I'm so blue be da dee dee dee dee da da da dee da blue ba da da dee da da da I'm blue now here's a little story about blue and when your white balance is often you don't have time to fix it before a show starts at least not all magenta I think that would be worse no I hope I'm a calming influence on everyone this evening those are my hopes I believe when I when I did the show from a hostel in Israel that one time I was blue for the entire broadcast as well so I had a great white balance the best of us yeah it does happen and you know my computer something probably updated while I wasn't paying attention which returned everything to its baseline poopiness Blair slightly washed out tonight and my autofocus is back on and going haywire so back to normal there we go ventures and video everyone here we go here we go and Jason welcome to the show we are about to begin our show starting in everybody ready starting in three two this is twist this week in science episode number 674 recorded on Wednesday June 6 2018 Mooning about Pluto hey everyone I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on this week in science we are going to fill your heads with what with hosts dating and cucumbers but first disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer there are things that we know and there are things that we do not know we can for a moment condense the world into these two categories knowledge and the lack of it but as we drill down the picture can become murky of the things we do not know there are things we know we do not know we often refer to this as the unknown like a mechanism for gravity or what existed before the Big Bang or where of where all of our missing socks have gone there is another category of unknowns that are far more irksome unknowns that we think we know things that we think we know but actually know nothing or at least have noticeably wrong and what makes this most irksome is that most of human knowledge may actually fall into this category and while most of humanity gets by relying on knowing about things that they do not actually know about we will endeavor to keep you as much in the know of newly known things as your noodle can navigate for nothing makes us more knowledgeable more knowledgeable as a species than this weekend science coming up next 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 once again to talk about all the all the news that we can fit in the show from the last week for this week for tonight we got science we have an interview we've got all sorts of fun things going on I had an alcoholic beverage tonight before the show a little unusual so it might be a little bit chattier than usual we'll see how it goes okay tonight on the show I'm a little blue if you're watching on the video I'm blue but not because I'm sad but because my white balance is off that's all on the show I have lots of science news I'm a little bit chattier than but because my white balance is off that's all on the show I have lots of science news I've got some dark matters I've got some sterile neutrinos and I got some other stuff in there Justin what do you have let's see I've got two things science may have gotten wrong and three new reasons to fear the future three that's that's limiting so that's good great all right and Blair what's in the animal corner oh I have some tough guppies I have reasons to be protective of your mate and I have the importance of a good cucumber everybody likes cucumber and we also have an interview this evening with Dr. Jason cuckoo is joining us to talk about Pluto but before we jump into the interview I would love to remind everyone that if you have not yet subscribed to twist you can do that you really can if you want to go to twist.org for information or you can look for this weekend science all the places that good podcasts and video podcasts are found okay jump it in let's do it let's jump right into this Jason cook he is an a planetary astronomer and research scientist he focuses on the composition and atmospheres of icy bodies such as Pluto Triton Sharon Kuiper belt objects comets and other icy satellites he uses spectroscopy or the wavelengths of light to learn about the composition of each object and he received his PhD from Arizona State University and recently published a paper that used new horizons data to investigate the moons of Pluto Jason welcome to the show thank you thank you for having me great to have you on I know we have chatted back and forth many times about online about various astronomical issues and you've always seemed like you know what you're talking about so great to yeah it's great to get you on here to talk about this thing that you do know about all right how did you get interested in in astronomy initial so how did I get started so probably about when I was about 10 years old so this is late 80s or so you know Voyager 2 was encountering Uranus and Neptune and I was a kid who liked to watch PBS not just for like Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street but Nova specials or nature specials I just sort of ate that sort of stuff up and when the Nova specials came out on Uranus and Neptune and then at the end the whole grand tour of the solar system that just brought me in of course at the same time Haley's comic came by my grandmother sent my brother a telescope and even though I was kind of too young to really know what was going on it's just sort of like it sat there in the corner for a few years and then I was like I'll start playing with that and I grew up in New York and pretty much the brightest things you can see in the sky were Jupiter and Venus and Saturn so yeah I got hooked. There's far off objects in the solar system and the mystery that they provide so is that what led you out to the distant icy reaches of our solar system is that like is that you just started looking that distant and just kept going. So as a kid I always thought that oh Voyager and I knew about Voyager hitting all the big planets and I thought well obviously it's going to Pluto why isn't no one talking about Pluto and of course it didn't go to Pluto and only Voyager 2 was possibly planned or Voyager 1 was possibly planned for that encounter but they chose Titan over Pluto no regrets of course but early 90s come around and I start reading about how there's always going to be there will be a mission for Pluto eventually and these missions would pop up and congress would take the money or somehow the mission would get killed but I was always like okay I want to be part of that sort of first time to encounter of course Pluto was a planet then so I can say encounter a planet for the very first time see what it looked like up close because in all our telescopes it just looks like a bright point of light and you really didn't get much details out of even with Hubble Space Telescope even the largest telescopes on Earth didn't get much detail out of Pluto up until like late 90s early 2000s or so. Yeah and so what I mean a couple of questions here let's start out with like what we did know about Pluto this blob floating out in space before we got these you know up close images from the New Horizons mission like what did we know about it? We had a pretty good idea of how big it was so at the time we said oh it's between 1150 kilometers in radius to 1200 kilometers in radius and the ambiguity is because we knew it had an atmosphere and we knew that because we'd watch stars go behind Pluto's atmosphere and that light would slowly dim out if it had no atmosphere the light would just turn off immediately and you'd know exactly how big it is but because you see a star setting behind Pluto's atmosphere you'd never knew exactly the right size. For some reason I thought that the New Horizons mission had really given us that concept of an atmosphere on Pluto so we knew that ahead of time. We actually knew quite a bit but we discovered a lot more with New Horizons so we knew it had an atmosphere we knew the surface was mostly nitrogen carbon monoxide and methane ices which are all very volatile so even at Pluto's temperature surface temperature 40 Kelvin or minus 370 Fahrenheit or something like that these ices will sublimate into a gas which form the atmosphere and the ices will then migrate from warm spots to cold spots on Pluto we knew it had a very large moon about half the size of Pluto that was Sharon we knew where it was in the sky we knew roughly its colors so in astronomy we used a lot of like these broad colors and blue, green and red colors and sometimes just those basic physical values give us ideas of what the composition is. It was sort of basic stuff we knew the atmosphere was relatively warm compared to the surface we didn't know exactly why it is. Yeah we knew there was a bright spot. You know what it was? Yeah you've mentioned a bunch about the aspects of light you're doing light based telescope work right so it's these images so what exactly is spectroscopy and how does it use light to be able to tell us things like you know we can look at the ice the image of this blob right to the untrained eye it looks like a blob of greys and whites in the sky but it really is this is methane and carbon and nitrogen and you know how do you know that? Right I always find this fun thing about astronomy is that all we can do is use telescopes to look at either reflected light or emitted light you know from stars and from that we can determine the composition of stuff so all that spectroscopy does is takes that light and breaks it up into a rainbow we're all familiar with seeing a rainbow because there's rain on one side of your sky and the sun is behind it and the light goes through the light and makes the rainbow pattern of course there's a lot more than just the visible colors as the ultraviolet which for us humans it leads to our sunburns and then the infrared which we normally sense as heat if we can see it or feel it if you think of like an electric stove and it's really cold it turned off the coils are dark and as soon as you crank it on high there's no red so that's all the infrared light coming into the visible so I would always use infrared spectroscopy so we're using this sort of weird range we can't see with our eyes usually inside of a telescope or inside the instrument there's a grating or something that sort of acts like a prism to break up the light and the grating all that is just a piece of material with a whole bunch of grooves in it and the light sort of scatters off of it onto which today we all have in our phones it's all modern cameras astronomers have been using that since the mid 80's so you break it up into light and what you get is a squiggly pattern in the end and really you get so you talk about seeing Pluto as a gray blob to the untrained eye what does it mean? Well spectroscopy to the untrained eye is a squiggly line it really is and it takes a little bit of work but you start to learn the patterns and stuff so methane and nitrogen water all these every single molecule or compound has a unique fingerprint so when the light goes through it or reflects off of it you get this sort of signature and you can determine the composition of everything from just the light itself and you can roughly get ideas of temperature ideas of how ices are mixed together you actually get a good wealth of information it's really fun I think that's amazing it's matching patterns and as somebody in the chat room said Kevin Unique he says astronomy is just analyzing photons I mean it's a little bit more than that we always joked in college and grad school if you're an X-ray astronomer and no offense to anyone out there who is you really are just counting photons in infrared now we know what you use to study and we're talking about Pluto so tell us a little bit about this actual study that you just published or you're getting published and how you use the New Horizons data and what you found so when New Horizons flew by in July of 2015 so the Pluto system is sort of like a bullseye you don't just get to see one target each one at a time you see it all at once and just by fortunate of the alignment of the system we got a very good close up view of Nix which is one of the small satellites of Pluto Hydra was not too close but it's also kind of sort of same size as Nix and then the two other smaller satellites Kerberos and Sticks and for the sake of the mission they decided not to go with making any observations of Sticks because it would be way too far and way too tiny but they tried for Kerberos and it was really difficult but I was able to pull out at least some sort of spectrum out of it so as it flew by it took a spectrum of these three different satellites and I can't say it's the very first time small satellites have been analyzed because Cassini has done a wealth of information at Saturn but for Pluto a lot of the mission designing observations really thought well we might not see anything at these small satellites might be too dark and they might be going too fast so we got more than we expected with these things that's cool so what did you find tell us the details what are we learning so what we pretty much knew is that they're going to be made of water ice that we first saw easily from the three satellites that we looked at but what surprised us was that there was also a spectral signature of ammonia or it wasn't pure ammonia it's some sort of ammonia material or ammonia compound but it was just sitting there at the right spot, right wavelength and it was at least for me we knew it was on Sharon and I thought it was somehow related to Sharon's formation and Sharon's past but no way would it be seen on these small satellites because usually ammonia when you mix it with water you depress the freezing point of the mixture from normally 273 kelvin and you can get down to 176 kelvin if you get the right mixture and this is the whole idea that you have cryovolcanic activity now that's not to say these small satellites have them they're way too small though completely frozen out why do you have it on these small satellites that's sort of still the open question because ammonia itself would get destroyed very about 20 million years or so what produces ammonia in the first place to have it to have these compounds I mean it's what would make it be there well the idea is that ammonia is part of the formation of the solar system so as we we're looking at these things and we see ammonia it's a remnant of our solar system formation the idea was that ammonia should have been seen at Saturn like in great abundances back people thought this in the I'd say up until the 90s or so 1990s but as observations got better we really weren't seeing it at Saturn we do see small traces of it now using Cassini data but since we didn't see it in big abundances with telescopes then they said oh maybe it's at Uranus we don't see it there or maybe it's at Neptune we don't see it there and so we've tasted all the way out but now we are seeing it Pluto and we're seeing it in you know Pluto's part of the Kuiper Belt so we're getting ideas that maybe it should be on other Kuiper Belt objects as well and some astronomers have definitely published papers saying it's suggestive it's here we think it's here so we're starting to put this puzzle piece together a little bit so is it that these larger gas giants that they're just big systems of their own that they've got so much dynamic volatility in their magnetic fields or gravitational fields everything that the ammonium compounds have been either broken down or they've floated off into space yeah so what I mentioned earlier is that ammonia itself would under normal UV conditions would break down in 20 million years 25 million years even at Pluto or at Uranus systems something has kept it there yeah so the reason we don't see it at other satellites in our solar system yeah it could be it was destroyed it might not have formed there our idea of how the solar system formed is that it probably didn't form in the same way we see it today planets do migrate so if the conditions weren't right where the planets formed and the satellites formed then they lost or never they're ammonia abundance and they probably have a more of a nitrogen enrichment and too could it also suggest that somehow Pluto's picked up this from a passerby in the not too distant past it's hard to tell when you have one object to study right so there's a handful of other objects like a KBO called Orcus some people thought Quarwar was one of them but others have said no there's definitely methane there and methane and ammonia have a special feature almost directly on top of each other so separating the two is really tricky it may be in the Halmea system as well I think more observations need to be done there so we're just starting to scratch the surface with knowing why is there Pluto not elsewhere or maybe it is elsewhere and we just haven't found it yet certainly the follow up fly by of 2014 MU69 which will take place in less than 7 months from now we'll get close up observations and hopefully I would hope to see ammonia there too but no guarantees right and this is the next object that New Horizons is aimed at yes it doesn't have a nickname yet do we have to go with the letters and I don't know how official it is but there's definitely people calling it Ultima Thule Pluto as you pointed out was a planet then we figured out that it wasn't a planet how about we recently discovered that it didn't even form like a regular planet would aren't we talking about a cluster of comets that got together and decided to become a planet we should all just find together in the last week and a half or so we reported on it last week this idea that it's a billion comets massive a billion comets that came together I don't know about that one I haven't really read that myself but certainly Pluto is the king maker or the kingpin of the Kuiper belt as far as we know it's the largest object it beats out Eris by 20 kilometers or so which is not much but it does seem to as far as we can tell it beats it out it also doesn't have the protomolecule that's good sorry there may be other objects out there in the Kuiper belt which are larger than Pluto but we haven't found them yet and the whole idea of a planet 9 is great in theory but really lacks the detection which hurts the theory I guess I think the interesting thing that came out of that particular study is first this idea that it's similar to other planets except that instead of more rocky dust material like the inner planets that this is more cometary material so it's got more of the outer solar system ices and what not that was floating around out there and that it didn't come from the inner solar system which what I'm thinking is that this story from last week kind of drives really well with your paper and the presence of the ammonium compounds because like you said if it had come from the inner solar system and then migrated out you wouldn't have found the ammonium compounds most likely and their concept wouldn't have worked so it's kind of like your papers are yes definitely and we see comments that come in from the or cloud or from pretty far away out there a lot of the compounds we see on Pluto nitrogen methane and carbon monoxide they tend to dominate out in the outer solar system so when the comet comes in like Halbop did in the late 90s we pick up these gases leaving the comet of course comets are a few kilometers big Halbop was one of the exceptions to being a large comet I think it was 20 kilometers or 40 kilometers then is much bigger but the whole idea of exploring MU69 is to compare comets to Pluto to everything in between you know we want to get a sample of everything it's hard to get to send spacecraft to all the all the objects although that would be such a dream yeah and did they have spectroscopic data from the Rosetta mission to the comet was it 67p Garamogs Garamogs it's a tongue twister there's definitely spectra of that so as that mission was going on my office made at the time he was part of the Rosetta mission and he worked with the Alice instrument that was the UV spectrograph on Rosetta so there's definitely information about spectra which we can compare to the comets to Pluto because New Horizons also had an Alice instrument UV spectrograph built by the same people right so you can have direct comparisons of these different solar bodies so in terms of Pluto and its status not as a planet these days what is its status I mean we're discovering all this amazing stuff and from the public's perspective and where I hear people talking or because they get excited about what's coming out of the New Horizons mission and the data that's coming back people want to argue that Pluto should still be a planet because it seems it's a dominant feature in that outer solar system I always think of its status as awesome it is what it is right so those people who want to say it's a planet it's a planet and there's those people who say it's a dwarf planet but wait wait wait that has planet right there in the name you know like some are gas planet some are rocky planet then it's a planet if they're going to call it planet then I think we're fine calling it a planet still it still still fills the it's still part of the planetary bodies in our solar system yeah I think that maybe I'm wrong in this but it feels like nobody really made an effort to get rid of it as a planet until other objects started getting found and named and people wanted to include them as planets like was it Xena warrior princess planet and then there was a they started to like want to keep adding and then people were getting to name them and then it would have just been too many planets so we had to stop it somewhere a thousand planets it would be pretty awesome it would be hard to memorize your mnemonic is pretty intense for that so I have to ask kind of with all this study of Pluto and the wealth of knowledge that you know obviously this is probably the thing that keeps coming up is Pluto is it a planet Pluto's a planet that's kind of the headline I think that's the thing that people think about first when you hear Pluto after that probably that picture of Pluto with the heart on it from the New Horizons mission but if there was one thing that you could make sure everybody knew about Pluto if it's your favorite kind of fact or thing that you'd want to cue in a conversation about Pluto what is that thing that you love to talk about besides being awesome what makes it awesome I guess I think in a way it's unique but it's also not the only one like itself it has mentioned the heart on there we knew when we were aiming there that we were going to this bright spot we didn't know it was going to be shaped like a heart but it's sort of basically a polar cap on the equator of Pluto which is bizarre and then we know that Triton which is Neptune's largest moon was a captured object from the Kuiper Belt and it's about the same size as Pluto and yet its surfaces doesn't have this big ice cap on the equator it does have these nice geysers that go off and left all these black streaks that Voyager 2 had seen we don't see them as same details on Pluto but there's some hints maybe something similar has happened on Pluto but Pluto has these weird seasons that go on we can think of seasons being roughly one Earth year how we experience them but then over millions of years Pluto goes through these different seasons where the tilt changes and there are regions of Pluto which never experience a polar night and so there's this dark band around Pluto which basically all the ices have been baked away from but then there's the heart sitting right on top of that terrain so bizarreness and who knows what Aris looks like Aris sits right in the same family as Triton and Pluto same size same composition but doesn't seem to have an atmosphere so it's the Pluto and their family super weird basically they're all like second cousins five times removed or something they're like yeah we're related but we don't talk to each other I just think it's so fascinating to have these objects that you know we you know it was almost luck that Pluto was found when it was found and now to be actually exploring it and like you said discovering it has these features that we never expected you know I am entranced by the icy cliffs these sheer icy cliffs that you can imagine is coming up out of nowhere on the yeah there there's one that so when we were first getting the first bits of data coming down and we were just you know I don't know how much of the story you've heard but the data came down to a very very weak slower than dial-up speed and so we were just getting just little bits during the time encounter and the first one of the first images that came down were these giant mountains and we said oh my goodness these mountains are huge you can't have mountains made out of nitrogen it's just too it's a softer ice so we knew right away we found water ice but we didn't have the spectroscopic signature for water ice and then we saw regions called Virgil Fassa which then stood out as being enriched in water and it's just a sort of weird crack that goes along Pluto and water just sitting there water on Pluto is unlike Triton Triton has water all over the place water on Pluto is just in these limited small spots trying to understand that is also part of the job of playing with all this data yeah what's your favorite moon Sharon I'll pick Sharon I'll just say it it's big and it's got interesting features of its own you said something intriguing there well back there may be larger than Pluto objects out there well the whole idea of Planet 9 that thing was I think some people think it's I don't know so many times bigger than the Earth or so but is there a chance that we've got like other undiscovered Pluto size or larger than Pluto objects out there in our solar system so it seems like we've been I feel like we've been looking for a long time but then I'm like well yeah space is big and lighting has to be right it's not as easy as just having one telescope pointed towards the sky right yeah so there's a lot of different surveys that have happened and are going on right now so they'll look at places along what's called the ecliptic where a lot of all the planets are lined up and they'll pick a point out in space and they'll just sit there and stare at it or they'll come back months later to see what objects might have moved and to the best of our knowledge we've only cataloged something like 1500 actual Kuiper Belt objects and they've covered roughly the whole 360 degree length of it but of course the longer you're exposed the deeper you can go nothing has really turned up that's bigger than Pluto one is objects that turned up and they said oh it's bigger and then they realized no it's not and so Kiki you were talking about this object I think a week or two ago that's going the opposite way it's the retrograde it's going in the other direction yes are those objects tougher to spot because they're going the other way like could there be a bunch of them but just because we've been tracking our telescopes and it's whizzing by the other direction we just didn't see it yes so what so you know when you're looking in the ecliptic you're only favoring objects that are going in the direction of the ecliptic objects which are going up or down you only have a small period in which you're going to see that object so while we know of objects which go retrograde or have high inclinations we only have a small number in our database just because they're rarely seen so it's not necessarily that they're I mean that's super rare that there's only like this one that we saw it seems like such an anomaly but they're so much harder to see that there's a lot of them out there and we're going to find them with time yeah it'll take time and the estimates for how many KBOs that are out there run in tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of objects of course it depends on how small an object gets because we're finding objects like MU69 which is 25 kilometers big they've certainly found smaller objects than that but it's probably thousands you know the numbers of them increase exponentially smaller you go right yeah I mean we still I mean asteroids come to our planet there was the story this last week of an asteroid meteor once it hit Africa but we only noticed it like a very brief window of time before it actually impacted the planet it was like hours ahead of time yes yeah I don't know if it was that asteroid or meteorite but someone had compared an object that was found to the size of a king size bed mattress this is what we're getting down to we're comparing to mattresses that's pretty vivid though I kind of get that now I just have an image of a king size bed flying through the air but maybe they folded it up into the size of a mini fridge you know mattress commercials on podcasts no sorry space futon space futon oh my goodness this is a good cartoon right here I need to get a telescope and just start just start tracking the opposite direction of everything else that's moving which I probably did the first time I picked one up and that's why it was very ineffective with it but if I stuck with it I could have discovered one of these mystery at that point you need a very large telescope so speaking of large telescopes Hubble is seeing far far far far away right it's seeing these amazing pictures but I mean every once in a while we focus it closer to home on our own solar system I mean why isn't Hubble finding these things for us it's got the best cameras well it did find for us okay there we go so you know a whole part of the mission was we were going to Pluto and the extended part of the mission was to go to a Kuiper Belt object and we always knew during the fly time to get to Pluto there was going to be a team that looks for a Kuiper Belt object and they tried from the largest telescopes on earth Keck, Subaru, Gemini they tried year after year and really just could not find a good suitable target and it came down to and it was like we got to hurry up and find something and they made a deal with with Hubble Space Telescope saying well give us a little bit of time and if we could find we think we should at least find so many objects in the small window if we do would you give us a bigger window and we found the right number of objects they gave us the bigger window then we didn't find as many in the bigger window and we whittled down from five targets down to two one which would burn all the fuel but might have been a bigger object than it was and then the one that would give us a more reserve fuel but a smaller object and so we went for the reserve fuel and smaller object. So Hubble is basically like my 11 year old when I forget my glasses can you read this? I think that it's an interesting point that comes out of this though is that you know we think of this you know looking at space and everything is that it's like this very concerted effort by the space community to find these things and do these missions but really it's a bunch of different teams who are all fighting for time for their own missions on very limited amount of really good equipment. Yes there's definitely an oversubscription rate to telescopes as well as trying to get money that just makes it very a difficult field to work through. So you're making it sound like we need another Hubble up there? I think they're doing that I think they're working on that. We had a second one that would free up a lot of that weight list for some reason the military had two Hubble's sitting in storage and said here you go NASA we don't want these anymore and so NASA is putting the W1st telescope up I don't know when it's a couple more years I think and of course James Webb is going up I think the launch date slipped from 2019 to 2020 It keeps slipping. Yeah well you know as long as the slipping is shorter and shorter each time. Right and the the Webb telescope is going to be an infrared telescope Yeah it's a very specialized machine. So it's going to be great for your infrared data catching. You're going to have a stream of amazing data coming down to work with. It's probably going to return a lot of spectra of Kuiper Belt objects for people like me to play with. That's exciting so that's got to be exciting. So you've got a couple of things that are you've got the rest of the New Horizons mission that is going to be bringing data from ultra awesome. There we go awesome and also the James Webb scope which will be eventually bringing you new stuff. Are there any other projects that you are working on? Anything that you're excited about? Well I'm just excited about anything that funds me. There's still so much more data out there with Cassini data and the idea that you know comparing results with New Horizons results because they both had like top line instruments for the times they were built. Voyager 2 didn't have an infrared spectrograph because that was too far advanced for the late early 70s I guess when they were building it. But Cassini and of course Juno is going on around Jupiter so that just got its extension to 2021 I think it is. So yeah there's more Jupiter going on and there's always talks amongst the community about getting back to Uranus, getting back to Neptune with I would hope a Cassini like mission where you're sitting there for they say we'll go there for two years and you end up being there for 15. And of course the Pluto orbiter mission is definitely in the works. People are pushing for Europa. Yeah Europa is now capturing everyone's attention because it is an ocean world, it has cryo volcanic activity, is there life there? And that's the one where they want to build the new sandals resort. I hope it has a lot of radiation shielding. Oh there's so many places to go and things to look at in the universe but thank goodness that we have our telescopes and are figuring out these tricks of looking at the light to actually bring them closer to us in the meantime and before we can actually in that meantime between now and when we can actually get there. Yeah. Yeah. Alright well Jason if people want to follow you and your astronomy and planetary science exploits online how can they do that? I'm usually on Twitter at Astro Cook I tend to use it here and there but definitely when I go to meetings that I fire that thing off. It's usually pretty active. That's my main outreach to the world I guess. Nice and your paper is going to be coming out in which journal? It's a big planetary journal. I'll probably also post a version almost a nearly finished version of it online so people can grab that and look at that nicely. Cool. So people are interested in taking a look at your ammonia data and they can. That'll be fantastic. So we are going to take a quick break right now. We've got some things to tell those of you who are listening back after the break with a bunch more stories. I've got physics. We've got ghost particles. We've got dark matter. I think Justin you've got some fun things and Blair has dark eyed guppies and cucumbers. Cucumbers! Cucumbers! Jason if you would like to stick around for the second part of the show please do so and if not feel free to hang up. You're like I'm done here. I think I'll stick around. Awesome. So we're going to take a quick break everyone. This is this weekend science and we will be back after these messages with more science. Stay tuned. Hey everyone thank you so much for joining us this week on this weekend science we are so glad to have you here whether you are listening to us right now or whether you're watching us on YouTube or watching us on Facebook thank you for being here and enjoying the science we hope that you are enjoying that you have enjoyed all this information about Pluto for the last little bit we have lots more coming up but for right now those of you who are enjoying the show if you would like to you want to help us out and keep this show going week after week after week if you want to show your love for twists and all its glory there are lots of ways that you can do this first of all head on over to twist.org. Twist.org is our website and it's basically the portal to all things twist. 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you I've been running this podcast that's an old thing that's the wrong thing I'm going to make another thing happen right now and we're back with more of this weekend science oh yeah we are back again and we have more science but first oh yeah it is time for favorite section of the show this weekend what has science done for me lately okay this week our letter comes from Melissa Hall what has science done for me lately it might not be the positive story but I thought I'd send it anyway now some time has passed however science allowed my vet to conduct the biopsy of my cat's lesion on his tongue to complete the histopathology to give me the information to know his diagnosis and to know what treatment was possible and what was futile this allowed me and my vet to provide the right care for my cat and not put him through unnecessary chemotherapy for a tumor known thanks to research to not respond to this science allowed me to research this inoperable tumor and ask my vet about a treatment with a small study showing positive results although small the main thing was the limited negative side effects and we went ahead nutrition studies gave me the right diet to keep him healthy the years of study the vets allowed them to know when this was not working and the science of euthanasia allowed me to give the gift of release from pain in a comfortable environment overall science has let me know I was able to do all I could and use all the knowledge of all the professionals involved to give a voice to my cat Melissa thank you so much for writing in as a cat owner and a cat lover and any pet owner I think could agree on pets I mean this is also a thing with humans there's a lot of the knowledge that we have now the database of what works and what doesn't work and what treatments can cause what side effects over time we can have a more patient choice and an informed choice when making these health decisions so that we don't as could have been the case here go right into a dramatically excruciating treatment that has no as we now know positive outcomes right yeah so science and the professionals who study it who use it that knowledge it's it is something that definitely does affect some people very specifically in certain instances but it does affect all of us every day Melissa thanks once again everyone out there remember this section is all about you tell us your stories tell us how science affects you today yesterday lately leave us a message on our facebook page facebook.com slash this weekend science or you can email me at kirsten k i r s t e n at thisweekandscience.com I want to keep filling this segment of the show with your stories so please wait. Alright you guys ready for some ghosts oh I don't know that's scary ghosts ghosts for this is a science show yeah the ghost in the machine maybe ghost machines this is even worse than I thought no this is a story about neutrinos so neutrinos there are three of them in the standard model there are three neutrinos that we are aware of that we have found and there has been some evidence that suggests that there might be a fourth kind of neutrino but the standard model of physics doesn't predict a fourth neutrino now the interesting thing about neutrinos is they kind of flip flop they're constantly like they want to be somebody else and so they're always switching from one flavor of neutrino to another they're like I want to be vanilla no I'm going to eat chocolate no I like strawberry and they're constantly flipping between these different flavors of neutrino and it's because of this flipping that you can kind of researchers know an estimate of the proportions of what kinds of neutrinos they should get when they're doing experiments like on you know on linear colliders or other things where they're smashing things into each other or when they're actually creating energy beams that would be creating neutrinos they know what they're starting with and then they have an idea of what they should be finishing with based on their understanding from the standard model of physics which has worked really well so far now this new new study there have been a couple like I said there have been a couple that suggest there might be a fourth what's called sterile neutrino sterile which is it doesn't have a charge it's not it's like kind of a it's a blank yeah I can't have babies exactly it's a neutrino with no lava okay no a ridge plain yeah and so this but the sterile neutrino like I said not predicted by the standard model of physics however there is a new experiment that just came out in the mini boon detector and this is at Fermilab in Illinois Batavia Illinois and it measures neutrinos that originate from protons that hit a source and it's a it's got there's a kind of oil and the then pro these these protons are shot out of the source and they hit this big ball of oil and they create these flashes of light which are the neutrinos and these they can be these flashes of light can be read and the types of flashes of light tell them what kind of neutrinos are there and then they found out that they had a lot more electron neutrinos in their measurement and they expected and they're like who why should this be and looking through all of their all of their equipment and everything they're like well we don't think it's background noise we don't think this is a mistake we think this is real and we think this is a sterile neutrino and if we add our experimental evidence to this other experiment both of our experiments become more significant our results become stronger together so a bunch of people in the physics community are excited about this that said like some people are angry I'm guessing yeah there are some people who are like well let's talk about this for a minute and in fact according to a a blog that is written by Tomasso DiRigo who is a particle scientist with Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Padua he says these excess events they pile up in like one area of the detector's energy range this low area and that's the same area where a lot of background noise from other particles piles up too and so he's thinking maybe you just mistook background noise from other particles for a sterile neutrino or maybe they've been seeing these things in every experiment in this range and just assumed it was nice I think this is like Jason talking about spectroscopy you were talking about a particular pattern energetic pattern in the data there's a predominance of signal here and this is kind of like spectroscopy in a weird way it is yeah and sometimes it's hard to know if you're going to mistake noise for something that is actually a result of something else we do our best to try and understand the errors we know what the sources are and what might be real and what might be false it's not always easy especially for those detectors they have to sleuth out any sort of sources of particles whatever I know in this particular case so I there's the kind of popular idea of the physicists of today these astrophysicists they want the standard model and so they're like yes something not predicted by the standard model and everybody gets excited about it but I kind of think this is like the requirement is if you have an extraordinary an extraordinary result requires extraordinary evidence if you have this thing they have to go back and prove why so there's another aspect from the science magazine article on this story they should have found different numbers of these neutrinos also in the cosmic microwave background radiation and so an early CMB background study kind of had room for the sterile neutrino the Planck data which is the most accurate data on the cosmic microwave background radiation has no room for sterile neutrinos so they're going to have to come up against some very significant data that's related to the actual formation of our universe yeah actually and I've got a story coming up a little bit later that actually pits Planck against some other observations locally in terms of the expansion of the universe which is sort of interesting so there is this and it's also a push to go away from the standard model which kind of disagrees with Planck just like this story is like how can you not root for something other than the standard model just because of how ridiculously cool it would be to have this new discovery and the things that it can unlock again you know it seems like it's I don't know I kind of like that I mean yes it's neat to have unexplained stuff and things that aren't predicted and oh my gosh let's go back to the drawing board and have these alternative theories but at the same time how amazing that we have a model of the universe that works for just about everything I mean this is no let's keep trying to break it but I think the strength of the standard model is amazing amazing explain stuff we can do things because of it moving on let's talk about other universal things dark matter dark matter that's out there that makes up a bunch of the universe that we've never seen except for we've kind of seen its gravitational effects but we've never actually discovered what makes it up right it's dark it doesn't interact with normal matter and it doesn't react with light so we're just kind of like we can't see it it's going on it's the explanation for everything we can't explain as probably dark matter it's the fudge factor right but it's not a fudge factor it's there's something going on what is going on and so some physicists have been you know lots of physicists are trying to explain what dark matter is and how it works and so according to an Ars Technica article earlier this year a project called Edges was taking the universe's temperature about the time that stars were first starting to form but the matter in the universe baryonic matter was cooler than expected the what people conclude from the data is that there must have been something else there to basically speed the cooling up to absorb the energy of the universe so that it cooled down faster right and so dark matter is a prime suspect in this particular situation but because it doesn't interact with baryonic matter in the right way how would it do that how would it actually say here let's bounce around together and I'll take your vibrations and vibrate more we'll cool down the universe a little bit you know how's that going to happen so new paper out physicists are proposing that dark matter is not just a single type of particle as we have been thinking that maybe it's kind of like an atom with a bunch of subatomic dark matter particles and that if it has a bunch of little particles that kind of clump together and interact with each other that maybe some small proportion of those dark matter particles would be charged electrically charged which would allow some amount of interaction and they calculate that maybe 1% so really tiny fraction of the dark matter in the universe but maybe 1% of these dark matter particles would be electrically charged and that according to their calculations would have taken care of that cooling during the early universe but we still don't know because nobody's actually seen it we still don't know but yeah let's just say some of them but not all of them but some of them have a charge but not all of them just a little bit it's fine yeah the good thing about this though is this paper comes out and actually adds some constraints to dark matter and in physics constraints are great because it narrows where you look for the energetic signal of a particle and so they have used supernovas and slack particle accelerators to come up with a mass for these and they say that they've come up with the charge that suggests it's about a million times smaller than the charge on an electron and they use it a mini charge and they say most of the parameters parameter space that we are considering is below this thermal relic line thus requiring new interactions to allow the dark matter to annihilate efficiently we leave this challenge for future model building of the needed dark sector anyway future model builders your work is cut out for you and my final story related to dark matter which is again pretty cool we know that fusion occurs when atomic nuclei crash into each other atoms fuse nuclei fused you have a new element there's energy released in the process researchers said well if we've got baryonic matter and we've got dark matter couldn't this happen to dark matter too couldn't there be dark matter fusion when dark matter particles run into each other and so researchers Sam McDermott published a paper in the June 1st issue of physical review letters if the idea is correct the proposed phenomenon may help physicists resolve the puzzle related to dark matter which is poorly scientists can't really explain how galaxies stars move the way that they do but some of the quirks of how dark matter is distributed within galaxy centers remain a mystery that's all related to dark matter and so potentially how dark matter clumps together is of import why wouldn't it why would we assume that dark matter wouldn't interact with itself if it doesn't interact with regular matter it definitely should yeah assuming it's matter matter it's strange it is strange that's dark matter for you strange it's still a place holder for a thing we don't know it's absolutely our fudge factor there we go now we know that our fudge factor has a charge and might do things with each other it may not be the wimps out there but there's definitely a charge out there yeah anyway dark matter some cool interesting studies pushing the envelope of what we understand about it and maybe giving us more room to question and learn more Justin what did you bring I brought the one of the unknowns apparently in modern science is why the expansion of the universe appears to be accelerating why are things going quicker out there some scientists argue it's due to dark matter and when you have inconsistencies you have a place to drill down further this is like a detective story so if you have a constant evidence or testimony could lead to solving the puzzle says Dr. Mustafa Ishak Bushaki professor of astrophysics in the school of natural sciences and mathematics at the University of Texas at Dallas and a lifelong member of the guys with awesome named society and his doctoral student Wikeng Lin have developed a mathematical tool that looks for quirks in cosmological data and this data is gathered by different scientific missions and experiments that data and said let's see if it's all agreeing with itself most recent research presented June 4th in the American Astronomical Society in Denver quoting voice again the inconsistencies we have found need to be resolved as we move toward more precise and accurate cosmology the implications of these discrepancies are that either some of our current data sets up systematic errors that need to be identified and removed or that the underlying cosmological model we are using is incomplete or has problems astrophysicists use a standard knowledge model of cosmology to describe the history evolution structure of the universe for this model they can from this model they can calculate the age of the universe how fast it's expanding this model includes equations that describe the ultimate fate of the universe what is the ultimate fate of the universe Jason the crunch or is it the go up in the cold darkness and what day of the week is it everybody bring a sweater bring a sweater and a towel cold crunch so okay so there's several variables called cosmological parameters these are embedded in the model's equations numerical values for the parameters determined from actual observations and that include things like how fast galaxies move away from each other and the densities of matter energy radiation in the universe but there's a problem with those parameters their values are calculated using data sets from different experiments and sometimes these values as they discovered here do not agree with each other how can it be that the actual universe doesn't agree with the actual universe that somebody else is looking at so Cody boys again if I should push our research is looking at the value of these parameters and how they're determined from various experiments and whether there's agreement on the values they've got this thing that they've got their index of inconsistencies of what they've called their system the IOI index of inconsistency gives a numerical value to the degree of discordance between two or more data sets so comparisons with the IOI greater than one are considered inconsistent those with over five are strongly inconsistent example the researchers used their system to compare five different techniques for determining the Hubble parameter which is related to the rate at which the universe is currently expanding one of those techniques referred to as the local measurement relies on measuring the distance to relatively nearby stuff this is going to be within our galaxy supernova using that that expected light candle candle rating for another time extra line observations of different phenomena at much greater distances Cody voice again we found that there is an agreement between four out of five of these models but the Hubble parameter for the local measurement of supernova is not an agreement it's like an outlier in particular there's clear tension between the local measurement and that from the plank science mission which characterized the cosmic background radiation so when we look around in the you know milky way things seem to be one way we go out further and that's a much getting a different so whatever's taking place it could be that we're in a bubble of the Hubble expansion of the universe right like it could there could be some sort of strange of affect of a local versus a far away maybe galaxies protect who knows but he goes on why does this local measurement of the Hubble parameter stand out in significant disagreement with Plank he doesn't have the answer but that's what he's looking at and it's like the universe it's all relative your point of view man that's basically okay you're quoting him this is very intriguing this is telling us in the universe the largest observable scale may behave differently from the universe at intermediate or local scales this leads us to question whether Albert Einstein's theory of gravity is valid all the way from small scales to very large scales in the universe there's no time that this idea has come up but I think you know it's interesting that you know again and again with new data sets and new approaches to observing the universe that this idea of not a homogeneous universe but a heterogeneous universe comes up and we know that there is something because of dark matter that there is spreading because of the dark energy right you know so we've got local clusters and then we've got other stuff that and our local cluster isn't as close to the other our neighbors because of the dark energy between us right it's pushing us apart and so it's happening but just it's just in what you said because of dark energy it's because of dark matter and it's because of gravity which we don't understand mechanisms behind the way I picture it man like you're making a smoothie right and you have all these ingredients and you only blend it part way and then oh my god the blender you knock it over right all the stuff hits the floor the really liquidy stuff starts spreading across the floor really fast that more clumpy stuff started coming up together in the blender kind of clumps up doesn't blend out doesn't spread out as far on the floor as quickly you know what you know what it does it goes splat yeah there you go that's what we're doing we're all just going splat I'm just going splat man smoothie analogies for the universe it's fabulous you know and I like to think of the little tracts between areas that connect areas in the universe as those stringy bits of mango yeah there you go blended yeah we're like a protein powder clump yeah that's what we are we're a protein powder clump are you hungry right now what's happening you look like you're acting like I'm just saying half so okay so this next story I've got here it sounds like something that needs to be disclaimer it's about an archaeologist who works in Israel Southern Jordan in Egypt and he's calling into question the validity of carbon dating red flags well but he's not like calling it like way into question okay this is more about a matter of resolution and detail on it so radio carbon dating is using there's a northern hemispheric version there's a southern hemispheric version these have these arcs of correctness apparently what he did was sounds pretty simple he went through and did tree rings of really old trees and did the calibration of the radio carbon dating from those and found they can be off by as much as 20 years to what regular carbon dating would do now that 20 years we're talking about a thousand years ago was it a thousand years ago was it 2020 was it 2020 years ago who cares right unless you're an archaeologist who's trying to reconstruct the history of the times and then 20 years or 100 years to become very significant in how everything relates and telling the story so so if you've seen that story and if you cross that headline go with that story is that reading it that's actually pretty interesting so there can be sort of localized shifts in how carbon dating accuracy works and this was a pretty good example that he found here yeah and I'm glad you brought up though that this is not like I've been to the AGU meeting where there are special interest groups that bring posters that try and report that you know dinosaurs and man lived at the same time because of you know problems with carbon dating and they try they have they have their own methodologies that they use to try and subvert the dominant scientific paradigm and so it's nice to know that this is not that this is actually somebody who knows a lot about radio carbon dating but is just finding the nuance of understanding his Cornell University although the the title of the paper may end up on one of those signs fluctuating radio carbon offsets observed at the southern Levant and implications for archeological chronology debates it'll probably on one of those signs see a scientist said that it's all just fine to it'll be a reference hopefully a reference for good ones so basically that so the end result is to understand it better have they have they've gotten it to have they figured out a way to make it make the timing more accurate or are they just bringing what he's pointing out is that local climate change in the past can affect what you're looking at there's a number of factors like one of the things that they found that had different offsets over those years was a spike in climate heat and drought and that sort of thing that somehow affected the way that the carbon uptake in the organic materials would be and therefore your your number if you're using the standard which is sort of the standard is used for like the whole northern hemisphere right it's going to be within this range if you in the northern hemisphere southern I didn't realize before this is a northern southern hemispheric differentiation between these the calibration curve but yeah you you you you cannot rely 100% on the detail there but it also points out that as he did established calendar dates between 1610 and 1940 with tree rings and and did it did his calibration off of those you can you can find to that calibration curve of north and south right well whenever possible we try to use multiple forms of dating right like carbon dating was definitely our what we thought was our most accurate thing which is why this might be kind of bummer but we also have relative dating which is the thing that I always think about where once you've established kind of a baseline you know based on the sediment layers for example that dinosaurs and humans were near each other just based on where they fall in the fossil layers so you know there's could have been right on top we could have been right on top of some yeah yeah separated by time I get it by time yes yes yes yes so it's hopefully this isn't too difficult or damning to information that we currently have because people try to use multiple forms whenever possible yeah and I just found that there is a small difference in the natural atmospheric carbon 14 concentration between the northern and summer southern hemispheres known as the inter hemispheric carbon 14 offset it's about 40 years but varies with time the southern hemisphere has a larger surface ocean area than the northern hemisphere with greater wind velocities as a result more carbon 14 in the southern troposphere is transported to the oceans through air sea exchange of carbon dioxide and more carbon 14 depleted carbon dioxide from the from the oceans is transported to the southern troposphere natural carbon 14 levels in the southern troposphere are therefore usually lower than those in the northern troposphere so it has to do with circulation and wind that's pretty cool I did that came from a website from the Australian nuclear science and technology organization that's really exciting that is a fun fact I'm going to put in my bonnet for later so not only is I can never remember is Australia ahead of us today I think that's what it is they're ahead of us one day now but they're 40 years behind us in the past yeah okay I'm not going to say anything I'm just going to keep my mouth shut we love our Australian friends I'm sure some of them are nice people but you know what time is it Justin it is not time for it's not Australia bashing show no it's not that time yeah what time is it my favorite part of the show time for Blair's Animal Court she loves our creature by the milliped no pet at all you want to hear about this animal she's your girl except for giant animal expert she's an uploader oh my goodness we've been talking a whole bunch about things that you cannot see today but I want to talk about things you can see and the things you see with it's your eyes so a recent study from the University of Exeter was looking at guppy eyes because they appear to be used in some of their communications with one another so for example eyes are actually structures that are used for communication in a lot of different species sometimes they're used as they have fake eyes to make them look bigger sometimes animals conceal their eyes to not give away their space or their actual size and so this is a new kind of twist in that for example in humans we have the whites of our eyes they're used specifically to help other humans or other animals as we've talked about in the past follow gaze so the reason you know I'm looking right or left is because you can see the whites of my eyes so that is a clear signal given through coloration in our eyes with guppies they do something absolutely which is insane which is they can actually change the color of their eyes to warn fish when they're feeling aggressive that would be awesome yes so their eyes are normally kind of a grayish color and they actually turn them black when they want to fight and they've what's crazy about this is that we've talked a bunch on the show about signals of aggression and escalating aggressive behaviors so that animals can size each other up and so a really good example of that is you have deer with these huge racks these huge antlers sets and they're walking around they're stamping their feet they're vocalizing they're doing kind of a head bob and they're actually sizing each other up to figure out who is bigger and batter and if they're evenly matched enough that they should go ahead and have a contest or if there should be a clear winner then the clear loser would back away so that nobody dies basically so in this case this is their version of that the bigger batter guppy has their eyes turn black and this is an honest signal is that larger guppies turn their eyes black when they are in the presence of smaller guppies smaller ones do not return the gesture they know that they are not big enough and they do not change the color of their eyes the way researchers figured this out was by actually making robotic guppies with different colored eyes and they wanted to see what would happen if smaller fish displayed aggression and larger fish were kind of pushed into that space where the smaller imposters had food and they found that the larger guppies usually attacked the smaller guppies that had the dark eye coloration the fake ones the robots so yeah so they could tell that they were kind of bluffing which is why they have this honest coloration of saying no man really I'm bigger than you they go okay fine good I'll leave you alone around this food so this is a new insight into why animals would have more conspicuous eyes why they would have this color change and why you'd have a behavior where you wouldn't try to cheat so it's not evolutionarily advantageous to them to try to cheat because they can see right through it so the way that I'm seeing this is going to sound super anthropomorphic but is that the bigger guppy is going I know I'm bigger and you know I'm bigger back off right and so it's kind of this acknowledgement of hey I know I'm I'm stronger than you and I'm giving you a chance to leave without us fighting so it's also as long as we're anthropomorphizing yeah kind of nice because it's like that awkward moment where somebody's like are you stink I mean you're like obviously not obviously see my eyes it's not a thing that I would be doing it's also similar I mean I wonder this isn't the color of the iris changing as opposed to something like cats who when they become aggressive or they're going to attack their pupils enlarge which is you know it might be an honest signal as well as letting in more light to allow for a more accurate attack but I wonder how that yeah I wonder how that works out with the guppies as well yeah so they're kind of lumping that all together saying that I signals might not be an involuntary response this gives us an idea that there's actually a reason for it and there could be signals being given through that that are being utilized so pretty interesting I love this idea of I mean we've talked before about honest signals in animals and some animals that cheat it where they use the honest signal to kind of get past a barrier and then they're like and they steal food or they do whatever it is you know they break they've broken the system because they're the cheaters but the system works because it allows so many people not people animals not to get in a fight yeah absolutely and so the payoff is less mortality from intraspecific competition right yeah so but jumping to interspecific competition I have a story about a very little known insect from New Zealand called a cave weta W E T A this is a crazy looking insect that not a lot of people know about there's not a lot of research that's been done on them they have barely been studied since they were discovered in this particular type in the 1960s so we're still learning a lot but one of the really crazy things about these guys is that they have extremely long crazy just outrageous hind legs like why would anyone need those and that's what this study is all about so the University of Auckland did a study looking at these super long hind legs that only the males have they found just by observing them in the areas where they live in these caves they found that they actually use them to shield females during mating so that other cave inhabitants can't interrupt them so this is not necessarily another male weta trying to get in on the action at least that's not what they observed I would be interested to hear that does happen in future observations but what they saw was quote-unquote nuisance neighbors kind of getting in near them and scaring the female off having these big legs is just like stay out of the way we're busy here move along move along right and this is because the cave wetas they spend most of their day in these caves they cluster in groups and when they pair up they actually meet for hours and it may many times over a day the longest pairing that they've observed so far was 11.7 hours wow so if the female gets scared off early into that process and she scuttles off into a cave that male might never see her again that might have been his only chance in a lifetime to mate and if he doesn't get that quality quantity time and might not know whether any babies which is you know the the name of the game so this is very interesting that this is a it's a protective anatomical structure to kind of create a a sphere of a sphere of influence a sphere of safety so this yeah this is one of the first things I've seen about man spreading yeah for sure to protect a female during mating this is something I haven't seen a lot of and y'all know I've looked into capillary techniques of the of the wild and crazy quite a bit so this is this is really cool I think it's really awesome instead of turning to the potentially nasty in trying to physically restrain which is how animals usually do this kind of thing he's just protecting her just going stay away stay away we're busy you get away we're busy just like he's not an orb spider yeah because then he'd be eight yeah for sure and very last I did want to talk today about the precious precious sea cucumber so cucumbers not for the salads but the ones related to sea stars they kind of derms that live in the ocean sea cucumbers they were one of my favorite animals that I worked with and I worked at an aquarium because they're so dynamic they really are there so you they're so squishy and fun to touch and then you pull them out of the water and they kind of firm up and they feel completely different and they have these spikes that look really spiky but you touch them and they're really soft and they can change their escape of their body all this kind of stuff also I love talking about how they eat poop which is actually the really important thing though that brings the story to us this week is that they are in a lot of ways the janitors of the deep sea but they also have a really important job to do that we just discovered this week so this is a study looking at sea cucumbers off the coast of Fiji and this was out of the University of Bremen and in partnership with the Wildlife Conservation Society they were looking at sea cucumbers and their effects on the habitats that they're directly in so we know in the kind of the grand scheme of things they're helping clean up the ocean you know they're pooping out what is essentially just sand so they're doing a really good job overall for the ocean but in these specific areas around Fiji they are harvested in great number because they're a delicacy people eat sea cucumbers there or many other names but so these guys because they're harvested people think that they're just these kind of floppy sea noodles that there's must be a bunch of them they're not that important a lot of people don't even know they're alive or that they're animals and they cook them up they sell them but what we're looking at is what exactly that's doing to the habitat and so this is a study on this coast off of Fiji between September 2015 and February 2016 what's really interesting about that is that it encompassed the El Niño event during that time they created 16 different plots with treatments which had different densities of sea cucumbers so you can imagine them scuba divers trying to move around sea cucumbers into these different quadrants and they had different sea cucumber wranglin yes exactly they had different concentrations of sea cucumbers so they had one that was considered harvesting one that was considered overharvesting and then control when plots with high densities of sea cucumbers oxygen conditions in the sediments were stable even during the El Niño event but when they had removed sea cucumbers from the area the penetration of oxygen into surface sediments decreased by 63% so in this case sea cucumbers not only just generally make the ocean healthier but they actually helped handle the increase in organic matter from rainfall and flooding so that's what's happening is you're kind of pushing all the sediment all this land yuck into the ocean right and then you have to process that and that can actually create an anoxic environment potentially and so sea cucumbers start eating all that stuff in overdrive and they are able to maintain a healthy environment through that fluctuation so these guys are very hardy but they're also helping keep the reef hardy so now we know sea cucumbers are an important source of livelihood for tropical coastal communities and so the fact that they're harvested and fished is a potential problem there's not a lot of sea cucumbers that are protected or endangered or regulated in their harvesting so this is an animal that definitely deserves an extra bit of protection and focus as we move forward and we have this changing turbulent ocean that we really depend on all over the world yeah which brings me to a story about the Cassin's oclets ooh oclets yeah unfortunately there was recently in the last few years there was massive massive die off of these oclets along the west coast of the united states in the fall of 2014 across the beaches from California all the way up to British Columbia these little sea birds that are pretty cute Cassin's oclets are adorable little birds they're dead birds all over the beaches nobody was nobody understood why they were picking up like tens of thousands of them and you talk about anoxic conditions in the ocean they can be exacerbated by organic material in the water but another thing that can trigger it is hot water water that doesn't move very much and so along at this period of time we had been reporting also on this blob the blob that was just parked off of the west coast of the united states in the pacific ocean and really what happened there were anoxic conditions the food the little plankton and other prey species that these little sea birds like to feed off of or the little fishes that feed on the planktonic species they all died off and so the Cassin's oclets didn't have any food and so there's a new paper that's just come out in geophysical research letters international team about 20 researchers from federal state and provincial agencies universities and wildlife organizations they've come together and published and their data was collected with the help of 800 citizen scientists who did the reporting on the birds that were found along the coast the senior author Julia Parish says this paper is super important for the scientific community because it nails the causality of a major die-off which is rare and this major die-off it really is it was there's something wrong in the ocean there's something wrong this is climate change that caused this die-off Parish added when we see these mass mortality events that's the ecosystem saying in big neon letters that something is wrong this paper can be used as definitive proof of the impacts of a warming world it's not a pretty picture and beyond the Cassin's oclets oclets after the initial period of the oclets dying there were additional species of birds that were found that died in very large numbers as well so it wasn't only the oclets it was other sea birds that were included as well but the oclets were the canary on the beaches bad news and maybe if there were more sea cucumbers yeah it's all of these it's all of these factors that tie together really you know that you know you've got our misunderstanding or just not understanding how species tie into the ecosystem how the cucumber is so important I mean who I wouldn't have thought that that it would be so important yeah that's why it's back to my old soapbox conversation over and over is save habitats not species right so one of the best things that you can do for the ocean is support the establishment of marine protected areas because the more marine protected areas we have people can't fish in that space people can't dump in that space and they're actually we've reported on the show about how more marine protected areas it's actually safe havens for species to go during periods of stress so the more space we can set aside the more habitats we can maintain for these natural ecosystems to exist the better chance we have I googled sea cucumber the first website that came up was healthyeatingsfgate.com yeah it's about eating them yeah they're not healthy eating go get a cucumber from the garden don't get a cucumber from the sea and then take it from to your local aquarium and touch a sea cucumber under the water I think you just need to tell people that sea cucumbers eat poop and yeah that may be a PR well except people still eat crabs and mussels and clams and snails and all poop eaters yeah yeah now we have to have the bottom of the food chain that cleans up after us otherwise it ends up being a very messy world that's true because we gotta maintain it all this ecosystem complexity all quick stories at the end here we've talked before about prions misfolded proteins that cause brain wasting diseases like mad cow crutes felt jacob's kuru kuru and the like well researchers have created them you gotta do that yes that is exactly it I mean I was gonna joke to take over the world no they're not this was published in nature communications and the study is titled artificial strain of human prions created in vitro in vitro meaning in a dish or in a tube the senior study investigator jerry safar says prions represent a watershed until now our understanding of prions in the brain has been limited being able to generate synthetic human prions in a test tube as we have done will enable us to achieve a much richer understanding of prions structure and replication this is crucial for developing inhibitors of the replication and propagation throughout the brain which is essential for halting prion based brain disease now prions are limited versions of normal proteins these proteins are found in the cell membranes of neurons throughout the body throughout the brain this is their normal normal proteins but something goes wrong and then when they become misfolded they get sticky and they become contagious and they cause other prions to misfold so yeah and so it's very important that we I mean it's important to understand what they are normally what happens when they are wrong and how we and how we can stop them from going wrong from going awry and so this is great research it'll be fantastic and then my final story has to do with dogs because we love dogs right dogs are fantastic well they have lots of flu viruses oh no disgusting creatures disgusting doggies published in m bio yesterday with about 15% of pet dogs that went to the vet because of respiratory infections carried flu viruses that are often found in pigs so not doggie viruses but pig viruses and we know that many human flu viruses come from pigs and so the concern now is that dogs could be vectors for pandemic flu so really what this means is if I had a dog which I do not currently but I will someday soon I'm sure if I had a dog and it was sneezing a lot I would take it to the vet and if it had the flu then I it would not get to lick my face or sleep in my bed until it felt better right yes you should take all the precautions a lot of the time you know dogs have dog flu viruses there are very specific dog flu viruses that do not replicate and infect humans they're not transferable but some of them are potentially and so the first flu virus in dogs was discovered in 2005 in the United States and it was from a horse flu virus called H3N8 that jumped from horses to dogs and it's like a shelter flu that can spread between dogs and in 2010 some dogs in Asia were found with a version of H3N2 that comes from birds and so we also know that cats can catch this H3N2 from dogs but then don't transmit it and so in this new study from 2013 to 2015 they found that some of the dogs had various swine H1N1 flu viruses which are infectious so this is you know it's an issue a lot of the viruses that the dogs have will not transfer to humans will not transfer to any other species but the potential is there for you know dogs if it is making the jump from pigs to dogs it can potentially make the jump then from dogs to humans and could be it could be disastrous but you know don't worry about it just you know don't go licking your dog if your dog has a cold it seems to be an infection right yes and no Blair Bazz as you're saying in the chat room this is not a witch hunt I see your commentary no no it's good to know zoonotics are very important and if anyone in this chat should know about it it's I when I worked with the primates I had to wear a mask every day because things could pop from me to the primates or from the primates to me is very important to be aware of so yes let your dog lick your face but only if they're feeling okay all right does anyone have any quick stories for the end here I got three quick stories here I'll just post the stories in the on the online aspect of the show three stories one is they're all to do with little warming one tropical cyclones or hurricanes if you're in the civilized part of the world are moving slower over land and water oh great hurricanes are moving slower that means that it's less of a problem no it actually means they stay over the thing what they're causing habit to longer when they go on land they drop water in a location longer and globally in different places Australia's seeing 15% slower I think they have the tropical storm right down there North Atlantic the ones that are hitting the United States with some frequency 6% slower not so bad Western North Pacific so this is like China Japan region ocean 20% slower than they did over time the national oceanic what's it discovered that may last month this is the quick part of the story gonna say the whole thing anyway no one's it but it's always kept the kind of Noah is announced that last month May 5.2 degrees above 20th century's average for that month across the United States who the heat is on but there is good news and the third story looked at high tide flooding that happens across the United States it's twice the rate it was 30 years ago that's not good news it's twice like that's something better if I can say one thing about this it's that when I read all of the Yale studies about people's current perspective on climate change the thing that is always so frustrating to me and the thing that's in many ways the most important thing that we get out there is that people believe it exists and it's happening but they don't believe it's happening to them or will happen to them in their lifetime and so it's happening right now one day the sun will explode exactly so my only hope in all of this is that when these proverbial seat cucumbers start hitting the fan here we can say look it's happening right now can we mitigation and adaptation now let's go let's do what we can everybody and there's a lot that we can do we can all work together we can all have our voice in local government I know there were recent elections yesterday in many places I hope everyone got the vote out we want to see you guys get out there and use your voice we can all do what we can in our local communities act local what is it act local think global act local yeah absolutely it affects it has those butterfly effects the things that you do I always thought that was always backwards I always think it should be think locally and act globally it's pretty hard for your average Joe to act globally when you don't have I don't know a podcast that's broadcast in many countries right now but that's right a second grader can act locally I am thinking very locally in fact so locally I might go somewhere very close very soon so that's the cue everyone I think we have made it to the end of another episode thanks everyone for joining us I would like to thank all of you in the chat rooms in the various places our main chat room our YouTube chat room our Facebook chat room thank you so much for chatting and having a conversation while we kept well we did the show and I hope you enjoyed your experience and to everyone who helps us make this 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Mark Tyrone Fong and Keith Corsell Thank you for all of your support on Patreon and those of you who may be interested in finding out more about Patreon you can do that at twist.org or just at patreon.com this week in Science next week's show, second week of June already oh my goodness it will be we will be back broadcasting live online 8 p.m. Pacific time on twist.org live you can watch and join the chat room if you can't make it you can also find everything in the past it's all archived at twist.org you can watch YouTube at twist.org or at facebook.com this week in Science thank you for enjoying the show twist is also available as a podcast just Google this week in Science in your iTunes directory or if you have a mobile type device you can look for twist number four, droid app in the Android Marketplace or simply this week in Science in anything Apple Marketplace for more information on anything you've heard here today or on our website that's at www.twist.org where you can also make comments and start conversations with the hosts or other listeners or you can contact us directly email kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinScience.com justin at twistmeaning at gmail.com or player at playerbandsideattwist.org just be sure to put twist T W I S somewhere in the subject line or your email will be spam filtered into oblivion you can also hit us up on the Twitter where we are at DrKiki at Jacksonfly and at Player's Menagerie we love your feedback if there's a topic you would like us to cover or address a suggestion for an interview a haiku that comes to you in the night please let us know we'll be back here next week and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news and if you learned anything from this show remember it's all in your head this week in science it's the end of the world so I'm setting up a shop got my banner on pearl it says the scientist is in I'm gonna sell my advice show them how to stop the robot with a simple device I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand and all it'll cost you is a couple of grand this week science is coming your way so everybody listen to what I say I use the scientific method for all that it's worth and I'll broadcast my opinions all over the earth cause it's this week in science this week in science this week in science science science this week in science this week in science this week in science science I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news that what I say may not represent your views but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan if you listen to the science you may just get to understand but we're not trying to threaten your philosophy we're just trying to save the world from jeopardy and this week in science is coming your way so everybody listen do everything we say if you use our methods, let it roll and it die we may rid the world of toxoplasma got the eye cause it's this week in science this week in science this week in science science this week in science this week in science science I've got a laundry list of items I want to address From stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness I'm trying to promote more rational thought And I'll try to answer any question you've got The help can I ever see the changes I seek When I can only set up shop one hour a week This week in science is coming your way You better just listen to what we say And if you learn anything from the words that we've said Then please just remember it's all in your head Because it's this week in science This week in science This week in science Science Science This week in science This week in science Science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science My life's in pieces, shows the way you go Neweka glivers And the methods of hypothesis, and patience And we're back with the after show of this week in science. Oh, Kiki still muted. I did mute myself so I could go away.  White noise. No. Okay, good. Just looped around there. I've got, there's like white noise in this list here. Oh, but there's exclamation marks next to it. Good. You guys may have just been sitting here listening to white noise. No. The second, the second song came on again. That's good. I was like, I gotta go. Back. See you guys later. This is the after show. We were talking ahead of the show. There's some tiredness in the, in the crew. Yes. Yeah. I think a new bed is the problem. What? You got a new bed? No, I need a new bed. I hear the Trump tower cells used hotel mattresses. The head of the EPA was for some reason looking into buying. Did you guys not heard the story? No, it's his, he wasn't he trying to, it's like paywall or something. He's trying to, he was trying to use his position to get his wife a mattress franchise. No, no, no. That was a Chick-fil-A franchise. Chick-fil-A. I had somebody who worked for him to go like look into, he heard you could buy a used mattress from the Trump hotel. And I wanted to, for what reason? One can only speculate. Why somebody would, and somebody who's spending like $40,000 on some proof phone booths is thinking of buying a used hotel mattress. I was just not using a black light on those. But aside from that, then it does make you sort of think like, I wonder if this is some weird sort of payola scheme. Like, aha, I figured out how I can find money from one place to another. I can buy the used mattresses from Trump and for $20,000, like it never went anywhere. But it's just like why in the, it's just such a bizarre. I think it's safe to assume that anything with certain people involved are a payola scheme. But yeah, but there's also like Pruitt himself, like that whole controversy about the minute he took office, he wanted 24-hour security. Like, it's kind of a tell.  For what I'm going to do. Didn't Ben Carson buy a $100,000 desk or something like that? Pruitt, I think, got two desks that amounted to that. He did. He got like a dining set that he then blamed on his wife. Well, my wife ordered it. It was her. Right. Sure. Sweetie, what do you think about this one? Whatever you want, dear. Charge it to the whatever organization I work for. I forget. I don't know. Oh, right. The United States. Yeah. And the YouTube's was wondering if you still, if you still had a spoon holding your microphone together. No, I'm guessing that's Dave Freidel. I don't know. No, I remember Kiki or you should, I should say, with the donations bought me a new housing unit for my microphone. So. Yes. Twist donations helped me get a mount that did not use duct tape and a plastic knife. Hurray. Yay. Super awesome. The boom mic is courtesy of Chris Clark. That's right. I noticed that I was having severe mic stand issue problem things. And. And. That direct mail. No, Justin and I just need new cameras so he doesn't go black at certain moments his entire screen and I don't turn into this washed out Banshee. Well, you could be blue like me. I could, I could get you this camera. This camera is amazing. I would go with that look. I think that's pretty good. It's pretty. The thing is. My eyes have adjusted to it. And now you look normal to me. Really. But. I'm. Color blind. When she first, when she first locked down, I was like, you're blue. But right now looking at her, I'm like, you look normal. You also thought the crosswalk icon person was green. I still, still to this day, I'm like, oh, the green walkie guys. So she just assumes green means go. So when that lights up, oh, that must be what green looks like. I didn't know that I was wrong until I watched a video about color blindness that someone sent me that's like, is this what it's like for you? They were just curious. And one of the things that I was curious about was you. They were just curious. And one of the people in the video said, oh, yeah, I always thought that the walking guy was green and someone told me it was white. And I lost my mind. I was like, it is not. And I started like, you guys. Like what color is the walk sign on the. And I'm like, yeah, it's a white, it's a white stick figure. What? What? I knew that. All these years. It's, well, yeah, it's like, I'll, I'll. Usually I go shopping with a friend or I'll ask like the person in the store, like what colors this, what colors this. So usually when I buy a new article of clothing, I know what color it is. Leaving the store. And I remember it. But every once in a while, I'll go to Goodwill or I'll do something where I'll buy a piece of clothing and I'll just wear it. Months and months and months. And then I'll be like, oh, yeah. Yeah. I really like this shirt because it's purple. And you know, I do really like her and someone's like, nope. It's not. Try again. And Jason, I got a question. How much, how much of the squiggly line interpretation is, is becoming like. Computer learning assisted. That's a good question. So like people are developing routines to, if you already get say a thousand spectra in of something, you can develop routines to sort of. AI sort through them. To pull out the unique ones or the more most interesting ones. But how much. I mean, so is that so then it's not so much, it's not so much that you can plug the data into the computer and the computer says, oh, this is this, this is this. It's more like, here's a unique pattern that the scientists should put their eyes on versus we kind of can rule these ones out as being noise or. Well, I mean, so for me, when I get a spectrum down and I want to know what's in there. And if it's not an obvious thing, it's you turn to modeling and try to reproduce the spectrum with known quantities, known values for methane or whatever and make it make a best match. Can a can a computer do an AI sort of thing? I don't know. A friend of mine, she does clustering. So it sort of takes spectra and finds finds the unique. Which which averages. So you have a whole field of spectra, which ones average together to make unique. Signals. And you can kind of tweak what you mean by unique, yes, tweak the unique. Yeah.  That happened. That's now things are going, but the data from that or never heard of it. But but the data from that is is pretty voluminous. I mean, you still have like one of the, it's one of the interesting things I think about when I'll be like seeing any of these projects or even even data that we're getting from telescopes. That data that's collected doesn't get gone through, you know, during the project, but it can sometimes be years and years after that there's still data to what is it? What's what's job security look like for a position like this? I mean, like in terms of like, could you run out of work without the next the next mission?  I mean, yeah, there's so much data out there. If you could think of something that you want to look for, search or compare to or do something with, you know, it's there. It's getting say usually usually we apply to NASA for certain programs trying to try to convince a group of fellow scientists that your that your idea is worthy of a couple hundred thousand dollars of money and two years of time. And is it and is it like can you get access yourself as a scientist in this field without being funded to go look for the thing that's interesting to study or is it or you have to get the the grant to even start the searching. That's the fun thing is that anyone with a little bit know how can go through the NASA archives because NASA is a government program and we pay for it with our tax money. So the data we get from New Horizons or Cassini or Voyage or whatever, it's all on a database, the planetary PDS planetary data systems stands for and anyone who has the patience to sort through it can find what they look you know find certain observations that could be just imagery and you can play with images to make them look nice or there could be squiggly line stuff or some other value. My backdrop is pretty sure of NASA. Yeah, I didn't really think you were on the moon. It would have been really difficult for me to go there and take this picture on my own. That's true. And lots of people do make beauty of Jupiter right now with the Juno mission the data that's coming from there are a few people who are taking that data and colorizing it and you know tweaking it and oh my gosh beautiful images coming out of that. Yeah. I don't know how many how much people realize that when you know when we have these missions going on our images actually come back as black and white and we put you know we we look at our objects through certain filters and then we try to represent what our naked eye would see when we combine all these images to make a color picture but because we can do that we can tweak tweak how the colors come out or contrast comes out and so Juno because it's got latest technology the best cameras and we're flying really close to Jupiter has really returned imagery that is borderline art art science art whatever.  Yeah, I mean the Jupiter of my childhood it's like forever changed. Yeah. Yeah, it's very true. Yeah. Yes, Sean Doran Richard Hendricks you said has has brought up Sean Doran in the YouTube chat room. Yes, Sean Doran I think has some of the best images out there. You can find him on Twitter you can find him all over the place.  No, I actually don't. Thank you, Blake. So yeah, we got to fight so the big they got a drill going again on the curiosity rover. So maybe this has something to do with something that came back as a result of the drill getting going. You know this is successfully drilled and then I think wasn't the challenge like okay now how to get it into the analyzer? Yes. And if they did that maybe they have a result. Yeah, yeah, which would be cool and but I mean it's the reason it's there I think they're doing their embargo on Thursday is that they're publishing in nature so it's a big paper being published in nature it's going to be something big but I don't know. I mean they're not teasing it as much as like I don't know. Sometimes you don't want to go too far. I hope they don't. I mean they've gone too far many times. According to Google it's a new discovery from Mars. That's it, yeah. It's not going to be life on Mars. Right. Didn't we hear that already? A few times. A few times, yeah. Okay it's a nature paper it's got to be good. According to Science Alert NASA is about to announce a massively exciting Mars discovery. Massively exciting. It's not aliens. By the way that would be probably going differently than massively exciting but it would be interesting. It's going to be at 3pm Eastern Time which is 11am Pacific Time which means perfect timing. I'll be back from my kickboxing class. I will be showered and ready to sit down and tweet it up with everyone else. I will watch it tomorrow you guys. So I'll be I will be online tomorrow. We'll see what it is at 11am. I don't think it's going to be life but we'll see. Next week I have tickets to go see Janelle Monae on Wednesday. I have concert tickets on Wednesday. Go have fun! I think I'm going to go see Janelle Monae so amazing! You deserve it! Thank you. When are you going? It's a Wednesday night concert. We hit all the great acts in the Portland area but they never are on nights that are convenient. It's either a Monday which I'm like it's Monday night. I'm tired. You want me to go the concert tonight? Next Wednesday. So is it an afternoon concert? It's an afternoon concert. It's an afternoon concert. Over by six. I don't understand what you're saying. Do but it's at the Edgefield which means they have a good Wi-Fi. It means they have to go there and stand in line forever. Oh yeah don't do that. That would be terrible. You're right totally not worth leaving the house on a Wednesday night of all times now I'll give everyone a concert review. I will go on I'll be watching and reporting on the NASA announcement tomorrow along with everybody else and Yeah, I'll be doing other things Next week next week. Oh my good if I can get tickets for the whole chat room hot rod Yeah, then Justin, I'll just be talking to nobody You know what you know what Blair we're gonna be talking about NASA's new discovery On Mars Kiki's at a what was the name of it? And again Janelle Monae Janelle the Janelle Monae band Oh Goodness old man Yes When I was young I've never I've never been a young person I've never been Someday I dream of being young No, yeah, I Leave everyone in very capable hands for next week Larry and Justin Luckily I found some stories. I wanted to report on this week, but I had too many so I Tentatively dumped them in the show notes for next week and you won't be here. I'll need extra stories anyway So it all works out. I have bird a couple of bird stories to send you again Give me all the bird stories. I have a fun one about bird sperm that I might talk about next week. Oh a cat tail No, get off my computer We're all here come I can't find out what the announcement is going to be before they announce it embargo People take embargoes seriously Sure do We don't talk about news before it is news Or else nobody will let you talk about the news again Don't break the embargo. That's why I've never been able to get behind the embargo wall because I'm like I want to know what it is now Right, they don't trust you Ooh, haha identity for and any in the chat room says leaving us incapable hands. Ooh, is Tom Merritt guesting? very rude But rude Maybe I'll just give him a call. Yeah. Oh, I was thinking I Do I do like inviting people for for guessing it's wonderful to have it's nice to have open slots Like this to have people like Jason to come on and talk about their current research But if you guys I would love some help brainstorming some names for people to interview You can send me a list of names.  You want me to make a list? Well, I'm gonna be giving you a list if you don't write it down once you get the list Another will be kind of we had the vault volcanists Ways while back Have some have them come on and dispel everybody's fears or create new fears about the volcanoes Yeah, maybe I'm Micah McKinnon. She is a Canadian a woman who is a geophysicist volcanologist Maybe she can do that that would be awesome. Yeah myth dispelling no just because there's an eruption in Hawaii and There's another one in Guatemala does not mean the entire ring of fire is going to go up in flames Oh, is that what's happening? No No time to run for the hills. No, wait stay away from the hills because that's Run to the valleys, but that's where the lava's gonna head to run to the middle of the ocean That there's no air is safe Yeah, is the moon the moon no longer has volcanic activity That's right some moonquakes Does it still quake? Well, I did when Apollo was there Okay, really Oh, I got a look into a story that I saw today that I just I looked at it very briefly and didn't have time to jump Was it the baby from three parents? No Oh No, which is possible and it's totally fine. Yeah, there's a whole science. It was all over the internet today Just science. It's okay. It was really fun weird. Yeah, it's totally fine. Oh, um You guys if you can see my cat. She's being really cute right now She's gonna attack me. Um from inside my sweater. So The story about the moon some headline was saying that the Apollo astronauts Messed up because they They drove around on the surface and they messed up the dust on the surface of the moon They decreased the light reflection of The moon by one to two percent. No, which yeah No, I need to look into this because it was like a what kind of story and I was like I got to get back to this later Because I was like it's a moon is big compared to the area that was possibly affected by any lunar landing, right? That sounds like Yeah, I mean, I don't know well, maybe not like like okay the reflection of the area of the tracks where the rover like are they That's changed and therefore some very specifically localized event around where the astronauts are there is that something like but I didn't see the story so I don't know I Would imagine the number of impacts that have hit the moon since Apollo has Done equally or it's not more Yeah, the dust Excluding alfros impact Which we did okay wait hold on okay, so this new study Just give a link to this study. Okay. What does it say here this new study? Scientists reported in a new study. They've solved the decades-old mystery of why the moon's subsurface warmed slightly during the 1970s They used lost data tapes that were recovered by scientists and it filled in a record record gap during the 1970s and They identified the source of warming as the Apollo astronauts themselves The astronauts disturbed the moon's surface soil by walking and driving a rover on it As a result the moon reflected less of the Sun's light back out to space Which raised the lunar surface temperature by one to two degrees Celsius where it was disturbed Where it was right? Where it was disturbed, okay, that localized event that makes sense there we go, okay all safe Not crazy time, okay Have you ever noticed how like if you look at the dark side of the moon it looks like a different moon What's the dark side? Well, it's not the actual dark side, but it's the What is there word for it? That's like the unrevealed to us side the side the other side side The far side the far side far side the far side of the moon It's like unrecognizable Yep, I mean, I so I in the past did work with Lunar data and I've somewhat become familiar with the far side of the moon But yeah, it is a completely different place you I think I've seen pictures where They'll superimpose the the far side of the moon with the earth in the background and people realize that's still a moon But it looks different Yeah, so let's see the China is gonna be checking out the far side of the moon soon. They're Changi Is it Changi for they must be for yeah Let me check in it out Changi three Changi four Okay, I like knowing that I'm not not crazy when it comes to the surface of the moon heating up There's an explanation for everything good Are we good to go you guys You guys ready for bed Yes, Nord free free fact dark side of the moon was a great album The far side was a great comic and the far side was a great great hip-hop Group good hip-hop, huh? It's been with a pH far side Power hip with a CH. Ah, you kids today Bar side p. Yeah, see why D. E Bar side all the stuff wrong Sorry It happened Sleepy people Jason's not tired because he knows he's an astronomer and all astronomers have been saw me as little known Astronomers don't Like why would I be out during the day? There's nothing to see I Also, don't drink coffee when I go observing No, I don't drink coffee at all But like when I go observing I just drink a lot of water they have to go to the bathroom a lot So you're not gonna fall asleep, right? Yeah, water is better for keeping you awake actually plus usually at altitude in the water My cat crawled in I'm wearing a cardigan My cat crawled in one side of the cardigan and has now parked herself inside the cardigan behind me and is attacking my back Pay attention to me don't pay attention to those cameras and those people over there Attention to me with my sharp claws. You should ask her if you're gonna have a behavioral issue with her right now Is that what it was no What was it behavioral difficulty that's what it was Was behavioral difficulty It was difficulty I remember it was many syllables Are we gonna have a behavioral difficulty right now? Yes, great This is how and he looked he looked chastened After I spoke sternly to him with my lovels goodness he appeared chastened and he looked at me like Yeah, yeah, yeah He stopped messing about he did what I asked him to do That can't we shan't be having any behavioral difficulties mama Go retire say good night player say good night Justin Good night It's been really fun. Thank you for joining us on the show tonight. Really enjoyed having you here There to pull plutonic font of knowledge That's a wonderful week, I will not be here next week, but twist will be back. So Bye night