How much how much time do we have forever? Hey everybody, this is this week in science and we are Going to record our podcast if you're watching this right now How exciting how exciting for you? Joining us welcome. Yes. This is the recording of the twist broadcast the twist broadcast of the podcast But we're going to edit things and that'll be the podcast so what you're watching now This is unedited raw unfiltered live You know still we try and be family friendly except for Justin occasionally get going on rants Years it was good, okay, but we're ready to go Are we here do we sound good? Can you see us? Yes, people can see us They were audible you're audible Justin Yes, hi, this is Justin. I'm You're speaking Like you look like you got a little party hat going on in the background Celebrating Fantasy of the sign of doing the show with a pre-recording of me talking about a story Where I start using my like I start talking like this and then I stopped talking, but the audio keeps going Myself like oops, I'm talking psychically. I better I better hurry up and use the mouth again to continue so that it's not out It's just This is the part where it's edited If you're listening here This is what podcast audience doesn't get to hear is me derailing the show occasionally But but how do you know that it wouldn't look like wouldn't look like the video just froze Right because you'd still have to gesticulate Oh, okay, so you're still moving around like you're talking but the the mouth will just be Yeah, and then you'll realize oh, and then you will start doing this We're gonna start this show in Three a two This is Twist this week in science episode number 792 recorded on wednesday september 23rd 2020 Where is the dark energy? Hi everyone, I'm dr. Kiki and tonight we will fill your brains with friend zones old sperm and more brains But first This claimer disclaimer disclaimer Science it's the reason for the modern world why medicine is a thing how technology came to exist It's a great collection of facts that have given humanity access to reliable knowledge Reliable because it's derived rationally based on evidence and experimentation Take the evidence of facts collected by thousands of scientists using the scientific method on the subject of global warming Increases in atmospheric carbon global temperature rise warming oceans melting ice sheets retreating glaciers decreased snow cover rising sea levels Increases in extreme weather events ocean acidification Now contrast that with the politician who simply says It'll just start getting cooler. You just watch.  I want to learn new discoveries that happen every day of the week There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to know Good science to you Kiki and Blair And a good science to you too Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of this week in science We are back again With all the science that we fell in love with this last week that we just want to talk about Because you know that is what we do. Oh, and we have got so much more as well in store I have Great stories tonight some really exciting stories. I am excited about. I've got microbial baby brains wobbly rings and arsenic because you know I like arsenic. It's great Just a nice alternative and we have a guest here tonight. Dr. Kevin Kroker And he's going to talk to us about dark energy and those geodes that we were so intrigued by several weeks back Yes All right, Justin. What do you have? I've got covid cats Why chicago is racist even after you die and asteroid heading for the earth also Also, it's heading it's heading toward the earth near Yeah Heading right towards the earth I heard that TV off. I love I love you. I love this the anchor ship of ruining the teaser Sorry, I can't Asteroid heading towards the earth the other and the other guy's like no, no, no That's for our listeners And then turn off the podcast. We want to make sure But I did have I did have the uh the microbial, uh baby brain Story that you're bringing also as a as I was going to throw that into the mix Uh, I can't wait to hear this one because I just saw it and I just was like, oh, this has to be on the show I love that you're bringing it. I can't wait to hear this one. It's so exciting. It's player. What's your drink? Yeah, what's in the animal corner? I brought really old sperm like really Old sperm. Um, I brought baboons in the friend zone and also stranger danger. So stranger Could be one Say can't be Maybe not hopefully not But as we jump into the podcast tonight I would like to remind all of you that if you are not yet subscribed to this week in science You can find us just about any place podcasts are found and you can find us on youtube and facebook and twitch Look for this week in science Now it's time For the science. All right first story at the head of our list Wobbly rings.  Yeah, you of data From several previous observations of that same black hole That's at the center of galaxy m87 And a little like zhuzhing using math and computers They've made a movie. They made a movie of the black hole now. It is not just a picture. It's actually What several images it's like a gif of a black hole and in looking at this beautyous gift of Gift of gift gift black looking at it It's very obvious that the accretion disk of material that is around the black hole Moves that the gravity of the black hole and the forces that are at work at play Make it so that it's not just a static object. You can actually see that there is motion that there is energetic change over time and this is a sequence of Images that take place over About I don't know eight or nine years or so that they took. Oh, it's a long time Yeah, several years and when I say mathematical computer science zhuzhing Basically, they took the the the mathematical model that they used to create The most recent image the most the image of the black hole And they didn't have as many telescopes at work looking at the black hole in these previous observations and so They took what data they had and then they used the model of the black hole and and Put it all together and so that's kind of simulated synthetic images in a sense It's real data. It's real stuff, but Uh, it would not have been as pretty without the zhuzhing This is astrophysics zhuzhing work Very very specialized stuff I don't know enough about but I appreciate that they knew they had data from previous observations And they were able to take what we knew What we know and the stuff that that was created the programs that were created the The models that were created and kind of work backward to give us more insight into this as into this astronomical object What I love about it is the the image that you're uh, you're sharing on the video here Uh looks like an eyeball I think of it kind of like a wobbly hula hoop It looked to me it looks like an eyeball that's looking around and then occasionally has a light flashed in it because the people It's smaller. I'm trying to figure out if it's it's something of rotation, but it doesn't look like it And that and I think that's the question whether you know It's the material in the accretion ring accretion disc at the outer red edge of the event horizon that it's getting You know, it's getting energized energized and so this is the what we see This is this ring isn't the ring. It's it's not it's not like it's not at the event horizon. That's somewhere No, no, no, this thing is this thing is sort of outer Yeah, kevin. You might know a little bit more about this You're looking at some sort of accretion phenomenon here is is mo but most people are expecting to This this is um, and so if there's whatever is sitting inside this this object, it's this image um, it's it's sitting in the the dark region so, uh, there's something called the Sort of innermost stable orbit for a photon and so if you're a particle of light and You're sort of around this thing if you're inside that innermost stable orbit You're probably you know, you're not going to make it out unless you collide with something else So, uh, things sort of get dark inside that region Um, right and so that's about if I remember the number correctly. I think it's Three short child radii. So you're maybe um And the event horizon if there is one is sitting at two short shot horizon So, uh, the object is sitting sort of inside the The the dark region by maybe about like 66 ish. I think I did that right So it's even further inside of the dark region Yeah, yeah, so it's it's much more compact thing. Yeah Yeah But it's interesting because the dark region is changing size to in these images Which I find pretty interesting So maybe that even suggests that the the object is even smaller on the the inside So you're seeing quite a large region of the the accretion disc. Yeah I think I mean it's just so this is our our first imagery of As as close as we can get to a black hole something that does not emit light And so we're looking at the light that is around it All the forces that are affecting it and the fact that we've gone from just one image to now having this picture. It's It's pretty profound and the fact that it's not static I guess is the is part of the story too because there's a turbulence of some some sort taking place of energies kind of Going in there that that may not have been expected in in some models So it's another pairing down Of there's models that won't fit this This discovery Yeah, we'll be paired down in our understanding Hopefully they'll be able to take more pictures next year This year they were not able to because of covid and uh and people not being able to convene in the same place And so the the measurements that had been taken historically Were not taken again So fingers crossed next year people will be able to get together and take more pictures and continue to monitor m87 and other black holes that they might be looking at and give us more More images more close-ups on these Incredibly dense interesting objects in our universe Yeah All right, Justin We're gonna go from black hole wobbly rings to cats Yeah, okay. So uh back in may there was a four-year-old cat Living with a family that got affected by covid-19 the family got affected by covid-19 And somebody in the family died from uh in the household Then this cat started presenting a severe respiratory difficulty breathing and such And so they took it into the veterinary hospital. This is mace. This is still somewhat earlier in all of the pandemicness and they were like, uh-oh This cat has died of covid or sick from covid So so they they tested this this is in spain Uh hospital in barcelona. It was diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which is not covid Right, so the cat dies because this is a horrible ailment, but they they did confirm that the cat was suffering From from this just hyper tonic cardiomyopathy. Is this when the heart gets very large? Yep, okay the muscle builds up Okay, so it's sort of like a chronic thing like it didn't happen acutely It sort of built up over time and the cat just reads some critical level and it was like nope Just happened to to die After all of these events were taking place. So okay coincidence However, pcr tests did confirm that the animal had been infected with the SARS covid-2 So, uh, but but this did not show any lesions or the typical symptoms or anything of the diseases that come along with covid The only reason they tested the cat was because of this coincidence, right? Otherwise wouldn't have known Uh, serological tests on this cat and another cat that was also living in the same, uh house Showed that both cats had developed antibodies against SARS covid-2 Right quote quote evo in both cases. We have detected a neutralizing antibodies in other words They have the ability to bind to the virus and block it Explains julio blanco aids research institute researcher This is important because it shows us that immune system if cats can deal with SARS covid-2 And and these specific cases protect them from developing symptoms So now we have two things going on now we find out. Okay cats Can get this And they can they have an immunity to this as well in terms of the the any any developing symptoms beyond Beyond then the question is wait. How did the cats get it? Did the cats get it from people did they get it from other cats? So the other question was can cats then spread it to people? Yes In the zoo world because they were like, oh god put on all the PPE every time you go near a tiger So right so somehow have this thing. Yeah in this particular case I guess these were very much indoor cats that didn't have access to other cats So they don't think the cats caught it from Mealing with other cats outside of the house. So when from human human to cat Human to cat. Yeah, so it's a reverse What you gonna call it when we get the disease from from animals went the other way the animal caught it from So they tested the the strain that the kovat that these cats were positive for and it was 99.9% similar To the virus that the owner had died from so this was From a human to animal transmission So yeah, so given it but then the other question is like, okay, cats are now I mean How do we how do we figure out how they've done it? Like this is something we can try to recreate in humans in any way Given the number of people infected worldwide and a very few reported cases of animals Experts continue to to note that pets play a negligible role in the epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 Cats can become very Residually it says infected and there's no evidence of transmission of the virus to humans, although really Who's looking? Who's going around testing a symptomatic cats to see if they catch it and how I mean I don't think they've they've actually been able to cross off cat to human transmission This is not something that has been looked at enough at this point I mean just consider within household If the cats can catch it and you know, maybe it can go back the the other direction But perhaps if they're neutralizing antibodies are strong Then they control, you know, they get infected, but they control the infection fairly quickly and then Don't really spread it because if once the once the virus is neutralized. It's neutralized. It's not It's not multiplying. It's not reproducing. It's not potentially getting spread back. So potentially If they are residually Still infected it's just saying that they they can Perhaps so so a cat to cat transmission might be difficult So what's your point here with this story? What are you trying to say? Okay, don't Wrap it up, buddy. Wrap it up. Seriously Cat people getting defensive. It means that we need to look at this We need to find out if cats can transmit demons now the thing about it is though Cats to cat transmission cats don't seem like they so they socially distance themselves anyway for the most part They don't go hanging out and snuggling up with three Have you watched those little like videos where they attach a little uh like a gopro to the pet cat and it's like cat adventure It goes around and like does all sorts of fun stuff Yeah, I mean Has like a little cat battles and like has like, you know, but it might be it might be another reason to keep your cats indoors Uh, keep them, you know, if toxoplasmic gondai eye isn't enough just keeping the birds and the lizards and the frogs. Yeah But yeah, there is there is something to the to the Story we've heard about cats being able to catch covid Yeah, so the three groups of animals that at least as far as I know, you know Animal people are worried about right now besides, you know, bats and pangolins, of course is uh, cats, uh, moustellids so like ferrets and weasels and um all of the Like boar pig That whole family There is there is uh, there is a report out of the Netherlands of a farmer who they believe became infected through minks Moustellid. Yep. Moustellid. Yep They're more worried about the moustellid farms themselves because those are money makers. It's Farming also, so it's not just minks or vectors the the mink actually become ill and they become yeah they become ill and they die and so if you have a mink farm that you're Using the mink for fur or whatever if the mink die off then that's that's a financial loss So Yes, that's but yes, there's the question Tell me about your sperm. No. Yeah, so, uh Queen Mary University of London And the Chinese Academy of Science in Nanjing Is an international collaboration and found the world's oldest sperm singular sperm like one of them Like like a group whatever the collective noun for sperm And this was found uh in a piece of amber Which had uh, which was from the Cretaceous period, which had a little tiny crustacean Talking really old. Yeah named Mayan mars cypress hui and uh Previously the oldest known examples of sperm we have found have been 17 million years old But this is looking to be Hundreds of millions of years old about a hundred million years old. This is this is old sperm So Fossilis sperm is so rare Partially because it just it doesn't stay It's not something that that is easily preserved. So actually it looks like The individuals in question had just Copulated and so it was very fresh and then and then what happened then what happened big thing a sap landed I guess Yes, these tiny A millimeter long, but wait, but you said these things are crustaceans So where'd the sap come from if they're underwater? A branch, I don't know Honestly, they were probably out of water for Foraging or something, um, you know think about hermit crabs, they're crustaceans that do um spend time out on land So that would be my guess. Yeah, is that they they climbed a tree that was near a water source to eat leaves or something Come out of the ocean one day for one thing and Yeah, this is why we're standing in the water So this is my the last little twist of this story that I absolutely love is that so oldest sperm teeny tiny little crustacean one millimeter long Giant sperm so There's implications here because uh giant sperm the other animals we've talked about giant spermin are things like fruit flies So most animals including humans produce tens of millions of sperm teeny tiny little sperm and huge quantities. They're playing the numbers game But fruit flies and crustaceans like these are famous for making Large sperm giant sperm to compete with one another Inside of the female So it's all about the strength not the quantity now. Well, you're saying large How large is the large sperm tiny still very tiny But just compared to our sperm really big um, and so Because yeah, these guys are only a millimeter big. So there's still teeny teeny tiny. You still need a microscope to see them, but um They the interesting thing here is that fruit flies current modern day animals that we found giant sperm in thought Scientists have previously thought that this was kind of a new kind of a novel Evolutionary adaptation this giant sperm, but it was around a hundred million years ago in the direct line of invertebrates And so there's an idea idea here that this was conserved over evolutionary time And so the idea of giant sperm is actually very old and very successful So this this has implications for our study of reproduction overall But yeah, also just the oldest sperm ever Very cool discovery It's amazing and and the chance discovery also. I mean the chance that it was Preserved and the chance that it was found and then to be able to realize what they're looking at and Yeah Yes, do people just sort of like look at like they find amber and the first thing you do when you find amber is like What's in it? And then you're like, okay Absolutely. You're like, I think this is old Take you back to the lab Yeah, there's actually like so there's there there are issues. There was an article recently about they were calling it blood amber similar because the amber is uh, they're using human labor that is not compensated and similar to the idea of blood diamonds but blood amber is a big field and the amber very often is Is Is scientifically interesting and so there are potential ethical landmines That are that are involved in using things like that All right, this is uh, there's one of those things is always there's an argument for uh for scientists To partner with illegal operations illegal dig sites illegal the blood amber Just to get the just to get those specimens out of there just to get the views or record Where things are pulled from no really we talked about this also Wendy when we talked about, um uh, the sort of archaeological site looters or illegal Um fossil trade where people are doing digs and sites that they're selling them You know having an archaeologist archaeologist who's in that world who can at least record it before it disappears and Is untraceable to when once it came from so So it'd kind of be like an undercover Scientist like you're just in the world. Yeah a little indiana jones I don't know about that Not the mileage Um, so I wanted to say because the internet will get me after this if I don't have this little addendum here Um, so I did a quick google and just to let everyone know who's who's itching to know Uh, a human sperm cell is about 50 Micrometers long so it's teeny teeny teeny tiny. Um, but a fruit fly a drosophila sperm cell Yeah, is 5.8 centimeters So what it's coiled It's super duper coin. I did not know this Like where's it where's it stashed? It's really just coiled up and teeny I picked like those like, um Those little grow things you would get as a kid that were in the like the little pill and then you would add it to water So I'm sure it's kind of like that except it's it's just coiled Do you just give like do you just give one of them to the female?  It's not chocolate. But yeah, we'll open it up later Yeah, so they're coiled and they're delivered to the female in a tangled coil and then they expand inside Oh, there you go Fancy very fancy. It's like yeah anyway uh for those Interested in The number pi you might love this story There has been a new exoplanet discovered that orbits its star in just 3.14 days That's right. Its orbital period is very close to Pi so it's not exactly pi. I mean pi you could go out to more digits But anyway close enough the astronomers from the kepler-2 mission who Have identified this exoplanet People would like it because everybody likes a little bit of fun So this is data recorded back in 2017 by nasa kepler space telescopes k2 mission and uh using this pretend looking for this potential planet they use ground-based telescopes in Chile's atacama desert called the search for habitable planets eclipsing ultra cool stars otherwise known as speck you lose speck you lose and they Confirmed that there was this Earth-sized planet. It is point nine five times the radius of Earth's And it's a low it's orbiting a low mass star smaller than the sun It's orbiting very very closely and very very quickly Still even though the star is cool and it's orbiting fairly closely it would be too hot for life to Exist they although they do think that the planet has a rocky core very similar to earth So it might be something very interesting to study for potential habitability of other planets and how Exoplanets unlike those planets in our solar system are evolving and moving through space and time Yes, pie. It's the pie planet. We go there and have pie Justin tell me about this asteroid. So there's this small It's called the near-earth asteroid Uh, it's about the size of a school bus and it's heading towards earth Is miss frizzle on it? Thankfully thankfully it will not be making a stop here As so many of earth's schools have been closed due to the pandemic It will be zipping by Thursdays of November 4th, which is tomorrow some of years time later today my time, I think Uh at a distance of about 13,000 miles From the planet surface, which I don't I don't know I mean that sounds great. It's not Close it's close, but it's not that's very close. So that's how close is the moon. I think the moon is I know it's further 200 400 000 miles. It's up there. Uh, the satellites that we have in geostationary orbit Are 22 000 miles south So this is going to be to see this thing So Yeah, great question. Uh to see it to Probably did you say that did you say that it's 13 000 miles? 13 000 So it's going to it's going to come closer than geosynchronous orbit. Yes It's about halfway point of geosynchronous orbit right in between whew underneath satellites Zipping by so sounds like 2020 to me You know except that it's going to miss except that it's going to miss Justin don't jinx it. Please So Even if it hit the atmosphere this thing is about 15 to 30 feet wide If it did hit the earth it would Likely break up in the high atmosphere becoming a bright meteor known as a fireball So it these things apparently hit every Once a year once every couple of years. It's not completely Off the map for for this size of an object to be hurtling towards and actually hit the earth's atmosphere So we're safe even if it does uh if the the projections are off by a bit But what I can do is turn off all of my devices tomorrow and uh, just say to my boss. Oh, I'm sorry I had I didn't have internet the satellite got hit by a Asteroid the size of the school bus. I'm sorry. It was out of my control. Sorry It's true. My netflix still worked, but otherwise I was unable to do anything Yeah, if it actually hit a satellite that would be pretty uh pretty amazing shot. Um It's going to be it's gonna make its closest approach at oh might not be able to see it 4 12 a.m Uh pacific time, which is 7 12 eastern time, which is a little bit before it when I wake up About uh, what is that? That would be about one o'clock ish Uh central european time, but uh, it's gonna be Visible I think for possibly If you if you had the light to see it or if you had the telescope maybe Um over the southeast pacific Uh would have the sort of facing views this thing Uh zips by so I hope somebody's on an airplane who can take a picture. No, that's not going to happen. Never mind Thanks covid I felt that one I did hear they're doing uh, they're doing trips in planes now where you don't go anywhere Yeah, get on the plane you fly around for seven hours and then land at the airport where you started So would you miss that experience it be that close to the next Just gotta feel it again, you know And have all your friends there ready to welcome you I'm sorry if you're back If you're going to take the risk of getting on an airplane in the first place actually go somewhere Please also if you're going to produce the carbon emissions, please go somewhere Oh my goodness. So so there is uh, there is something along the lines of needing to keep the planes running to have them well maintained Which is an important thing there is And and apparently the the folks that have been opting for that have just been like, yeah Let's go see our home state from the air. That might be fun Let's just look out the window with a nice view and circle around and see everything like a little sightseeing adventure I kind of get it. I I like that. Anyway, this uh, this this this finding is uh, they say there's hundred Over a hundred million of these small asteroids like the uh, the schooly that's going to go by on thursday Uh, but they they're small enough that we will only ever have a couple days warning at this point That that this thing is coming by. We won't see them otherwise Yeah, although we're gonna you said they're gonna pop in these fireballs. So so this is not so troublesome Yes, but this is part of the system that's allowing us to see the larger ones We're looking for things that aren't you know, 15 to 30 feet, but maybe more in the 460 foot wide or long size So so we are this is part of the system that is looking for the The earth ending threats The larger ash uh, asteroids out there that uh, that would actually impose a really big problem for the earth This is a small one But I I like to know that this is taking place that there we do have eyes on space Looking for these things We we can even tell the the based on the trajectory that this thing's coming back In 2041, uh, which point it will make a more distant flyby than it did this time Uh, but yeah, we are Stay away Stay away. Yeah, we are tracking Uh, these these objects in space We're trying we're trying to track the objects in space We're also trying to track life back through its history And at one point in our planet, there was no oxygen but there was life so Oxygen was the first The first extinction event right it was it was there was all sorts of life before oxygen Really became this thing that you know, we're like, I love my oxygen filled air at one point in time life was like no That's toxic toxic. Yes So the question is what did those early organisms rely on? There were photosynthetic organisms organisms that were chemo Autotrophs where they were relying on chemical energy. There were also organisms. They think that we're photosynthesizing But without oxygen oxygen takes the role of the electron carrier in photosynthesis and there are other elements that can take its role and many like 2008 there was evidence of a bacterial use of arsenic And they've been looking into it ever since and there's now a paper published in communications earth and environment by a group out of the University of Connecticut about their research looking into microbial mats that were found on That were found up in the atacama desert. So we're talking about the atacama desert where we're doing teles telescope observations of the universe were also finding Bacteria that are living in this really dry low oxygen high uv radiation environment and They have found these mats that apparently Are they they say the best thing to be looking at to be approximating the study of what life was like When it first got its start on the planet So it's high sulfur. There's water running over these microbial mats the microbial mats are in and this kind of stream environment that has zero oxygen completely Hypoxic anoxic no oxygen whatsoever And they think to date What the researchers have said is that every time they're looking at microbial mats that researchers are like, oh, it's like life before life We don't began the way that we look at it today The researchers like no no not really because all these microbial mats you're looking at they have oxygen in them We found one that doesn't and so So now they think that they can really look further at how at the processes that are in place In this high desert high uv high salinity high sulfur zero oxygen high arsenic environment And really verify how they are How they're working Maybe the beginnings were arsenic based Hmm Poison is love poison is life We're new candy lines, I guess Yeah, so it's fun stuff arsenic Um, you know instead of arsenic and old lace it's arsenic and old old life old life. Yep Old lice There it is Okay, moving into the present If you just tuned in you are listening to this weekend science If you are interested In a twist shirt or mug or other item of our merchandise you can go to twist.org and click on the zazzle link Browser store and find all sorts of items that will show your love for twists and also help us out All right. I would now love to further introduce our guest tonight Dr. Kevin Croker is an astrophysicist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa where he's studying dark energy and objects like neutron stars and geodes And he recently authored a paper on geodes that we discussed on the show a few weeks ago. Thank you for Joining us on the show. Thanks for having me. It's uh, I don't usually get to do uh Something like this and so it's pretty exciting Well, we hope that you're having fun so far and now that we're really going to start asking you questions We hope that you continue to have fun I introduced geodes a few weeks back, but um, you know, just for yourself, how did you Get interested in your field of study in astrophysics and how did you kind of come to focus on things like neutron stars and these dense weird objects in space So like do you want this sort of like real big picture like how far back do you want to go? As far back as you want to take it. Yes Uh, I guess I should just say that um At undergrad I wasn't uh, I didn't formally study physics or astronomy I was a computer scientist So that's what I was sort of cs engineering type stuff. Um, but every night I used to get online and read the fizz.org or whatever They're not paying me. I promise. Um I used to read the what I call the hot sheets, right? Uh, just to see, you know, what was new what's going on Uh, sort of, you know, things like what you guys are doing here. Um, and so I was really interested in this sort of thing but I felt that it was Not accessible to me like it was it was a very far reach at the time, uh, but I got into a Richard Feynman And he's uh, he was really really a strong popularizer of science and his professional work has held in in quite high regard And I just really liked his His stories. I really liked the guy like I was like this guy's pretty awesome Like he's got a pretty cool life. I wonder if I could do something like this And so after uh, after I finished the cs thing and spent a couple years at the radio station I sort of taught Myself some physics and you know, basic math the calculus like I had to do algebra and calculus to get on my own because I'd forgotten it Um, and I sat in on some classes And uh, professors were kind and you know, they wrote some letters for me and I was able to able to get in out here in Hawaii And uh, that's how I got here and that's how I ended up doing physics. So I came out here because the Sort of there's a world expert out here on uh, what's called a weak scale supersymmetry I named zerxes tata and sort of before uh, before lhc's didn't sort of find evidence or at least immediate evidence for this This model called weak scale supersymmetry I was definitely looking like it was really really going to be viable like it was something that was going to be very relevant And so, uh, I decided that this would be sort of a good place to be I ended up with uh with a different advisor that does Nutrinos, which are these very tiny sort of fragments of a nucleus Um, it's one way to think of them and they don't like to interact with matter very much And so they carry a lot of interesting information that you can't get other ways and he always hung out with the astronomers Up at uh, up at the institute and so because he was hanging out with them I'm that I'm hanging out with them and they worried about His particular friends. I guess worried about large-scale stuff sort of cosmology big things And so that's where my research topic eventually Came from I was worrying about very very very large-scale stuff like the biggest scales you can get um Something called the initial condition problem So you have the big bang sort of the universe started in some very dense hot state And then you can always ask the question. Okay, that's great and it agrees with all the data Where'd that come from or what happened before that? And so a lot of people will dismiss that as sort of like a metaphysics issue like this is you know Beyond testability or whatever Uh, but it's not and so people have started to to worry about these things again and So I was initially sort of working on that idea and I was trying to sort of construct like a Almost like a biologically inspired model So you instead of saying, you know, it just started in a bang We're not going to care about what came before because then you have the issue of sort of specifying like What was initially there in order to get the equations to specify everything else correctly downstream? You can just say well, there was a a universe before that and what was before that another one before that And so this idea is is not mine. Uh, it's been around in russia for quite a while and uh So I was playing with ideas like that and I was trying to build a model that sort of that worked um in sort of a more precise way And I just was failing. I couldn't do it. Uh, it was pretty hard A lot of people have failed have have failed at this problem. Have you like this is this is one of those big questions of How does it all fit together? Yeah, it's not failure. It's because we don't have to figure out what the universe is like before the universe I failed Yeah, I shot a little too long on that first one didn't didn't get there. Yeah, so uh So what what happened though is I'm writing these this model down and I kept I I expected to find something that would look like uh, would look like dark dark matter Which is another one of these these problems that we're dealing with right now And instead I found I kept getting these regions of dark energy And these small regions of dark energy and I was like that's that can't be right This is You know, that's not that's not the way I thought about it. I'm ahead and then I just sort of thought well, wait a second What would happen if you did have something like this? And I just ran really quickly the the numbers just on a like envelope calculation and uh And it was sort of off by a factor of a thousand Which sounds pretty awful um But the sort of the sort of leading explanations for a cosmological constant that don't work or Off by about a factor of 10 with 120 zeros after it So going from 120 zeros to three zeros felt pretty good to me at the time um And so I I wrote like a real quick paper and like pushed it off to some journal and they got back to me pretty fast They're like, yeah, that's a cool idea. But but do a damn calculation so Um, yeah, so that's how I got started on this was you know This weird coincidence that I wasn't expecting to find um, so I didn't know so much about the Uh dark energy problem at all or any of these things because I was worried about sort of something unwrote like unrelated So I sort of came at this problem from a very different perspective um And that ended up being somewhat useful down the road Was that that addressed your question? I kind of went for a long time. I'm sorry. No, it absolutely does But um, so you're coming at dark energy from this different perspective of you know, where where Where did the universe come from where did where did it all start? Well, yeah, but it led down to this very small. Yeah very small things So I was sort of focusing on extremely large stuff Yeah, and then I found out that you get these really small things and they seem to contain the stuff you You wanted sort of to get At the pretty big but not ridiculously big stuff So it was this weird connection between very very very vastly separated Scales and that's weird. That's odd. And so that sort of caught my attention and I kept playing with the idea so When you start looking at dark energy though, what just I have heard that What just I have heard that uh, the the universe is Connected from the macro to the micro scale like it is all one continuous Universe, it's the same universe. So if you are fine, no, no, I mean, no, no, no, no, no, no, I mean, yes I'm doing this stating the captain obvious thing here but but That finding a phenomena At that at that it should there should be something that connects the the very large observation to something That's actually taking place on the minutest of scales. They have to it has to be built on this foundation in the first place So if what you were looking for, I'm really glad that you feel this way, right? Because because I felt this way as well um, but A lot of other people don't so And it was very difficult to sort of figure out why Um, so I'm really interested to know where you were sort of exposed to this idea or where you developed this intuition Oh So Isn't this the argument between sort of uh Quantum physics and more like people who are looking like that scales have disagreements on how they are Able to calculate things But they have to be connected because they're all phenomenon built on phenomena built on phenomenon built on on physics all the way down So it has to be connected There's no way that you go at this scale that everything just completely changes and has its own rules and isn't doesn't care What's happening at the other scale of the universe? So I should make a disclaimer first that the the sort of the things that I work on and the the frameworks within which I work Are our einstein's theory of general relativity So and I really really Last time I worked on quantum mechanics was years ago Eight years ago or something like it just just in my studies right not not with respect to any sort of research So I I'm very much a relativist and a sort of a A very bad applied mathematician. Maybe you could say um So I I'm not qualified to speak on anything that has to do with quantum mechanics So I just sort of work only with with general relativity and the way that Sort of I would call classical theories sort of stuff that happens before the advent of quantum mechanics Are usually regarded is that they sort of have this property called locality And so whatever is happening here and whatever is happening here like if they're going to somehow interact with each other Uh, you know, there has to be an interaction that sort of propagates at most at light speed And so there's the you can have these delayed effects. Um, but to have some sort of non-local correlations or things that are sort of happening at the same same time, but at different places that notion is Actually can be ill posed in in classical theories. And so most people's expectation Within a theory like general relativity is that you you really shouldn't have effects like that taking place um And so that's why dark energy is actually somewhat interesting Especially with the way we went about doing it. Yeah, so let's talk about dark energy for a minute That wasn't your focus but dark energy In the way that we understand it is we really don't know what it is We know that it has to that it is a force that it is Involved in the expansion of the universe well to say that we don't know what it is is so there's there's sort of It's good to separate the observational evidence for a thing from the thing itself And so the observational evidence for the thing is sort of coming from a couple of different places So you've got the you've got the evidence from Supernova that are pretty far away in this sort of this you build this distance ladder We sort of bootstrap your way up looking for parallel axis So stars kind of move around like this and then you can get the distance to these poofing stars called sephiids And you can see sephiids further out And then you get the distance from to those And you can use the distance from the sephiids and you see these exploding stars that are really bright And then you can see this much further out because they're much brighter And so you can sort of build this scale of distances out And the supernova look sort of Dimmer than they should which sort of tells you if you interpret it that way The easiest way to interpret it is that the universe is expanding faster than you thought it was And that's that was sort of the first observational evidence for The phenomenon that has been attributed to dark energy got it. Okay So and then consequently there's Other evidences has come into play so you can sort of You can sort of look at the look in the sky and look at where galaxies are And you can sort of ask questions like if I have a galaxy here And I draw a circle that's of a certain radius out from that galaxy What's the probability I'm going to find another galaxy in that circle? And you can sort of answer that question for many different radii of circles And then you can play that game at every galaxy you pick on the sky And so then you get some sort of average description of the probability of you know If you're looking at one galaxy, how likely is it that there'll be another one nearby? um, and so you look at sort of Data like that and that sort of gives you information on the expansion history of the universe And you find that the way that that's set up is uh Suggestive that you have a certain amount of matter in your universe And it that matter it counts for maybe one third of the total Energy that you need in the universe. And so there's sort of like a missing 66 That that should be there. Um, but it's not acting like matter And so it turns out that that Number works with the same number that would cause the the brightnesses of the supernova to be Dimmer as much as we see them to be dimmed So so can I real quick when we're talking about uh, matter and energy Matter the energy that's in the universe. Are we talking gravity? Okay, no, so let's this is actually a really good point you bring up just in and there's sort of like a language issue And sort of the names dark matter and dark energy are pretty unfortunate names Um Yeah, they're placeholders, but they sort of they sort of you're easily confused because you hear, you know About einstein and energy is mass and all these things and so you think the energy is matter And then like how's how dark energy and dark matter different? It's very it's sort of in the mind It doesn't keep the the concepts cleanly separated when when they actually should be um, and so I think it's it's funny that the original name for dark energy. Oh, it's not dark energy, right? Of course It was it was something called Mu vacuum it was called mu So this this russian guy in like a Siberian prison camp and like this it's like the sixties Wrote a paper about how you know, you should expect to to find There should be material that he called mu That should have very strange properties, but it should be there and so this is sort of another example So I gave you two examples of observational Evidences the supernova and the brightness is in the sort of the It's called the turnover in the matter power spectrum is the phenomenon I described before And so there's also sort of the theoretical argument that you should have material like this You can sort of play a mathematical game With uh with einstein's equations and you find that that most things that you know about sort of fall into a certain category one but then light falls into like a category two And then there's two categories a three and a four that that are totally crazy and you don't worry about those But it turns out you can ask like okay, what are all the possible things that fit into category one and There's one thing that's very strange and We would call that thing now dark energy But it's like a material And so he's like well, you know, we never we don't have never seen anything like this before but then he goes and talks Oh We have a freeze. What happened Kevin has been frozen. Uh, but thankfully Kevin is about But look Kevin's pretty great story This is how you know You know he looks decent whenever I freeze because my face I think moves so much when I talk it's always In the middle of a micro expression. That's just terrible. So that's Kevin if you didn't know before you're very photogenic It's kind of you to tell him You can't hear he's he's stuck in the uh, he's stuck in the ether at the moment He's everything was great up until that moment like the internets Oh the internets, what if I I remove him Yeah, we're gonna have to message him and let him know to come back and pick up right where he left off Right exactly where he left off at that specific explaining Explaining how this this missing matter this this unseen type of mystery matter Oh, he has friends in our chat room sigh star sigh. Thank you for sending a message.  Let's just How it is this is the part of the show that's But one of these things one of these things like a bus-sized asteroid I'm just A school bus-sized asteroid. It's the size of a school bus Uh, was is that what happened? Oh It won't be by Purely a few hours. Yeah Yeah The one of the things that I do always find fascinating this when it's like really hard for people to understand that There's this phenomena that we recognize in the universe Which is this dark energy and the the one is dark matter that we don't have a physical mechanical thing We say hey, this is that material particle that's doing this We have that issue with gravity Gravity we can absolutely calculate its effects Within we know how it works. We don't we can land ships Uh on on foreign planets. We can predict the motion of an asteroid the skies of a school bus And when it will be back and how far we can project all of these things based on understanding gravity We don't know what it is. We don't know how it communicates. We don't have a physical thing. That's like this is the mechanics of the The of the gravity particle or the gravity Wait, we don't have that yet and yet we understand that it exists. So Uh, I think I think at some point Uh, we will we will get closer to that in the meantime We're done. I mean the more we look we're gonna we're gonna hopefully I mean I hope at some point in humanity's future and we solve these problems I think if we keep looking we'll undercover this This kind of stuff, but at the at the same time He says he should be back.  I want to talk about geodes. Let's not go off in the weeds I've got to talk about the geodes All right, am I in the weeds? I don't know that I'm am I in the weeds? We're gonna steer back Okay, I'll be right back to you. I'll be right back. I'll be in the uh, I'll be in the I'm gonna go to the the green room. You're going to the green room. Bye All right Blair you look so excited So we just I don't I'm trying to decide should we try to do something else? Right. That's always my uh, my spot sitting here Should we keep going with stories and other things when we will end up having someone come back in hopefully and If they do come back in then you know It is going to interrupt and would we have to start over on the other stuff or what should we do? Now Justin's going to take a break. So maybe he won't have to take a break later That's true. Yeah, it's 2020. I'm not surprised lightning rod. No, and yes In the meantime Smash that like button If you want our guests to come back I want dr. Crocker to come back. Smash that like button right now We're going to keep doing this podcast. That's right time for an AMA shoe brew Sci star sci says his connection is back So let's see if we get him back in here Todd Nielsen great to see you in the chat room. Hello Anunnaki. Hello. Yes hydration Get the hydration in there while you can we don't want to break your screen flying out. Don't I mean not smash it with rocks Smash the like button with your I did not hear about dark bosons today shoe brew. I did not How is the gio thing spelled like gioed g e o d e gioed it stands for And hold on one second. I got I got it in my oh kevin's back. Whoo-hoo bringing him back. Here we go Welcome back. We're glad to have you join us So i'm actually a new person now That's right. Can you can you hear me? Because this is we working Okay, I don't see Justin. Did we lose him? Oh, he went and took a break I wore him out He's like he said I'll be back Get into it. So yeah, there was I'm sorry for the extended delay. I don't know what cut out But then I have sort of had the window Uh smaller on my machine and so there was a button that said enter the broadcast studio that was not displayed So I didn't see that I had to click the button to note her for you Yeah, so I'm very sorry for that. It's it's my fault. Um, you figured it out though. You're here Well, I know these things happen We've done. Yes, sci-star sci is in the chat room. Thank you for answering the question about what geodes stands for generic objects of dark energy Yes, and it's some did did sci-star sci identify himself No, just said sci-star sci Somebody who knows you I I think that they're very reliable source. So that's good. Good. Good. I hope though All right, so you were in the middle of telling us about the russian and how he was looking at Looking at all these things and playing with mathematical games. Yes playing the mathematical games. Yeah, he was just playing mathematical games Um, so his name is eros glener. By the way, he's still alive He managed to get out of the ussr and end up in san francisco So he's in some sort of uh elderly care facility. Um So I think he's pretty old at this point like 98 But he's still kicking And uh, yeah a pretty impressive person. He only has one arm also so Yeah, let me try to put this there. Okay, that should be better. Sorry Um, so yeah, I a little bit derailed so you'll have to sort of reorient. So we're talking guys about What he called this stuff is a mule this mule material and it's just a sort of a very strange type of material Uh, so yeah, this was stuff was predicted to exist a long time ago and as usually happens in physics You sort of you hit on sort of a useful idea pretty early Uh, but the data is just nowhere near there yet There's no evidence for it And so it sleeps for a while and then comes back up 20 30 40 50 years later And so I had dark energy was was one of these things So the way that um, I guess it picked up the name a dark energy is You would not usually expect or you would not um, oh welcome back You wouldn't usually expect uh Sort of a phenomenon to happen like this mule material so Gleaner thought that it it should happen during gravitational collapse when you're trying to something is crunching crunching crunching crunching crunching down that eventually Eventually everything exquisite into everything else That you would form this mule material and so it wasn't thought for various reasons that are actually very very technical and uh, that these Localized regions of mule material would somehow conspire to produce like a large scale Sort of effect and so the I guess we should take a step back um How I should I should ask also are you guys with me with respect to this Notion of dark energy is just like a type of stuff, but just a different type of stuff Okay, so um, and then I guess the chat window told you guys that that geode is generic object of dark energy so it's it's a ball of Mule mule material and that's it.   There's nothing else sort of crazy to it except the properties of mule Mule material is really weird stuff. Yeah, so when we when I came across your paper that was recently published and the idea and and recent and last year's paper and Things talking about this idea of geodes the the concept of a black hole is something that People are fairly familiar with at this point. It's like, okay matter Collapses down and then at a certain point it there's it It smashes all up. You have a vent horizon light doesn't escape You've got weird effects of the black hole and but that's just a weird black hole thing And now you're saying that some of these black holes can actually be A different maybe there matter that's black hole in the way that we would describe it normally and other times Maybe it's this mu material or is it always mu material? So that's actually a really good question. Um, there are some models that that that say that you could make a black hole Or you can make an object like a mu object that would also have an event horizon and you can make ones that don't it really is sort of a Black holes are sort of funny objects Because they're sort of characterized entirely by maybe three things They're characterized by their mass they're characterized by their charge if they have any and they're characterized by their spin and those three numbers suffice to like give you everything you can ever get out of a black hole at least if you're not playing hawking games and That's sort of why it's why black holes are a problem And people think that that's a very interesting thing to study is because you have all this sort of stuff information Going into this object yet somehow all of that's broken down or digested in just these three numbers And that's troublesome in various ways and people have really worked on this for for a while uh, so you don't have to You don't have to always form a black hole. You don't always have to form a geode these are sort of We don't know these are sort of solutions that are admitted by Einstein's equations and On the outside of these solutions like outside of anywhere any funny business would be happening They sort of look the same And so as far as observations can distinguish them like local observations uh People thought that they were the same basically and so they didn't bother making a distinction And it's much easier to work with the black hole solutions like as a mathematical thing They're far less complicated.  There's nothing out there and there's nothing happening Uh, and that really simplifies the math And black holes really that it's gravitation And so if you if something's close, it's going to get pulled in by gravity But gravity falls off kind of with distance and And so so the thing it's interesting about a black hole yet you're you you said something that was actually very correct That the classical black hole solutions are what are called vacuum solutions So you don't have any stuff Yet somehow it acts like there's stuff there, but you don't have any And for instance the way they found the spinning solution the Kerr solution, which is the one that that ligo fits the waveforms against The the question that was posed was What's the only way that I can sort of make a thing that if I rotate it in some direction it looks the same And there's nothing special going on away from it What's the only way that I can describe a universe that has that property? And the answer was the the Kerr solution And so there is no description of any stuff There was no sort of dynamical process where things were collapsing things were creating the pressures built up And there was a conversion into a spinning black hole It's just you got this thing And then people were like well, you know If this is a if this is a real object and something like this has to be able to form somehow And then people you know added on ideas like that But there is to my knowledge No fully dynamical model of the formation of any objects like this at all whether it's geodor black hole so people have done sort of uh You know just really really Toy models where you have a bunch of like a spherical cloud of dust coming together and by dust I actually mean it doesn't it's it's pressureless It doesn't sort of smack into itself and it just sort of collapses I mean there's models like that But I mean you just saw the wobbling ring around the image of these things That's nothing at all like what's going on right? so There's obviously a lot more complexity than these these models these vacuum models Yeah, it is just it's the problem with the mathematics is einsteins einsteins equations are just so gnarly that You really don't have to make any progress at all. You got to start as simple as possible And isn't there isn't there's some sort of a joke where uh, a physicist is asked to describe a cow and then says, okay Picture a cow is a completely spherical object Let's start with the most basic Get rid of all of the leg that you're the thing It's a spherical cow And I mean the spherical cow would probably but the spherical cow like Can get you a lot of like a good, you know, you can't speak English right now The spherical cow can do a lot for you. There we go. It's a close approximation Yeah, you can figure out maybe how much methane a spherical cow produces so But how is it going to how will a spherical cow help you with black holes and geodes? That is the question And so the answer at least to me was it won't Yeah, and so we had to sort of figure out A way to deal with that, you know, we can't play with spherical cows If we're going to be in a real universe and we're going to deal with real sources And these sorts of problems were Beyond me and so I had to team up with a mathematician and And we worked pretty hard on this for a while and we've been making some slow progress And that was really the Sort of the thing that that matters the most was sort of figuring out how to go about dealing with these what are called very strong sources in einstein's theory without making the approximations that are usually made when dealing with Strong sources locally like when looking at their mergers when looking at things that are recruiting onto them And that was the that was the pretty hard that was the hard part Instead of how to how to get these sources into like a bigger picture that fits together into a coherent whole And that's actually what the the three papers in this series do the first paper in the series that you mentioned deals with sort of the The the the base level of the calculation And so the strategy is to sort of instead of all right, so we take a step back again Usually the way physics is taught in school if you guys had it in intro physics Is that if you understand the way the the parts of the thing work And the parts are simple Then you can sort of build piece together the parts You know bit by bit by bit and build up a very complicated thing And if you understand how the parts work, you can understand how the whole works So this intuition or this sort of approach to a problem is physicists usually attach a word to it We call that linear All right, so if you know the parts, you know how the sum works and that's linear Uh, the and a lot of the things that we have a lot of the theories that we have are Are actually linear so electricity and magnetism ends up having this property and that's really nice So we can do good things with it very quickly Um newtonian gravity also has this property and so it's very nice to work with Uh quantum mechanics also has this property and so it's very nice to work with as a formalism Einstein's general relativity does not have this property It's not linear and that's what makes it so hard to work with you can't sort of use techniques that are You can't break the problem down into little chunks and then build up from those chunks And historically working with general relativity people have attempted to do that anyway And the reason is just that that's what we know how to do right and you know, what else are we going to do? uh and so what we I worked on with the mathematician Um was really trying to figure out a way instead of like going up from the little bits and trying to build a big structure How to actually come from the top down instead of start like in very broad sketches and then Step by step refine the picture sort of like you would like if you were making like a piece of artwork or something Or you know back in the day like i'm going to really date myself here with age But uh when you had a modem and you were downloading an image on the internet And sometimes there'd be the images that would come in line by line, right? But then sometimes there would be images that would come out like really blurry And then the blurriness would like resolve and just sort of like blockiness And then the blockiness would resolve into sort of like, you know Just sort of a rough blur and then it would sort of come into the full resolution image and it would come in into these stages And so the approach we took with einstein's equations was exactly like that second way of storing an image And so we sort of build the calculation in layers and each layer we make a further refinement on the previous layers And uh, we found out a way to do this that allows us to sort of Incorporate very very strong sources In a way that's agnostic to the the fine details of this source and When we did that the First step of the first layer when it's just a like a uniform color It's not just black. It's some uniform color that first layer We found that the the the strong sources Are are effectively smeared out That the dynamics the behavior of the universe you expect in that course's most average sense Really does require a smeared out version of all the sources that you have present And that's a really weird thing to consider Because if you have something like a gas And you think they're bunch and you're thinking about atoms and atoms in the gas and say it's in a bottle And these atoms are bouncing around The the gas inside the bottle has a pressure Because those atoms are smacking into the the container and they're pressing out on it, right?  All right, they're not bouncing off of each other not bouncing off of anything else so Like why why should whatever is going on inside the geode? Influence what's going on outside the geode And so people people sort of thought that that was the case So they sort of agreed with this Common intuition where you have like the sort of what I would call the kinetic theory sort of conception of pressure um But that's not what you get when you do this sort of layered approach to einstein's equations You get that the behavior of the zero layer Is complete average cuts right through everything it sees everything And so you pick up the pressures that are inside the geodes and when you do that things get wild How am I doing am I are you guys with me? I'm in you're telling this story It's wild We should definitely take a question break though. So please like just sort of share with me where you're at what you're thinking um Before we go to the next step Yeah, so these you've got these sources and the geodes right these things that are they're out there We're not they're not pushing against each other According to this kinetic theory, right now that you've done the math differently looking at einstein's theory now you're going no no no They are influencing each other. They are doing something. They're influencing this stuff around them. Yeah. Yeah, that's right That's how why so Well, you sounded like referees now Oh, wait a sec wait a sec before before how and why before right before it So, uh, I was there's time about this earlier about how uh gravity. We don't have a mechanism Exactly for we we can we can calculate how it operates throughout the universe But we don't know exactly what a gravity stuff is. We don't know what the communication is We don't know. Okay. Let's take it. Let's so so but but so so we don't necessarily I don't necessarily need to know What's the mechanics? that uh that are why a geode Is is a thing But do we know as we do with gravity can we we can see its its effects and how it is reaching beyond and having effects Further than its its locality So you so you want to okay, so you'd like to move to the the observational stuff Or you would you like to I need a little observational Well, yeah, so I mean the first thing that I would I would say um the first thing that drops out of the wash Is that if you form a bunch of these geode objects around when the universe was maybe 800 million years old uh You get you get what's called a cosmology you get what looks like a cosmological constant that has the right value So instead of just having to add some number to einstein's equations If this is the end stage of stellar collapse if it doesn't form a black hole But it instead forms these Mew material objects then You just automatically expect a cosmological constant. It's not like a weird thing. It just happens now It's not exactly constant. There's some time variation And if your observations are precise enough you can tease out that time variation Maybe shows up at about the 1 percent point 1 percent level But there's a new experiment uh called desi a dark energy spectroscopic instrument That is going to be able to look back pretty far um And uh, they sort of look at uh Galaxies in the sky and get very precise data as to how fast they're going away from us Uh, and they might be able to sort of sniff the little effect that you would expect to see if you were sort of forming Geodes instead of forming black holes So, uh, that's one example of sort of how you just get you get the the best fit model Just sort of automatically when you have these things around and yet it's you can distinguish it from The best fit model presently by more precise measurements How do you feel about that? Oh, does that does that mean that there's a there's a time point in the creation of the universe where It went from geode formation to black hole formation or is it are they still completely separate phenomena? No, so you could so so I guess the Yeah, so you could you could yeah, you don't so that what we're trying to what I have the position that I take Right and it's it's maybe a position that I shouldn't take with the position that I take Is it uh, you don't need black holes Right, they have all sorts of theoretical problems And if you just replace them with these sort of dark energy objects Uh, you just sort of start fixing other things that weren't making much sense before And but but if I'm gonna be a if I'm gonna be a straight scientist, which I should be um, Then then they can coexist There's no reason to have one or the other and you have to you have to apply like an awkums razor argument to shave off the black holes Hmm And so that's a Blair cap. Yeah, so I'm I'm trying to synthesize all this. This is crazy. So I think I guess where I'm getting stuck is Uh, does this change what we know or does this change how we know what we know? About the universe That's a that's a pretty profound question. Um so I guess so let me just take a take a step back. Um I would say that this increases our confidence that einstein's equations are very very very good Description of whatever's going on um Because from the conclusion that that we've conclusions that we've drawn uh, working within einstein's framework is that uh When you sort of start crossing t's and dotting some i's Uh, you start explaining these phenomenon that had been unexplained for a little while and So that tells you that that the currently accepted theory of what's going on for gravity Is is is better than you thought it was like much better than you thought it was and so einstein's got another home run um Yeah, and so that's that's I guess does that answer your question Yeah, so it's it's kind of filling in these these question marks In the equations that we were trying to use to explain things that we knew about the universe Right. So for instance, like the the dark energy you could you could you can add that I keep saying it and maybe I should have said it earlier I'm sorry You can model that you can take einstein's equations. You can just stick a constant in there basically a constant Time something called the metric but you put basically a constant term in there and it's permitted you can do it It doesn't break anything But it seems sort of ad hoc like you just pull it out of somewhere um And so a lot of people sort of had issue with that like they didn't think it was pretty But other people were like we don't give any we don't care about Whether it's pretty or not if it's the data, it's the simplest model and we're gonna go with it, right? um And so now you don't need to put that number in there, right? You can just instead of forming black holes Which have problems of their own with the sort of one-way edges And the singularities that are on the inside If you just get rid of that idea and you instead replace it with these dark energy objects Then you've solved those Problems with one-way layers and you've solved those problems with information paradoxes And you've solved those problems with singularities and you also get this this cosmological constant number for free So I would say that I would say that We've worked on shows that again, einstein's equations are are even better than we thought like much better But I think it also shows that we have a long way to go for Really understanding or capturing the the essence of what what they're telling us How is that? great So this this idea originally, you know 50 60 years ago was a thing it was kind of Not looked at for a long time geodes have it's like oh, geodes are out there But not really looked at in the way that you've looked at them With your collaborators until now How is the astrophysics community responding to your ideas? That's a great question How am I going to respond to this one? So I have to say that you know people like scientists are a pretty conservative group, right? Yeah, very you really have to come correct So you can't just like drop and I like I said that first paper I pushed back in 2016 and they just threw it back And he was like yeah, this is cool. But come on do something Um, you know, that's really the sentiment and so the impetus when you've got a new sort of way of approaching An older problem is is on you You really have to to make the convincing argument that people should pay attention to it And that's just a slow process First off because you know when you first come up with an idea and you make some connections You don't have the fully clearest picture of what's going on like you can maybe Sort of like the way we actually built the model. You don't see Sort of how all the you don't see all the puzzle pieces in their precision Right, you just sort of see I'm looking at a puzzle You realize you're looking at a puzzle and you're like well, you start hunting for the border Right and then you start laying the border pieces out You find the corner pieces first you get those corners in place Then you start building off the corners and eventually you have a border in place Once you get the border in place you can start working your way in um And so that's it's really sort of how the the research grows organically From this sort of initial idea to realizing like okay, it's going to have these implications and moving on from that So I can tell you that I had the fortune of having one of these sort of Really prominent cosmology people just sort of down the hallway for me And this guy's named nick heizer and he's no longer here at uh, hawaii. He's moved over to france I don't want to say the name wrong because I don't speak french. Well, it's ens is the abbreviation and uh One of the most interesting things about working with a guy like that is that Even if he doesn't agree with what you're saying He can see all of the consequences of the idea very rapidly And so I had this very like heated dynamical like exciting exchange with him where I'd be like well, what about this and he's like I mean, I bet you could get the right cosmological constant if you made a bunch of these things But that's crazy, you know It's sort of and we'd iterate back at he I'd be like, well, why is it crazy and he'd you know have some reasons and then I'd take Okay, thank you. You know I go and sit and think about his reasons Yeah, do I agree with these reasons? Like is it is it making sense to me or does this not make sense to me or you know, do I You know and sort of you continue this sort of like almost adversarial But professional interaction with this with this person and eventually you sort of like You knock off the the broken parts and you're left with the stuff that works um And I still think to this day Nick highs. You're just not like what we're doing But compared to three years ago, it's a lot tighter Yeah, that's I mean that kind of yeah that kind of relationship can really help Your ideas really really hone them fine tune them and like you said make them better over time So we've got the the geodes. We're We know that they're acting on Things they're on each other on the stuff around them. So the papers all three of them. They've now you've now said that they In your models, they support the idea of Expansion that they work in the way that we see the universe expanding Yeah, and so the the thing there was it so great You got that you basically did a counting game at that first level of the calculation You did a counting game smeared everything out and said hey, can we get the right number? And you can pretty easily it's very flexible, which is a nice thing to have um But if you sort of that's not the universe we of course live in we live in a universe where there's you know Not everything is identical everywhere.  So I guess a hundred thousand suns ish That's a pretty heavy thing. So we've got about a bunch of things going around our own milky way galaxy that are of the order 10 to the four so 10,000 or a hundred thousand. Yeah, 10,000 10,000 10,000 10,000 solar masses And uh, so they usually called dwarf galaxies So we've got to think around uh, I hope I don't get the number wrong here. Maybe around 128 of them Something like that. So there's this little like collection of Little tiny galaxies going around ours uh, but you definitely couldn't have a A population of a thousand 100,000 solar mass objects that would start causing trouble And so it was very important that if this idea was going to be a viable explanation for this number that you You find the nine signs equations when you look at the largest scales That these things are not hanging around galaxies too much And to answer that question we had to take we had to take the zero the first level calculation Use that as an input for the first level calculation They say zero yeah zero and then to first zero to first. Yeah, that's right And we had to input that into the first and then we had to see okay What's going to happen if we just sort of start with the very old universe when everything is still very hot And everything's still just sliding out and cooling down and nothing's really clumping together yet Where do the geodes end up and so that's the question we answered in the third paper And it turns out that they uh That their spin matters And so if they're spinning very slowly, uh, they clump faster than matter they clump faster than black holes and you can I understand this idea that um That in terms of the geode themselves I said they get heavier right as they get older And so they get heavy is that from matter accretion? I mean they get heavy intrinsically And it's the same phenomenon that when you see light from a very distant galaxy and it's redder That that energy that's in the light is not because the galaxy has a relative motion To you and any sort of the Doppler sense effect That's actually a common misconception and you can you can run the math and see that it has nothing to do with the Doppler shift What that is is just the light losing energy because it's it's inhabiting what's called a a Friedman cosmology It's not flat space. It's sort of a space that's filled with stuff everywhere and the sort of End effect if they're being stuff everywhere is that stuff sort of I don't know for a better word entrains you or sort of saps you in some way Or usually saps you and so for things like it's like how I'm getting heavier over time So that's not that's not the right That's not the right intuition Yeah, and you got to be careful because there's sort of this old notion It was called tired light in cosmology and that's not the same phenomenon As the the well understood photon redshift, which is what I'm talking about now so geodes instead of losing energy By virtue of their nature. So light loses energy by virtue of its nature Geodes gain energy by virtue of their nature And so they gain energy pretty quickly But geodes are not light. There's sort of localized things and so when they gain energy they gain mass And so they get heavier And so if you have sort of two objects two geodes or two say things that are not geodes and they're rotating each other As the universe is getting older and older these things are staying the same weight same mass and so Their orbit is not changing But if you have two objects that are getting heavier as the universe is getting older Their mutual gravity is going to increase And so they're going to spiral into each other And in this sense they collapse faster than than regular matter does And so we actually sort of characterize this effect in the second paper But we didn't sort of consider the effects of spin. We didn't know how to do that at that time And we only sort of considered what would be called. Oops. Sorry. What would be called the newtonian limit?  It's going to make the whole thing go faster and if you're pulling in tons and tons of matter you're getting lots of spin And so you can show that these things are expected to spin up pretty quickly and so, uh In that sense, we were able to make an argument that was at least good enough to pass the referee process at the astrophysical journal That uh, that that things would spin up and they would undergo this repulsion effect And so most of them would not be around galaxies in fact, most of them would be Distributed uniformly, but since most of space is these void regions most of them are in voids Which we couldn't see anyway, so yeah, they're dark and they're dark Yeah, an object that's about 10 to the 5 solar masses if it's almost the size of a black hole is one fourth the radius of the sun And it's completely dark So they're really hard to see But there are signatures that you can pick up Okay, so this would there be gravitational lensing Are is there going to be testing can we test this that is the Absolutely, right and that's that's actually what's most useful about the geodes scenario is you can exclude it in tons of ways It has signatures everywhere across so many scales from the scale of you know You know compact coalescing binary systems to the scale Galaxies you can count how many of these things might be around to the scales of clusters of galaxies and to the scales of of cosmological distance so um So we got two questions one was from justin right and then one was also from from yukiki so Well, which justin please remind me your question Or just can it can I think they're tiny so it'd be hard to spot one So you asked the lensing So I don't think the number of densities and I'm not an expert in gravitational lensing I don't think the number of densities is efficient for you to to get sort of a strong lensing signal Like to see something as like a blip. I don't think there's enough of that Um, and because they're uniformly distributed Ish, uh, I don't think you'd be seeing a uh a weak lensing signature either And so that's sort of this. I don't know if you guys know what weak lensing is but sort of when you You look at the you look at some region of space and you look at the a background field Of galaxies that are further away than the region that you're sort of interrogating And you look for subtle distortions and the orientations are the way those galaxies are You'd think that normally if you're looking at that region and there were sort of no shenanigans happening in between me And what i'm seeing That all of the galaxies would sort of be randomly arranged Right, maybe their ellipses and they're sort of randomly rotated ellipses and there's no sort of preference anywhere And so you start with that assumption and then you look at some region of space and you say, aha I see all these galaxies sort of stretched and squished and rotated Sort of something big in between something's in between us. Yeah So something is sort of subtly affecting the background field And if you can look at enough of these background field galaxies you can reconstruct Sort of what is sitting in between you and the background field And so that's called a weak gravitational lensing And if you have these things sort of distributed uniformly though, then you're not really going to have any Preferential shears or deformations in one region or another region. And so I think the weak lensing signal would be small Now actually this nick keiser guy that I mentioned before is bread and butter is is weak lensing So he might have some things to say about that, but I think In terms of other tests though, I mean, so, you know, you could you could Test light traveling through void regions of space see how Weak lensing occurs whether or not it does you could Is there is there other triangulation? Are there other other ways to get it? Yeah So what you just said actually if you if you say we can look through light passing through voids And if you just don't say the lensing part you actually identified exactly the other way to look for these things And that's something called the integrated sacks wolf effect or is w effect for short And so what happens there is that or the usual way that it's described is you have a Light sort of comes into a galaxy cluster something very heavy And as that light is coming into the cluster It picks up energy from Gravitation and so it becomes bluer And then as it leaves the galaxy cluster it loses energy and it becomes redder again And usually you would expect this effect to balance So the amount of energy you picked up coming in Is going to be equal to the amount of energy you lose going out right so you don't expect an isw signal But depending on how the universe is is growing if the universe is growing very quickly like an accelerated expansion then sort of the Cluster itself is thought to get stretched With the expansion a little bit And so the light coming in Picks up energy But as it's leaving things got stretched a little bit too much And so it doesn't lose as much energy on the way out And so you expect that the light gets a a slight blue shift It gets a little more energetic And people have looked for this effect and they found it So you can look in clusters and you can like use the the light from the cosmic microwave background As sort of the backlight and you can look for the imprints of structure On the cosmic microwave background and you can look for these subtle shifts hotter and colder So you get the the hotter ones when you have material Likewise, if you have a very empty region the same thing happens in reverse and you get a colder A colder photon coming out And so it turns out that That geodes add a new contribution to the isw effect Something called anisotropic stress And don't ask me where that word comes from or what it means You can ask me what it means. I don't know where the word comes from It's just to me. It's a very sort of confusing word It's a sort of a characterization of the notion of things wanting to shear So that's sort of like stretching squishing deformation Um and so geodes add a source of this type of stress And that changes the isw signal And so in the process of writing paper three, we you know did the did a bunch of the simulations and have the results And we still need to analyze them to Compute the isw effect to see okay. Is it is it visible? Is it a large one? Um Uh, it could be too large, right? It could break things people have measured this, right? And so we have to we have to figure that out make the measurement and see if it's consistent with the data that we have already That's great. So you you've got you you're working on the model. You've already got observational data You're correlating things with and so it's a matter now of just going through All of the possible places you can look Yeah, where where does where do the geodes? What what assumptions do you make and what predictions can you make and then how does that line up with your data? Right So we knew that they we knew that from these these binary star pairs in the milky way that they couldn't be hanging around galaxies And so we had to get them away from galaxies So it turns out that they like to get away from galaxies on the realm So that's good if you're worried about binary star pairs and galaxies But now they're sitting in voids And so now we got to make sure that the data from the voids still makes sense So that's that's next in the list All right That's a lot. I mean that's that's exciting. It's really It's it's got to feel I mean how How does it feel you've got this new idea this thing? I mean, it's not new new, but it's That really No, no, it doesn't actually you feel like you're at the beginning of a journey or is this And I honestly if I were to be completely honest it feels terrifying that's it's really what it feels like. Oh because Like I said, the the community is a very conservative community And if you really want to get people to pay attention Because to to to really investigate an idea to consider whether or not someone's work someone's analysis is correct Right. It's it's very technical stuff. It takes a lot of time You have to be like I care about this enough to really dedicate Two three four hours a day maybe for a couple of weeks to get your head into the right space to be able to understand Okay What were they doing? Why did they go about doing this and and do I do I agree with their methods? Do I agree with their conclusions? That's really hard work and people are very busy So there's a really really high bar in order to to to get people to pay attention And so I think it's just a very slow process and so we're doing the best that we can to Make connections with observations on many different scales that already exist and make predictions for upcoming experiments And I think it's just a matter of time. It's a new idea and people I think will be uncomfortable with it for a while But if enough people begin to sort of notice that hey it keeps working I think eventually it will sort of draw the the necessary Sort of harsh critical attention that it really needs to To take it to the next level right you really need people that are going to come around and be like I hate this and I'm going to get rid of it You know and then they come at it Yeah, they come at it right and then they they give you all that they got and then you know if it survives then It's like the 36 chambers, right? You got to start a chamber one and then you got to get the chamber two and Don't try to chamber 35 first because they're just going to push you out the door Yeah, don't don't go too far ahead of yourself, but I think you're already I mean you're already beyond just a theoretical Analysis this is actually this is actually getting into Experimental aspects. I mean you're doing observational experiments, but this is experimental And I mean, yeah, and I think what's one of the I mean I'm going to I'm going to give a shout out here to my department here in Hawaii Is that I had the fortune of sort of coming of age in an extremely observational and an extremely experimental community So we have the the astronaut the observational astro community up at the institute for astronomy And we've got a bunch of people that work on particle physics experiments Here in physics and astronomy And so whenever I would interact with my my mentors here The question was always what are the predictions? How do we measure this? You know, so I wasn't ever sort of allowed to get lost in theory land I always was being pulled back and be like, all right, it's going to do this or it's not going to do this Am I going to see it here? and that was the really the way to sort of Make progress with people was to you had to connect to the data Uh, so that's sort of the approach that I think we've taken from the from the very beginning was all right, how do we best connect with the data and Because this idea is wild the consequences are wild even though we're working entirely with an Einstein's framework And people are going to have a pretty difficult time with this unless we can really show that it pays dividends And so that's why we've that's why we've taken it the tack that we have I got I don't know why I got this uh this funny image of of what you've just described is Is a small bird continuously being pushed out of the nest Occasionally hitting there and then having to get come back to the I got it this time Hang on hang on I mean, I feel that that's sort of aptly that aptly describes the graduate student experience Um, you know, you're trying to fly on your own and you really you're really not strong enough yet But but it sounds it it sounds like they're uh, yeah having that focus of of it's not just a A nice idea that you can work on in the sandbox, but uh being being pushed up against actual Observation experimental minded people must have accelerated Your appreciation for the idea as well Oh, yeah, so I mean there was a lot of like I said, there was a lot of honestly a lot of fear Right like like this like because the way that I came at the problem It it seemed to me to be sort of clear that there was only one way forward But that was not at all what anyone else was doing and so I'm like am I just crazy? Like like why isn't it? Why doesn't anyone else seem to see this or like why isn't anyone approach the problem in this way? And usually when I when that happens to me, it's because I'm wrong Yeah, I mean usually when that happens to me, it's also because I'm wrong, right? So I mean and right so this one uh, this one's still going That's ongoing. It's very it's yeah, that's really an interesting interesting concept. And I think it's uh an interesting one to talk about because it really Uh gives a new a new spin on black holes and I I don't think I like Blair approved of that one I heard the groan From the from the stage when the groan comes from the stage. That's when you know, you're in trouble It's when you know, you're doing your puns right groan of approval. You missed. I knew that Uh, so there's a question in the chat room. This is uh, it goes back to I think first order concepts and I just have to ask the question. Um, you talked about the um the The supernovas and things that we're using to measure redshift and expansion in our universe The question from the chat room is I was told that no one has proven the universe is expanding as there was no direct measurement I've yet to see a direct measurement I've seen lots of proofs which assume the redshift is based on expansion But I've never seen proof that it actually exists How can you prove the expansion of the universe while you are confined to a gravitational well? Okay, so I think the I think the the first the first way to answer this question is to sort of Clarify that when you do physics or any sort of experimental science or observation like astronomy You really don't prove anything like proof is a concept that's squarely mathematical You sort of lay out your assumptions Uh, you lay out your axioms if you're really going back to the basics And then you sort of follow a very strict logical framework to arrive at a conclusion And that conclusion is called a proof Um of whatever concept you assert so you asserted something and you're going to say I'm going to show that Given the assumptions I made given the axioms I took given the framework that I'm assuming for my logic That I can string these things together and I can arrive at a conclusion and then I will have proved this conclusion Uh, so whenever you're doing uh stuff like observationally, there's you're never going to have that you just can't get it, right? Uh, all you can do is sort of come up with a with a mathematical model With some sort of description of what you think reality should be doing And then be like when I look at the night sky, is this what I see is what I see consistent And so you can check consistency And so when we do that, uh, we assume the model that that Einstein wrote down is a good one And we assume that because it's it's been very very very consistent with everything we've observed since its inception And every new observation seems to strengthen Strengthened this thing is working every new observation is consistent with the predictions of the theory And the predictions of Einstein's theory tell you that light should redshift in an expanding universe And it should redshift by an amount that's consistent with what we see And so Everything we do is within this framework of Einstein's theory And if we were to suddenly find that something was not working like badly not working Then we would be forced to sort of consider a different model but the photon redshift is is something that is Very consistent sort of consistent at a very low level Um And so it's one that we we have a very strong belief in and I guess I will you use the word belief here Because it it does come down to that It is a belief in the in the the validity or applicability of the model that we've chosen to work with And so ultimately science does have to pick a model and choose to work on that And at some point there will be enough data around and the data will be of sufficient precision That you'll see that that model might not be the best way to go anymore And then you build a new model and but until then you you work within the model until you find good reason to leave it So in that sense, uh, I would say that the photon redshift is uh real and confirmed And uh, it's consistent with the and the distances that we infer from that effect Make sense or need to be taken seriously I think maybe it's the way to say that and also that framework with the with the within which you're working Has been challenged General relativity has been challenged and tested and my goodness you anybody who could find a It's working It's actually I mean that's probably the biggest surprise in all of scientific history Is standard model general relativity. It's like it works And and and but generality has been a lot a lot around longer than standard model. So I'm gonna I'm gonna push my push my topic right here You know, okay We've been cruising for 50 years longer and it's and it's just that's like the most uh mind-blowing thing to me is that uh Something that can start with a set of equations and observations in a human mind can then have Thousands of human minds attack it from every angle and still find it consistent with the universe that we're in Phenomenal might that's the most mind-blowing Thing to me about all of it. But yeah, so I think that's the most important thing to me about general relativity at this point. And it's and it isn't a dedication Uh, necessarily to that framework It's been a framework people have really earnestly worked hard to to to to yeah, it's it's sort of like a dedication to knock it down Yeah That's right And so that's what it reminds me of you earlier saying like I'm just waiting to for you just excited about the idea that the harshly criticized so so you're looking for that that tear down to to help uh Knock off more of the parts that don't work and to and to you know, bring it into a greater resolution because that's how That's one of the the things that improves our concept of the universe is is trying to knock down the assumptions or the the the assumptions based on evidence even uh that we have Is it's by getting another another attack From a different angle and and finding whether or not it remains consistent. Yep I can't wait until we're intergalactic travelers and doing these experiments to check and see if they still work then You know, it's like, oh, yeah when we can travel through wormholes I'll still be here Okay wormholes may exist with geodes Oh So wormholes are extremely interesting thing actually. Um, I have no idea. I have no idea at all Um, they're possible within Einstein's theory. You can you can build wormhole structures like they're they're consistent with the math You have to sort of as far as I know you have to break something called the deck You have to break the dominant energy condition Okay Uh All right, so reset there You have to break the dominant energy condition to be able to hold a wormhole open Okay, and the question is like, okay You can do that, but when you break the dominant energy condition, uh, what happens is There exist observers That don't agree on the causal ordering of events So when the dominant energy condition is maintained, that means anybody, whether it's it's people like us or whether it's you're traveling with a light beam Everybody agrees on the same ordering Of the way the universe plays out Now we won't agree on the time We will see certain things happen more quickly or more slowly, but the order of the events is preserved for everybody If you violate the dominant energy condition, that is no longer true And so people Usually think that violations of the dominant energy condition are pretty bad news and should be avoided But there's nothing intrinsic to Einstein's equations. It says you're not allowed to break the dominant energy condition And there's even situations in quantum mechanical systems where it appears the dominant energy condition is violated And so it's really not clear whether or not a Uh structure like a wormhole is is a viable thing As far as Einstein's equations go you can do it. It feels a little naughty, but you can do it I want to make the call back to the dominant energy condition here. Yes, and uh Uh, but in quantum mechanics already seems to sort of suggest that there might be phenomenon like this Uh, but that's sort of the everything else is a theoretical game at this point with respect to wormholes So it sounds like there's a chance. So that's good. Right. There's a chance. There's a chance All right. Okay. So geodes don't break wormholes. This is as far as I know yet Yes, okay good All right. Thank you so much for sharing all of this information with us and joining us tonight. This has just been very generous with your time Absolutely. Thank you. I mean, thank you for listening to be ramble forever. Oh, awesome It's been it's been great talking with you Is there a place that people can find more information about the work that you do or Oh, so the thing is um, there is like a wikipedia page Uh, but I I'm like maximally conflict of interest. So I I don't edit it Um, I've commented on the talk page about it and just to sort of clarify some things for the For the editors to sort of decide whether it meets notability criteria yet and things like that um And so I would honestly say that the page is out of date Um, and it's not it's not had sort of an expert's touch to make sure that things are things are correct Accurate, right. Um, so And maybe you're maybe you're pointing the the way that I really should just sit down and and write some of this stuff up And maybe a more accessible way and just stick it on my web page or something Um, if you think there would be interest in that, uh, there is sort of a There's a stack exchange Astronomy stack exchange threads sort of what are geodes Or some someone asked and some astronomer was like, I never heard of these things And so I actually got on there and it was like, hey, I'm the guy that lead author of these papers Like here's what's going on and I answered their questions and people were pretty satisfied with their responses But they were a little technical Um, is there a place not yet, but maybe there should be Yes, there should be people should there should be a place where people can find more information So maybe you guys can edit the wikipedia page Make a geode twitter account Do I have it? Do I have a twitter? Yeah, you should make a geode twitter account and like social media terrifies me As geodes That's probably good. Don't get in just stay away. It's an evil dark place right now.  No, it's terrible We have your we have a link to your web page at the university of hawaii and we can also link to the geode wikipedia entry So what it might be on our website to send people better if you're if we link your podcast or we link this live stream Is so just like put like oh, what are geodes? Did you just click it? It takes you to this This conversation if you think this conversation was useful. It'll be recursive Yeah, we can sort of Drive the click traffic I like it. I like this idea You guys could make some geode merch It's just it's dark nobody can actually It's there I can send you a paper The hat is really heavy. It's just it's really heavy and it tries to push you away All right, everybody we have come to the end of our interview Dr. Crocker, thank you so much for joining us. We are going to continue on You're welcome. We are going to continue on to some more science stories. You're welcome to join us or I think I have to talk out at this point. Yeah to go your way. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much. Yeah See you guys later. Have a good night. Bye All right, thank you This is this weekend science Thank you for listening We are really glad that you're here with us. We hope that you learned something in that interview I know I did We try to bring you interesting interviews and conversation around science stories every single week Right down to earth up to date views credible reliable sane That's what we really try to do but It's all because of you that we're able to do it So if you are able head over to twist.org click on the patreon link and choose your level of support To help us keep bringing this science sanity to the world And to more people it's all because of you We really can't do this without you. Thank you for your support And we're back with more this weekend science and you know that interview We went on and on and on about the astrophysics So I think it's time For some Blair's animal corner What's Blair? What you got Blair? Oh, there we go. There we go. I'm here Um So I have uh, I have a couple of kind of silly but fun stories that actually have some good implications to the greater scientific world This one's from Duke University. They love their primates. And this is looking at male baboons Actually 35 years of data looking at more than 540 baboons over those 35 years in a national park in kenya looking at Plotonic relationships so relationships between males and females that are not related to copulation or reproduction Because you know, there's been lots of studies done about family groups about Definitely female female relationships male male relationships But when when we think about males being friendly with females you as tend to assume as a As a lot of biologists would assume that it has to do with reproductive perks at some way Even if you're not currently getting any of those perks Perhaps you're hoping you will at some point Maybe that's happening because they're related in some way to offspring. So they're helping protect or maybe that by giving Kind of social behavior friendly behavior. There's a hope that at some point down the line Maybe you'll get a shot But then at the same time we also know from studies with humans That humans who have close friends friendships are more likely to live longer than those who don't And human studies also show that making and keeping friends can be as important for longevity as losing weight or getting exercise So we have these two kind of very different ways of looking at the world Perhaps no coincidence that one is looking at non human primates and one is looking at human primates And they're they're you know, we we are kind of want to separate from that. It's all about sex thing No, you can be friends with a guy But then when we're looking at the baboons, we don't want to believe that for some reason I think is very maybe it's a subconscious thing. I don't know. Anyway, um I'm fine with it. There's been there's been these patterns of Opposite sex friendship that has been seen all over the animal kingdom, but especially a lot in mammals And they use statistical techniques to look at mortality risk at each age And to see if there was links between survival and friendship And if those were the same for males and females They Do spend a lot of time together grooming which is usually how you look at social behavior in primates That's how they bond that's how they relieve stress and that they help each other with hygiene And there's this push pull. I help you remove those bugs. You help me remove my books, right? Males don't spend very much time grooming each other makes sense. They're probably rivals. They don't want to help each other But they do groom with females even ones Who are not currently fertile Who are currently with a child from a different individual So they they do it not just right when it might result in sex So they looked at 277 males 265 females. They looked at the strength of the bonds in their inner circle Um, basically just by the time grooming each other And they found that both sexes have benefit from strong social ties And they the males specifically live longer lives if they're socially connected And that males that maintain strong female friendships were 28 percent more likely to make it to their next birthday Then ones that were socially isolated. That's a very dramatic way of plugging it. But um, yeah, so it has a very It's a strong indicator So of course more weak work needs to be done to look at how those links have Is it causal? Is it correlative? And then if it is causal, how do those bonds specifically affect physiology and lengthen lifespans? Is there a physiological change? Is it all hormonal or mental? So these are all questions, right? um And so this is Bringing it way back saying that it does seem like friendship has evolutionary roots Very far down definitely in the primate family tree Probably in the mammalian family tree I bet you could go further But yeah, it's it I immediately think about stress Mm-hmm that uh an animal group that's not a solitary one is It's stress hard their stress hormones will be reduced If they are having physical contact with other individuals whether or not they're getting Reproduction out of it and I would imagine it also helps strengthen the bonds within the social group as a whole You know, so they've got their local their little band of baboons You know that that they're troop that they rely on and If you are involved in a mutual grooming relationship a friendship With other individuals you're going to be able to Rely on those individuals Is there a food shortage? Is something dangerous? Is something have it? You know there is that undercurrent of troop trust That I think like that and that also goes back to stress. It probably would reduce stress it maintains those bonds and I would I would imagine it probably allows everyone to be cool Yeah, and live together Yeah So we're talking about Yeah, but we'll I know very violent animals. Yeah I feel like that's a stress-based society Right, so we'll do astronauts mutually groom when we're on Mars. Yeah, they should I mean it also I was never a girly girl growing up I didn't really have any female friends and then I got to college and I did a disorderly instantly I had all these female friends and the first time I had a another girl A braid my hair or like mess with my hair The thinking back on it with like the science hat on It was it could only be just a rush of positive hormones just like a flood of dopamine or something I don't know But it was it feels really good and it just feels like you're being like taken care of and a space that you can't see And I don't know it's it's really hard for me to describe But it is you know what girls braid each other's hair. There's a reason for that. I would guess it has something to do with this but um Yeah, it it It's interesting to think about it from the baboons, but also with humans, especially in covid times when we're not allowed to touch each other I think I experienced something very similar to that With a significant other who basically pinned me down and clipped my nose hair I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it. Just stay still stay still. This has to be done Okay, current good good good. I was hoping it sounded like That was the right ammo. Um, anyway, uh, moving on from, uh, reducing stress to fear Um Pretty simple story just looking at The uh, this is from the institute of marine biodiversity exploitation and conservation looking at the impact of humans on uh, how wild animals respond to predators And sometimes it takes a little bit of science being done to confirm what I'm sure we all would have guessed Which is the more animals come into contact with humans That could be through captivity, domestication or urbanization They stop avoiding predators their avoidance behaviors like vigilance freezing And fleeing they all start to deteriorate They analyze results from 173 peer reviewed studies They looked at anti predator traits, uh, both behavioral and physiological So they were looking at long-term evolutionary changes as well in 102 species They looked at domestic Captive and urbanized mammals birds reptiles fish and mollusks. So this is a pretty big swath of, um life That we're looking at here in terms of animals And they found that contact with human overall led to a loss of anti predator traits And simultaneously the variability between individuals increases And then decreases in generations, uh in contact with the human So that basically the human comes in Reduces pressure pressure from natural selection because they're kind of letting everybody survive And Then think about like dog breeds right some of them that are said their whole lives In the doctor's office because of traits that were allowed to continue that could have been a problem, right? So they reduce pressure so that allows them to kind of radiate And then uh After that then they they've kind of started to be selected for being more docile or domesticated. So They had almost immediate changes in responses in the first generation after contact with humans So the initial response is all behavioral and then genetic changes come later on of course um so Domesticated animals their anti predator responses Started to disappear three times faster than urbanized animals. So that makes sense. You're talking about um a dog versus a pigeon So definitely um animals that live in your home Are domesticated our cattle things like that They are being selected for And they are dependent on humans to survive urbanized animals are not being intentionally selected for by humans and they also Use humans to help them survive but could survive without them. So it's a it's kind of a different thing um, and then captivity actually had the slowest changes which is great Because that's where endangered species are being bred to be released into the wild. So this is actually great news Also herbivores apparently change behavior more quickly than carnivores And uh solitary species really than group loving animals Yeah, so the the solitary versus group loving that should jive because uh group living animals have versions of themselves to gauge how they act But if you take a solitary species and you bring them home They think they are you they don't have another version of them to Compare to compare. They think they're one of whatever they're around. So that would make sense. Um, so obviously I don't think my cats think that they are me though Right, but no, but they think that They think that they are they're the humans in charge of your household. Yes Right exactly Uh, yeah, there's a hierarchy, but they might think you're all the same species.  Um, and so there's a lot of implications for conservation um Captive breeding programs like I mentioned livestock management So this is an important study because I think the first thing that I took away was what I said like great awesome captive breeding is the Is the lowest impact. So let's just keep trying to Reduce as much of that impact as we can if if we're trying to captive breed animals for later release into the wild That's excellent. But this also is a reminder I brought this because a few weeks ago someone had asked about feeding wild animals on your porch That is exactly what we are talking about here with urbanized animals So if you get them used to humans then they might get eaten so Uh, yeah, so it really is That you want them to be a wild animal do wild animal things because that attributes to more than just Their diet it attributes to how they're going to react if they see a coyote or a mountain lion. So Uh, it it's part of the overall survival of these animals is making sure that The only ones getting this intense Specified selected contact by humans are Species that we intend to live with us forever hence domesticated species, right? so That's cool. Yeah, this is it's interesting I want to I want to ask a real quick question. Uh, which one Got the predator response Uh Reduced quicker was uh, it was a carnivore versus vegetarian The herbivores did it herbivores. Yeah reduced faster. Okay. Yeah, okay. Yeah, they got their guard down quicker It's just interesting. Yeah It made me think of uh, it made me think of sharks Being terrified when there's orca present Because I think if you are If you are a predator Uh, you know another predator Must be terrifying because it's not your norm.  They'll eat each other because meat is meat Yep It's an interesting thought Fascinating Hey, Justin, did you have any stories? Oh, uh, yeah I actually do somewhere Okay, yeah, this is uh from force steward who is an associate professor of sociology in stanford school of humanities and sciences Uh, he worked with some researchers University of chicago Kaley white and shannon Morrissey they were looking at how chicago news organizations cover homicide victims Uh in in the print Uh And they focused on chicago in 2016, which was one of the deadliest years In the nation's uh third largest city They had 762 people who were homicided murdered Not fun fact Chicago has a serious homicide problem and it's sort of like looking at some of the the sources Of where this data was collected It's pretty grim, but That's just the not fun fact. So this study was just published in the journal sociology of race and ethnicity What they basically did was they looked at Um, how people are written up After they have died after they have been murdered in the little blurbs Uh of the local newspapers and they found a disparity And how people were written up Based on race. So they uh, so here's the uh Disparities extended to the, uh, uh Cities hispanic majority neighborhoods and black majority neighborhoods versus the white majority neighborhoods chicago sort of an interesting place because it is uh, basically it's a third African-american a third hispanic and a third cacation You would think this would be a very sort of place that you would have this blended pool of being able to see uh, a sort of Maybe a uniform approach. However, despite the the the makeup of the city. It is still a very segregated city. There are vast majority Black vast majority white neighborhoods majority hispanic neighborhoods as well so Despite its diversity chicago remains a a very segregated community uh, basically this was this was something that Stuart had come about about because he had sort of been looking at there was uh, uh, uh, jacob blake His sister said something and interesting an interview Uh, when when she said and and when you say the name jacob blake make sure you say father Make sure you say cousin make sure you say son make sure you say uncle and then effort to humanize and not allow That attack to be a statistic um And so he sort of got interested in this and started looking into How press covers these things. Is there something that you can quantify so quoting Quoting Stuart here as a as a social scientist I thought wouldn't it be even more powerful to quantify the value of different folks lives from different racial identities and backgrounds and news coverage And hold those up next to each other So this is how he came about focusing in then on chicago, which has a few databases that list everyone, uh, who who has been murdered in their city And has a couple of places where they actually have been links to Where this has been reported in the news They examined 2245 news articles about homicide victims They looked at how much coverage each person received considering factors like word count and which articles recognized someone is more than a name victim But as a complex, multi-dimensional human being Mentioning family community connections. Uh, there were articles Some of them which were they did interviews with other people in that person's life Uh, they craft references also with chicago police department public records Their analysis determined that uh about 35 percent of murder victims in majority white neighborhoods Were likely to be covered as a complex person Uh, that is double the amount in majority black neighborhoods, which was 17 percent and hispanic neighborhoods, which was 18 percent Homicide victims in majority white neighborhoods received about 450 words more Of text on average the nose killed a majority black neighborhoods Researchers found that black victims names were sometimes misspelled had transposed letters in the news reports Even just reading the news articles This is moracy. Who's out of chicago? Yeah, even just reading the news articles There was a palpable difference in the way victims and neighborhoods were talked about This paper does well to remind us that the disparities are on a neighborhood and community level So they differentiated between articles that simply listed a victim in a weekend review of the homicides and more nuanced articles That tried to capture an individual's lives There were other articles especially about victims from majority white neighborhoods where the reporters were doing interviews with family members and friends with teachers coaches all sorts of people in the victims life And they were providing quotes said white who's uh The department of sociology university of chicago They talked about the victim in a very different way Like this complex person who has value and who's being missed by the community family members and friends so Stuart at the end of saying here race isn't just your Femiotipical coloring races a series of historic economic symbolic importantly geographical set of power Relations where some people are stigmatized and rendered powerless or less powerful These are systems of domination So even you know when when when we have had these conversations about what is Uh systematic racism. What is what is a an institutional racism look like? Uh, here's a pretty good example. The just the way that the community Is reporting on the victims of homicide has A racial bias to it has a huge bias and I think There are many examples. There have been uh people Within media who have often said make sure you look at the verbs at that how How the headlines of stories are even worded because the way that they're either Passive or active voice the headlines are worded in a way that make you immediately Emotionally jump to a certain conclusion Um, and then like all these bits of evidence that you've brought in through this story. It's yeah It's part of that systemic disenfranchisement telling a different story Yeah, there was a really interesting article actually from npr back in june about how, um, Black victims are usually called unarmed black men specifically This is part of the phrase which it actually has an implied bias saying that uh Young black men are expected to be armed and dangerous and so there there's actually, uh And something that npr wasn't even aware of and they had to be educated and they had to release this article And say that they were going to change the way that they did this because if a victim is white They're not an armed white person. Yeah, so it's yeah, there's definitely something there That sometimes it's so baked in that even trying to be Just the most Impartial inclusive you it's still there. Yeah. No, that's a fascinating one That was never occurred to me, but yeah unarmed black man. We've heard this phrasey ology over and over especially in a lot of these uh, these these reports, but Hey, you don't hear about the uh Which at first you sometimes think like, oh, they're actually indicating that they they're pointing out the fact that this was Right, this was an innocent But by that this was an innocent black man because they were not armed as As would have been then it would have been acceptable Right or the implication that that is somehow an outlier from the expectation. Yes, right. Yeah, totally Our words matter and I think the point with this particular study is really interesting that Chicago you you would think since it is fairly Evenly divided But not integrated but not integrated that's the that's the big Kicker kind of there, but Yeah, can we get away from that language? Yeah, this is one of journalism Which is supposed to be impartial supposed to be in that active voice and it's supposed to be telling the stories of the community Um, when when you have the system that is designed to be unbiased And it's uh recounting of of events and things taking place and then you find That layer of bias palpably in the words of the researchers obvious Yeah, that's that's like the definition of an institutional systemic racism or bias that that that The journalist doing this It's not like they're like, oh, I'm going to intentionally specifically Refer to the this person be either way they died because of their race differently than it I know, you know, it's it's that uh that hidden bias That is even worse in a way because that way it continues without even the person authoring it necessarily Recognizing that it's taking place. So hopefully so that now now this has been done in one city It doesn't mean that Chicago is an outlier No, yeah, I'm sure that if it were to be analyzed across the united states, we would find it everywhere Unfortunately, this hopefully the story gets some traction within the journalistic community So that they start to pay attention to the way Bias effects they're reporting. Yeah It's a great point This is this week in science if you like this show Help us grow our audience tell a friend to subscribe today I have a couple of stories before we finish our hour here. Let's talk about Brains Brains and how they develop Yes, shall we go there? Yes. Yes. We just Yes, let's talk about how brains develop you Have a baby you think oh, you know It starts out as a little ball of cells that blast assist and the blast assist then has all these cell types It has its genomic map to be able to turn into all the different cell types that the body needs Some there's gastrulation and the body gets a gut and then it starts dividing and oh look There's like a little head area and a tail area and there's little limbs forming and meanwhile Well, the shape of the body is taking shape there are Cells for the different tissues that are taking shape as well neurons start to grow that start connecting different parts of the body The brain to the gut the brain starts to form So you often talk about the things that Mothers eat while they are pregnant Affecting the development of the offspring. We often talk about even the things that mothers have put in their bodies Leading up to the pregnancy. Oh, were they a drinker? Were they a smoker? Do they have enough folic acid? You know all these things that can that we know can potentially affect That young baby. Well questions have arisen as to whether or not microbes have any impact into that brain development And you might think wait a minute. Who's microbes what because okay We know there's the placental barrier, right? There's the placenta It mingles the mom's blood blood supply with the babies But it's a barrier kind of like the blood brain barrier And it's supposed to kind of let nutrients pass through but it's this very specialized organ to support the growth of the baby And so it's the nutrients come from the blood of the mother to feed the developing embryo So how could the how could microbes be involved? Why would they be involved? well, some researchers just published a paper in nature this week reporting that When they took microbes away from pregnant mice Started out with germ-free mice no microbes or mice that they gave antibiotics to The offspring of those Mothers the brains did not develop in the s