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Waving At Memories, Justin Had Some Marijuana, Glowing Monkeys Batman!, Rhinos In The Dark, Intergalactic Planet Hunters Score, Falsifying Research, This Week In The Future, Neanderthal – Human Battle Royale, and more!
I'm the host of this little science show. 
I am going to try and listen and hope that this episode is not filled with polotics and global warming. I have stopped listening because I can’t take it anymore.I like to laugh I love paracites,I especially love plants and their toxins. I have been bitten by four monkeys in Indonesia.I am 38 and I am done playing political football. There is a huge world and galaxy out there.American polotics and your teenage listeners make you sound like you live in a micrcosm. I wish you the best. Have fun, Alan Cable
Hi Kirsten, Justin,
Here is the link to the transcrit. Our website can translate the english transcript to 13 other languages, so it may help some non native american audience of yours as well.
http://www.futuregen.sg/business-process/transcription-service/transcript-twisorg-june-2-2009/
Justin: Disclaimer! Disclaimer! Disclaimer!
Whatever you are planning today, whatever your mind is prepared for, whatever is expected to unfold over the next 24 hours, over the next week or over the next month or even a year, remember, such probabilities abound within each moment of time that any predictions you have made must be met with an ability to identify, adjust and adapt in the event of the unexpected.
Nothing, not even nothingness itself can be counted on ahead of its being encountered. And while preparing your mind for the unexpected sweet nothings, much like the following hour of programming, does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of the University of California at Davis, KDVS or its sponsors.
It should be the mental mantra of all free thinking minions to expect the unexpected, to welcome changes on the fly as opportunities to engage in mental gymnastics of our free will through critical thinking.
Regardless of how things end, we should look back and laugh, knowing that we have done well enough to win, or poorly enough to lose at something new and thereby learn from it.
Whether other outcomes were possible, impossible means nothing to us now. Possible and impossible are meaningless words to the free thinker. Do not be limited by words. Do not be limited by thoughts. Heck, don’t even limit yourself to listening to, This Week in Science, coming up next.
Justin: Good morning, Kirsten!
Kirsten: Good morning, Justin! That was a nice, lung-full this morning.
Justin: I was just getting started.
Kirsten: Yes!
Justin: I got more lung-fulls where that came from.
Kirsten: We are just getting started. And this is This Week in Science. I’m Kirsten.
Justin: Hi, Kirsten!
Kirsten: Hi! And we are talking about science today. We have no guests. It’s just me and Justin in the studio talking science.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: We’re breaking it down.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: And today, I brought stories about the brain, about glowing monkeys…
Justin: Glowing monkeys.
Kirsten: Glowing monkeys, batman. And some planet hunters, interplanetary planet hunters.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: Yeah. And some other stuff, there’s a lot of others. This Week in the Future, it’s a new segment.
Justin: I’ve got some marijuana.
Kirsten: You do?
Justin: The ability…
Kirsten: Want to share?
Justin: …to see tiny things from…
Kirsten: No.
Justin: Get down, girl.
Kirsten: I’m kidding.
Justin: I’ve got the ability to see things from space, tiny things, amazingly small things from space. And I have a compulsion to fake science, so watch out.
Kirsten: A compulsion to fake science.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: That’s not a good compulsion. I don’t like that compulsion.
Justin: It’s actually more widespread than many have thought, this compulsion to make up fake science.
Kirsten: I wonder if it’s like compulsion to steal things.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: I don’t know. Kleptomania.
Justin: Where are my sunglasses, by the way?
Kirsten: I don’t know.
Justin: Yeah, what’s going on around here Kirsten?
Kirsten: I don’t know.
Justin: Talking about the reefers and the things (they’re) missing.
Kirsten: Wait, what?
Justin: Never mind.
Kirsten: What? What?
Justin: No, no. I’m not accusing anybody of anything. (whisper) Slowly backs his chair out of – kicking distance.
Kirsten: All right. So, researchers at Caltech have been looking at the hippocampus trying to figure out a thing or two about memory.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: Mm hmm. And maybe they have. They realized that the hippocampus acts a little bit differently than was previously thought.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: Mm hmm. So, what’s a hippocampus? The hippocampus is this little tiny structure that I actually used to study when I was in grad school so, I’m very familiar with it.
This structure pretty much in the middle of your brain that deals with the consolidation of memory so, and also with spatial information. So, there are neurons in the hippocampus that fire when you are in particular locations and they’re called place cells.
And researchers have thought that like these place cells, you know, when you’re coming into a corner of a room or in a particular area, these place cells fire and response to particular attributes of that room, of that spot in the room and it’s been thought that these cells, the hippocampus basically fires all synchronized at once.
That (bringing) hippocampus has activated cells that are supposed to fire when you’re in particular places, fire and then information is transferred to the rest of the brain. So, that you know where you are and there’s a memory formed with that location.
Wow! These researchers were like, “Well, let’s take a look at this. And we’re going to take rats.†And they have rats in a little rat room with electrodes stuck in their head. And so, they can actually, in real time measure what happens as the rat is moving through the room with what happens in — to the neurons in the hippocampus.
And they found…
Justin: (This is only in) the webcam. I’m getting a diagram that can point into the brain.
Kirsten: I know my hands are all over the place we need a webcam in here. So, what Athanassios Siapas, who is a associate professor of computation and neural systems says – he says, that the hippocampus has a series of local time zones just like we have on Earth.
Justin: Interesting.
Kirsten: So, it’s not a synchronized activation of the hippocampus that occurs where like all the associated place cells all fire at once. It’s kind of like a time-delayed activation.
So, it’s one area in the hippocampus, it’s like a wave. So that it will activate in one part of the hippocampus and then the wave will spread out and move to the end of the hippocampus. So it’s, you know, step by step activation as opposed to everything all at once.
Justin: What kind of time frame are we talking here? Can you say that?
Kirsten: We’re talking – very small time frame.
Justin: Right. But I wonder if it’s…
Kirsten: Yup.
Justin: I wonder if the time frame is somewhere related to our perception of a moment, not hours but the mouse’s.
Kirsten: That’s an interesting question.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: It’s a very interesting point. So, what they’re looking at, they call them theta oscillations. So, it’s particular type of activation, a particular type of wave, the theta rhythm. And so, it’s an oscillation that actually sweeps through it.
And I’m not sure, I’m sort of, that’s something the time activation of the theta rhythm is probably related to that. So, whatever time frame that takes place in. So, you know, it’s really kind of an interesting discovery in that these changes, one of the researcher says, “Changes our notion of how spatial information is represented in the rat brain.â€
And so, it’s believed that the firing of hippocampal neurons encodes the physical location of the rat and its environment or a point in physical space. But they’re findings suggest that what is encoded is actually a portion of the rat’s trajectory.
So, a segment of physical space and probably like the direction that the rat is moving or like, you know, if a rat is moving toward a goal, and you have a goal that’s in a particular location and space, you can come at it from all sorts of different trajectories.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: And so, it’s this trajectory that somehow is being monitored and encoded by the hippocampus.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: Yeah. Not so much an “I am here†but kind of an, “I am going there†kind of a representation. So, it’s a really interesting take on how the brain works, how the hippocampus works.
And we don’t know whether or not this is the same in human’s brains but the hippocampus is very similar and we see a lot of similarities between species and how the hippocampus works especially within a mammalian hippocampus. So…
Justin: That is such a like Giordano Bruno, Copernicus, sort of way of framing yourself in the universe.
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: These bodies in motion and their relationship towards each other, away from each other as oppose to set locations of things interact. It’s kind of interesting. That would be inherent in our brain somewhere.
Kirsten: Yeah. It’s really a nice insight.
Justin: Yeah, thank you.
Kirsten: Good commentary. I like that.
Justin: (It’s like that.)
Kirsten: I don’t know, I don’t know.
Justin: (It’s like that.)
Kirsten: You’re listening to This Week in Science.
Justin: Still. Marijuana, okay. This is kind of an interesting study. They interviewed a lot of people who have HIV and AIDS and who use marijuana to treat symptoms versus symptoms that they were being treated with, I don’t want to say, approved medications, because it’s in a way, it’s an approved medication here in California at least.
Kirsten: Yeah. I mean, a lot of what happens, people will lose their appetite and so the marijuana helps to bring their appetite back. There’s…
Justin: There’s appetite anxiety…
Kirsten: Anxiety.
Justin: …depression…
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: …fatigue, diarrhea, nausea, peripheral neuropathy, which I have no idea what that would actually be trying to say.
Kirsten: It’s inflammation — neuropathy of the nerves. So, like your peripheral nerves, so, in your limbs, your fingers, your toes. So, you might actually like get – have pain as a result…
Justin: (Unintelligible)
Kirsten: …or like maybe shaking or, you know, there’s a loss of nervous control.
Justin: Yeah. But the interesting thing is it’s much more common here in the United States. Or they sort of couch it as saying either the marijuana use amongst patients is much, much higher in the United States or that we’re more willing to talk about than the other countries that were involved in the study like, they did the…
Kirsten: I don’t know.
Justin: …Africa, Puerto Rico, or a couple of the other ones that were part of this, Kenya, South Africa. So, the idea here though is that they – in comparing these over the counter medications…
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: …they found marijuana to be just as effective, actually lowered a lot of things like anxiety. And it brings, you know, it is another point towards the debate, that radius and many parts of the United States as whether or not to allow marijuana to be used medically.
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: And it’s sort of – it always amazes that this gets tagged in to every single debate on this as, you know, the idea that doctors have a hard time prescribing. Doctors would have a hard time prescribing marijuana to be smoked because it’s a known carcinogen.
You know, when you’re talking about HIV, AIDS and people who are, you know, having a hard time keeping a meal down, enough meals down during a time frame of a week or so, there’s (unintelligible)…
Kirsten: I mean…
Justin: …versus…
Kirsten: Yeah, I mean, but that’s forgetting that there are many other ways to ingest THC which is the active component in marijuana. And there’s been research to develop drugs that are just THC, so you can take in a pill form.
You know, at the marijuana shops here where people can actually go to buy the products, I mean, they have chocolate with THC mixed into it. There, you can buy brownies, you can buy honey. You can, you know, there are many other ways to actually – that they’ve actually prepared the product so that you can minimize the carcinogenic effect that would occur from smoking. If you’re not a smoker, you don’t have to smoke it.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: I don’t know. And so, that reduces that argument, the validity of it.
Justin: And I think the biggest problem is it’s so much cheaper than the prescribed medications. I don’t know why that would be an issue but somehow I think, it maybe.
Kirsten: So, what are they finding? What’s the big thing of this, I mean, it’s just…
Justin: It was just in surveying the traditional medications that are being prescribed by doctors…
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: …through pharmacists, through the, you know, our pharmaceutical industry versus the patient just using marijuana to treat the same symptoms and the outcome was about the same if not better.
It was actually rated better by the users on a bunch of different points especially the anxiety and depression part portion of the symptoms were more reduced than the rest.
And it also shows that a lot of – at least in the United States according to the study, there’s a significant percentage of those with HIV and AIDS who are using the marijuana to treat symptoms versus…
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: …at least a report from other countries which may have more to do with their legal system or the acceptability of it in the society. It’s hard to tell on that one.
Kirsten: Interesting.
Justin: But it’s pretty common now, all right, here in the States.
Kirsten: Yeah. I mean, there’s been a lot of research. It is a drug that can be used to successfully to treat symptoms. And it just has been demonized by…
Justin: I think, that’s what fascinated…
Kirsten: …you know, by misuse. I mean, when at the same time, there are more people using – I mean, according to polls, I read something recently where there are more people using pharmaceutical drugs and misusing pharmaceutical drugs…
Justin: Sure, sure.
Kirsten: …than they are using these so-called illicit drugs.
Justin: All right, I think that’s part of what fascinates me about this story is the two-fold. The one that’s still largely illegal…
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: …for one. The other that it’s being widely used which is a fun combo there. And the other is that it’s being rated as effective. So, yeah, it makes me wonder where the foot-dragging is really coming from and why it can’t be applied.
In California, we’ve done a pretty good job…
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: …on the state level of decriminalizing it. But we still have federal issues and we still have, you know, much more work to be done.
Kirsten: Yup.
Justin: But I think it should be – I don’t even think, it should be like, I don’t think these platforms and I don’t think, this is a necessarily good idea, all right, the way that we’ve got set up now. I mean, it would be nice if, you know, your pharmacist could just prescribe it to you and it would be just that easy.
Kirsten: Yeah. There are a lot of problems that would be dealt with if things were decriminalized. But this is not a political show. This is a science show.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: We’ll move on to more science like glowing monkeys.
Justin: Glowing monkeys is very science-y.
Kirsten: Very science-y. Researchers have made the first green fluorescent monkeys.
Justin: Because the world was being traumatized by monkeys bumping into each other in the dark.
Kirsten: Yeah, thank you.
Justin: Now, they will be able to see each other late into the night.
Kirsten: We have the Japanese to thank for this one. Transgenic marmosets, I mean, I’m just hearing a song right now. I mean, there’s going to be something, some song, transgenic marmoset…
Justin: Go for it Kirsten.
Kirsten: Yeah. I don’t know. So, why create transgenic glowing, green, glowing monkeys. Well, what you do is transgenically insert this jellyfish protein, a green fluorescent protein that’s actually called, Green Fluorescent Protein, GFP.
You introduce the gene into the embryonic primates. The gene in this case, sometimes, it only gets into certain tissues. But in this case, they’ve actually been able to insert the GFP protein into like all the tissues of the marmoset.
So, it really allows us to be able to look at different tissues and be able to see– watch the development of particular tissues, all the tissues in this marmosets when they’re expose to a particular kind of light, blue-light.
This kind of research, it improves on using retroviruses. So, these viruses that insert backwards –retro. They insert, instead of forming proteins, they insert into DNA.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: And these viruses have been used for a long time. These virus vectors have been used for a long time to insert genes into DNA to be able to create proteins of various different kinds.
This just improves on the technology. And like I said, got green protein in all the tissues. So, you don’t just have like a glowing green – the skin of the monkey only glowing green, you actually have the muscle tissue…
Justin: Wow!
Kirsten: …the brain tissue, all sorts of different tissues are able to glow under light. You know, the ethical questions, you know do we really want to be using…
Justin: Yes.
Kirsten: …primates for research? Yes. I mean, it doesn’t have a ton of public support but, you know, primates are the closest relatives we have.
Justin: (Right.)
Kirsten: And so, to be able to see how tissues develop, how things, how diseases are passed on, how things move, I mean, it’s all very important. It’s all very, very important.
Justin: And really, as the billions and billions and billions of people who turn into more billions and billions and billions billions and billions and billions people on the planet, I think the ultimate goal of genetic manipulations like this are one, we’re going to get to the point where more and more of them can be passed down to other generations. So, the next generation of monkeys would also be going that sort of thing.
And once we start to get there, once we can start applying that to humans. We cannot only eliminate disease; we can also engineer future humans to be much smaller. A lot of people hear that and say, “Wait a second, why do we want to be smaller?†Because then, we have more resources, then we have more room. I mean…
Kirsten: Yeah, you need more – the larger you are, the more resources you need to survive.
Justin: Exactly. So, instead of having, you know, seven, eight, ten billion, you know, people who are between five and seven feet tall or what have you, what we do is we get everybody down to about three feet, right? Just imagine walking into your house, half your size, your house, you would have doubled your square footage in relation to your own body.
Kirsten: Nice.
Justin: Amazing! Incredible! You now live in a palace. Congratulations! Going to the grocery store, you don’t have to buy a third of the food you normally buy, that would be much money you’d save right there. We have to make the credit smaller, you know, wallets would all have to be small. And we have to downsize some things.
But I think overall that’s where we’re going to have to go. The planet, we can’t make it any bigger. And it’s going to take too long to make Mars habitable. We’re just going to have to make people smaller, that’s where should be setting the journey of genetics. We should make THAT the destination, smaller people.
Kirsten: Mm hmm. Thank you very much.
Justin: That’s just…
Kirsten: End of the rant.
Justin: …my two cents on…
Kirsten: Yeah. I love this technology. I mean, like you said, it’s not just inserting the gene, it’s also – they’ve gotten it so that it’s gotten into the gene line.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: And the gene is being passed on from generation to generation in these marmosets. So, the marmosets are having glowing, green progeny.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: Baby-glowing green marmosets. And it’s not just that, “Now, okay, we have this population of green glowing marmosets.â€
Justin: We’re just cool enough by itself, we’ve got to stop there.
Kirsten: Right. But now, it’s like, okay so, the technology is really – it’s better. We’ve got into all the tissues. So now, let’s look at other genes that we can insert. Let’s see about looking at, you know, genes for Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, you know, all sorts of disease-based genes and see how, you know, see what we can do in terms of transgenic development of these animals that are very close to ourselves.
Justin: Yeah. And we’ll get to see all the places where it goes wrong…
Kirsten: Yes.
Justin: …where we have altered the genes so that there is no Alzheimer’s except now there’s some other issue that pops up that’s been, you know, that we’ve actually fouled up horribly by manipulating that genes that the Alzheimer’s was the better of the two outcomes or whatever.
I mean, these are all these things that we need to work out in the laboratory and then, yeah, applying to people when another few generations perhaps have passed.
Kirsten: Yup. Anyway, if anyway wants to call in, I know animal research especially primate research is always a very sensitive issue. I’d love to hear other people’s comments.
Justin: I really wouldn’t.
Kirsten: No? You’re not interested? All right.
Justin: Okay. I’ll hear, I’ll listen. I’ll be polite and I’ll listen. But I won’t care. I won’t. So, it was like – here you are put – so, you give us a call – no, I don’t want to. So, NASA is doing some amazing things with satellites.
Right now, a single-celled phytoplankton are being tracked. They’ve discovered this glow that’s being emitted from our oceans by the phytoplankton and they can use this fluorescent red light that they’ve measured to sort of study, not only changes in population and size of the phytoplankton, these little things that live off through our ocean.
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: They’re actually more – I didn’t realize this, but they are – I think the largest form of what do you call it, of plant life on the planet…?
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: I mean, it’s huge sections of the ocean which is, you know, most of the world which these things are doing the whole photosynthesis routine.
Kirsten: Yeah. The whole photosynthesis routine that minimizes the importance…
Justin: With the chlorophyll and the thing and the oxygen making…
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: …and they’re taking the carbons out and the stuff. And yeah, you’re doing a good thing for the planet.
They can actually track the large populations and are sort of back-engineering the signals that they’re getting, this glow that they’re getting so that they can see a lot of the different things that are actually transpiring – transpiring?
Kirsten: That was…
Justin: That was the word. It’s a real word.
Kirsten: It is.
Justin: I said the real word. There was more than – okay.
They can actually tell the efficiency of the photosynthesis by the glow. They hope to be able to tell to extract how much carbon is being taken out in any given time…
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: …how reproduction is going, how iron is being taken up and being used as a nutrient.
Kirsten: Right.
Justin: I mean, it’s an amazing – for something that is so tiny to be able to track from space, I think it’s brilliant.
Kirsten: And then the implications of that for, you know, turning the satellites back on the planet and looking for this kind of a signature that suggests that possibly, you know, if there are similar photosynthesizing organisms on other planets, I mean, we can look for a similar signature.
Justin: Or even penguin poop.
Kirsten: Penguin?
Justin: That’s another – yeah. They started tracking large populations of penguins by the dark smudges on the ice…
Kirsten: Really?
Justin: …where they’ve been. Yes.
Kirsten: That’s great.
Justin: I mean, that one is kind of a no brainer right? You look down, it’s like…
Kirsten: “Oh, penguins have been here.â€
Justin: Yeah, penguins are here. But it’s a way to track them across the ice that wasn’t, you know, it took somebody to think of it.
Kirsten: And now we have satellites that have the resolution is so great that you can actually see that kind of stuff on the surface of the ice.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: It’s not just, you know, looking at it from a great distance. The resolution of the cameras is actually really high and quiet able to see that kind of stuff.
Justin: I know.
Kirsten: Yeah. I’m really interested in like the tracking of the phytoplankton though. And how that, you know, what kind of information that’s going to give us about changes in ocean cycles.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: You know, whether or not, you know, we haven’t been tracking it for very long. I mean, there’s been mostly like, you know, tracking it through boats on the water. People actually getting out there and getting their hands wet and trying to track them.
And this kind of ability is going to give a much broader view and a faster view of maybe changes and how this very, you know, this is the bottom, the base of, you know, the ecosystem. These phytoplanktons support just about everything.
And so, to be able to track them and see how, you know, changes to a planetary, you know, atmospheric environmental cycles take place and how they change – I think, it’s going to really have some big, big future implications where our understanding of how things work.
Justin: Absolutely. It’s half of all. It’s half of all photosynthetic activity on Earth comes from phytoplankton.
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: And yeah. Because they’re spread out over the large swaths — I mean, that’s the ocean, it’s like a 70%, 72%…
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: …of the Earth’s surface…
Kirsten: Right.
Justin: …is the ocean. And we do have – yeah, going out there on a ship and studying a small population, we get little bits of data. Being able to see how the population operates over the entire globe by these satellites, by this close- by this signature, it’s amazing.
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: Huge step.
Kirsten: I’m just like, “Wow! That’s cool. Wow!†All right, good work planet hunters. You found a new one. Yehey!
At NASA’s JPL in Pasadena, a team of astronomers, well, two guys actually, they’ve been off and on for the last – every six months or so strapping a monitoring device to one of the telescopes owned by JPL and have been using a technique called astrometry or astrometry.
Justin: Astrometry.
Kirsten: It’s a very long technique. It takes a long time to actually see what’s going on out there. But the idea behind it is that you can focus a telescope with this device on it on a star and then look for signature wobble that occurs when a planet is gravitational affecting that star. So, you see this at a wobble.
But, you know, you have to…
Justin: Astronomy, astrometrics? What is it called?
Kirsten: Astrometry.
Justin: Astrometry is about wobble-wobble?
Kirsten: Wobble-wobble.
Justin: Somehow, I think I already knew it.
Kirsten: Yeah. And so, it looks for this tug, the wobble-wobble of a planet pulling on the star because that’s just – it’s kind of like if you had a hula hoop that has something in it, inside of it, you know, that hola hoop going around you kind of tugs on your waist.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: And so, that hula hoop is kind of like a planet going around a star, you know, the hula hoop tugging on your waist, if you were a star. Think of yourself as a star.
But it takes precise measurements. It takes a long time to figure it out because, you know, you have to wait for the planet to make it’s orbit around the star. And sometimes, planets have really long orbit periods. So, sometimes, it’s very, very time-intensive…
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: …over the course of years.
Justin: We take a year, some take – yeah.
Kirsten: Right. Some go faster, some go much more slowly.
So, they’ve been looking for about 12 years for an XO planet. And they found one, it’s a gas giant, like our Jupiter. It’s around a very, very small star. And it’s in the constellation Aquila, 20 light-years away.
The XO planet, they’ve named it, VB 10b. The star is called VB10. And it’s a little tiny star. It’s like one of the smallest known stars. It’s an M-Dwarf, 1/12th of the mass of our sun. And this Jupiter-like gas giant that they’ve found is actually pretty small.
And the gas giant itself is almost as big as the star. They have very similar – close to the same mass.
Justin: Interesting.
Kirsten: Or close to the same…
Justin: Size.
Kirsten: …size, yeah. So, this cold Jupiter, there might be more of them that could possibly be found using this technique and they’re actually looking for more. And this is one technique that is very good at finding this kind of gas-giant like planet around smaller stars.
And the reason they’re looking at smaller stars is that the smaller stars may have solar systems similar to our own. You know, this giant though, it is very, very closing it. It’s orbiting at about the same distance from its star, as Mercury is from our sun.
So, it’s fairly – it’s really close to its star. You know, probably not a lot of other planets, Earth-like planets around this little tiny star…
Justin: Right.
Kirsten: The star itself is probably not hot enough to be able to really support that kind of environment. But it’s an interesting planet, a new, newly proved planet hunting technique, it works.
Justin: The thing I’ve been thinking lately is the pans-permia idea, right. With life of some form or another, originated out there in the laboratory space and then made its way on a meteor or an asteroid or some sort of thing into the Earth or some other thing.
One of the ideas that I have – sort of been like playing with here is what if it doesn’t look anything like life on Earth when it got here? You know what I mean? I mean, even the life that became this life could have an adaption to this planet. It maybe that the planet Earth in its primordial state totally, you know, could not support the formation of what became life.
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: But that would have to be form somewhere else. It would have to be form in a different environment.
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: Some sort of extremophile planet…
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: …where everything’s extremophile, nothing that’s on there could survive on Earth except some where in travel of space and landing on Earth that found a nice, cozy little spot and adapt it until it could function.
So, life could exist on any of the – that’s the thing, it opens up any planet, with any type of atmosphere. Maybe a potential origination spot for a form of life. And we may not need Earth-like planet at all for the beginnings of life to exist.
Kirsten: Right, right. That’s exactly right. I also think, it’s very interesting if we think of – there’s this idea of life as, you know, a certain definition of self-replicating, able to, you know, looking for its survival using resources. There are lots of aspects to what defines life.
But now, we’re looking at viruses. And people are – there are some people who say, “Well, viruses pretty close to being alive.†I mean, they do a lot of the things that, you know, a full cell does a bacterium.
However, they have to – they’re kind of parasitic. They have to use other cells to be able to have their reproductive functions.
Justin: I’ve got news for you, Kirsten.
Kirsten: But…
Justin: …so do we.
Kirsten: I know.
Justin: I just want to point that out real quick.
Kirsten: Just point it out. But I’m just thinking that maybe we need to think of life in kind of a bell curve aspect. So that maybe, you just think of life as building blocks. You know, that as long as there are building blocks, it’s like blocks and building blocks, that different pieces are going to, you know, be taken out and put back in and that things are going to be swap around to make things fit the environment that they’re in.
So, maybe as long as those basic blocks are available anywhere…
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: …you know, and the right chemical conditions are available to allow swaps to change, you know, to allow the Erector Set of those (hearts)…
Justin: Well, Erector Set, you’re a little close, I was thinking more tinker toy.
Kirsten: More tinker toy.
Justin: That’s just the way I envision.
Kirsten: Yeah. I think, you know, the search for other planets, the search for, I mean, bringing other planets at one point were just hypothetical. And now…
Justin: Like galaxies…
Kirsten: …other galaxies.
Justin: Well, that galaxy is for what, 60 years.
Kirsten: Something like that.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: And other planets, that’s only been the last few years really. And now, it’s never finding them everywhere. And so, if we find life anywhere, it’s just going to, you know, suggest that it exist everywhere. Because when you find one, there’s going to be more. It’s like cockroaches.
Justin: What? No. It’s like ponies.
Kirsten: Like ponies?
Justin: Yeah. I don’t know.
Kirsten: I like your pretty picture.
Justin: And what cockroaches?
Kirsten: Your pretty picture of life. If there is one, there are more. Mice, cockroaches.
Justin: Same (goes) through the ponies. I received one pony by itself just hanging out? No, there’s always like a flock of them.
Kirsten: All right. Well, we have to take a break. This is This Week in Science, stay tuned for more, coming up next.
Justin: (Walk.)
Material daughter’s favorite song now.
Kirsten: I love the song. Thank you Monty Harper for Roundy Round.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: And from the 2009 Music Compilation which I hope many people have received from the KDVS Fund Raiser. Thank you everybody who donated to KDVS. And we hope that you’re enjoying the CD as a gift from TWIS in KDVS to you for your donation.
And I hope you know that this CD is probably going to be a collector’s edition because of the missing track.
Justin: The hidden track.
Kirsten: The hidden track. It’s not really missing, it’s just hidden. It should be there but somehow in the production process, it didn’t show up as it’s…
Justin: Two tracks walk in one track.
Kirsten: One track. Oh, dear. Two tracks are better than one. I don’t know. This is This Week in Science and we have more science news. Bring it.
Justin: All right. The frequency with which fabricated data is fused into research is more common than previously figured according to Daniele Fanelli of the University of Edinburgh.
Kirsten: Edinburgh.
Justin: The results find that false data is not only more frequent but might be particularly high in medical research. Woo-Suk Hwang’s fake stem-cell lines or Jon Sudbo’s made-up a cancer trials were some of the more prestigiously published examples of bad behavior in science.
Kirsten: Bad.
Justin: This current analysis focused that behaviors actually distort scientific knowledge and extracted the frequency of scientists who recalled having committed a particular behavior at least once or those who knew that a colleague had.
It’s a very fun sort of some numbers that came up here. On average, across surveys, around 2% of scientists admitted that they have fabricated, falsified, altered data to improve an outcome at least once…
Kirsten: Wow!
Justin: …which I don’t understand at all what that could possibly mean. How do you – in the pursuit of science, can you improve an outcome?
Kirsten: Or if you want a certain outcome. And then, you just…
Justin: How do you improve an outcome with bad data?
Kirsten: Change.
Justin: No. That’s not – that’s no. That’s not improving an outcome. That’s just lying.
Kirsten: Yeah, it’s lying.
Justin: That’s pretending to do your job and not actually doing it.
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: Up to 34% admitted other questionable research practices including stuff like failing to present data the contradicted one’s own research and dropping observations or data points from analysis based on a gut feeling that they were inaccurate.
Kirsten: Wow!
Justin: So, our next…
Kirsten: When we keep finding out more and more about how inaccurate and how unable humans are to actually really see real patterns, like we see patterns everywhere…
Justin: Right, right.
Kirsten: …so, you might feel that there’s a pattern. And so, I can just leave that out.
Justin: And that maybe that that one data point that’s completely off the chart, off the spectrum of all the other data points was the data that you texted in, that you were too hang over to come into lab. And so, the lab assistant ran the operation that day.
Kirsten: Right.
Justin: And that’s the only data point that’s out there.
Kirsten: Right.
Justin: It could be, I don’t know.
Kirsten: And there are…
Justin: I’m making up excuses now, but still.
Kirsten: There are outliers. And you can, you know, drop…
Justin: Is that white (liers)?
Kirsten: No.
Justin: No.
Kirsten: Data points that don’t fit.
Justin: Right.
Kirsten: And when you have very few of those, you know, you can kind of take those out of the rest.
Justin: Can you?
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: I don’t know.
Kirsten: Statistically, there’s a certain – you can fudge things or the statistical fudge factor.
Justin: Or they allow them and say, that yeah, they’re not representative of the – because you have…
Kirsten: Not representative of the sample.
Justin: They’re not representative of the sample or they or if you’re within your margin of error that…
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: …should be – you should have error…
Kirsten: Right.
Justin: …still.
Kirsten: Yes.
Justin: Yeah, okay. So, this is a part that starts to get hilarious to me. Survey asked about the behavior of colleagues as well. So, 2% had admitted they’ve fabricated, falsified or altered data to improve the outcome, whatever that means.
But when asked about behavior of colleagues, 14% knew somebody else have fabricated, falsified or altered data to improve an outcome.
Kirsten: So, a lot of people know that 2% of scientists, right?
Justin: Either they are extremely popular or there’s an under amount of self-reporting going on.
Kirsten: Which is probably more likely.
Justin: Mm hmm. So…
Kirsten: You think?
Justin: Yeah. And up to 72% as opposed to the 34% who admitted questionable research behavior, 72% knew somebody who would have committed other questionable research practices. So…
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: … there goes the 72% from 34%. So, it’s a really – and what’s funny is that this – they figure out this sort of ahead of the survey, Daniele Fanellie had figured out that there was a lot of varied data coming back about how often this happens.
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: And a lot of it was in contrast with itself and didn’t make – by focusing on the question of what do others do, you know, as opposed to just to yourself, this is how the sort of number jumps much bigger.
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: The self-reporting is always lower, 2% to 34%, this is 14% and 72%, it’s amazing. So, what does really – this is…
Kirsten: But at the same time, you know, the reporting of others is probably over estimated.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: You know, probably people are not fully reporting their own activities. And they’re probably over estimating what other people are doing. And so, the number – the real number probably lies somewhere, you know, somewhere in the middle.
Justin: I don’t know, it could be higher. It could be higher because look, if only 2% are a forthright enough in the survey, maybe that other 12% that somebody knew about is only a smaller sample of a much larger percentage that were keeping it hidden from their colleagues better.
I mean, they’re saying that the troubling thing is this misconduct was reported most frequently by medical and pharmaceutical researchers – pharmacological researchers, which…
Kirsten: Oh, that’s no good.
Justin: No, it’s not good for a society at large.
Kirsten: For health, yeah.
Justin: And it does imply that there is a profit motive to this, you know, which is again, this is where the problem comes in, when you have industry generating its own science for its own ends, you end up with higher percentages of fraud. And we talked about this a few times on the show already, but…
Kirsten: Yeah. And we were talking about the scientific journals that are being…
Justin: Manufactured.
Kirsten: …manufactured, you know, they are basically advertisements. And this is another side to that story.
Justin: The 29% of research that is where they fail to sight the fact that they work for the industry or (unintelligible)…
Kirsten: Or they’re, you know, or there’s the underreporting of results because they’re not the results that are, you know, are…
Justin: Wanted.
Kirsten: …wanted.
Justin: Wanted, wanting at the…
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: Wanting at the beginning of science an outcome, bad, bad news.
Kirsten: Well, everybody goes into something like, “Oh, I think it’s going to be like this.†Or, you know, you have an idea…
Justin: “It would be great if this does this.†Yeah. It would be cool.
Kirsten: Yeah, but…
Justin: It would be cooler than not finding it, that it does it.
Kirsten: Right. You know, there are tons of string theorists, sort of like, you know, their whole careers are banked on the fact that, you know, “Oh, string theories, you know, we’re going to find evidence for it.†Still new evidence.
Justin: Hey, well, they back-off. They figure out they’re out. They found the parachute. They’re calling it framework now. It’s a framework for an idea. You can play other ideas to the framework…
Kirsten: Right.
Justin: Show me a graviton or…
Kirsten: Show me the future. This Week in the Future, your data will last a billion years.
Justin: Oh, great. I’ll never get those pictures off of Facebook now. Oh man!
Kirsten: Forever, even long after we are gone, your pictures. That’s right. All you college kids, just watch out those party pictures that you post on Facebook, it could last longer than…
Justin: He knows one of your friends has a sharpie. He’s just waiting for the first person to pass at on the couch…
Kirsten: Mm hmm, yeah.
Justin: …and you’re done.
Kirsten: And when that alien raised in the future finds our planet, that’s been destroyed, they’re going to be like, “What is this disc?â€
Justin: “Early men used some sort of marker to write things all over their face and their foreheads.â€
Kirsten: Researchers at UC Berkeley are looking at using nanotechnology, carbon nanotubes with little nano iron particle embedded inside a little bit in the middle of a hollow carbon nanotube that can be used, can be flipped, flip that bit to record information.
And because of the location inside of the carbon nanotube, it allows it to retain the information that’s stored on it — retain that encoding for what they are suggesting could be a billion years.
Justin: Now, all we need is information that’s worth keeping for a generation, let alone a billion years.
Kirsten: You know, can you imagine, like what would you want to store for a billion years? What could you possibly want to store that long?
Justin: The only thing I can think is like family photos. If my great, great, great, great – but then, by the time you get down that many generations…
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: …they’ve got so much family behind them that they’d have to look at so many pictures of dead people who they’ve never met, it would be like, “Who’d even look at that?â€
Kirsten: Yeah. It’s an interesting idea, you know, it brings up just the technology of school because we’ve been talking about the failure of some of the modern information storage devices that as things become more nano as they get smaller and smaller or running into the possible problem of gamma rays interfering with the information and maybe screwing up your MP3 player because all of a sudden, you know, you’re storing much more information in a smaller amount of space.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: And we’re dealing with sub-atomic levels of size that can actually be influenced by subatomic particles that, you know, that are hitting the Earth all the time but you don’t even notice.
Justin: Right.
Kirsten: You know, so, there are these very interesting implications that if we could come up with a data storage that can get past that, maybe the size won’t be such a problem, you know, like you’re going to hit by a gamma ray storm, gamma ray burst, you know, your music will last through it.
So, Gannett, one of the researchers, he’s a graduate student in Physics at UC Berkeley, he says, “There are a few nice things about this system. First of all, the voltage required is only around a couple of volts which is very easy to generate and compatible with existing technologies. And second, the iron will stay where we put it, that is, it doesn’t move when the voltage is turned off.â€
Cool.
Justin: I think this is going to be use by the microbloggers, the life bloggers, the people who are taking records of every meal that they’ve had throughout the day, every purchase they’ve made, every…
Kirsten: I mean, we talk now about the data storage problem of, you know, how are we ever going to find enough space to store all the data. The information is being produced by all these people who are, you know, all the people who are online, who are doing stuff. You know, it’s just people writing books, it’s just online digital data that has to be stored somewhere and where’s it going to go and how long is it going to last. You know, your CD might break down over 10 or 15 years.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: But how are we going to make something that will last in perpetuity that we can stick in a library, that actually is going to be there as long as we are and maybe longer.
There is another study and I should have brought that out also. But there was another study that has increased, potentially increased the amount of information that can be stored on a DVD at too amazing amount. So, this is something on the level of like 10,000 gigabytes or something that you could put on a DVD.
Justin: Wow!
Kirsten: I don’t remember the exact number, but it’s another technological jump that could really increase our data storage which, you know, increase the amount that you can store on a smaller space and the length of the time that it can be stored there, we’re dealing with some really interesting implications of a future of information.
Justin: Right. And yet, the majority of information, it’s still worth now they think? I mean, it’s still, we’re still using the brain somewhat, all right.
Kirsten: We are?
Justin: Yeah. I mean, like, because they think that happens is you can store all the information like, all right, we’ve got – now we have magnetic tape reels, full of volumes of information we’ve stored on these tapes that nobody has a player for anymore.
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: Or nobody has – all right, like the next generation’s got a DVD, like why would I need that? Why would I need something physical to store my data on?
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: Like when there’s remote storage for everything and nothing needs to be physical. Taken in or put out like, you know, I mean, we’re going to change a few more times our complete platform from which we’re launching all these information.
Kirsten: Yeah, where we are now is not where we will be in the next 15 years.
Justin: Correct. And 53 million years ago, life wasn’t where it is today either.
Kirsten: So, This Week in the Past?
Justin: Yeah. Ancient rhinos living above the Arctic Circle. Huh?
Kirsten: So, not in Africa.
Justin: No, nowhere near Africa.
Kirsten: Nowhere near – above the Arctic Circle.
Justin: Above the Arctic Circle. We’re talking like Ellesmere Island, we’re talking like the Northern Greenland sort of parameters.
Kirsten: Where now like hardly anything lives.
Justin: There’s like polar bears and some seals and narwhales, that’s about all that ever ventures out there.
Kirsten: Right. And little tiny, little, little plants.
Justin: Not even plants, really. It’s pretty much rocks…
Kirsten: Lichen.
Justin: …ice water.
Kirsten: Lichen.
Justin: That’s it.
Kirsten: We’ll do some lichen.
Justin: It’s just – it’s cold and then, it’s dark for six months and it’s light for six months and that’s what you get. That’s beautiful! But it’s (really) not…
Kirsten: Not habitable, really. I mean, not incredibly habitable.
Justin: Well…
Kirsten: But 53…
Justin: Fifty-three million years ago, it was a swampy tropical-lesque sort of forestry thing over there with deciduous leaves and aquatic vegetation springing up everywhere. It’s pretty luscious spot actually.
Kirsten: So, it might have been kind of nice except for the darkness…
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: …issue out of six months.
Justin: Right. And so, one of the things that – they’ve sort of been wondering for a long time, there knew there was life up there, they knew that things were living there. But they didn’t really know if they stayed, if they stuck around…
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: …or if they did migration.
Kirsten: Did they migrate, right.
Justin: Right. Because it’s dark for six months. Who’s going to stay out there? Well, it looks like through teeth – this kind of it also, this is amazing to me once again that science is as clever as it is.
They’ve used an analysis of carbon and oxygen isotopes extracted from fossil teeth of three varieties of mammals that they’ve found in Ellesmere Island. One was hippo-like, semi-aquatic creature and there’s the tapir, I don’t really know what a tapir but a third is rhino-like mammal known as brontothere.
So, the animal teeth are fossils that are strong enough to survive…
Kirsten: Right.
Justin: …the freezing, the unfreezing, the thawing, the movement, the motion that goes on up there. And the isotopic signatures of the carbon from enamel layers that form sequentially during…
Kirsten: It’s kind of like Tree rings.
Justin: Right. Yeah, exactly. So, they could see what types of plants they’ll be eating sort of seasonally. And what they found is they – their diets did change…
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: …conservatively. They went from eating a lot of leafy stuff to going after more twiggy things, more hard things in the dark months. But it also showed that they were staying there, munching on this – like, they live in the high Arctic all year long munching on some unusual things during the dark winter months. Something that I don’t…
Kirsten: Unusual things.
Justin: Oh, it gets dark, they were eating strange things.
Kirsten: Now, I’m thinking of what kind of strange unusual things could they have been eating.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: Who knows? Who knows?
Justin: Yeah. So, the temperature has probably range from just above freezing, all right? So, 34ºF, 35ºF, 40ºF region to nearly 70º in the summer months. It’s a pretty nice place actually. In fact, if the warming gets any strong – it might be a place to buy real estate.
Kirsten: You’d be ready to go? Yeah.
Justin: You know what I’m saying?
Kirsten: I think there are various countries and various individuals who are already up on that. People have given that a try.
Another historical tooth story that’s telling a tale of an ancient species, the battle royal between humans and Neanderthals got pretty violent at one point. And this is the first evidence of actual violence most likely between humans or our Hominid ancestors and Neanderthals.
So, about 28,000 to 30,000 years ago, a human may have eaten a Neanderthal child.
Justin: What?
Kirsten: Yes.
Justin: No.
Kirsten: Yes.
Justin: Say it ain’t so, Kirsten.
Kirsten: So, there’s evidence from this site called Les Rois – it’s French, Les Rois in Southwestern France, a butchered jawbone and a teeth that were found that suggests that a child, a Neanderthal child was eaten.
Researchers say, “Four Aurignacian sites, including Les Rous have yielded perforated human teeth, which confirms the interests in using human bone, and teeth in particular by Aurignacians for symbolic purposes.â€
So, symbolic purposed, basically, some of the teeth were maybe use for adornment.
Justin: Bling, bling.
Kirsten: Yeah. A little toothy necklace, you know.
Justin: Wow!
Kirsten: Yeah. So, they say that the marks may have resulted from slicing through the geniohyoid muscle, it’s a muscle at the bottom of the oral cavity, to remove the tongue. And it’s unclear whether or not the Neanderthal was actually killed by the human outright or whether, you know, it was scavenged maybe the result of a battle between a Neanderthal tribe and a human Hominid tribe. Or whether it was a, you know, actually an act of murder.
Justin: And perhaps whether or not we ate them.
Kirsten: Exactly.
Justin: These are our ancestors. These aren’t cruel warrior-like Neanderthals preying upon the early man while we coward and run. This is us eating children?
Kirsten: Yeah. So…
Justin: Oh, man!
Kirsten: …this research suggests that modern humans may have butchered Neanderthals and that maybe the environmental changes that were going on somehow – modern humans were more easily adapted to the changes. We were able to get on our feet faster. And then, started taking Neanderthal territories that would have led to skirmishes between the two different species.
Justin: Wow!
Kirsten: Yeah. And that maybe in those skirmishes, skirmishes things happen and, you know, it’s very possible that it’s one of those things whereas like, “I will eat my enemy.â€
Justin: I will take their strength…
Kirsten: That’s right.
Justin: …(of their youth.)
Kirsten: Who knows? Who knows? The brain size was definitely, you know, big enough for, you know, for thought to process it. I mean, there’s probably, I don’t know, how much similarity in thought to, you know, who we are now or at least to the tribal individuals throughout the world.
Justin: Yeah, maybe that’s so different.
Kirsten: How much similarity? We do not know.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: Very interesting, very interesting. And teeth tell the tale.
Justin: Again.
Kirsten: Again. So, watch out what you do with your teeth in your lifetime.
Justin: So, a whale of a tale is being told by fishermen, tax accountants of old, a whale of a tale, it’s all true, I swear by my tattoo.
Kirsten: By your tattoo?
Justin: Huh? The historical archive of fishing related information has been assembled by the Census of Marine Life, to give researchers a picture of aquatic populations of the past. This is a very creative, collective data points that they’ve collage together here.
They’ve gone across the diverse range of science-y disciplines from paleontology archeology, history, fisheries, ecology to just, you know, looking in the logbooks of old sailing ships.
So, I get up, (if that would) be history, I suppose. This sort of collection of the information about the marine populations here. Some of the data points are interesting.
Passages of Latin and Greek verse written in the 2nd century CE suggests Romans began trawling with nets. I mean, they were using net fishing, 200 years CE or BC, I can’t get the standardization time down.
In the early to mid 1800, years of overfishing followed by extreme weather collapsed the European herring fishery. And then, the jellyfish that herring had preyed upon began to flourished and completely changed the food web from that area.
Kirsten: Right, which is happening again, now.
Justin: Yeah, what is the – Philippine seahorses, they found plunged to 10% of their original abundance based on old fishing reports.
Ocean waters of New Zealand used to have right whales in the neighborhood of 27,000 before the oil hunters arrive in 1800. By 1925, they were perhaps as few as 25 reproductive females left. That number is back up to around a 1,000 as about the population of the right whales in there.
And they’ve estimated that population through analysis of whaling logbooks and records of catches and that sort of thing.
Comparing photos, this is – I love this. They compared photos of trophy reef fish that were landed in Key West by area sport fishermen between from 1956 up to recent times, right.
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: So, you’re looking at the, “Here’s what I got.â€
Kirsten: “Look at my big fish.â€
Justin: “Look at my picture taken and he’s (looking) at my big belly and here’s my fish that I’ve got.â€
Kirsten: Right.
Justin: The large – they revealed that it was the fish size shrank from an estimated 44 lbs. lunkers that they’re pulling out there and taking their picture next to about 5 lbs.
And there’s also mix of species changes and everything else in there. It’s not that the single fish went from 44 lbs. of…
Kirsten: What a creative use of photographic information.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: That’s really creative. Like, “Hey, we can actually look at this and compare over the years. All these people have been documenting stuff for us.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: Hey, we can just look at it.
Justin: Yeah, 1956 to 1960, large groupers and other predatory fish dominated the catches, including sharks that averaged over six feet long. By contrast, small snappers with an average length of one foot are dominating the catches today.
Also, there’s something called bottom scratching, which most people haven’t probably heard of, but it was a San Diego phenomenon, Southern California where people would go out snorkel, you know, or just holding their breath and catch this, you know, 25 lbs., 30 lbs. fish with a spear or even with their hands at the bottom of ocean right there off the coast of San Diego.
And you can’t do that now, those fish are gone. None of that stuff is there anymore. So, there’s a lot of – and there’s like, old footage of people going out there and doing that stuff.
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: So, anyway, basically this was showing us another example of the fact that the population of marine life used to be so much bigger than we actually think of it is today that we – to conserve, to get it back to a maintainable amount, we have to go and – you’re giving me the finger?
Kirsten: Yeah, it’s the end of the…
Justin: It’s a wrap it one.
Kirsten: It’s a wrap it…
Justin: Got you.
Kirsten: It’s end of the hour. We have to get out of here.
Justin: Oh, no.
Kirsten: This has been This Week in Science. Next week, we will be interviewing Doug Richards who is a – he writes science pieces for National Geographic Kids. And he’s working on some sci-fi books for kids in the 9 to 12 age range.
Justin: Cool.
Kirsten: Yeah. That actually use Physics principles to teach.
Justin: Okay.
Kirsten: So, Physics through science fiction. And we’ll be talking with him about his writing and the Physics and the science education, different creative ways to teach kids science next Tuesday.
And in the meantime, we hope that you enjoyed the show. We’re available as a podcast. You can go to TWIS.org to subscribe to our podcast, if you’re interested in that.
And for anymore information, our shownotes are going to be available on the website as well as our forums where you can get involved in community conversation. TWIS.org is the website.
Justin: Yeah, we want to hear from you, so email us at kirsten@thisweekinscience.com or justin@thisweekinscience.com. We love your feedback. Make sure to put TWIS somewhere in the subject matter or you’ll end up spam-filtered into oblivion.
Kirsten: And again, we’ll be back here next Tuesday at 8:30 am Pacific time. We hope you’ll join us again for more great science news and that you’ll stay tuned on KDVS for more great programming.
Justin: And if you’d learned anything from today’s show, remember…
Kirsten: It’s all in your head.
Tags: Waving At Memories, Justin Had Some Marijuana, Glowing Monkeys Batman!, Rhinos In The Dark, Intergalactic Planet Hunters Score, Falsifying Research, This Week In The Future, Neanderthal – Human Battle Royale
Podcast: http://www.twis.org/audio/2009/06/02/359/