Justin: Disclaimer! Disclaimer! Disclaimer!
The age of reason is rapidly approaching, tearing down institutions born in less illuminated times. As the light of reason brightens the proponents of the old way are shouting loudly against the winds of change.
Not willing to go quietly into the darkness of unexamined philosophies, they scream, that any change will result in death, in ethical, financial, ideological apocalypse that will destroy the fabric of society as if it heralds the falling of a modern Babylon.
Fear ye! Fear ye! For alas the end is nigh. And in a way, they are correct. This is the end of the world as they have known and profited from it. And while (unintelligible) of old world financial theory in new seeds of reason, sprouting up from the national health care scene, they, much like the following hour of programming and do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of the University of California at Davis, KDVS or its sponsors, we will endure every complaint of the old world looters with still older wisdom of their plight.
For every complaint that man has waged against change has always come from two places — his fear of death or his fear of losing his grip upon the lives of others. And when we take away the HMO’s whip, we will find that the change has left us truly free. Free from fear of debt’s fortune and the influence of the fortune maker’s commission upon our health.
And as many have found, when we are free of fear, we feel more inclined to think freely as I think you will find here on This Week in Science, coming up next.
Justin: Good morning Kirsten.
Kirsten: Good morning Justin.
Justin: Hey, Ali.
Ali: Hey!
Kirsten: And Ali in the back. That’s right. We are here.
Justin: Welcome to This Week in Science minions.
Kirsten: That’s right. We’re here, yet again…
Justin: Be ready to get your science on. Wooh!
Kirsten: …with more science. Wee! We got science, science, science. And, oh my goodness, yeah, we have some news, I guess, at the end of the show. There’s some – I don’t know – maybe you’ll never know the difference.
No difference. Where did Justin go? Justin just left.
Justin: News at the end of the show. Am I getting fired?
Kirsten: No.
Justin: Oh, okay never mind.
Kirsten: Not yet. Anyway. But in science this week, I have stories about birds, rocks, and space and the mystery of life.
Justin: Yeah. I got a new junk dealer.
Kirsten: A junk dealer?
Justin: Are we talking stories? Ooh. And let’s see.
Kirsten: I thought it was just cigarettes that were your problem. Do you have any cigarette tonight?
Justin: I have, how do you travel with cancer on a budget?
Kirsten: That’s important.
Justin: Why brainstorming doesn’t work…
Kirsten: Oh man.
Justin: …if you’re around other people when you’re doing it.
Ah, ooh. Yeah, this is a good one. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s answer to the power crisis that faces things. And how to predict what people say or our ability to predict what people are saying. I’m not really sure I haven’t read the story yet. We’ll read it live on air. It’s like high wire act.
Kirsten: I will just – yeah. I’ll predict what you’re going to say. I always know what you’re going to say, Justin. Well, maybe not always. Big story this week sent in by Ed Dyer. Hubble confirms Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: Mm hmm. Yeah, so we’ve had, there had been a few experiments, gyroscopes in space and what not experiments to find out – you know, whether or not Einstein was right. Is the Theory of Relativity actually accurate? Does it describe our universe?
Justin: It describes, it still doesn’t explain. But it does describe.
Kirsten: It does.
Justin: Very well.
Kirsten: That’s why I said describe.
Justin: Yeah. Absolutely.
Kirsten: Yes. So, European scientists used Hubble, the NASA European Space Agency’s co-managed Hubble Space Telescope and looked at what – an effect called natural gravitational weak lensing. And through doing this, what they were able to do is describe the expansion of the universe which is part of what’s going on in the Theory of Relativity.
Justin just brought in a nice picture book that you can’t see at all with pictures taken by Hubble.
Justin: These are rad. Check this out.
Kirsten: They’re beautiful pictures. It’s story book type. It’s pictures…
Justin: Oh, look at this one. This is brilliant. These are galaxies, people. Wow. This one – these are all kinds of stars. They look like stars in the sky. Those are all individual galaxies out there.
Kirsten: That’s right.
Justin: Billions and billions and billions.
Kirsten: Right. So, in a sense when Carl Sagan said, “billions of stars”. There are…
Justin: So on.
Kirsten: …there are. But there are like more than billions of stars.
Justin: At least in the estimated known universe right now it’s 70 sextillion…
Kirsten: Right and…
Justin: … which is a lot more billions…
Kirsten: He should have said…
Justin: ..it’s like billions and billions of billions and billions
Kirsten: …he should have said billions of galaxies as opposed to billions of stars.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: He should have, he should have.
Justin: The story then…
Kirsten: But I guess it’s not as poetic, maybe.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: Anyway, Tim Schrabback of the Leiden Observatory looked at over 400 thousand galaxies – close to 450 thousand galaxies – within the COSMOS field. The COSMOS Survey used the advanced camera for surveys that’s on Hubble over a thousand hours of observing time that was used to look at all of the – to take pictures of the universe and they look at these galaxies within the pictures of the universe.
They used redshifts. So gravitational weak lensing is the idea that the gravity, the amount of mass that is in any galaxy is going to affect the gravitation in that area. More mass means like more pull, more gravitation. And gravitational fields can actually bend light and change the speed at which light travels. So as light is passing…
Justin: No. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Don’t change the speed at which light…
Kirsten: It doesn’t. It bends it. So that it shifts it.
Justin: It just bends – and the lights…
Kirsten: It’s the apparent speed of, that’s why it’s a shift…
Justin: No. It’s not it.
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: Well the…
Kirsten: …because it changes from one wavelength to another. So it’s what we call the redshift…
Justin: Right. Okay.
Kirsten: Because the gravitational effect of the galaxy is affecting the wavelength of the light in such a way that the apparent color of the light as it travels toward us…
Justin: Shifts to the red.
Kirsten: …shifts to the red spectrum.
Justin: Yeah. If something’s moving, like really quickly away from us. The wavelength will feel stretched out or look stretched out to us. And so it’ll appear redder.
Kirsten: Exactly.
Justin: But the lensing thing isn’t – there’s no – it’s not changing it.
Kirsten: Yeah. The lensing affects the light.
Justin: It’s not the speed. It’s the space and then light travels that space.
Kirsten: Through the space. Okay
Justin: That should be a very important distinction.
Kirsten: Okay, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, okay.
Kirsten: You’re right. You’re right.
Justin: It’s thousand – I’m in extremely…
Kirsten: It affects the space and it affect – which – through which the light is traveling.
Justin: You are correct, Ma’am.
Kirsten: And as a result – thank you – all right. As – we get the distinctions clear here.
Justin: And I’m arguing with a woman who earlier, like just a few minutes ago like flashed a knife at me. So, I got to be really cautious.
Kirsten: You got to watch that, I got a knife down here. I’ll knife you. Anyway, they also used the redshift data from ground based telescopes as well. And what they were trying to do based on the redshift using the gravitational weak lensing effect of these hundreds of thousands of galaxies, they’re trying to figure out how far away different galaxies are and whether or not they are moving away from us at an expand, you know, an expanding – whether or not there is expansion taking place.
Justin: Mm hmm
Kirsten: And so they said, “The sheer number of galaxies included in this type of analysis is unprecedented. But more important is the wealth of information we could obtain about the invisible structures in the universe from this data set.
Dark energy affects our measurements for two reasons. First one, as its present galaxy clusters grow more slowly and secondly, it changes the way the universe expands leading to more distant and more efficiently lensed galaxies. Our analysis is sensitive to both effects.”
“Our study also provides an additional confirmation for Einstein’s Theory of Relativity which predicts how the lensing signal depends on redshift.” So they also go on to say, “With more accurate information about the distances to the galaxies, we can measure the distribution of the matter between them and us more accurately.”
Before, most of the studies were done in 2D. Just pictures…
Justin: Brightness
Kirsten: Like taking, yeah. And…
Justin: Just – they had the candles out there. They figured out how bright…
Kirsten: And it’s like looking at a picture. You can’t, sometimes, if there’s no frame of reference you can’t tell how far away, how distant things are.
Justin: This is a very close, very dim star. Oh no, it’s a very bright, very far away star.
Kirsten: Exactly. And what – this is a really neat analogy that Jan Hartlap from the University of Bonn went on to say, “It’s like taking the 2D images that we used to use. We’re like taking a chest x-ray. Our study is more like a 3D reconstruction of the skeleton from a CT scan.”
Justin: Wow.
Kirsten: Yeah. On top of that, we’re able to watch the skeleton of dark matter mature from the universe’s youth to the present. So, because of the distance in space, we are able to actually see younger and older areas of the universe and how the dark matter is changing and developing and how it’s creating what they’re calling the skeleton of the universe.
Justin: That’s pretty rad.
Kirsten: Yeah. Yeah. So they’re going to keep looking at it. I think the one – they’re going to keep doing more surveys like this, looking at more areas of our universe.
But the really neat part of this is that, in addition to being able to take a look at how dark matter is distributing mass and things like galaxies within the universe, it’s also able to verify the Theory of Relativity does indeed describe our universe quite well.
Justin: It’s definitely a good description. Though it doesn’t have any explanation for what gravity is, which is an amazing thing to me.
Kirsten: Isn’t that great?
Justin: That nobody actually understands that mechanism.
Kirsten: But what is it? Oh, you know, it could be strings? Oh yeah, could be like some other like by-product of something else…
Justin: That throughout all of…
Kirsten: I mean there’s so many different ideas.
Justin: And then throughout all of human history, there were no deities in charge here for having created gravity. Gravity is just a given. Yeah, that’s just gravity. There’s up, there’s down. There was no…
Kirsten: That’s true.
Justin: They had gods, they had…
Kirsten: It wasn’t a mystical force.
Justin: No. They had ancient gods who were in charge of lost sheep. But there’s nobody in charge of gravity like that one predominant constant force on – that we’re feeling on the planet. There’s one thing that…
Kirsten: Mm hmm
Justin: …every time when a child is born, it’s the first thing that we have to conquer in this world is gravity.
Kirsten: Gravitas.
Justin: Just to be able to raise their head up. No deities of gravity, just – yeah. It’s because of – perhaps because it was never absent. It was just always there by its lack of absence, you know.
The wind you can put guards of the northeast, the southeast wind had god, whatever. Cause the wind would come and would go and you’d notice it was there. Gravity always there, yeah, you never know and it never left. So…
Kirsten: Yeah. Moving on this is This Week in Science.
Justin: For 30 years – more than 30 years, for a really long time now. The world has been waging a war on drugs. The question I have for the minions to quickly contemplate is this. Why?
Why not allow people to become addicted to powerful narcotics that alter their brain’s reward systems until only the drug suffices to give pleasure and that all other worldly activities are put on hold or devalued.
Is it a matter of personal disagreement with the free will of the drug user? Or do we hold that those introducing the drugs are unfairly manipulating a weakness in the biology of others, that we so adamantly oppose the free reign of narcotics in our neighborhoods, schools and at our Wall Street parties?
Take a moment to formulate your opinion on this. There won’t be a quiz but there will certainly be more to wrap your head around in a moment as I continue with the following story.
Recent research by scientists from the Scripps Research Institute had discovered that the same triggers, in fact, the very same molecular mechanisms involved in our compulsion to overeat are those that sustain our addiction to drugs – the very same molecular mechanisms. TWIS reported in brief upon this finding last year, well, before I think even the preliminary abstract was presented to the Society of Neuroscience in Chicago.
Kirsten: Mm hmm
Justin: But now there’s a fully peer reviewed study being published.
Kirsten: Yey!
Justin: Tantarara!
Kirsten: We like it when fully peer reviewed studies get published…
Justin: Yes.
Kirsten: …because it’s no longer just simple speculation or anecdotal evidence. It’s or…
Justin: Or a leaking out of just some of the study.
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: The full study goes significantly further than the abstract, which is good because if it didn’t it means that the abstract was either overly detailed and outrageously long. Or that the full study lacked such detail and was partly brief.
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: So, good thing that they made it longer. Research rats demonstrated that the development of obesity coincides with the progressively deteriorating chemical balance in the brain’s reward system. Pleasure centers in the brain become less and less responsive to what were – they were basically feeding these rats junk food.
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: Simulating a poor diet for humans – lots of high calorie cheesecake and probably fast food burgers or something. So they demonstrated this…
Kirsten: The rat equivalent of cheesecake and burgers.
Justin: Cheesecake. I’m sure rats would eat cheesecake. I’m sure it wouldn’t be a hard thing to get to eat.
Kirsten: Twinkies!
Justin: So their pleasure centers in the brain originally became excited by this junk food, these high-calorie, high-fat, sugary, sugary meals. But their brains became less and less responsive to the original dosages of the junk food and the rats quickly developed the compulsive overeating habit consuming larger quantities of the high-calorie, high-fat foods until they became obese.
Kirsten: Obese.
Justin: Very same changes…
Kirsten: Yes.
Justin: …occur in the brains of human junkies in the narcotic world who are forced to consume greater and greater quantities of cocaine or heroin to meet their next fix. And the fix is never as good as the last fix, but it becomes the only reward at that point that the brain will accept.
Kenny – you’re going to have to look up his last name because I’ve edited him out of my version of this thing – he’s a scientist – Kenny said, “I’m Dr. Kenny,” he’s a scientist at the Scripps Research Florida Campus.
He says that, “The three-year study confirms the addictive properties of junk food. The new study explains what happens in the brain of these animals when they have easy access to high-calorie, high-fat food. In this study, the animals completely lost control over their eating behavior – the primary hallmark of addiction. They continued to overeat even when they anticipated receiving electric shocks.”
Oh, my goodness. “Highlighting just how motivated they were to consume the palatable food.” Shocks! Electrodes in my twinkies! The scientists fed the rats a diet modeled after the type that contributes to human obesity – easy-to-obtain high-calorie, high-fat foods like sausage, bacon and cheesecake.
Kirsten: Cheesecake.
Justin: Yeah. And after the experiments began the animals began to bulk up dramatically. “They always went for the worst types of foods,” said Kenny, Dr. Kenny, “and as a result they took twice the calories as the control rats. When we removed the junk food and tried to put them on a nutritious diet – what we called a salad bar option – they simply refused to eat.”
“The change in their diet preference was so great that they basically starved themselves for two weeks after they were cut off from the junk food. It was the animals that showed the “crash” in brain reward circuitry that had the profound shift in food preference to the palatable, unhealthy diet. These same rats were also those that kept eating even when they anticipated being shocked.”
Kirsten: Shocked. Boy.
Justin: So, in addiction, the reward pathways in the brain get overstimulated. You have these things that – your cocaine or your heroin or your cheesecake – is firing off in your brain and it overstimulates this reward system of the brain to the point of, sort of, dampening it to where the output, you need a larger input the next time to receive reward.
Whether it’s cocaine or cupcakes, junk food craving – the junk cravings are the same. Body temps remarkably well to change.
“And that’s the problem,” says Kenny, Dr. Kenny. “When the animal overstimulates its brain pleasure centers with highly palatable food, the system adapts by decreasing their activity.” The system, it won’t work.
Kirsten: The system.
Justin: What is this system?
Kirsten: It’s the receptors on the nerve cells. If they’re getting overstimulated that means that there’s as lot of neurotransmitter coming down the pipe. And as a result, they will decrease the number of receptors that they have to grab on to it. So that they can actually moderate and modulate
Justin: Who’s moderating and modulating?
Kirsten: The neurons.
Justin: No. No. No. No. No. There’s some control center in the brain that stimulates.
Kirsten: Oh. Okay. Okay.
Justin: Oh yeah.
Kirsten: A control.
Justin: Really. It’s like a junk dealer. Of course they want you to get more each time. Something we’re about it – so anyway, in the study they…
Kirsten: I don’t know if there’s a control center. The neurons actually self-regulate – if there’s – this has been shown in alcoholics as well, where there’s an actual down regulation of the receptors that can actually grab on to the neurotransmitter.
Justin: Well in this study, they focused…
Kirsten: Is there a control center?
Justin: …on a receptor in the brain that play an important role on the vulnerability of drug addiction, obesity – dopamine D2 receptor.
Kirsten: Yeah. That’s a good one.
Justin: Good.
Kirsten: That’s a big one.
Justin: That’s a big one. The D2 receptor responds to dopamine. The neurotransmitter that is released in the brain by pleasurable experiences like food or sex or drugs or cocaine. Look…
Kirsten: Or cheesecakes?
Justin: …or cheesecakes, or cupcakes. This is the part that’s just drives me nuts about the brain in general: that you have in there a little drug dealer that’s going to give you a little dope – dopamine – that will give you a little bit of mental heroin…
Kirsten: Uh-huh.
Justin: …for eating.
Kirsten: Uh-huh.
Justin: And then it’ll give you a little bit of mental heroin for having sex. Like, you can’t – like does that mean I don’t actually like sex or food? But it’s just to get…
Kirsten: Oh. Now you’re getting metaphysical on it.
Justin: Is this just all drug dealer in my head? That’s like, “If you’re going to have sex Justin, I’m going to give you little heroin.” Is that what’s really taking place? Is this not me? Am I not choosing beef because I’m hungry, am I choosing beef because if I don’t eat I’m not going to get the heroin in my brain?
It’s freaky, this is like this weird control thing…
Kirsten: No. but it’s eating…
Justin: …going on in my head.
Kirsten: …it’s, so in the case of food…
Justin: Mm hmm
Kirsten: …you know, it’s not all food that necessarily releases this quantity of dopamine. It’s fatty foods, it’s sugary foods.
Justin: Wait, wait, wait.
Kirsten: It’s foods that have, that have a – and the reason…
Justin: But these are very unnatural foods though.
Kirsten: …that Dopamine gets…
Justin: We’re talking about…
Kirsten: No.
Justin: …foods that is like…
Kirsten: But they’re great…
Justin: …this is like crack cocaine.
Kirsten: Right, but evolutionarily…
Justin: This is like boiled down. This is not natural street drug.
Kirsten: …evolutionarily, I mean, if you found a fatty source of food, that’s energy.
Justin: Oh yeah.
Kirsten: Fat and sugar are energy. And so, if you find something that has that energy in it, your body is like, “Yeah! Find more of that.” And so it’s reinforcing your behaviors that led you to find that really energetically rewarding food.
Justin: Absolutely. Actually – no, I agree. I agree. It’s just that it’s my brain that’s controlling this idea, not me.
Kirsten: Yes. Your brain. That is the question of the brain and the mind.
Justin: This is the, “Who am I?”
Kirsten: Where do you exist?
Justin: Where am I that I need a drug dealer in my brain to reward me for eating? It’s just nuts.
Kirsten: Sometimes wouldn’t it be nice to get rid of that little drug dealer in the brain? I mean, I’m sure there are many people out there with problems related to that little…
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: …brainy drug dealer, the dope dealer.
Justin: So yeah, so there’s a couple of things then. I mean, so there’s this whole thing of like, “Where am I? Who am I? What’s actually controlling me in my brain that I need a mental drug dealer?”
And who is this little drug dealer my brain is even feeding the drugs to if it’s into my brain? Is it my body? Is that separate from my brain?
Kirsten: No. it’s in your brain.
Justin: It’s into my brain?
Kirsten: It’s in your brain. It’s just too…
Justin: So it’s one part of my brain is like – got my other part of my brain turned into a junkie?
Kirsten: That’s right.
Justin: It’s like a little like street gangs going on in my head now. I got little territories being sorted out like throwing up gang signs like left brain, right brain…
Kirsten: And isn’t it great?
Justin: … left side, west side…
Kirsten: And isn’t it great? That the over-arching, you have the big junk dealers peddling to the little junk dealer in your brain. So this is very…
Justin: So yeah…
Kirsten: …it’s very MEDA.
Justin: … here is the other question. Do we go after like Sarah Lee like she’s the MEDA Inc. cartel now? I mean like…
Kirsten: There are several people. There are lots of people who actually think that yeah that’s a good idea. That we…
Justin: That we got to shut them down?
Kirsten: Yeah. New York City talked…
Justin: Wow!
Kirsten: …about having a fat tax and taxing all junk food. Like there are ideas out there like this. This is a concept people are thinking, if we tax junk food like cigarettes, will people stop eating junk food? Will it decrease the amount of junk food people eat? Probably not.
Justin: Wow.
Kirsten: Yeah. That’s an interesting study.
Justin: But those people…
Kirsten: Oh, Dr. Kenny.
Justin: If those people follow this study, those people will starve themselves to death before they’ll eat anything but junk food.
Kirsten: Well that’s it. That’s – the other side to this is that we are not mice. We’re not rats. We, I mean, we do respond to stimuli in a very similar behaviorally distinct manner. But we are not. I mean, what else…
Justin: I don’t. Look.
Kirsten: What would you do if you…
Justin: I don’t know, where we’ll…
Kirsten: …were to put – if someone would stick electrodes on the door to your refrigerator with like a timer? So that at night, like after dinner, every time you touch the door to your refrigerator or to your cabinet to go get the junk food, it would give you a shock. And in the morning when in the morning when it’s okay to eat food again. So you don’t do this midnight refrigerator raids.
How would you react? Would you just go through, bust through that electro-shock?
Justin: I’m saying if you cut this people out – I mean, because no rats go around like, you know, getting firearms and robbing banks or shooting people over, you know…
Kirsten: They don’t.
Justin: … cupcakes yet. But…
Kirsten: And, and…
Justin: …humans might…
Kirsten: … neither do people.
Justin: …Humans do it over heroin and cocaine from time to time.
Kirsten: But not cupcakes.
Justin: Well, who’s to say that if we cut them off of cupcakes that they wouldn’t be, you know.
Kirsten: There wouldn’t be violence in the streets.
Justin: Mugging people from – there would be.
Kirsten: Cupcake riots!
Justin: Can you imagine? This is a junkie nation.
Kirsten: Oh, man.
Justin: I am now afraid of my neighbors.
Kirsten: I’m worried about the cupcake riots.
Justin: I’m locking my cabinets.
Kirsten: Well, the biggest eater is now from the 80s, is now intra-solar system, intra-galactic. It’s Pac-Man. And Pac-Man is on the moon of Mimas. Yeah, Pac-Man. Well it’s not really Pac-Man. But it looks a lot like Pac-Man. NASA’s Cassini’s spacecraft took some heat signature pictures, infrared pictures of the surface of Saturn’s moon Mimas.
And the pictures themselves are kind of interesting. If you – I’m going to put the link on the website from the JPL website, so you can all take a look at the pictures if you haven’t seen them already. But the infrared spectrometer shows a really interesting varying temperature on the surface of the moon – that looks a lot like the left half of the moon is like the backside of Pac-Man.
And then there’s a crater on Mimas on the right side of the moon, called the Herschel Crater. And really the heat signature looks like – there’s a Pac-Man on the left side of Mimas that’s eating Herschel Crater which is a little bit warmer like one of those little power dots from the old Pac-Man game.
Justin: Okay.
Kirsten: Now, the odd thing about this is that the expected temperature variation, based on the way the sun’s rays hit the moon is that it would be just warm in the center and of the sphere of the moon. And then it would be diminishingly warm as you go to the outer edges.
So it would get warm in the middle and then cooler and cooler and cooler towards the outer edges, as space wicks the heat of the sun away. But what they find is this really interesting Pac-Man eating a power dot…
Justin: Okay. And just…
Kirsten: …variation in temperature.
Justin: …just a quick translation for anybody under 50 who can’t visualize…
Kirsten: Excuse me, under 50?
Justin: …Pac-Man.
Kirsten: What? What? The 80s, the 80s. Pac-Man – the 80s. Under 30.
Justin: Right. Well.
Kirsten: Under 30. Okay?
Justin: Picture a – picture…
Kirsten: Ali do you know Pac-Man? Ali knows Pac-Man.
Justin: Picture a Pokemon. Well, a Pokemon was the 90s. Because anybody under 30 wouldn’t know it.
Kirsten: Know it has to be Pac-Man because it’s the little circle with the…
Justin: Back or vent.
Kirsten: …with the triangle taken out of it for the mouth. But, anyway this is a really interesting – the V-shaped pattern of the temperature variation indicates that there’s something odd going on on the surface of Mimas that we didn’t expect. That maybe there’s a distribution of some kind of either ice or rock, some kind of substance on the surface of the moon that is emitting heat differently from other parts of the moon.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: Additionally, it’s thought that Herschel Crater came from a giant meteor impact at one point in the past. And that possibly that impact actually…
Justin: Created the internal thermal dynamic fists.
Kirsten: … right, that maybe are pushing out to the other side…
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: …of the moon. And maybe it’s redistributed some of the material of the moon around the moon in a way that has led to this interesting pattern. So looking at it there’s a bunch of neat stuff to figure out. I’ll put the link on the website because the images are just really, really spectacular.
I mean you don’t expect to see Pac-Man eating a power dot on a moon of Saturn.
Justin: No. Maybe you don’t.
Kirsten: It’s 9 o’clock.
Justin: That means we’re half done with the first half – well we’re all the way done with the first half of the show. And we have a second half of the show that’s going to come up after we’re done with the first half which is now.
Kirsten: Which is now? We’ll be back in just a few minutes. Stay tuned.
Justin: Thank you for listening to TWIS. If you rely on this show for weekly science-y updates, please understand that we rely on your support to keep bringing those to you. Donate. Keep the science-y goodness on the air. We’ve made it very easy for you.
Go to our website www.twis.org. Click on the button that will allow you to donate $2, $5, $10 or if you like, you can donate any amount of money you choose as many times as you like. Again just go to www.twis.org and donate today. We need your support and we thank you in advance for it.
Kirsten: That’s right. Robots are taking over. It’s This Week in Science. We are back for the next 27 minutes.
Justin: Twenty-six and a half.
Kirsten: That’s right. Bring us a story.
Justin: Stories.
Kirsten: Bring us a story, Justin.
Justin: Okay. So, I think we’ve figured out, maybe perhaps, what to do with all that sugary food which we confiscated from the cabinets of the junkies out there.
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: And there’s a new technique being developed to – by engineers to engineer yeast to transform sugars more effectively into alcohol. Woohoo!
Kirsten: Sweet.
Justin: Yeah. Let’s drink it. And to – oh, that could be economically environmentally sounder way to replace fossil fuel. So what we’re talking about it as a fuel not as a substitute for one…
Kirsten: Yes.
Justin: …one habit for another. Scientists presenting to the Society for General Microbiology Spring Meeting in Edinburgh were talking about this. Dr. Christian Weber and Prof. Eckhard Boles from Frankfurt University, Germany have worked out how to modify yeast cells so that they successfully convert a wider range of sugars from – everything from plant waste – like wheat and straw – into alcohol that can be used for biofuels.
So it sounds like they’ve – that’s a pretty wide target of, you know, not just saying we’re going to do wheat grass or we’re going to do sugar cane or corn…
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: …or one thing. They’re developing a yeast that can sort of take all commerce…
Kirsten: Digest all of the biomass.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: It doesn’t matter what…
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: …part it comes from. Which I think is a, you know, a fair way to do it and you don’t have to specialize. That way you don’t have to have all sorts of separate…
Justin: Right.
Kirsten: …types of strains of bacteria, strains of yeast – whatever you’re using – for your particular biofuel production facility. You don’t have to specialize for a particular area. You’ve got, you know, you can take stuff from all over.
Justin: Yeah. So bioalcohol produced from microbial fermentations are considered an example of second generation biofuels that just use raw materials that are not normally used in food production.
Because this is one of the big problems of the biofuel industry, I think, is that when we’re talking about turning corn – especially the corns are the one that bothers me – because it’s such a staple diet for at least, you know, North America probably increasingly for the world.
Kirsten: And cows.
Justin: It’s in everything. Cows eat it, everything eats it. If we turn – if we commoditize that into a fuel and have to compete – our stomach versus the gas tank of the nation, it’s going to end badly. So I mean…
Kirsten: I know the addictive stomach going after the corn syrup or is it…
Justin: It’s just…
Kirsten: …or is it the addictive accelerator foot?
Justin: Oh man, it’s just a bad….
Kirsten: …left foot.
Justin: …it’s a bad competition to set up there. So I’m glad they’re going off…
Kirsten: We’re going to drive ourselves into oblivion.
Justin: Anyway, these researchers, these scientists have come up with this new engineered yeast they’re very excited about. They started a company, it’s not one way or the other to – I’m not, you know, to shout out the company but – BUTALCO.
Kirsten: BUTALCO.
Justin: BUTALCO is – really the best name you can come up with for your company is BUTALCO? Oh, geez! This is like, call me people…
Kirsten: It’s probably…
Justin: …maybe we could work on something.
Kirsten: …based on a chemical name like Butanol or something.
Justin: That’s exact – very good. Yeah, it is. Yeah. That’s it.
Kirsten: There we go.
Justin: Wow. Very well done.
Kirsten: In other interesting chemical bacteria yeasty news – not yeast – but bacteria, researchers publishing in – where did they publish – in Nature just the other day. The story was sent in by Ed Dyer, thank you so much. That researchers have discovered a new – well maybe not new – who knows if it’s new. We probably – we might have known about it already.
But it produces – it’s a methanogen – so it lives in the mud, in the muck – in anaerobic conditions where there is no oxygen. And it can take up methane and nitrogen containing compounds…
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: …in the mud. And through chemical processes, it creates its own oxygen to breathe.
Justin: That’s right.
Kirsten: So you’re like, “Oh, look! There’s no oxygen here. Why don’t I just make some?” Yeah. So this bacteria goes from being anaerobic to aerobic. No oxygen…
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: …to oxygen, just through the use of nitrogen-containing compounds and methane.
Justin: So is this our new terraforming agents? First represented….
Kirsten: Hey?
Justin: …to the planet earth to take to some methane rich planet?
Kirsten: Right.
Justin: And like light up the blues?
Kirsten: Exactly. That’s fascinating. It’s a fascinating idea. Yes.
Justin: That’s rad.
Kirsten: Yes. So there’s a lot more. I mean, there has to be methane and nitrogen-containing compounds. But if those are there then it seems like this little methanogen could be good to go. Additionally…
Justin: One small step for mankind. Wait, one small step for…
Kirsten: Step for microbe…
Justin: …microbe, for mankind. One giant leap for planet earthlings.
Kirsten: Another idea that kind of relates to the Saturn JPL story from earlier – oh and – I don’t remember where I found the Pac-Man story. But the – from Ed Dyer again, the impact like Herschel Crater maybe we should be looking – I don’t know if they’ve looked already – but maybe we should be looking for amino acids, the building blocks of life; like maybe glycine on Mimas.
Because researchers presenting at the American Chemical Society this last week, which was in San Francisco, they presented a simulation that they ran on the Atlas Computer Cluster at Lawrence Livermore Labs that included molecules that are normally found in comets, ice, as a mixture of water, methanol, ammonia, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide – all of these contained in the ice in comets.
If a comet had come and impacted a planet, is that impact strike enough to create the pressure and also the temperatures necessary to break up the bonds that hold those molecules together and allow them to create new bonds and new molecules like amino acids? Because in water, methanol, ammonia, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide — all of the pieces are there for amino acids.
Everything is there. All it takes is either an enzyme to get it going or a big impact, something that would actually get things to mix it up a little bit. So they did this simulation and they actually found that the shock compression – the weakest shock compression that they modeled that had a pressure of ten gigapascals and a temperature of seven hundred kelvin which is really hot.
They found the formation of carbon nitrogen bonds and they found the hint under these sorts of conditions, everything’s very reactive. So if you have one sort of morsel that has an essential component like a CN, carbon nitrogen bond, you can imagine more carbons adding to it and getting a complicated amino acid. And they went on to do some much heavier impacts and actually found glycine-like compounds and molecules within their simulation. So…
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: …it’s very, very possible that the impacts of comets on earth – that maybe brought…
Justin: Should have brought us all going.
Kirsten: …the water to earth could have also made the amino acids.
Justin: Wow. Would have been good timing if they did it all at the same time too.
Kirsten: Yeah. That’s pretty cool. Pretty neat news.
Justin: Yeah. Scientists discovered a woman in Siberia. She quickly gives them the finger. This is an amazing story. There’s a finger that they have found in Siberia that they believe to be a new species and yet – as of yet undiscovered species of human being-ish ancestor which in a…
Kirsten: Human-ish, I like.
Justin: …well I forgot what you call it? It’s a new species. It doesn’t have a name yet.
Kirsten: They haven’t classified it yet.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: They don’t even know. I mean, they think it’s a new species. But they have to really make sure that it is.
Justin: They’re pretty sure.
Kirsten: They’re pretty sure.
Justin: Yeah. This finger they believe belonged to a child who died some 48 to 30,000 yrs ago. And it was thought that, see this is interesting, because they thought that there were only two species of early human alive at that time. The, you know, us and the Neanderthals.
Now we have the Homo floriensis.
Kirsten: Right.
Justin: So that’s three.
Kirsten: So maybe it be could related to them.
Justin: This will make four. No. No. No. No. No.
Kirsten: They think maybe a distant cousin of Homo…
Justin: Cousin?
Kirsten: …floriensis? Yeah. Maybe.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: Because it pre-dates and they’re thinking possibly that’s where the original Homo floriensis….
Justin: Came from all that…
Kirsten: …population come from.
Justin: Wow. Yeah, because, you know, experts believe the finger belongs to a child. But it could just be small-ish and maybe they don’t. It’s a good question. But all they have is one finger. So…
Kirsten: Yeah. There was a mini T-rex found in Australia.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: Yeah. But the question – they found a hip bone. It’s like, I love like these big proclamations that are made from like one piece of an organism.
Justin: Yeah. Yeah.
Kirsten: So, okay. So, the finger and the genetic material – it’s Justin’s finger – that could have decayed, and that we that we could be getting also maybe some kind of contamination. You don’t really know, I mean, maybe there needs to be more work on it to make sure that there’s not some kind of contamination or mixing somehow.
Justin: Yeah. And they had to eliminate like a whole slew of dinosaurs that were like small version dinosaurs…
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: …when they discovered they were juveniles. But the morphology…
Kirsten: Right. Exactly.
Justin: So the morphology…
Kirsten: So maybe this little T-rex. Yeah.
Justin: …the bone structures changed quite a bit when they age. It wasn’t like, you know, like we’re used to, like, you know, we have our skull that’s shaped this way, it stays that way.
Kirsten: Right.
Justin: Even though it grows, you know, expands.
Kirsten: Right.
Justin: We – our bones stay the same shape throughout our life cycle.
Kirsten: Pretty much.
Justin: Yeah. Pretty much. There’s some fusing that goes on. We like…
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: …we lose the number of bones.
Kirsten: There are cartilage – cartilaginous areas that become bony, I think. Yeah. So the…
Justin: But they actually kept growing bone mass in different areas. So they…
Kirsten: Right.
Justin: …they had to change around a lot of the…
Kirsten: But it’s a hip bone. I don’t know how much a hip bone. If it’s just a small hip bone or a big hip bone…
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: …how much would that adjust over a life cycle? But the interesting thing about the T-rex also is that it was – pre- dates T-rexes…
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: …in the rest of the world. So it’s early. So maybe, who knows maybe a T-rexes could have come there and moved before Pangaea broke up. We don’t know. And maybe they were mini, maybe it’s a juvenile.
Justin: I thought that…
Kirsten: But it’s one hip bone.
Justin: I thought that T-rexes…
Kirsten: One hip bone. It’s not, I mean, go look for more bones, people.
Justin: Yeah. Yeah. Because I thought that like – aren’t the predecessors, the T-rex, like the gigantosaurus – what’s it – those are bigger.
Kirsten: Right.
Justin: Those are bigger than the T-rex.
Kirsten: Right.
Justin: The T-rex was shrinking over the years. And then they found that this one’s smaller, yeah it’s just interesting.
Kirsten: It’s very interesting. This is all interesting.
Justin: Also interesting – seventeen thousand-year old lead burrito.
Kirsten: Excuse me?
Justin: Lead burrito.
Kirsten: I don’t want a lead burrito.
Justin: It’s a lead…
Kirsten: That sounds like it would just sit in your stomach.
Justin: …sarcophagus. It’s like a folded – it’s like an inch thick of lead that’s been folded over into sort of like a coffin, 800-pound coffin that they found in – near Rome. And they’re trying to figure out, first of all, how to get into it. Like, they’re probably going to do some big scanning, trying to get through the lead which is hard to scan through. Lead is very difficult, you know.
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: Superman can’t even see what’s going on there.
Kirsten: Right. That’s how they…
Justin: Protected from radiation…
Kirsten: …hide nuclear material.
Justin: Very odd though…
Kirsten: And they’re smuggling it into the United States through the ports.
Justin: Even the wealthy of Rome, you know, couple thousand of years ago, there were mausoleums. Very rare for someone…
Kirsten: Right.
Justin: …to be buried in a coffin.
Kirsten: A coffin.
Justin: If at all buried, you know.
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: And for 800 pounds of lead is extremely…
Kirsten: It’s a lot.
Justin: …extremely valuable, I mean, I don’t know. Maybe this is they figured out lead was poisoning them all and this is where they put it all. I don’t know but look, it’s an extremely massive fortune in this lead. So what they’re thinking of doing is melting a little hole in it. They’re going to first…
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: …they’re going to heat it up. They’re going to heat the whole thing up a little bit and then try to do some scans because the bones – if there’s bones in there they’ll heat differently than the rest. The other idea is to melt a hole in there and insert a camera…
Kirsten: That’s…
Justin: …light and try to do a look around.
Kirsten: It’s an interesting idea as well.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: Yeah. Interesting.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: Another story, Peering Into the Darkness from David Eckard. NASA is using the wide field infrared survey explorer WISE – the Wise Telescope – to look for dark objects in space.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: The ones – objects in space that do not emit light or do not reflect light very well. So they’re looking at brown dwarfs, dust clouds in various parts of the universal neighborhood and asteroids. And it’s already starting to spot dozens, dozens of asteroids that have been completely undetected by other telescopes and detection methods.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: So asteroids are usually in the asteroid belt. But some of them actually get popped out of the asteroid belt based on various gravitational forces and get on earthbound trajectories. So we want to know. Yeah. We want to see…
Justin: Some of us want to know. Some of us want to see.
Kirsten: …see these dark objects, right?
Justin: Some of don’t want to see the ones coming towards us.
Kirsten: I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know.
Justin: Some of us know that we just can’t get out of the way. And if we just know that our days are numbered…
Kirsten: Well, here’s one…
Justin: …or quite so many, then we would just rather…
Kirsten: …Ned Wright says WISE has only been in orbit for about 3 months. But we’ve already found a handful of asteroids classified as potentially hazardous and…
Justin: Classified.
Kirsten: …classified as potentially hazardous including one scene in 1996 and then lost until it was recently re-observed by WISE. One of the discoveries puts an asteroid in a pretty much within three times the distance of earth to the moon. That’s going to be coming near us, so WISE is going to see lots more asteroids as it keeps looking at the sky.
But maybe not all of them are huge risks. From (Tom Macey), there was a study published in archive.org that asteroids might actually just be piles of dust and gravel and not very solid after all. And so they might not be something – not all of them – might be worth worrying about…
Justin: Well I don’t know.
Kirsten: …because they are just like little, little the van der Waals forces that help geckos stick to walls are actually taking these little fine pieces of dust and sand grains and gravel, and just kind of holding them together. And so you couldn’t actually – the whole idea of like blowing up these asteroids with a nuke or…
Justin: Wouldn’t work.
Kirsten: … it wouldn’t work because…
Justin: because it goes right through it.
Kirsten: …it would, bwoook! Go right through and then the asteroid would…
Justin: Pile sand.
Kirsten: …re-clump back together because the forces would just pull it back together again. So – and also if it’s just a pile of sand, it’s not going to hit and it’ll scatter.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: It’ll be like salt…
Justin: Most amazing light show.
Kirsten: It’ll be like salt in a shotgun.
Justin: Most amazing possibly light show. Well of course, then again we’re assuming that these are small – like small bullets, your typical shooting star that you see.
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: It’s something that you see streaking across the sky. It’s something about the size if not smaller than a dime.
Kirsten: That’s not.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: No.
Justin: It’s – absolutely.
Kirsten: No, bigger than that.
Justin: They’re tiny. No. No.
Kirsten: They’re bigger than that.
Justin: No. No. They are tiny, tiny, tiny. Go look it up. Go if you got the Internet Google it right there. Go and Google that.
Kirsten: I’ll look – I’m not going to spend the time doing it right now but I will. If someone wants to ask…
Justin: If these things are boulders, it could be…
Kirsten: …if someone wants to send me links…
Justin: …like a shotgun. Take out everything all at once.
Kirsten: Yeah, I want to see, I want to see. Boom! In bird news, Pamela Taylor sent in a story that Mama Knows Best. A team publishing in Science, they showed that mothers leave a message in the egg when they create the egg that lets babies know what the environment they’re going to hatch into is like.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: So that the babies actually know whether or not to beg more or less for their supper. “You’re going to have a hard life, kid. It’s going to be rough.” “Okay, I’ll keep quiet, Mama.”
Justin: Oh, my goodness.
Kirsten: Ed Dyer sent in another story about birds which is really interesting, published in Behavioral Ecology, Indiana University Bloomington study. Looking at organic stinky compounds in the preen oils of dark-eyed juncos. They are birds that usually comes through here in the fall.
Justin: We get dark-eyed juncos in this town?
Kirsten: We get dark-eyed juncos. They pass on through.
Justin: I’ve never heard of this one before.
Kirsten: They are cute little brown birds, little gray heads.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: Yeah. Dark-eyed juncos, they’re great. They migrate through this area of the Central Valley, on their way between the Sierras and the coast. But a lot of – there hasn’t been a lot understood about the role of smell in bird behavior because for a long time we didn’t even know the birds could smell.
Their olfactory bulb – the part of the brain that deals with odor – is tiny, teeny tiny in birds. Well you know, a lot of birds compared to the olfactory bulb that’s found in other birds. But research in Sea Patrols found that hey birds like, birds can smell and they possibly have a huge part of their behavior determined on smell.
So, this study looked at these juncos and found that there are differences in the odors, the compounds that are in the oils that they use to preen themselves between not only different populations of birds but also between males and females within populations of birds.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: So there are individual – each bird has an individual odor that’s actually characterized by population. So birds can actually tell whether or not or they could possibly tell whether or not they belong to the same population of individuals based on the way they smell. Hey, you smell similar.
Justin: Interesting.
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: Is it like…
Kirsten: It’s very interesting.
Justin: Is it like…
Kirsten: And so maybe this is another…
Justin: You’ve got the same – you’ve got the BO that I recognize? Or is it more like…
Kirsten: Right.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: Right. Kind of like, you smell…
Justin: Or you smell like Sagebrush.
Kirsten: You smell like…
Justin: We’ve all been hanging out in Sagebrush. So…
Kirsten: Right. Well, not like Sagebrush. You know, I don’t – that’s something that has yet to be determined. But it could be that odor does play a role in speciation and allowing birds to separate so that, “Oh you don’t smell like me anymore. So I’m not going to associate with you.”
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: I mean, this is anthropomorphizing a little bit. But from the Listener Mailbag we had a letter from Barbara from Australia related to our question of whether or not people can smell in their dreams.
We haven’t had a scientific answer to the question, but Barbara says, “Yes, I can smell in my dreams. A couple of nights ago I had a dream, weird as usual, in which I was squeezing jelly. And I distinctly remember it smelled acidic like some silicon ceiling gels or RTVs.”
“Also in the same dream I was watching someone cook and I couldn’t smell the food. So smelling in my dreams is not consistent. I would like to point out though that I lost my sense of smell about seven or eight years ago…”
Justin: Aaah.
Kirsten: “…and can’t smell much at all these days.”
Justin: Interesting.
Kirsten: Which is fascinating.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: Really fascinating that there is the sense of smell in the dream even without it in daily life.
Justin: See I can…
Kirsten: That’s fascinating.
Justin: Yeah. And I can remember even…
Kirsten: There’s the brainy memory.
Justin: …the abstracts, non-linear nonsensical dreams that I have. There’s some pretty too much detail sometimes upon waking. And I don’t smell. I have no recollection. I have no smell – recollection of smell or anything. Which is a weird thing cause it’s so closely linked to your memories.
Kirsten: That’s right.
Justin: Like you can smell something and it can trigger memory. But in dream, I don’t smell nothing.
Kirsten: You don’t smell nothing. Matt wrote in and says, “I was listening to your podcast for March 9th and I found some errors, ignorance, problems that bothered me. I’d prefer to say it in person. But being on the East Coast and still in school presents a problem.”
“Slap Justin and demonstrate how when a body has its outer radius shrunk than its rotational inertia decreases and it has the same energy than the velocity increases. E = ½ divided by,” no, I don’t know what that says, “to the exponent of omega times the W to the 2nd .”
“Anyway, based on the equation of inertia and motion, rotational inertia is similar to mass but based on how close mass is to the rotational axes. Axis, the effects may not be noticeable but they are important for GPS, communication satellites and anything else in orbit when the change may have occurred, especially if the axis moved…”
Justin: Right.
Kirsten: “…as this will require any satellites designed intended for geosynchronous detection to move, otherwise they would lose this.”
Justin: Okay. Somebody, anybody give me an update where they’ve changed any of the satellites with the GPS or had to do an adjustment because of the earth – no.
Kirsten: Because of the earthquake, right?
Justin: No, they didn’t. Sorry.
Kirsten: They probably didn’t.
Justin: Oh, by the way, I do have to do a correction. Early in the show I said that most of those big asteroids, shooting stars you see at night are smaller than a dime.
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: Totally wrong. They’re smaller than a grain of sand.
Kirsten: Smaller than a grain of sand?
Justin: Yeah. I totally overestimated.
Kirsten: It’s that what you checked? All right, Ali checked up on it.
Justin: So because the big one that we see…
Kirsten: Thank you.
Justin: …every like, what’s the big meteor shower that everybody goes out into the farmland put some blankets to watch it? The Pleiades-something, anyway, whatever it is…
Kirsten: I – right, no.
Justin: …it’s like a dust – we’re going to a dust cloud.
Kirsten: The leonids.
Justin: The leonids. We’re going to a dust cloud.
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: It’s all that is. And it’s…
Kirsten: Yeah. (Loren) wrote in and said, “You mentioned on,” I guess it’s not last week anymore, “you mentioned that there wasn’t any reason to believe that mitochondrial DNA would mutate at a faster rate than normal DNA. Mitochondrial DNA actually does evolve faster than nuclear DNA.”
“This is because if there is a mutation on one strand of nuclear DNA, there is only a 50% chance that the mutated strand will be passed on to the child, two strands.”
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: “Conversely, if there is a mutation in mitochondrial DNA and bottlenecking occurs where you get a small number of mitochondria, the relative proportion of that mutation could be greater.”
“Also, mitochondrial DNA is more susceptible to mutations in general than nuclear DNA. Just as prokaryotic DNA is more susceptible to mutations than eukaryotic DNA,” that’s bacterial DNA that doesn’t have a nuclear membrane, where eukaryotic DNA and multicellular animals does have a nuclear membrane.
“This is because the mitochondrial DNA does not have histone protection, is incapable of performing nucleotide in excision repair, replicates slowly where it spends a lot of time as single-stranded DNA and has more rounds of slow replication. Because of this it would seem pretty obvious to me that mitochondrial DNA can be variable between members of the same family as well as within the same person.”
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: Which is interesting. On next week’s show Ali’s going to be bringing the science. The Science of Climate Change, as she reviews the past ten years in climate science as the second in our series of the TWIS Decade in Review. And I’d like to give a shoutout to (Carl Buts) for this last story.
A story basically that is – it’s on singularity hub – but researchers at the Intelligent Systems Informatics Lab at Tokyo University have created a journalist robot. It can go out, take pictures, ask questions and investigate some scene and then write a story and post it to the internet. So…
Justin: You know, you know, actually…
Kirsten: How long?
Justin: …this may actually be one of the highest and best news. We may need robots, because if we want unbiased reporting, we may need to turn to machines.
Kirsten: We may.
Justin: Because I don’t think people are going to do it anymore.
Kirsten: That’s right. And I just want everyone to ask themselves right now. Do you know that we aren’t robots?
Justin: Mm hmm. Program creepy ending. Thanks everyone for listening. We hope you’ve enjoyed the show. TWIS is available via podcast. Go to our website www.twis.org. Click on Subscribe to the TWIS Science Podcast for more information. Or just, you know, go to This Week in Science, Google that up in the iTunes.
Kirsten: Google that up in the iTunes.
Justin: Google that up in your iTunes.
Kirsten: Or all of them.
Justin: This Week in Science and you’ll be right here on the cutting edge of the technology.
Kirsten: That’s right, for more information on anything you’ve heard today, show notes are going to be available on the website www.twis.org. We want to hear from you so send us an e-mail to kirsten@thisweekinscience.com or justin@thisweekinscience.com.
Justin: Put TWIS in the subject or be you’ll be spam filtered into oblivion. You can also get us on the Twitter @jacksonfly or @drkiki. And we’re also, you can telegraph if you still got one of those, if you got that goner. We’d love your feedback. If there’s a topic you would like us to cover or suggestion for an interview…
Kirsten: That’s right.
Justin: …a kitten trapped in a tree, whatever it is, give us a call, let us know. Insider stock tips, always welcome.
Kirsten: And we will be back here – or at least Justin and Ali will be back here – in KDVS next Tuesday at 8:30 am Pacific Time. And we hope you will join us again for more great science news.
Justin: And if you have learned anything from today’s show, remember…
Kirsten: It’s all in your head.
Podcast: http://www.twis.org/audio/2010/03/30/442/