
Right.

Speaker 4 (38:20):
So yeah, it's I think I'd be interested to see
what things look like in the in the in wild
animals as well because of that, because like I would wager,
for example, that elephant seals, they they go from their
basic metabolic rate, they go down to you know, I
don't even remember what it is. College was so long ago,
but you know, a fraction of their metabolic rate while

(38:43):
they're diving, So they have do they have the a
basement right, the opposite of a ceiling? Do they have
Like I can't go past half of my basal metabolic rate?
But similarly, you know, penguins when they're swimming when they're
my do they have a maximum of their metabolic grade
that they can reach right when they're sprinting from one

(39:05):
space to another because it's too cold or they're in
between land masses. So yeah, I.

Speaker 1 (39:16):
Don't get and I don't think I think we've got
the endurance running thing down. I'm not sure we have
the diving like a sea lion down.

Speaker 5 (39:25):
No.

Speaker 4 (39:25):
Well, and in the case of elephant seals, you also
have special pressurized eyeballs so that your eyeballs don't implode
under the pressure. Right, So there's other things that you
need to get that done.

Speaker 1 (39:35):
Hm, goggles got it all right? This is this week
in science. Everyone, thank you so much for joining us
for the show tonight. If you have not yet, head
over to Twist dot org click on the Patreon link
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(39:55):
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(40:17):
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(40:40):
that would be amazing. Everything you do for Twists is
a gift. We can't do it without your support. Thank
you very much. All right, everybody, let's come on back
right now and I'm going to once again reintroduce our
guest this evening Daniel Whitson is the author of a
book that's just out and you too can find out

(41:06):
whether aliens speak physics. That's right. Daniel Whitson hosts a
podcast with Kelly Wienersmith and additionally, what's the name of
that podcast.

Speaker 5 (41:17):
Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe?

Speaker 1 (41:20):
Extraordinary Universe because the universe is extraordinary and it's your
universe because you're talking about it in the podcast. It
is fantastic. You've also been been part of creating a
PBS show for kids that inspires curiosity. Eleanor is the
name of that one? Are you still working on that?

Speaker 5 (41:40):
Yeah, Eleanor wonders why. The show on PBS is for
three to five year old It's about life, science and curiosity,
and the goal of the show is to teach kids
to learn to answer questions by them on their own
by using basic practices of science, and to show adults
that it's okay when kids ask you a question to
say I don't know, let's figure it out. You don't

(42:01):
have to know all the answers to talk about science
with your kids. And so that show is just finishing
its production of its second season, which is a lot
of fun and so new episodes are coming on PBS
right now. Because of the current climate, we don't know
if PBS will still be a thing. Corporation for Public
Broadcasting sadly is no longer. We're also supported kindly by

(42:23):
Department of Education are TL grant, which is no longer,
and so things are looking difficult, but we'll see about
a third season.

Speaker 1 (42:34):
My fingers are crossed for you because and for all
of the parents who are out there who would love
some additional help answering questions with their kids. I think
it'd be great. Blair is going to be looking forward
to that fairly soon.

Speaker 4 (42:50):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (42:54):
So your book, do Aliens speak physics? Do they give
us the short and dirty? Yeah?

Speaker 5 (43:05):
The book asks whether or not we can, when aliens arrive,
make a mental connection with them using physics. Because I
was always told, and this is one reason I got
into physics, was that physics was sort of special among
human sciences and that it's bigger than Earth. Like, yeah,
it's cool to study pandas and understand life and everything
here on Earth. It's fantastic and important, but we expect

(43:27):
that the things we learn might just be limited and
relevant to stuff here on Earth, But physics is supposed
to be about the whole universe, and like gravity is
here as gravity is there, and we see gravity working
the same way in distant galaxies, et cetera. So the
idea is that, you know, physics asks questions that are
bigger than humanity, and so it might be that not
only humanity is asking those questions. And I've long fantasized

(43:50):
about the scenario where aliens show up and we can
make a connection using physics, and then they can give
us some answers, because we have big questions about the
nature the universe that are not answered, like how where
did it come from? What is it made out of?
Puts inside black holes? You know, what is space? Anyway?
All these things we don't understand. It would be wonderful

(44:11):
if aliens, who might have been doing science for millions
of years, could just like tell us, could just like
leap us forward in our own scientific future. So that
was my fantasy. And you know, folks like Carl Sagan
tell you that we're fairly confident that aliens will do
physics the way we do, because the same laws of

(44:32):
physics apply everywhere. But the book asked what that would
really happen.

Speaker 1 (44:38):
Yeah, the same laws of physics apply everywhere, but if
you are coming from a different referential frame, a different
perceptual frame. Blair's a zoologist. So if we could imagine
a planet of squirrels, how would they why? Why would
you do that?

Speaker 5 (45:00):
You have PSSD post squirrel stress syndrome. And that's a
fun joke, But you're exactly right. Just because the laws
of physics, or we think that our laws of physics
apply everywhere, it doesn't mean that the people in those
other places would describe them the same way. So really

(45:21):
the book is about the philosophical question of is physics
the map or is it the territory? Like are these
we're looking at the universe through a human lens? Can
we disentangle how much of it is the universe? And
how much of it is this single human lens we
all have in common. Until the aliens arrived, we won't
be able to tell how much our humanity has distorted

(45:41):
the physics that we've interpreted, and how much of our
humanity is in the physics that we've interpreted, and how
alien physics might be shockingly alien. And so the book
goes through a bunch of arguments for how physics could
be essentially invented or discovered.

Speaker 1 (45:58):
You mentioned earlier we were talking about exoplanets and you
were talking about you were talking about the rogue planets
that might cross in front of a star. And so
you've got this eclipse of an eclipse of you know,
and at one point in time, we thought that the
Earth was the center of the universe, right, the Earth,
Everything centered around the Earth, because of course we saw

(46:20):
the sky move around the Earth at night, and so
our way of looking at it. And now we have
these new eyes on the sky to be able to
show us show us new things. What kind of logical
pathway did you go down to try and imagine, say,
you know, if you were on another planet, if you

(46:41):
were an alien, how do you get into that mindset
to think of it from a I'm not a human anymore,
I'm not on planet Earth, I'm not a human.

Speaker 5 (46:53):
Well, you got started exactly the right way. You have
to question, you have to identify and then questions the
assumption you're making and wonder is this really the only
way we could have done it? And we have a
terrible history of this, right, we make these assumptions that
seem reasonable, Well, we look like we're the center of
the cosmos, so obviously the Earth is at the center.
And we also tend to fall for the flattering assumptions

(47:16):
like ooh, the Earth is at the center, therefore we're important, right,
So it's easy to therefore also say things like, well,
we figured out physics and it seems to work, so
therefore aliens will and that puts up at the intellectual center, right.
It says that human physics is like the physics, that
everyone out there will also be doing the same stuff
and working on string theory and all sorts of stuff.

(47:36):
And that's very tempting to believe. In my personal fantasy
of an intergalactic science conference is very fun to think about.
But because it's so tempting, I think it needs extra skepticism.
So what I tried to do is look at all
those assumptions and ask like, well, how do we know?
Are we really sure? And you can start from the
very basics, like how do we know that aliens do

(47:58):
science at all? You know that aliens wonder why about
the universe if they have the same curiosity. You know,
Laarr was earlier wondering like, I wonder if this I
wonder if that I wonder, if you did this study,
what would the answer be. That's interesting, that's wonderful, and
that's a very human thing to be so curious and
to want to know about the universe. But that's also emotional, right,

(48:19):
it's a it's part of being human, and it's different
from person to person. One person is super interested in physics,
another person interested in poop, another person interested in geology,
somebody else interested in you know, languages. We have an
amazing diversity of science on Earth because of the personal
reactions people have to these questions. And so to us
to say that aliens will automatically be curious like we

(48:40):
are and will automatically develop the same sort of methods
to build these mental models about the universe, that's a
big leap. That's a big assumption that we have that
in common with them.

Speaker 1 (48:53):
The idea of like mental models. So like, as a
cognitive scientist from you know, I studied bird brains and
so it was this comparative brain and behavior work trying
to come up Okay, apes, we have a theory of mind. Right,
they can like look at another animal and go, oh,
this other animal is going to the squirrel is going

(49:13):
to dig in the soil and height it's nut, thank you.
This is how the apes are talking. Yes, but forever
and Blair like for in the animal corner is we're
constantly like the well dah, you know, like suddenly a
scientist did a study that shows an animal is smarter

(49:35):
than anyone thought. Oh, an animal is clearly intelligent, you know,
like in this particular way. And so I think it's
a really interesting the way that your book goes forward
with these scenarios and delving into this this perspective of Okay,
how do we put on the skeptical hat, but also

(49:57):
how do we really try and consider I think the
cognitive kind of philosophical aspects of what aliens would be
interested in. I've read plenty of sci fi books, and
some of them you have space faring aliens who were
not curious, but they leapfrogged into the stories. You know,

(50:20):
it's not real sci fi, not real whatever. I don't know,
do you think that curiosity is necessary?

Speaker 5 (50:33):
It's a fascinating question. I don't know if curiosity is
necessary because the only thing we can do is like
look at our one example here on Earth and try
to extrapolate from that, and even here on Earth, we
have been developing technology and getting better at stuff long
before we had any idea how it all worked, before
curiosity helped us. You know, think about like bread and cheese,

(50:56):
these things are you have to be a master of
the microbes to make these things work. I had no idea.
We didn't even know germs existed until fairly recently. So
we developed these technologies through trial and error without knowing,
just knowing, like here's how you do it. The same
way like I will go into the kitchen and make
a sou fle a, and like I don't understand the
food chemistry. I don't really want to understand the food chemistry.

(51:16):
I just want to eat the soup flee the same way,
like a sword maker knows how to make a sword
without understanding like the condensed matter physics of the structures
that make that thing super sharp instead of super dull.
They know how to do it, they don't know why
they don't understand it. So we were technological.

Speaker 1 (51:36):
Exactly how it works.

Speaker 5 (51:38):
Humanity was technological for a long time before we were scientific.
So it's certainly possible to develop technology without being scientific.
And you know, we tend to think about Oh, look,
we have developed science. Now we have science, so we
can use science to understand the universe. Science itself is
something that's evolving, it's changing. The way we do science
today is very different from the way Galileo did it.
Look at the studies you pointed at earlier. They have

(52:00):
simulations about the early solar system. So now we have
this new element of science, you know, computational simulations, incredibly
powerful tools for doing science. Gallet couldn't have imagined it.
What future elements could we add to science? Have aliens
added to science? So they will look at our science
and be like, yeah, barely even doing science. I mean,

(52:21):
that's the way we did science a million years ago.
So I think we tend to over accentuate the way
that we're doing things now and imagine that we're at
some final step that we have the science badge and
we're going to keep doing it this way forever. But
it's just a moment in our history. You know, we
don't even have the word scientists until about the eighteen thirties. Right,

(52:43):
Science is a fairly recent thing, and so it is
hard to imagine. And you know, on your other point
about like what is it like to be an ape
or or what is it like to be in the
minds of these creatures? You know, it's it's really sobering
because we have these other intelligent creatures on Earth, and
if you imagine we're gonna be able to communicate with aliens,
why haven't we been able to talk to whales and

(53:04):
dolphins like they evolved in the same climate as us,
in the same biosphere, of a lot of senses in common,
and yet we can't crack that code. So to imagine
we're gonna be able to crack an alien code, it
is like, wow, that's that's ballsy. You know, there's lots
of human codes we've never cracked. You know, there's so
many like written languages from ancient cultures. Nobody knows what

(53:25):
they say, what they mean. And these are like biologically
identical humans to us, living on the same planet and
with a similar culture. In many cases, we have like
we know about their culture, we've all sorts of cultural context,
and we still can't crack the code. So aliens are
very likely to be much more alien than we expect.

Speaker 4 (53:45):
So this is actually a pretty good argument for the
use of AI or machine learning. Is that I keep
seeing these research articles coming out related to using AI
to decode dog barks or whale song or trying to

(54:05):
be able to speak languages right, and so on one hand,
I could say, like, Okay, so this is actually a
pretty good reason to keep cooking on that, because we
ever do end up speaking with intelligent life from another planet,
maybe the AI will help us kind of like decode
what's happening. But then again, that is making a lot
of assumptions about how communication works, that it would follow

(54:28):
similar rules of syntax or contexts that we use and
animals on Earth use, and so you know, there's still
a lot of leaps that there would be similarities that
we would be able to draw upon. And so I
think what you're bringing up is such an important question
of just like we can say, like, you know, I

(54:49):
know that what I see and I call read is
not necessarily what you see and you call read. That
this is all about perspectives, and that what we consider
curiosity or communication or scientific method or you know, any
of these things might be completely you know, forgive the
word but like alien to another life form that has

(55:11):
none of the context that we have grown up around.

Speaker 5 (55:15):
Yeah, that's exactly right on your point of using AI
to translate alien languages, I'm all for it, but you
know the challenge that AI will face, it's the same
challenge that we face, which is, how do you know
when you get it right? Like if you right, if
you intercept some human code, right, your teenagers writing in
their diary and some code they don't want you to

(55:35):
read it, you know when you've cracked it, because it
goes from gobbledegook to oh, it's talking about where they
went on Thursday, blah blah blah. But alien language, like
you could try to decode it, but like, how do
you know when you've got it? It could be so
you're looking at it and you don't even recognize it.
And I think, more deeply than that, this is question
of like how aliens experience the universe. Like we know

(55:58):
that our senses are limited. We only interact with a
tiny slice of what's out there in the universe, and
we tend to think of our senses like giving us
a direct revelation of reality, Like the room I'm in
and I know that my computer is here and whatever,
but there's a lot more in this room, this dark matter.
There's neutrinos. I'm not sensing, So our sense of the
universe internally is limited and defined by our perceptions. We

(56:21):
talked earlier about like space telescopes. These are like technological
extensions of our senses, but crucially they don't change like
our mental model of the universe. You notice when you
look at an image from JWST, you don't see it
in the original infrared. It'd be invisible to you. When
you talk about gravitational waves, they don't show it to

(56:42):
you in terms like the waves. They play it for
you like a sound. We're always translating things back into
our own sensorium because that's the way we make sense
of the universe. And so if aliens have a very
different sensorium or like octopus, right, they're like distributed brains.
What's it like to be an octopus? No idea, what
you like to be an alien? That's going to really

(57:02):
shape the questions they ask about the universe, and I think,
more crucially, how they accept the answers, because you always
want answers in your own familiar, intuitive language, and that's
going to be different for aliens as it is for us.
And so we could end up in a situation where,
like they have answers, they don't really make sense to
us and our physics. They're like, what are you even
talking about? You know, even if we get past the

(57:23):
communication questions.

Speaker 1 (57:26):
So in the early part of the book, you referenced
the Drake equation, and which is the equation that kind
of says, if there is intelligent life in the universe
that could be space varying that we could meet, like
could it be there? What's the probability? Right, So it's
a probaba ba ballistic calculation of that, and you add

(57:47):
a few factors to it for your book. Can you
talk about like those factors and why you added them. Yeah,
you think it's useful. Do you think that is actually
should we like officially change the Drake equations?

Speaker 5 (58:00):
Well, I mean Drake's equation tries to calculate how many
intelligent civilizations there are out there that could send us
a message. But I was interested in more than that.
I don't just want there to be an intelligence civilization
that sends us a message. I want to make mental
contact and talk about the secrets of the universe. And
so there's a sort of a subset of Drake's aliens

(58:22):
that I'm interested in. The ones that do physics the
way we do, so we can get answers to our
physics questions. And so I added a few terms. I
added terms like one, what're the fraction of those civilizations
that are technological that do science. We don't know that
it's one hundred percent, as we just talked about. Another
term is communication. Even if they can send us messages,

(58:42):
can we make mental contact? Can we decode those messages?
Because every communication has a translation step, or you go
from idea to symbol, and that translation, the assignment of
ideas to symbols is cultural and arbitrary, and so inverting
it might be impossible. And then this is the quest
question of are they interested in the same questions as
we are? Did they see the same emergence structures in

(59:05):
the universe? Do they ask about those same things? And
then finally, do they have the same kind of answers
as we do? Like are they interested in the same things?
Would they accept our answers? Could they be working on
a completely orthogonal theory of physics that also works? And
what does that even mean about the nature of truth?

Speaker 1 (59:22):
AI didn't they come up with like a completely different
way of explaining things.

Speaker 5 (59:28):
Exactly or you know, could they come up with the
theory of physics that we just don't even understand, like
are we biologically limited from understanding alien super advanced alien physics?
So those are the things I put together to extend
the Drinke equation to ask the question, what fraction or
how many aliens are there out there that we could

(59:49):
have this physics conversation that I think Carl Sagan imagined
and that young Daniel imagined when he was getting into physics.
Is that really possible? Because that's what I wanted to
figure out.

Speaker 1 (01:00:02):
So you think it's possible in an infinite universe with.

Speaker 5 (01:00:08):
I think two things. I think it's very unlikely because
a lot of things have to fall into place. Like
the beauty of the Drake equation. I mean, it's not
complicated like the shortening equation. It's just a bunch of
numbers multiplied together. But the beauty of it is that
that structure reinforces how you have to have everything fall
into place, Like it doesn't matter if you've got lots
and lots of planets if none of them have life
on it, and it doesn't matter if a lot of

(01:00:29):
them have life on it. If it's all just green slime.
You have to have everything fall into place to have
intelligent aliens communicate with you in the same way. You
need a lot of philosophical assumptions to go the right way.
For them to be aliens out there we can talk
to who are interested in the same stuff, whose answers
we can digest, who can help us understand the universe,

(01:00:50):
It's very unlikely. On the other hand, there are probably
lots of them, and you only need one, right, I
would accept just one civilization of advanced aliens that help
us understand the universe. That's all it takes, because you know,
I hope this's just one answer, and I'm happy to
accept the indy of it, you know.

Speaker 4 (01:01:08):
So, one of the things you said that I thought
was really interesting was talking about the way that they
would communicate with us, and that the way that we
communicate would would make sense to each other, and we'd
be able to kind of create almost like a narrative
amongst each other in the way that we talk. Because
one of the first things I thought of is the

(01:01:28):
gold the Voyager Golden Record, which I have a copy
of here. Aside from the images I've listened to, the
actual albums and the thing that always struck me about
it is that it feels extremely random. There's no message.
It's just like, here's some whale songs, and here's some
people singing, and here's some babies crying, and here's a symphony,

(01:01:53):
and it's there's no narrative, right, It's just a bunch
of stuff that we put on a record that's like,
here's the things that make humans, which really was like,
here's some things that usually make like a western white humans,
but like, but like, here's some humans stuff, right, and
here's some Earth stuff, And so I think that's the
other thing is like, do we need to be more

(01:02:16):
strategic in what we send out into space so that
it is a narrative. So it indicates that we want
to communicate that there's a way that we talk, so
that if they have an AI that can be trained
on what we send out into the universe, that they're
not sending us back babies crying and whale songs, right, Like,
I think that that's the fantastic.

Speaker 1 (01:02:38):
Exactly, you're sending back a virus that can infect all
of our technical.

Speaker 4 (01:02:42):
Systems, and then we are back in the back in
the dark ages.

Speaker 1 (01:02:51):
Because the robots come first, and it's world robot domination, right, right, right,
right right.

Speaker 5 (01:02:57):
I think that's a great example because imagine if you
a message in space and you were playing around with
them trying to translate it, and you turned it into
sound and then it sounded like alien babies crying. Would
you think, oh, yeah, I've got it right, You'd be like, no,
this is just garbage, Like it's hard to even know,
and what do they intend? Right, what does this even mean?
And you know, a question about being more intentional and

(01:03:18):
building a narrative. Before the Voyager Probe was the Pioneer plaque. Right,
this is what got sent down on the Pioneer Probes,
and this is where Carl Sagan and Frank Drake put together.
And it's much simpler, right than the Voyager record, which
has you know, audio encoding and like, oh my gosh,
I don't know that I could build something to decode there. Now.
This is just pictograms. And they tried to be strategic

(01:03:41):
about it, and they tried to avoid obvious cultural influences
and to be universal, and they drew diagrams to represent
like the hydrogen atom and these kinds of things because
they were hoping to find some kind of symbols that
they thought were going to be universal that only had
one interpretation. But that's impossible, right. It's the assignment between

(01:04:04):
ideas and symbols is always arbitrary and so inverting it,
you have to know the culture and in order to
decode these symbols, right, And so for example, I took
these symbols and I showed them to a bunch of
physics grad students and I give them the afternoon and
a bunch of donuts, and I said, what do you
think me? Exactly? And they're young enough to I've never

(01:04:25):
seen this before. And you know, this is like the
perfect audience because they're biologically human?

Speaker 1 (01:04:30):
Is this because like they're they're younger than cassette tapes exactly.

Speaker 5 (01:04:36):
They're like the pioneer what. Yeah? And you know this
is like much easier than the task aliens will face
because again, these are biological humans. They grew up in
the same cultures as Carl Sagan, their physics grad students, right,
who has more in common with Carl Sagan than these folks.
And they couldn't make any progress. They had no idea
what these things because they represent like I'm not just

(01:05:00):
like you know, one depiction of the hygien atom, but
like depiction of the hydrogen atom as like orbitals the
way like Neil's board drew it. The human concept of
an atom from like about a ten year period, about
one hundred years ago, right, Nobody depicts on hygien atom
that way now and didn't before, and so you know,
it's very reflective of our culture. So as much as

(01:05:21):
I love looking for aliens and the SETI project, I'm
not optimistic that they're ever going to get a signal
that they can decode. In the book, I focus on
the much much easier scenario of the aliens get here.
They arrive and I saw.

Speaker 1 (01:05:35):
Someone everything's all good.

Speaker 5 (01:05:40):
Exactly. So many the comments that aliens will never come here,
and I hope you're wrong. But in that scenario, we
have a lot of problem to solve, which is like
we have some cultural context in common because they're here.
We literally are in the same place. We can like
point this stuff and say apple or donut or doggy
or whatever, and hope to build from there some dictionary

(01:06:00):
we can use to establish communication. But I think if
it's just messages across space without any cultural context, that's
going to be really hard, maybe impossible.

Speaker 1 (01:06:11):
I mean even one of the images is of the
Arecibo Radio Observatory, which is kind of broken, not there anymore. Yeah,
I was, so that was one of that one hit home,
that one really hurt. But but that is I think

(01:06:34):
that is the part of science that as scientists, I
think is sometimes forgotten, which is the cultural context. And
there is no separating science from the cultural context. Even
though as I said earlier, you know, we scientists try
to UnBias and you know, make it as far from

(01:06:58):
human interpretation possible, but you can't do that, and then
it's in the world, and then it's of the time.
And so how do you ever, how do you like,
aside from being able to understand and use a signal
from an alien species with an alien culture in its
own space and time, how would we ever design against that?

(01:07:23):
I think, well, we get timeless.

Speaker 5 (01:07:27):
Yeah, it's impossible to know, and you know, we can't
fully unwrap our human biases until we meet aliens. But
one thing we can do is try to make sure
we're using as many different human cultures as possible. This
is one reason why like cultural diversity in science is
important because people come in with different assumptions and different
questions and different curiosities, and they help you realize, oh boy,

(01:07:48):
I was asking this question this way. This is another
interesting question. And even more than like our current diversity
in science, we had this amazing sort of natural experiment
here on Earth where we had the develop meant independently
of mathematics and astronomy and sort of proto science in
the Americas with the Mayans, and in the Far East
with the Chinese, and you know, in the Middle East

(01:08:10):
with the Greeks and the Sumerians, the Babylonians, and we
can compare and contrast those and the historical record to see,
like wow, which directions are inevitable, which directions are random?
And cultural you know, unfortunately or fortunately those cultures are
no longer distinct and separate. So the experiment it sort
of ended prematurely. It'd be fascinating, like to figure out now,

(01:08:33):
like what would the Mayans be studying if they were
still doing science today and the Spaniards hadn't you know,
burned all of their books. I love thinking about that.
I read a fantastic science fiction novel about that by
Tad Williams once. Anyway, for the book, I did dig
into those records and look at like how did the
Mayans approach this versus the Chinese? And you know, the

(01:08:56):
story is similar across the continents that everybody saw patterns
in the sky and then tried to understand them and
used math to understand them. The kinds of math they
used are different, though, Like the Chinese were very algebraic
they look at like patterns in tables of numbers, and
the Greeks, of course, very geometrical. They think of answers

(01:09:16):
as like where are things in space? Shapes and circles,
and the Mayans sort of in between, like they had
very advanced mathematics. They had more more accurate predictions for
where the planets were than the Europeans when the Spaniards arrived.

Speaker 1 (01:09:30):
So I'm wondering the records. Someone earlier, Paul Disney said,
made a reference to base ten math. Right where there
has been math that's base twelve, base sixty. There are
multiple and I think it was Mayans who were base sixty,
and so the difference in the way the numbers calculate,

(01:09:53):
you know, it's not the math is still there, and
the way it works, I guess still works like, yeah,
did you did you look at that deep enough to
like be like, oh, there's some real differences here, or
you're like, oh, yeah, it's all kind of similar, just
different places.

Speaker 5 (01:10:10):
Yeah, well it is quite different.

Speaker 3 (01:10:12):
You know.

Speaker 5 (01:10:13):
The Chinese again, they're algebraic, and so if you read
the early Chinese writing about their theories about the cosmos,
it doesn't quite make sense to you if you're a
geometric thinker, because you're reading it you're like, so, what
is where exactly? And where do I put stuff? And
that's just not how they were thinking about and they
weren't thinking geometrically. Most of us are, you know, have

(01:10:33):
grown up in the West and are the way of
thinking is geometric because of the Greeks and the Babylonians,
and so we're so geometrical as thinkers that some of
that early I don't think.

Speaker 1 (01:10:43):
I was until Pythagoras, you know, like that.

Speaker 5 (01:10:46):
Theorem exactly, And it wasn't until Descartes that we understood that, like, oh,
geometry and algebra actually the same thing. They're just different
ways to tackle the same fundamental concepts, you know, like
how two equations on a page you can solve the
algebraically for the solution or you can grab them and
see where they over intersect. It's exactly the same fundamental mathematics,
just two different sets of structures that turn out to

(01:11:09):
be equivalent to each other, which is super fascinating. But
you know, you ask a really deep question about mathematics,
and I saw somebody in the comments say like, well,
certainly math will have in common with the aliens, even
if not physics. And that seems compelling, and it seems likely,
but it also how do we know, right, we do
science with math, and we find math everywhere we do science,

(01:11:31):
and in fact, you know, math sometimes leads us to
answers like this cases in the history of science where
people have just used mathematics to say, well, this would
look be prettier mathematically if we had this other term,
and then it turns out, oh, yeah, we have that term.
It exists in the verse. So math seems to lead
us to answers, but we don't know if it's actually

(01:11:52):
necessary or just very very useful. And I read this
mind blowing book it's called Science Without Numbers. A philosopher
who said, look, this idea of like having a number
line and putting things on a number line, that's just
an abstract concept that works in your head, but you
don't need it. You don't need those numbers to do

(01:12:13):
to do science. And he developed the theory of gravity
without any numbers. And it's not a very nice theory.
It's not very useful theory, but it does work. And
so it sort of proves the point that like math
could just be an insight into the way our brains work.
That's something that's convenient for us, an easy shorthand for
us because of the way our minds work. It doesn't

(01:12:34):
have to be that way for aliens. Or it could
be that we have in common, and that would be
an incredible discovery, but we can't take that for granted.

Speaker 4 (01:12:42):
We also think about a spaceship that would run without math.
But I can see how it's possible, right, you know, spaceship.

Speaker 1 (01:12:54):
We got to fermentation, We got to like ma exactly.

Speaker 4 (01:12:57):
You can have a biochemical combustion system that's just like
you feed this goo the right amount and the engine
goes like there's something ill possible. Right.

Speaker 5 (01:13:08):
And I had a really fun conversation I emailed nome
Commci nonome chomps case, thinking who else has thought about
linguistics and aliens? So emailed him. And he's famous for math, right, Yeah,
he's famous for like actually reading his email and answering it,
and so he read have a conversation with me, And
I asked him this question, and he said math. He said,

(01:13:30):
the way to make contact with aliens is through math,
because arithmetic is the foundation of all of human math,
and everything builds from there. And one plus one equals
to everywhere. And I saw Paul Disney there in the
comments commenting about whole number integers, and that's a compelling
argument because it seems likely that like one plus t
one equals two everywhere. But you can also imagine aliens

(01:13:53):
that don't have whole number integers, Like what if you
know your aliens that are like existing as tendril of
plasma and the atmosphere of a star and the edge
of your body is not like you can't really define it.
You never come up with this like I'm different from you.
I count myself as one and you as two.

Speaker 1 (01:14:11):
Slid math, slime mold math.

Speaker 5 (01:14:13):
Yeah, so maybe they only start from like real numbers,
you know, and integers of like why would you even
to them? It's like why would you draw this weird
dotted line between your body and the rest of the universe.
Like that doesn't make sense. That's totally arbitrary. And when
you think about it, kind of is like where is
the edge of my body? Is it? Do my hairs count?
Is it like my personal space? Like in the end,
I am drawing an arbitrary But what.

Speaker 1 (01:14:34):
About when I pick up a pen, get in a
car and I'm driving the car. Is my body now
the entire.

Speaker 5 (01:14:41):
Car exactly right? You know? Or you lose an arm,
is it still part of your body even though it's deteriorated.
These turn out to be they seem like obvious questions,
but they're very fuzzy you philosophically, and that tells you, Okay,
there's some assumptions here, and those assumptions may strike you
as obvious, But there's so many times in the history
of physics and science when things that have seemed obvious

(01:15:02):
about the universe have turned out to be not at
all true. And the whole point of science is to
not just accept our intuition, but like, let the data
tell us. And we just don't have data about these things.
We just don't know. And it could be that when
the aliens come, that's when we figure out, Wow, were
we wrong about stuff we assumed was true.

Speaker 1 (01:15:22):
I think your next book title is not at all true.

Speaker 5 (01:15:29):
That's the one I'm right after the aliens come and
tell us what's up man?

Speaker 1 (01:15:33):
Exactly? So you like you're you're getting at something that
I actually was thinking about as I was looking reading
through your book, and the book is like it's it says,
do aliens speak physics? And you think you're going to
get into a you know, pop culture, you know, popular

(01:15:54):
physics book, but then it's like all about animals andilosophy
and like all these different ideas that are not physics.
When it comes it's much broader. Did you plan on
making a gateway book?

Speaker 5 (01:16:14):
Yeah? Well, you know, I wanted to ask this question,
is physics discovered or invented? And to get there you
have to know a lot about biology to understand perception,
to understand how we ask questions, and philosophy to know
what is the underpinnings of mathematics and why science works
at all. So for me, these projects are fun because

(01:16:35):
they give me an excuse to dig into something I
always wanted to know more about but haven't had an
afternoon to do it. And now I'm like, oh, it's
part of this project, so I'm going to go read
three books on philosophy of numbers, you know, and so
it's super fun for me. And I originally pitched this
idea for a book to my fourteen year old. I
was like, what if I wrote a book about whether
physics is human or universal? And he was like, yawn,

(01:16:58):
that sounds really boring, and you know, that hurt my
feelings a little bit, but you got to listen to
the teenagers. And so then I came back. I was like, Okay,
what about a book where aliens arrive and it's about
whether we can talk science to them? And he was like, oh, yeah,
I would totally read that book.

Speaker 1 (01:17:12):
And I'm telling you so seriously. I read this and
I want to give it to my fourteen year old now,
like I do. I'm like, this is I was reading.
I'm like, I needs to read this book because.

Speaker 5 (01:17:21):
There's so many fun ideas in philosophy, and in my opinion,
not enough books like that explore the edge of popular
physics and popular philosophy, because hey, the reason popular physics
is cool is because of philosophy, Like why do we
care where the universe came from because they're deep philosophical
implications about what it means to be human and alive

(01:17:41):
in the world.

Speaker 1 (01:17:44):
Every physicist, like theoretical physicist, goes from writing books about
theoretical physics to writing books about philosophy. I know everybody
takes the Sean Carroll track.

Speaker 5 (01:17:59):
Well I'm going.

Speaker 4 (01:18:01):
I'm writing philosophy now.

Speaker 5 (01:18:05):
Well, very flattering. Any comparison to Sean Carroll is very
flattering because he did it right. You know, he actually
went and learned the stuff and noticed what he was
talking about. There are other physicists, I will mention he
is a kind and modest and humble guy. There are
other physicists who make the very much more common mistake
of assuming that because they know physics, therefore their experts
and everything, and they can opine about everything without having

(01:18:28):
done the reading. And so I really didn't want to
make that mistake. But I was very lucky. There are
a bunch of really smart philosophers here, you see Irvine,
who read this and made sure that I wasn't making
a fool myself, and I was correctly summarizing some of
these discussions. But there's a lot of really interesting stuff
in philosophy that I think more people should know about
and it's really relevant and fun to think about, not

(01:18:49):
just like dry and dusty.

Speaker 1 (01:18:51):
And I think that is also at this critical time
in the United States for science, where we have this
question of Okay, people know science is important, people know
that it impacts their lives. They have money for science.
That's great, But who okay, whatever, why do I care?
That is the that is the crux, right.

Speaker 5 (01:19:13):
Why do I yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:19:15):
And the how do you humanize science? Because the glass Tower,
the bubble has been isolationists for way too long, and
it's making approachable books like this that that break down
those thought patterns and assumptions and make you start thinking.

Speaker 5 (01:19:39):
So thank you. I agree. And you know, the more
people we can bring into science to show them the
joy of curiosity and wondering about the universe, and that's
why I love you all.

Speaker 1 (01:19:49):
Show Okay, so donuts, why the donuts? Donuts?

Speaker 5 (01:19:55):
In the book, one of my role models as a
writer is Dave Berry, and he has.

Speaker 1 (01:20:02):
This column about was that a San Francisco Chronicle or No, No, No, No, Miami, Miami, Harold.

Speaker 5 (01:20:09):
Miami Harold. He had this this article which I will
always remember, where he says, some words are funny, you know,
like the word weasel is funny, booger is funny, and
so you know, you just try to like pick something
whimsical and add it to each chapter is like, you know,
something to hang on to, because the idea of this
book is like, there's big ideas in there, but I

(01:20:30):
don't want to weigh you down. I want to break
it up with a bunch of dad jokes and cartoons
from my friend Andy Warner, so that you got a
big idea and then someone laugh at to make it
so easy.

Speaker 1 (01:20:40):
To read throughout. There are really wonderful cartoons and lots
of pop culture y type stuff and it's really it's
very fun. And at the beginning of each chapter you
have these sci fi short stories, yeah, hypothetical situations that
they are actually a little fun science fiction short stories.

Speaker 5 (01:21:05):
The idea there was, you know, we're writing a chapter
about a concept. Do we have to use math? Do
aliens have to use math also? And then I wanted
to illustrate that and like, what would it be like
to meet aliens that don't Why would that be hard?
What would be surprising about it? So we tried to
make a concrete scenario to illustrate each concept. You know,
if we met aliens that had very different sensoriums or

(01:21:28):
asked very different questions or whose answers we couldn't understand,
what would that be like? What we do in that scenario?
How would we figure it out? I'm also a huge
fan of science fiction, and so I couldn't resist the
urge to write little fictional scenarios.

Speaker 1 (01:21:42):
And have you written Have you done sci fi short
story or novel writing before?

Speaker 5 (01:21:48):
No? So this is the first for me.

Speaker 1 (01:21:50):
But I give it your next project. Are you writing
my book next?

Speaker 5 (01:21:55):
Or it's about you? Guys have already spoiled it because
it's about invading world about alien squirrels, So that's ruining it.

Speaker 4 (01:22:03):
You got it you? If I can also suggest you
should you should probably pitch to the Futurama writer's room,
because I know that they take a lot of scientists
in there and and several things you brought up to there.
I was like, man, this sounds like an episode of Futurama.
The plasma alien that doesn't know where they end, and
another begins Futurama.

Speaker 5 (01:22:27):
It's always been the end of my career would be
writing for Futurama.

Speaker 1 (01:22:30):
Yes, we're excited about Big Bang theory when that was
going on. Futuramayah, kind of where it's at for science
TV these days. Except for Eleanor, I.

Speaker 5 (01:22:46):
Think we have very different audiences, but the same breath.

Speaker 4 (01:22:53):
Well, first one then many years together.

Speaker 1 (01:22:56):
Yeah, okay, So I don't want to keep you forever
and late into the night, and I know Blair probably
is going to be needing to get on to her
child as well this evening. Are you working on anything
else right now? I mean right now? It's like everybody

(01:23:17):
the books available, where can they find it, where they
can find you.

Speaker 5 (01:23:24):
So the book comes out November fourth, so very very soon,
and you can look it up online everywhere, and it's
at alienspeakphysics dot com. If you're pre ordered the book,
you can get free stickers from some of the aliens
from Andy. Look for the link on my website www
dot alienspeakphysics dot com. And I have a podcast, Daniel

(01:23:44):
and Kelly Explain Sorry Daniel Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, where we
talk about biology and physics and everything in between and
have a lot of fun. And then in my day job,
I'm doing particle physics, which keeps me quite busy, but
I really love it research and.

Speaker 1 (01:23:59):
Teaching, and you are going to find either use all
the machine learning to search through that data and find
something new at the.

Speaker 5 (01:24:09):
Atlass that's the plan, exactly, discover something new, blow your minds.
Collecting nobilp rise, that's the goal. But we haven't got
there yet, and if.

Speaker 1 (01:24:19):
You don't, in the meantime, you're writing great books for
people to enjoy. Thank you, Thank you so much. It's
such a just always it's been what I said this
earlier when we were before the show. I think it's
about two hundred and fifty or sixty episodes since we
talked with you previously.

Speaker 5 (01:24:37):
Amazing. Congrats all wow, Well, thank you very much for
having me back on and for reading my book and
for considering buying it. And thanks to your audience.

Speaker 1 (01:24:46):
Yeah, thank you so much. Thanks for joining us, and
thanks for chatting about science with us. I really appreciate it.
Good night, have a good night. Thank you, thank you
for being here for this great interview with Daniel Whites
in his book To Aliens Speak Physics. Now it is
time for the next part of our show, the part

(01:25:07):
you know and love as Blair's Animal Corner.

Speaker 4 (01:25:12):
With Blair, she loves talk creature by pid ped.

Speaker 5 (01:25:22):
If you want to hear about the animals.

Speaker 4 (01:25:26):
Except more giant pat.

Speaker 1 (01:25:35):
What you got, Blair?

Speaker 4 (01:25:37):
So yeah, let's talk panda poop. So hi A, here's
what's gonna happen. I'm gonna explain this story to you.
I am going to harken back to a panda poo
related story from ten years ago. I cannot believe that.
So we're gonna get there. When you're like, this sounds
like something maybe we've talked about on the show before,

(01:25:59):
it's so we have. So I will explain. Okay. So
this is a study all about how pandas and bears
gut microbiome is different if they are in captivity or
in the wild. And I know you're all saying duh,

(01:26:22):
which you're right, duh, right, our microbiome is different if
we live in San Francisco or Portland, or the United
States or Italy or Portugal or like any like antiartine,

(01:26:43):
like it's literally anywhere. Your microbiome is different based on
where you are because of just environmental factors, but also
based on what you eat, on nutrient availability, on genetics,
there are many different things that go into the fact
that your microbiome will be different based on where you

(01:27:04):
live and so on its face, just saying that a
microbiome is different from captive animals versus wild animals, duh.
You're being fed a stable diet by people who take
care of you versus foraging or hunting for food in
the wild. You are just physically in a different place

(01:27:24):
with niff different microbes on surfaces in the soil, in
the air. Right, You're being exposed to humans which you
might not be exposed to at other times, and other animals,
but also different levels of stress, right, not to mention
different genetic stock if you are in captivity. Right, So

(01:27:46):
there's lots of different kind of reasons that a microbiome
could be different. What this study is talking about is
how it's different, How does it vary and is it good?
Is it bad? Kind of is there is there an
issue related to the difference between captive microbiome versus well microbiome.

(01:28:08):
So this is a research study out of China. They
did a poop test. They collected fecal samples from wild
and captive members of three endangered species that is, giant pandas,
red pandas and asiatic black bears. So when they said
pandas and bears, they that's what they literally meant, giant pandas,

(01:28:29):
which is a kind of bear group.

Speaker 1 (01:28:31):
Or was that Are they all related closely?

Speaker 4 (01:28:34):
So here's why I think they did, and they didn't
say exactly why. This was the three that they picked.
So you have your giant pandas and your black bears.
They're both bears. You have your red pandas. Giant pandas
and red pandas are both pandas, which means they means
they are bamboo eaters. So you have kind it's kind
of a venn diagram, right. So you have your you

(01:28:55):
have your bear that isn't a true omnivore, You have
your bear that eats like a panda, and you have
your panda. Right So yeah, so you're kind of covering
all your bases. So they looked at wild versus captive
members of these species. They used RNA sequencing. They identified

(01:29:15):
different types of bacteria present in the samples, and so
they were looking at ribosomal RNA. They processed the data
with statistical tools and they scored and ranked based on
diet genetics and captivity to the animal's gut microbiomes, so
they're getting it all these different factors that I mentioned.

(01:29:35):
They found that in captivity the environment being a research
center or a zoo that was actually the biggest single
factor driving change in gut microbiib structure. There was a
twenty one point six percent change in microbiome structure based
on being a research center or zoo versus in the wild. However,

(01:29:55):
lineage genetics explained a twelve point three percent shift, and
die alone looked at a there was a three point
nine percent change. So overall, trying to kind of zero
out potential different confounding variables, the physical location they were in.
Being in captivity had this huge, huge impact on the

(01:30:17):
microbiome in these animals, And they found that the gut
bacteria of all of the species were more similar to
each other in captivity, even though they were distinct in
the wild, which again makes sense, especially if you're taking
all of these from the same physical space, because they're
being supposed to the same people, the same cleaning products,

(01:30:40):
the same Like I said, soil air visitors, right, a
lot of the environmental microbiome that you could get absorbed
to over development, right, and so there was this similarity
whether you were a black bear, a giant panda, or
red panda, there was more similar larity amongst these very

(01:31:01):
distinct groups who lived in captivity. They also found, oh,
something kind of unexpected, which was that there was a
change in the animal's digestive capabilities. So wild bears and
pandas had proteobacteria that helped break down complex plant material,

(01:31:22):
but in captivity all of them were dominated by firmacutes,
which are associated ermacuities thank you cuties, which are associated
with the fermentation of starches and sugars.

Speaker 1 (01:31:38):
And so for the bamboo right, or it would.

Speaker 4 (01:31:43):
But it would also make sense for things like kibble,
which is what you're getting in captivity, a lot more gluten,
a lot of.

Speaker 1 (01:31:52):
Do the pandas eat kibble or is it just the bears?

Speaker 4 (01:31:56):
So good question. I don't know about this particular institution.
I know that bears always get a certain amount of chow.
So it's possible that it was offered that they make
a particular bamboo eater chow that they would provide to
these animals. I don't know, but it's very possible. There's

(01:32:17):
considering that you know, there's an entire industry of specialized
chows for zoo animals to try to round out the
carbs that they need in their diet. And so one
of the other things that they found was that living
in captivity had an increase and potentially harmful bacteria like
streptococcus and so again, also that might have to do

(01:32:41):
with the fact that they are in more confined space.
They can't get distance from where they go to the bathroom.
As well, there could be cleaning issues, are people not
scrubbing in and out of spaces appropriately or you know,
there could be any number of reasons related to that.

Speaker 2 (01:32:56):
But so.

Speaker 4 (01:32:58):
The main take away from this paper is that this
twenty percent change in microbiome from being in captivity versus
being in the wild means one thing. It doesn't mean
that being captivity is bad, but it does mean that
you can't take a wild panda and PLoP them, or sorry,

(01:33:21):
a captive panda and PLoP them into the wild, or
a captive asiatic black bear and PLoP them into the
wild because their microbiome is not suited to the wild diet.

Speaker 1 (01:33:33):
Especially if that's how they have grown up, right, right,
maybe if they're multiple generations in captivity.

Speaker 4 (01:33:41):
Right, and so this is a concern for fitness post release.
And so there is a call from this research team
for conservationists to explore the idea of using probiotics or
fecal transplants if there is an intention to introduce an

(01:34:01):
animal that was raised in captivity to the wild. And So,
while I have my own tangent about pandas that I'm
going to bring in related to twenty fifteen, as I
kind of teased before in a minute, the overarching kind
of takeaway from this story I think is really important
to conservation as a whole in that whether this is

(01:34:23):
something that's been looked at or not, I think it
needs a second look in reintroductions in general. So there's
a lot of things that are paid attention to with reintroductions.
Does an animal know how to forage or hunt? Does
an animal have all of the adaptations that they would

(01:34:45):
have as a wild animal. Are they imprinted on humans
or not? There's lots of things that you look at
before you release an animal into the wild that was
raised in captivity. But how closely are we tracking the microbiome,
like for the for the condors that we mentioned at

(01:35:06):
the beginning, Do those condors have a microbiome well suited
to eating carrion in Pinnacles National Park? Right? Like?

Speaker 1 (01:35:16):
Are they ready with the condors and with other like
avian and other you know hand rearing situations where you
rear animals and you know this also, but where you
have the intent of rearing an animal so that it
can be introduced to the wild, there is minimal contact
they try and do you know with cranes and condors

(01:35:38):
they do like these special behaviors with they wear wings
and they do things to have gloves so that they
can feed the babies as puppets there. Yeah, it's a
puppet that oh this is a parent condor. No, it's not,
but close enough and a lot of it though is
It's not with concern for the microbiome. It's concern for

(01:35:59):
sex and vision, so the senses. What is the growing
animal going to to basically grab onto latch onto for
its stereotyping behaviors? Moving forward, right, what when it becomes
an adult, what is it going to find attractive? You know,

(01:36:20):
is it going to run at a car because he
thinks the car is mommy? There's not a it's we
don't want anything to smell like a human, because then
human smelling things will be okay and acceptable.

Speaker 4 (01:36:34):
Right, so comfortable a source of food, yes, absolutely, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:36:38):
But it's it's never as far as I know, I
don't have I don't think I've ever heard of anybody
taking the microbiome into account.

Speaker 4 (01:36:47):
No, no, And so I think that.

Speaker 1 (01:36:49):
This is a huge I'm outside of that.

Speaker 4 (01:36:51):
It's a huge question. That's just like with human health,
we're just starting really to look at this stuff and
talk about you know, probiotics have been part of the
conversation for a long time, but kind of with a
lot of smoke and mirrors of just like, hey, back
to your it's good for you. Just take this yogurt.
It's fine. But the kind of scientific approach of it,

(01:37:15):
the surgical approach of what is your microbiome, what do
you have lacking? What did your microbiome used to be?
There's so far to go with human health that I
think it makes sense that we're kind of just starting
this conversation. But it needs to be addressed because if
this is happening with black bears and pandas, it is

(01:37:39):
likely happening with other animals as well, because you know, I'm.

Speaker 6 (01:37:42):
Just just thinking though, you know how you go sometimes
to a foreign country and because you are not your
body's not familiar with the microbes in a foreign country.

Speaker 1 (01:37:53):
Suddenly you end up in bed or the bathroom for
two to three days and your vacation is ruined. Right,
You're doing that to an animal, right, You release an
animal into the wild, and suddenly they're foraging on their own.
They're coming from their zoo or basically very clinical environment,
even though it's dirt and whatever, it's it's not the

(01:38:15):
wild and the.

Speaker 4 (01:38:17):
Food well, and where we might miss our sight seeing
and spend a couple of days in the hotel room.
They might actually get eaten because they are ill, right, so,
or they might miss mating season, or they might not
migrate appropriately, or they might starve or die of dehydration.
There's only a.

Speaker 1 (01:38:36):
Lot gassy and they just stay in the you know,
in the cave a little bit longer.

Speaker 4 (01:38:42):
Yeah, so it's yeah, it's a huge question. And so
just to kind of address that I have talked about
the pandemicrobiome before, this raised questions for me about this
study that I talked about, which I could not believe
was from twenty fifteen, and this was looking at the

(01:39:05):
microbiome of pandas. And this is where one of the
funniest things about pandas to me came came up during
my time on the show, which is that it seems
like pandas always have a stomach ache. Right, it's because
they don't have the right bacteria to process bamboo, and so.

Speaker 1 (01:39:23):
Is it because they're in captivity?

Speaker 4 (01:39:26):
Right? So that was my first question was where did
where did these pandas come from? So like, where did
the poop come from? What is the poop source of
these pandas? And so I it took me a minute
because a lot of it was paywalt now because it's
so old. But I found I think it should be free.

Speaker 1 (01:39:45):
That it's so old, come on, I don't know.

Speaker 4 (01:39:47):
I don't know. It disappeared from a lot of my
usual sources. But I was able to find it. And
so they sequenced bacteria from fecal samples from giant pandas
living in a research base. So this is still a
captivity environment. And so what they found over the course
of spring, summer, and late autumn for a whole year

(01:40:08):
is that they ate about ten kilograms of bamboo leaves,
but the gut bacteria was similar to carnivorous and omnivorous bears,
but differ from plant eaters. And so this is where
this whole kind of joke that we started about them
always having a tummy it came from because they don't
have the right microbiome to eat bamboo. And now I
want this study redone with wild pandas, because what were

(01:40:34):
they feeding these pandas in this research base because they
said they're eating ten kilograms of bamboo? Are they eating
anything then?

Speaker 1 (01:40:40):
But didn't. Then they say they're like, oh, they have
the microbiome for a carnivorous Yes, that's correct, like they
should be eating meat, but where they're eating bamboo. And
then there was a later study that was like oh
there's something that you know whatever, but they still didn't
answer the question in it, right, So yeah, this is

(01:41:00):
I love this.

Speaker 4 (01:41:01):
Question, laire. Yes, so I think that it is a
related but different study. So that was looking at is
there microbiome more similar to a bear or a red
panda the original panda. So this is that like vent
diagram I was talking about. And so they found that
their gout bi microbiome was more similar to the black

(01:41:23):
bear basically, but this is in captive pandace. So if
there is a twenty percent variance in the microbiome from
captivity to the wild, then I can't help. But wonder
if you pulled fecal samples from wild pandas, would you

(01:41:47):
find the same thing. Would you find that that microbiome
is similar to a black bear versus a red panda,
or would you find that it is more similar to
a panda.

Speaker 1 (01:42:01):
I think this is a great question. I don't know either.
I don't I want to know if anybody knows.

Speaker 4 (01:42:08):
So all that to say, I still think pandas are ridiculous.

Speaker 1 (01:42:14):
I mean, they haven't done this test on wild pandas
because there aren't that many of them.

Speaker 4 (01:42:19):
Yeah, they're they're just hard to anyway. There there's they
spook easily, you know, all that good stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:42:28):
But they do like to play. They're cute. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:42:31):
They also they also get lost really easily, which was
another study that I loved. But he just lost all
the time. Anyway, I think you know.

Speaker 1 (01:42:41):
Where you are when you're just in a research institute.

Speaker 4 (01:42:43):
All I want to acknowledge that this is one of
those situations where panda research gets a lot of money,
and ultimately I think panda research is stupid because they
are animals that we could save that we are not
doing research on, and have ecological importance way higher than

(01:43:09):
that of pandas. Right, And so this is where condors
are very different from pandas because condors have a very
important role in an ecosystem. They actually care about reproduction.
They're not as ridiculous. So anyway, point being that, I
get frustrated sometimes with panda research, but I think it's
important to acknowledge when a piece of research that was

(01:43:32):
panda research and I'm doing my little air quotes here
for those of you listening, this funding and interest and
attention that was paid to pandas in this research project
looking at the microbiome has the opportunity to benefit lots
of other endangered species and reintroduction programs, and so for that,

(01:43:54):
I just wanted to acknowledge that this is a potential
win in conservation. Thank you to panda conservation efforts in
this case.

Speaker 1 (01:44:06):
I mean the pandas themselves, but the eco like there's
a lot of like the broader ecosystem and other stuff
that it's the big keystone you can serve the keystone
ish species and you get other benefits.

Speaker 4 (01:44:20):
Yeah, but the pandas they're not They don't have that
big of an impact on the bamboo forest. This is
part of my problem with them. They don't really do
anything but put in this case oking. Sorry, they're very cute,
so they get money. Yes, they're like they're like a
flagship species for China. So a lot of research goes

(01:44:42):
to Chinese research institutions to study pandas, and so if
we could use that to our advantage for conservation as
a whole, I think that is amazing.

Speaker 1 (01:44:53):
Control the bandas the research, that is amazing. The more good,
the better share it. Everybody, all right, we need to
finish this show, so I am going to very quickly
go through a few stories that I thought were very
interesting this week. Researchers have I think they're at MIT.

(01:45:20):
They have created a system they're calling multi cellular integrated
brains or my brains m I brains. They're brain organoids,
so little tiny clumps of cells in a dish, maybe
like the size of a dime or so, Whereas before
historically you could put a single cell type in a

(01:45:43):
Petrie dish and maybe find out, oh the neurons grow together.
All that's great. What they have done with these brain
organoids is they have systematically tested different proportions of different
kinds of cells together and been able to create a
complex system that is grown from individual donors induced pluripotent

(01:46:10):
stem cells and can be customizable through gene editing and
can have it's three D human brain tissue that can
have all all major brain cell types in it, parasites, astrocytes,
endothelial cells, neurons, oglio onlygodendric only, godndroglia, I haven't said

(01:46:34):
that one before, and microglia. And more so, they have
the ability of creating basically systems in which you can
have You can go and create a mini brain in

(01:46:57):
your lab and it can have of blood cells, neurons, astrocytes,
glial cells, all of the things that are necessary to
study the metabolic dysfunction of Alzheimer's disease. For instance, because
you can grow blood vessels closely to neurons and astrocytes,

(01:47:18):
you can create the blood brain barrier and immune system
ecosystem that can recapitulate disease states. Because you can edit
the genes that say, oh, the astrocites have there's an
issue with the apoe four gene, or there's an issue
with mitochondrial function, or there's this, and you can grow

(01:47:41):
these little, tiny, like dime sized clumps of multiple cell types.
This my brain is going to be amazing, and it's
going it's going to help me live longer with my
cognitive function. I hope it's kind of amazing. And it's

(01:48:02):
beautiful too. These brains are these cells. They've got multiple
blends of cells that you can put together. You can
the study that they just published, it goes over all
of the things that's in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences this week, and the group that has

(01:48:24):
has published it is says it's my brain.

Speaker 5 (01:48:27):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:48:28):
Maybe they're calling it me brain, am I My brain
is the only brain brain Seriously, it's the only in
vitro system that contains all six major cell types that
are present in the human brain. They've enabled research to

(01:48:49):
discover how one of the most common genetic markers for
Alzheimer's disease alter cells interactions to produce pathology. Maybe my
brain will help us get to.

Speaker 4 (01:49:01):
Brains like brain. I like my brain.

Speaker 1 (01:49:05):
I can't help it brains. Yeah, these are the kinds
of things that make me laugh. Anyway, I think I
think it's a really really pretty amazing advancement my brain.
It might move neuroscience therapeutical therapeutic research forward. And Blair,

(01:49:25):
you know how you've talked, you brought you brought to
the show the plenarian research about how they chopped off
the body and grew the body, chopped off the head,
regrew the head, and it was like.

Speaker 4 (01:49:35):
How do they do that?

Speaker 1 (01:49:36):
What are the plans doing? And so researchers just published
a study of this basically the immortal flatworms, the plnaria.
This study came out and Sell reports last week. The
researchers determined in the study that when humans, we have

(01:49:59):
stem cells, and those stem cells when they're in like
a certain organ or a certain part of your body,
they're responding to all the instructions in that part of
your body. So if your liver is damaged, you have
stem cells in the liver that are oh be more
liver stuf. The plenaria, however, they don't have those niche controls.

(01:50:22):
Their stem cells do not respond to the cells near them.
There's no like neighborhood that controls them in the way
that human tissues have are controlled. So they don't know
all of the details or the genes and everything that's involved,
but they have seen that there are some cells that
it's like, Okay, my gut is missing. I'm not getting

(01:50:46):
instructions from my gut anymore, So maybe we should build
something that brings the gut back. Also, it's the stem
idea where this research will go is in understanding the
controls on stem cells. We can potentially use this understanding

(01:51:09):
to help us grow new organs, new limbs, to treat,
to treat losses moving forward, spinal cord injuries, these kinds
of things.

Speaker 4 (01:51:19):
That's interesting. I will say I was always kind of
such a weird thing to say. I was always kind
of charmed by flatworms in all of my various biology classes. Well,
their diagrams are very cute. It look like they're wearing
a little hat, and they have these little pin prick eyes,
and they have their very simple body plan, and you're

(01:51:40):
just kind of like, I mean, they are just doing it.

Speaker 1 (01:51:45):
Their worms.

Speaker 4 (01:51:48):
Kind of worms, kind of little flat worms. But I
think the the thing that is interesting, but also I
feel like I'm not getting my hopes up too high.
Really to this is that there's just so simple, right,
It's like a jack of all trades, master of none situation. Right,

(01:52:09):
Like they have these stem cells that they're not they're
not being given specific directions because they're they don't have
a complicated body plan. Right. It's it's it's not it's
not analogous to our specialized systems.

Speaker 1 (01:52:27):
It is bilaterally symmetrical, and it has a head to tail,
so like it doesn't have a spine and notochord, you know, but.

Speaker 4 (01:52:36):
As specialized specialized regions of their body.

Speaker 1 (01:52:39):
They have a head, they have amid a gut. They
have a gut that's separate from the brain. They have
a little nervous system. So plenarians actually as far as
like simple organisms, to understand the controls that limit stem
cells or that you open them up and make them

(01:53:02):
more limitless, because that's one of the things also like
we have so for instance, spinal cord injuries because of
neighborhood limitations, the nerves don't grow as quickly and so
you don't have the repair function to allow the nerves
to regrow. But if you could turn make the instructions different,

(01:53:25):
the nerves would be like, yeah, ne, ne good, No,
I'm a grown leg. Why not.

Speaker 4 (01:53:34):
You just see a flatworm with one little like I
just can't help a picture like a doll's leg poking
out like a baby leg. Yep, there you go.

Speaker 1 (01:53:50):
You're welcome. Anyway, researchers are looking into how they regrow
these body words, and it's very interesting. So I was
excited to see this study because I thought it would
be fun to show it to you.

Speaker 4 (01:54:05):
That's awesome.

Speaker 1 (01:54:07):
One that Justin would have liked and probably would have
brought if you were here this week is the fact,
not a fact, but a new idea about the human brain.
Researchers looked at a whole bunch of old, dead, ancient
human teeth and they were like, there's a lot of
lead in them, and so they're like, oh yeah, people
probably win in caves and there's water coming in the

(01:54:29):
walls of the caves, and like, oh yeah, I'd probably
drink the water in the caves, and there's lead in
the caves. And so early humans probably suffered massively from
lead poisoning, which would have limited brain development, led to
limitations in language development. And this is Neanderthals also and

(01:54:53):
would have led to higher rates of aggression. They determined
that there is a gene mutation even though we are
still injured. And you know, lead poisoning is damaging and
does lead to these these terrible things. Now, so lead pipes,

(01:55:14):
get rid of them, Fix your sewer like, fix the
water supply, everybody. Let's make humanity better, less aggressive, smarter better.
We can do this. We can. But the fact that
we are not hurt more by lead poisoning in our
modern societies is thanks to a mutation that we got.

(01:55:35):
It's one mutation that is just slightly shifted from the
original version, and it allows us to withstand the lead
poisoning a little bit more.

Speaker 4 (01:55:47):
They did it, and it's and it's from it's from
a common ancestor between us and Neanderthals, or it's from because.

Speaker 7 (01:55:55):
You said yeah, so they and what they found is
that we out competed Neanderthal cousins because we got this geneient.

Speaker 1 (01:56:07):
And so they grew brain organoids with Neanderthal gene variants
and human variants. They determined that there is a difference
in modern humans and this Nova, the modern human version
of Nova one. When they took Neanderthal this Neanderthal cells. No,

(01:56:29):
they edited neuronal cells to have the old version that
Neanderthals had and the modern human version that we have,
and then they gave them lead, and the neurons with
the modern human version did much better. So the idea
is that thanks to And there's been a question and

(01:56:54):
Justin would probably get at this, there's been a question
about how Neanderthal spoke language, that they might have had,
how much aggression they had, whatever. Maybe they were lead
poisoned and they couldn't talk to each other. I have
no idea.

Speaker 4 (01:57:07):
I just think they were just angry all the time,
angry used they couldn't talk.

Speaker 1 (01:57:12):
They're like, ohooh, but humans. Then we got our mutation
and we were like, I can handle a little lead poisoning.
It's not that bad.

Speaker 4 (01:57:20):
Still that still that to be clear, let's still be warlike. Okay, yeah,
I think you know, you guys like to make a
lot of fun about how young I am, but I
think I'm now the often the older person in the
room who's like, I'm of the last generation of lead
based pain in his fest.

Speaker 1 (01:57:40):
It's the last generation.

Speaker 4 (01:57:48):
No, Like, while I was in high school, they started
abating asbestos and lead based pain in all the public
schools like that. I really feel like that was the
the end of that era, at least in you know, California.
But yeah, it's I think it's very wild we make

(01:58:08):
it such a big deal out of lead poisoning and
how terrible it can be to our bodies and our brains,
and and that we actually have an advantage compared to
other organisms and their processing of lead is shocking to me.

Speaker 1 (01:58:25):
Honestly, it's amazing. We've been lead poisoned so much and
we've gotten this far.

Speaker 4 (01:58:32):
So the poor animals getting all the runoff from all
of the all of the lead products that.

Speaker 1 (01:58:39):
We have, it's why we can't talk to them.

Speaker 4 (01:58:43):
Oh, that's why they're just mad. They're like, you're dumbing
all this gross stuff. No, thank you, I'm not going
to talk to you.

Speaker 1 (01:58:55):
And finally, there's one last study that uh, I thought
was just fun for the end of the show. Out
in Communications Biology, a couple of weeks back, researchers looked
at five hundred and seventy seven people who previously years
ago had watched an excerpt from the Alfred Hitchcock Prevens series,

(01:59:20):
an excerpt eight minutes of an episode called Bang You're Dead,
and while they were watching it fMRI scans, so they
had a measure of these individuals from eighteen to eighty
eight of their brains as they watched this video clip
and the research previously, they were able to determine that

(01:59:41):
this particular video clip, for whatever reason it's the black
and white Alfred Hitchcock noss, maybe it's the storytelling, whatever
it is, it leads to really high levels of brain synchronization.
So like at certain points in the eight minutes, your brain,
most brains are doing pretty much the same thing, and

(02:00:02):
so it's kind of a control right for this is
your brain on Alfred Alfred Hitchcock. And they took those
people now they'd previous previously watched it, had their brain recorded,
and they had them do it again and find out
whether or not their brain readings changed over time. What

(02:00:28):
they're trying to answer the question of is what is
it that makes it seem like time goes faster as
you get older? And so one of the things they
saw in this is that the older adults their their
the fMRI recordings that they just used, now that the

(02:00:50):
older adults their brains shifted to a new activity state
less frequently, so younger adults were more synchronized in how
their brain responded and win different activity states were happening,
and older adults. If between the first time they did

(02:01:11):
this watching and this new time, the older adults had
fewer shifts in their activity state over time, whereas the
younger adult. Younger adults are like new thing, new thing,
new thing, new thing. The brain's constantly keeping track of
stuff all the time.

Speaker 4 (02:01:29):
Yes, yes, how do we know it has to do
with their age and not with the fact that they've
seen it before?

Speaker 1 (02:01:36):
That was my question. Also, I mean, I love the
idea of controlling and being like I watched this at
this one point, and now I watched it at this
other point, and so I think it would have been
better if they had had it. I'm watching it now
this first time, and then I'm immediately watching it again
right after, because then it's kind of close in time

(02:01:59):
or even this time around. If they'd had two basically
immediate watchings.

Speaker 4 (02:02:04):
Well, there's also definition returns, right, like if you've seen
something two times versus if you've seen something five times.
Things everyone familiar.

Speaker 1 (02:02:12):
Everyone in this study had seen it once before.

Speaker 4 (02:02:15):
Right, So no matter what to me, it would make
more sense to do a massive study, a massive sample
size of twenty five year olds watching it for the
first time and a massive sample size of forty five
year olds watching it for the first time, because then
everyone's watching it at the same time. If your sample
size is large enough, you can say, ah, this kind
of averages out to how a brain reacts to this thing.

Speaker 1 (02:02:37):
Yeah, which is what they were trying to do. But
they're trying to do it, but they were you know,
they had to get like, you know, make different groups,
and so their groups were eighteen to forty two, forty
three to sixty three, and sixty four to eighty eight.

(02:02:58):
And they did find that age affected the duration of
neural state. So basically, like like I said that, there
people who stayed within the same age range, you know,
that eighteen to forty two age range, they they kept

(02:03:20):
having fast activity state shifting, but the ones the older,
older adults, theirs got slower, so there didn't shift as much. Anyway,
the researchers suggest that it's because of this kind of
shift in activity awareness or the brain, you know, the

(02:03:42):
brain is shifting in what it's doing at different times,
and so because the neural states become longer with increasing
age in visual and they say also ventromedial pretty frontal cortices,
that this has something to do with how we perceive

(02:04:04):
events in time. So preserving alignment between neural states and
perceived events suggests that there's course event segmentation that remains intact.
But the bottom line is basically your brain is like
I don't see a lot of stuff going on anymore,
Like I know everything already, fine, Fine, not surprised, Fine,

(02:04:31):
not surprise. Where's a younger person? Right?

Speaker 4 (02:04:33):
How much of it is just about like that exposure
to the world. How much of it is having an
old brain that is less plastic? Like? What what is
causing this to happen? Is it? Yeah? Is it that
that you know it's novelty is not novel anymore? Or
is it that like your brain is just not as
good at braining?

Speaker 1 (02:05:00):
Oh, thank you. I hop my brain stays good at braining.

Speaker 4 (02:05:06):
I mean, if nothing else, I want my brain to
be a good brainer. That's what I want.

Speaker 1 (02:05:13):
Yeah, I mean, the the question is, is your brain
shifting into different activity states? How does that impact your
logging of events? And so if your brain is like
on this like I'm turning over at a different pace.
I'm turning over at a different pace. It's like a
mouse versus an elephant.

Speaker 4 (02:05:36):
Well, and also like I would argue, yes, I understand
the metaphor you're pulling here, but like I'm having trouble
understanding if if that's good or bad or if that's
even part of this study, Like is it bad? Is
it bad that the brain is not recognizing new activity

(02:05:57):
states as often in an older brain? Or is that
good because the brain is more practiced at responding to
the world, right, And that's kind of what I was
getting at. Is is this a judgment call on? Like
this is an old and tired brain that is not

(02:06:19):
as good like I was saying, as good at being
a brain right like or like yes, like is there
a statement associated? Is there a quality associated?

Speaker 1 (02:06:30):
This study not judging quality? No, they're not looking at that.
But what they were seeing is that there is this shift. Right,
Younger brains are more they change state more often, and
so that means they're logging more events. And so it's
just kind of because more things are happening within one

(02:06:51):
smaller time of span of time, time seems longer. But
because older adults are like, your brain is like, it's fine,
it's fine, nothing new, nothing new. Time gets drunken and
condensed because you're not logging as many new events. And
so this is the other question. It's like, if they

(02:07:13):
had shown a new video to the older adults, would
it have been fine? Fine? Fine, haven't seen this before
logging new event, logging new event, logging, new event, and
suddenly it seems longer. And so I think your question
is rotating.

Speaker 4 (02:07:26):
Yes, But also like, I think it's so easy for
us to associate the quality of young versus old as
young is better. We you know, we talked, we've talked
on the show about young blood and how young blood
is better than old blood, right, like like literally better
just different. It's but but it reduced inflammation, it made

(02:07:50):
mice live longer. Young blood was better, right, So like,
but but I think there's it's easy to assume that
a young brain is better, but there might be actually
cases where an older brain is better because you carry
you carry more knowledge and experience, and so there's actually
the brain is special. It's sure over time, as you

(02:08:12):
get like an old old brain is probably worse.

Speaker 1 (02:08:18):
But that's gonna be you know, similar. Also like, if
you can keep inflammation down, right, does the old old
brain act like an old old brain?

Speaker 4 (02:08:28):
Right? So do you want an old brain with young blood?

Speaker 1 (02:08:31):
Yes, that's what I want. That sound bad, like yeah, no,
that's what I want.

Speaker 4 (02:08:41):
That's how I'm gonna get to two hundred old brain, young.

Speaker 1 (02:08:43):
Blood, old brain, young blood.

Speaker 4 (02:08:48):
Good friends, Papa John's you it? Oh my gosh.

Speaker 1 (02:09:09):
All right on that note, have we done it?

Speaker 4 (02:09:13):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (02:09:14):
We made it to the end of this show. A
great show. How much fun.

Speaker 4 (02:09:19):
This is great.

Speaker 1 (02:09:20):
We're all getting older together. I hope time it flew
for you tonight. Maybe no, I don't know if you
enjoy the whole show. Thank you so much for listening. Fada,
Thank you for all your help with social media. I
know that we had some issues this week. Thank you
for persevering Identity Ford. Thank you for recording the show. Rachel,

(02:09:42):
thank you for editing the show. I really appreciate that.
And all of you in the chat room. Thank you
for chatting, for making your comments. We see you in there.
It's so fun to be able to see those comments
and see when new people come in. I saw who
is the new Matt Baluos. I see you in there,
there's Uziel. You've got FODA identity for all sorts of

(02:10:07):
great people in the chat room, gord Our and Lore others,
not just in the YouTube but also Twitch and other places.
Thank you for keeping the chat space really great space
to be I appreciate all of you being compassionate, respectful
and just having a good conversation here. Let's all do
this well together. It's all about that, everybody. And of

(02:10:28):
course big thank you to our Patreon sponsors. Thank you too.
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(02:11:10):
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(02:11:36):
for all of your support on Patreon and if any
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to head over to Twist and click on the Patreon link.

Speaker 4 (02:11:46):
You too.

Speaker 1 (02:11:48):
Can have your name mispronounced with flair at the end
of the show. No, we appreciate it very much because
it is your support that helps keep this show going.
We do appreciate you, and on next week's show.

Speaker 4 (02:12:04):
We will be back on Wednesday at eight pm Pacific time,
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Speaker 1 (02:12:12):
Yeah, and if you want to listen to us as
a podcast. Just search for this Week in Science wherever
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your friends to subscribe to.

Speaker 4 (02:12:22):
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You can also sign up for our.

Speaker 1 (02:12:34):
Newsletter, which Blair will send one to knowing you're hitting.
Ah No, I mean, seriously, do you want to hear
me write about things I've been thinking about just writing
about things lately?

Speaker 4 (02:12:49):
I might do it.

Speaker 1 (02:12:50):
I just have to email Blair and get the password.
But uh will be great? Well, my son, all right,
we should send newsletters. We should do that. It'd be great.
We should That'd be fun. What a thing? What a thing?
If we did that, you should totally subscribe.

Speaker 4 (02:13:05):
We'd love your feedback.

Speaker 1 (02:13:06):
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Speaker 4 (02:13:26):
Oh yeah, you gotta put twist in the subject line,
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in a fridge alongside a fecal specimen from an undisclosed species.

Speaker 1 (02:13:37):
M hm, no buddies can note. Nope, just the microbiologist,
and we don't have one of those here. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:13:46):
Oh. We look forward to discussing science with you again
next week. And if you've learned anything from the show, remember.

Speaker 1 (02:13:54):
It's all in your head.

Speaker 8 (02:14:00):
Speaking science. This week in science, This week in science,
This week in science.

Speaker 5 (02:14:11):
It's the end of the world.

Speaker 8 (02:14:13):
So I'm setting up shop.

Speaker 4 (02:14:15):
Got my batter.

Speaker 8 (02:14:16):
Unfurl it says the scientist is in. I'm gonna sell
my advice. Tell them how to stop the robots with
a simple device.

Speaker 3 (02:14:24):
I'll reverse all the warming with a wave of my hand,
and it will cost you is a couple of gras.

Speaker 2 (02:14:33):
Because this week science is coming your way.

Speaker 8 (02:14:36):
So everybody listens to what I say.

Speaker 3 (02:14:39):
I use the scientific method for all that it's worth,
and I'll broadcast my.

Speaker 5 (02:14:44):
Opinion all over dear.

Speaker 4 (02:14:49):
Go.

Speaker 3 (02:14:49):
It's this week in science, This week in science, This
week in science, encire science, This week in science, This
weekend Science this week in science, This week in science,
This week in science, This week in science, This week
in science, This week in science,

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