Science! A 2013 Year in Review

the end of two thousand thirteen. We wanted to look back at some of the big stories of two thousand thirteen that kind of relate to stuff we've talked about all throughout the year on Forward Thinking. Yeah, because it's been an awesome year for for science and technological development. Amazing year. If you look at just a small list of the stuff that happened in two thousand thirteen, you'll realize that this podcast, if we were to try and

cover all of them, would last approximately seventeen hours. So we have decided that we're going to just pick that leapt out at us. These are not necessarily the most

important or most world changing stories. It's not a comprehensive list by any means, but this is the we We each took a section of the year and kind of looked at some of the big stories that happened during that part of the year and singled out some stuff that we really wanted to talk about and just kind of give an overview of some of the amazing things

that have happened so far in two thousand thirteen. Also, I should say we are actually recording this on December seventeen, two thousand thirteen, so there's still some of two thousand thirteen left to go. Yeah, if the Aliens land sometime between now and December or so when this show airs, yeah, it won't make the list. And also it's because the Aliens don't want us to talk about it. So uh, it turns out that I I drew the first part of the year, the first third of the year. So

let's start off with January. And January started off like gang Busters and the astronomy world guys, I mean like crazy amounts of astronomy going on, Like people were just constantly looking up and wondering what was out there and finding new stuff. Well, you know, in December you get a solstice and and that's that's fun for people who are obsessed with the sky, and but by come January, you're you're recovering from that. Okay, what else is out there?

What's going on? So lots of different reports that all

kind of are related came out in January. For example, Caltech researchers reported that based upon the information that we have gleaned from the Milky Way, that uh, they figured that for every star that's in the Milky Way, there's probably at least one planet, not necessarily meaning that every star has a planet in orbit around it, but that that's the ratio that works out, which means that we probably have between a hundred and four hundred billion exo

planets out there in the Milky Way and the Milky Way galaxy, just in our galaxy. Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics estimated that there are at least quote seventeen billion end quote Earth sized exo planets in the Milky Way. Now, that does not necessarily mean that these plants are in what we call the Goldilocks zone, though there was an

interesting paper about that. Later this year, yep Uh and some Kepler astronomers discovered an earthlike exo planet called k O I one seven two point oh two, which could uh, it was similar to Earth. It was in that Goldilocks zone and they say, so far as of January of this year, it was the most likely candidate for a planet that could potentially support alien life. A lot of qualifiers there, because obviously right now we can't tell if

in fact there is anything there. But it was one of those where they said, look, here's an example of a plant that could potentially be a planet supports life as we understand it here on Earth. Big exciting news and all of that, of course kind of related, which is why I grouped them together. Also in January, did you guys see the story about scientists figuring out how to cool down gas to quote below absolute zero end quote?

I have not. I don't even understand. I don't think that. Okay. Yeah, First of all, I sort of object to that particular type of reporting, saying below absolute zero. Absolute zero essentially means that you have a system where there is no energy there, you have no molecular movement. Yeah, it's essentially a universal constant, the way that the speed of light. Yeah, it's like the it's like the coldest something can get. If you think of cold as movement within a system.

So this particular research study used lasers and some evaporative cooling on atoms to create negative temperature. And in this case, what they mean by negative temperature is if you think of a classic system, all right, most of the atoms in a classic stable system are low energy atoms. Okay, if you add energy to that system, some of those atoms jump up to a higher energy level and they get a little chaotic, get a little crazy, start moving

all over the place. So in a negative temperature system, it's the opposite. In your average system, most of the atoms are high energ g. So the only atoms that are not really adhering to this are the few low energy atoms. So if you add energy into a negative temperature system, you then boost those few low energy atoms up into high energy and it becomes more stable. So it's the opposite of what we would think of with a classic system with positive temperature. And that's what they

really mean by this negative temperature. It's that the physics themselves behave in a way opposite to what we would see in a classic system. So it's not that it's colder than absolute zero that somehow you have negative movement. It's that the actual laws of how the system behave is inverted from the way it would be in a

classic system with a lot of low energy atoms. So I think in this case there was a lot of confusing reporting going on where uh, you know, some terms we're getting used in a very casual manner that ended up confusing things. But generally speaking, I mean it's an amazing news story. I just don't know the it was necessarily reported in the most understand as many deep science news stories happen to. Yeah, yeah, I mean, we can't all be forward thinking, right, I mean we can't. I

just told us to a higher standard. I am joking people, so don't don't get mad at me. Another great story in January, so any C and Corning paired up to create a multi core fiber optic cable that was capable of transmitting one quadrillion bits of data also known as a pet a bit in one second. That's a huge amount of information. Yeah, one thousand terror bits of information

in one second over a cable. They said that this has the potential of being able to maintain a speed like that over a cable that's as long as fifty kilometers. I believe We talked about this in our speed of Communication video, and it's pretty phenomenal stuff, right, I mean, this is this is where you're able It's it's you know, we all know that really this is going at the speed of light essentially more or less, but it's the

amount of information that you're able to pass through. Is the throughput as opposed to the speed, Right, that's what That was the point we made in that episode. And in fact, a lot of the things I'm talking about kind of relate to episodes we've talked about in the past, which I just thought it was kind of cool to

look back on this stuff. The way they did this was they created a triangular structure inside the fiber optics that would allow you to have multi phases of light passed through at the same time, so that the different light would not interfere with one another. So you could pass multiple pieces of information through the same core all the all the same time, and of course at at light speed. So it's pretty phenomenal stuff. Uh. January was also in deep space Industries announced that they had plans

for asteroid mining. He had a big episode on asteroid mining. UH. They would launch the first spacecraft, the plan is to launch it in twift and that is not necessarily a mining spacecraft, but a survey spacecraft. UM. The School of Medicine at the University of St. Andrew's used the geometry of light to pull objects towards the source of light. Man, we should have done an episode about tractor beams, Yes,

we did. Yeah, a lot of these were kind of the inspiration for those early forward thinking episodes, and so you should definitely go back and check those out, and we've done. We did a full podcast about this too. We talked about tractor beams, both the science fiction version and the science fact version, which is pretty cool. I

believe that's the one where we consulted Wiki PA. Yes, yes, And I think, Lauren, I think you have something that you want to talk about in January two before I move on to February, Yeah, I wanted to mention that was the month that that Rice University researchers announced that they had created this or well, that they had used a wet spinning method of creating carrent carbon nanotube thread that UM that can be used to both suspend and power a lamp. And and I've talked about this before.

I'm seriously infatuated with it. Um that the wet spinning method lets you dissolve clumps of carbon nanotubes and kind of squish them out into a thread, then wind it up and dry it out. And um, the resulting thread is macroscopic. It's like human hair sized. It can be hundreds of meters long. It has the connectivity of metal, the strength of carbon fiber. And yeah, you can you can watch a video of them both suspending and powering

a lamp with it. And this is super cool because you know, before creating carbon nanotubes was one of those processes where we couldn't do a lot of it, and certainly not very long carbon nanotube chains of them would be would still be microscopic or even smaller than microscopic. Yeah, so this was an incredible development and has the potential to be truly transformative in future applications. In many applications.

I mean, we we just did an episode about clothing, like, like, imagine entire pieces of cloth that are woven out of out of this kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, that's it's hard to imagine, to tell you the truth. It would be amazing to see and this could potentially be the groundwork for that. So moving on to a February, that's when the curiosity rover. You remember that little guy,

he's adorable or it's adorable, shitt and anthropomorphize it. Uh, the wheeling around on Mars Chicken out for possible signs of Martian life, as well as just doing surveys geological surveys. Really it's a geologic coal device, but you know it's looking for other stuff too. Uh. It used a drill to get a deep rock sample. Is the first time we ever got a deep rock sample from a plant

that was not Earth, So that's kind of cool. It bore a six point four centimeter hole into a target rock and scooped out dust for analysis and determined it well. It was able to determine the age of the rock, uh, within a within a narrow range. That narrow range being between three point eight six and four point five six billion years old. Sounds like it's about as old as the Earth. To give it take a billion years on that one. That's a pretty well anyway, it's kind of cool.

Also in February, the Large Hadron Collider shut down for maintenance, which was a planned shut down, although not just maintenance, but also to uh to address some problems that were kind of a faulty design issues so that they can fix that up. Once that all gets fixed up and it ends up coming back online, it's gonna be a two year hiatus, but once it comes back online, it will be operating at approximately twice as much power as before, so we'll be able to have much higher power collisions.

And as you collide these particles at higher and higher energy levels, you get to see more stuff. So, uh, you know, they already that this kind of dips into March, but they already had announced that they felt fairly certain that the mysterious particle they had detected with the Large Hadron Collider was in fact the Higgs boson, which is

the particle that explains why matter has mass. So you know, you can only maybe we'll start to learn more about dark energy and dark matter once it comes back online in two years. UM. Now, as far as the scientists who work at CERN, don't worry about them. Their jobs are secure because they have terabytes and terabytes and terabytes of data to sift through while the LHC is offline,

so they've got plenty of work. And the last story I have for February is that this is a this is my feel good feature because this is one of those things that I want is Victor Mattivets is a computer science grad student at the University of Illinois Chicago built a body suit that has haptic feedback system built into it and he calls it the spider Since Suit

after our favorite friend Web Slinger. Yeah, spider Man. So so the Spidy Sinse suit has haptic feedback built into it and can detect when you come close to an

obstacle or something is coming close to you. And the way he tested it was he took people who were wearing the suit, put blindfolds on them and had people rush up to them, and gave all the people with the body suit little cardboard ninja stars, and he said, of the time they were throwing the stars right at the people who are coming at them, because the feedback would be located in the same like giving you an idea of what direction the person or thing was coming from.

And while this was kind of a funny way of showing off this technology, the plan is to use it for people who have visual impairment so that they can get around their environments better, and it actually uses ultra sound technology. It projects out ultrasound signals and has tiny little microphones embedded in the suit that pick up the reflection of the signals. So it's kind of like echolocation in a way. I was going to say, this sounds a lot more to me like Daredevil than Spider Man specifically.

But well, the spiky sense of someone about the swing of a fist that your head, I don't know. I get it. I get it was the comics movies. But I was thinking you were going to say that the suit allows you to capture insects and liquefy them into precious fluids that you then derived nutrition from. No, not this one. I kind of want that suit. Yeah, that kind of relates back to our our discussion about bug burgers.

But yeah, let's let's move on show we Okay. March um So March, you know I mentioned arid the Higgs boson. That's when certain announced that the particle they had discovered they were reasonably certain it was the Higgs boson. But March was also the month when there was a report about another research project from cal Tech, this time one involving self healing circuits. Now I once again I kind of object to the terminology here. Uh, it's super awesome

work that was done. I don't necessarily think of it as self healing unless you think of the circuit as just, you know, it heals in that it's still capable of doing what it's supposed to do even after its suffered damage, because it's not that it repairs the damage. What happens instead is that they built circuits that if you were to damage the circuits and they used a laser to do it, it could reroute whatever was going on, so that the circuit could still fulfill its function even with

that damage there. So it's not like it fixed the damage. It was just able to work despite the damage. I really just thought of it as resilient. Yeah, I don't have any specific bullet points on them. But later in the year, there was a lot of interesting polymer research into you know, non conducive materials, but materials that could, in fact, given given a certain amount of stress, that nickel alloy that would repair micro tears if you were to, uh to apply kinetic pressure to the alloy. That was

really cool stuff too. But April that's when the Massachusetts General Hospital scientists grew rap kidneys in a lab. So what they what they did was they took some kidneys from deceased rats. They used detergent to strip away all the cells, the kidney cells, so what was left was the connective tissue like the blood vessel tissue and everything else that was left. But everything else was stripped away.

They then used some a combination of human umbilical vein cells to line the blood cell connective tissue and kidney cells collected from newborn rats to try and rebuild kidneys. And then they implanted those new rebuilt kidneys into living rats and it worked. Now, this is actually worked. That's been done for a while. It's not like this was just done. Now. The work was published this year, but it dates. The project itself dates back to two thousand eight. Uh.

Couple downsides. The rebuilt kidneys do not work as well as your normal kidneys would. In fact, for the rats, that works at about a third of the efficiency. But you know, for for dialysis, the percentage of efficiency is somewhere around fIF before you get put on dialysis, so

it's actually above the dialysis threshold. So it already meets that. Now, granted this is for rats, it's not for humans, and the scientists were very quick to point out that elite from rat to human is incredibly complex and that that this approach would not be something that they could easily pour over to humans. It's more of a a you know,

learning as we go. Uh. They said that in order for it to make a true working human kidney, they would need to learn more about steering stem cells so that they developed into very specific types of tissue so that way you have a good possible transplant oregan. So we're still years away. In fact, the scientist says that he thinks we're decades away from seeing this being used as a way for human transplant, you know, to actually

grow replacement organs. However, he says, we're gonna learn so much along the way about how these organs repair themselves that that alone will be really useful. And um, that's all I have. I'm ready for someone to pick up in May. I mean, I could mention the fact that IBM made this cute stop motion animation by manipulating single atoms and taking pictures of the single atoms using an electron uh telling microscope. And it was a boy in his atom and it was adorable. But that's just my

own favorite little story from me. It sounds like you did mention it. I guess I did. Ye. So in May, pretty big breakthrough human stem cells created by cloning, right, that's huge. Yeah. So it was a paper presented called human embryonic stem cells derived by somatic cell nuclear transfer and that was by schukrat me tell Ipo. I think I said that right, hopefully, But basically he was working

at the Organ Health and Science University in Beaverton. Oregan and his team was able to create embryon extend stem cells specific to the patient through cloning. So big for

therapeutic cloning in the future, big research promise there. In June they had the initiation of Google's Project Loon, right, yeah, Google Loon was, uh it still is a project that Google is looking into to provide WiFi too hard to reach locations using these balloons that carry the transmitters essentially and they float in the stratosphere and you would use hundreds of these things to create WiFi networks into areas that otherwise would never get this this kind of service.

Lauren and I talked about this on an episode of tech Stuff and we were absolutely I don't know if Charmed amused by the story of the the Alpha launch, where all right, we're basically Google men in black showed up at this nice sheep farmer's house in New Zealand and said, Uh, we want to install this thing. We can't tell you what it does. Yeah, we just want to put this thing on your roof, but we can't tell you what it's for, what it does. We can't tell you who you're with or who we're with. Do

we less do it? And they said, right, and look into this light. Yeah. So then they installed it and then uh tested it out and everything was working, and then they told they came back and they said, hey, you've got WiFi. Yeah, They're like wow, And so they hooked up their computers to the WiFi and it worked. So it's a a project that is still being uh kind of unfolded. It's really interesting stuff. Though. Also in June, didn't we have a really big Supreme Court ruling? Yes,

we did place out on the science turf. Yeah. In fact, this is one of those things that that I know a lot of scientists and doctors were very eager to see happen because it settled a question about whether or not companies could patent human genes. I mean, genetic study is is hitting you know, a furious pace right in

research facilities. There's a lot of potential to treat various diseases or to diagnose diseases, and there there's a lot of incentive for companies to develop ways of doing this because it's you know, it's a complicated UH area that very few companies can get a head start in. But of course if you have that ability to head start, then you want to protect that by patenting the heck

of the stuff, including human genes. Well, there was a Supreme Court hearing where some scientists and doctors challenged patents held by a company called Myriad Genetics and specifically the genes that they were interested in correlated to risk of hereditary breast and ovarian cancer. And the sciences doctors were saying, we want to be able to develop our tests so that we can test women for this and and screen

them for it effectively. But if you hold, if this company holds the patents on it, we can't do that without first going through this company. So it's restricting people, uh and their ability to get quality healthcare. And so the Supreme Court sided with the scientists and doctors. It was a unanimous decision. They said that you cannot patent something that is occurring naturally. You can't do that. So

you can't discover something that no one was able. Even if you were able to isolate that gene, you can't patent the gene because it occurs naturally. What you can do, they said, was if you create something synthetically, like you create synthetic d n A, and you create genes this way, some sort of synthetic gene that you can patent, So

you can patty your dinosaurs. But not if you're able to recreate dinosaurs synthetic means, which is what you would have to do, because there's no surviving genetic information that we could so that you know of well, you're not going to get it from a mosquito trapped namber, so that's already been disproven. Look, you don't don't don't tempt me to fly my car at you later today because I'll do it anyway. So, yes, that was a huge finding right there by the Supreme Court. So it's big

news and great news for scientists and doctors. This wasn't necessarily big news, but I thought this was quite amusing. So this is from a BBC report that was in July, and they reported on research that was presented at the uk A National Astronomy Meeting. Uh And I just thought this was cute. Basically, they predicted that the last Earthlings to survive on this planet will be microbes. Big surprise. Uh. They sort of laid out a model here. I thought

this was interesting. And so they were researchers from the universities of St. Andrew's, Dundee and Edinburgh. Uh, and they looked at what's the future of the planet Earth gonna look like for life? They said, well, and about one billion years, things are going to get really nasty because of the increasing size, intense and luminosity of the Sun. Basically, the oceans are going to boil, filling the atmosphere with water vapor, which will trap more heat and cause a

runaway greenhouse effect. And that's what people used to think happened to the planet Venus. I'm not sure if that's still the prevailing theory for why Venus has such a hot, dense atmosphere today. I know that theory has been challenged, but it might still be the main theory. I don't want either way. It would suck for say us, Yeah,

it's it's not good for life things. Presumably in a billion years we have figured a few things out blow yourselves up, right, So in a billion years, basically that'll kill all macro organisms left on the planet. So plant and animal life bye bye. But extreme O file microbes might still be alive in subterranean water sources, and that's who they think will be the last ones hanging around.

But they also said that all life on Earth will be cut put by two point eight billion years from now, So we've got that long to get off this planet and colonized greener pastures. All right, good, good to know our timeline. Yeah, okay, So also in July, I thought this was beautiful solar impulse complete the cross country flight. Now we've talked about that in our in our Flight

podcast about the future of aircraft. Designed that the Solar Impact Impulse was an all solar aircraft, literally all solar. So on the one hand, it took a while to get from California to JFK in New York. They left in May and they arrived in July, and of course they stopped. It wasn't continuously they had to watch bio Dome eight times in a row. I don't know how many times. I don't want to think about that. Um right, So they stopped a bunch of places along the way.

But it is pretty amazing. I mean, I don't know if you'll realize how cool this is. This is a plane powered entirely by solar panels. Keeping that in mind, it had some pretty major drawbacks obviously. So yeah, I mean it went slower than your average car speed, and I'm sure that carrying capacity was low. Right. That was also the pilot. You could have one person on board. In other words, Yeah, um, okay, so that's pretty cool.

Also in July, Boston Dynamics, that is the robotics company that created the Big Dog, that big, horrible scary thing that I think in the future will become a really cute thing. Yeah. It's a thing that can throw cinder blocks. Again exactly. Um so uh, they they for Darper created Atlas, the humanoid robot, which is a terminator. Um it's uh, it just is like would you call like the Yeah, it's six feet tall, it's bipedal, and it looks scary

as hey. You can walk by petally it can go over a rough landscape, it can manipulate objects with its hands, it can scan the environment with sensors. So it's got like scary stereoscopic camera eyes, and it's got laser range finding, and it would be great in disaster scenario. So imagine, like a nuclear power plant melts down. You need somebody to go in there to a sort of human shaped

and sized environment, uh and do some things. You might be hard to get vehicles in there or whatever, but this thing can go in there and do jobs that would probably kill people, and you know, track down human beings and carry them to safety instead of completely killing them. Yeah, fingers crossed. Fingers crossed, assuming that the person would not

be terrified to death of the lumbering monstrosity. Yeah, Well, you don't want to be the person that's the same size as the Atlas spot in the biker bar when it comes in looking for clothes, so that you're actually the camera eyes aren't that great. So what you do is you hunker down and it can't tell that you're not actually the same size as it. So it's like the the mythical eyes of the t rex and dress a. No, it might just think that you're like a fetal position

sized human. That's fine. I often am that speculation on my part. Maybe the Atlas spot is smarter than we all suspect um, much better at stealing your clothes. Excellent, Okay. Also in July, Curiosity Rover has traveled one kilometer. It's a little rover that could the miss roll for the good but broken petty um. In August we got the unveiling of the in vitro meat hamburger served in London no jokes. Yeah, meat grown entirely in the lab, but

cruelty free. That's pretty cool. And so in case you haven't listened to our podcast on this, we talked about it in the Future of Food episode. But um, the in vitro meat is real meat. It's not fake. This is one for real cow beef. But no cow had to die to make it. Um. Well, actually I think maybe this batch they did, but in theory like an

original cow and has to die. To me, I don't think it was truly cruelty free because from what there was grown in veal stock and one of those scientists I here was really snooty, So there's a little cruelty in the lab. Regular basis. So it was really expensive. The the lab grown hamburger cost about three thousand dollars, a little bit of my price range most days. Yeah, but you know, maybe someday you'll win the lottery and and feed yourself on sweet, sweet lab grown flesh. Okay,

I want to hit one more. Element one fifteen confirmed ununpenti um. That's way up there on the periodic table. It's one of those big atoms that you do not find in nature. You have to create in the lab synthesizing smashing atoms, because it basically dissolves into nothingness within Yeah. It has a half life of less than a second.

It's my micro seconds. Uh. It flies apart immediately. And so this is cool because it had been previously claimed to have been discovered I think in two thousand three by scientists in Dubna, Russia, but researchers this year just created it again. So they pretty much confirmed it. Yep. And that means it's going to get an actual permanent name. Won't always be called unknown pentium. It'll be called something out for all the ages on obtaining them. Maybe. Yeah.

Well that's a funny point because also this element one fifteen has showed up in science fiction and in conspiracy theory literature. There was a guy who claimed that he once worked at Area fifty one and he had worked on reverse engineering alien spacecraft. What he said as well, they create their anti gravity propulsion with the use of

element one fifteen is a fuel, that's how they do it. Uh. Yeah, we already knew that he wasn't telling the truth, but this is pretty much proof that he's not, because the atoms are not stable enough um to be in any kind of technological sense, unless there's some really unexpected isotope of it that that we're not foreseeing right now. But

I still don't believe him. Yeah. So one fifteen we're getting up there, and the cool thing is, as we keep climbing up the synthetic element ladder, there's also always the possibility that we're going to discover, as we've talked about before on here, sort of an island of stability, the super heavy elements that are much more stable than we expect, ones that don't almost immediately you know, end

up deteriorating into something else. And if we do discover elements like that, they might have unknown technological applications that could be really useful to us. Okay, so that wraps up August, right, Oh, yeah, so that we're moving into September. Alright,

September we had some awesome news and AIDS research. UM a vaccine that was developed at OHSU appears to have cleared s i V, which is the semi in version of HIV in monkeys entirely um and until now, infections have only been cleared in very select cases where people received anti viral treatment is as soon after contraction as possible, or um or during stem cell transplant. But so this, I mean, this is major um and And basically what they did is they modified a common virus called um

pido megalovirus. Yes, that is an actual thing, Sido megalovirus UM. They modified it to express certain proteins from s i V, and that prompted the T cells and monkeys bodies T cells being you know, a common part of the immune system, to develop a really intense search and destroy mechanism for s i V. So, uh, you know, huge application not only in in AIDS, I mean, because HIV is a

really virulent virus. UM It's it's very powerful stuff that's really hard for the body to clean out, but it could be a huge step in caring not only AIDS, but many other terrible diseases. So awesome. Um. Also in September, we got news that Voyager had officially left the Solar System a year previously, which time officially super officially this is important news about uh, you know, NASA said that Voyager had in fact been traveling through interstellar plasma for

about a year. The tricky thing about all of this is that Voyager, you know, doesn't have an ionized gas sensor on it, so it needed another kind of indicator. And to what they wound up using was they tracked this burst of solar wind that had originated in March and uh it it vibrated the plasma around the craft in April, and scientists figured out from the pitch of the oscillations that the plasma was dense enough that this

was in fact interstellar space. It's kind of funny because the announcement came this year, But then it's one of those things where like, so, guys, I guess where Voyager has been for like a year. But that's the only science works, right, because you know, you have to check and double check and triple check and all this and wait for data to come back to you from satellites.

It's an interstellar space. So yeah, I was just thinking about, like, when we're naming all of these discoveries, it's funny that I think in a lot of these cases we're not actually saying when the discovery happened, when we're talking about when the information about it was published, which is an important step. So oh sure, sure, And and I do

love that that sciences. I mean, just like with the Higgs boson, where people for a long time, we're like, we think that this is totally a thing, and it wasn't for months, months, years until they said this is totally a thing. We still think, yeah, and exactly, we're really pretty sure. But hey, we are an interstellar species. Now we are something that we made. It has left our Solar system. That's beautiful and terrifying, not just my

hopes and dreams. In better news, um September was also when the Mars rover found a whole lot of water in the soil and continuing along with with with Jonathan's news about it digging up some some good soil samples. About two percent of the surface of Mars soil is water, which is you know, potentially exciting for lots of future applications of us getting over there or even discovering what

might have been there before. Yeah again, you know, the rovers a geological survey type device, but it's always possible that that we'll have one that is more speci tyfically suited to looking for signs of biological life sent later. And it's always possible that the Curiosity Rover could uncover some other example of that through its you know, operations as a geological survey machine, but that's not its main purpose, right. There was some exciting in vitro pluripotent stem cell research UM.

Previous research had dictated that cells could really only be reverted into a pluripotent stem cell state UM, you know, from which most any kind of cell can develop in addition the lab, but researchers at the Spanish National Cancer Research Institute in Madrid found that it's actually more efficient to carry this out in a living animal, and they may have even taken the cells into a more primitive tote potent state, which means that other tissues like like

placenta could be developed from it. You know, this is incredible stuff because you know, for the longest time, it looked like stem cells. Like the stem cells we were going to be able to use for the most part would be uh, would not be pluripotent stem cells even right, They'd be stem cells that could develop into maybe one

or two different tissues, but not any tissue. Whereas this has the potential to be truly revolutionary if if we can you know, replicate it and also use it in organisms other than say mice, right exactly, And even that it would be more efficient to do that in a living, living being than in a in which then you have to get the stuff in the addition to a thing,

and that's a whole other complicated process. So this is really exciting for you know, like regenerating tissue or limbs or stuff like that in the future potentially um quick note. In October, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to Francois Englert and Peter Higgs for the mechanism that led to the Higgs Boson discovery. Oh, I had something in October. I wanted to talk hall. Yeah, that is my favorite holiday,

but also a logical discovery. There was a really cool paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper was called Prevalence of Earth Sized Planets Orbiting sunlike STARRS, and this was an update of predictions about the number of earthlike planets habitable planets in the Milky Way galaxy. Basically, a Kepler survey of forty two thousand sun like stars uh found six three planets and about ten of them were Earth sized and inhabitable zone the

goldilox zone. Yeah. So this is a quote from the and that that means habitable for life, of course, as opposed to for rocks, for rocks and dust. You know, I just don't have it. Of course they do. A quote from the abstract, this is direct. We find that twenty two of Sun like stars harbor Earth sized planets orbiting in their habitable zones. So that's more than one

in five. Whoa, that's a lot. So if you've heard our podcast about the Drake equation, that's sort of like a ratio and number you get for predicting the probability that there's life technological life out there in our galaxy. See, that's one variable. We're starting to lock down the number of planets out there that could have life. That that number is fast closing on something tangible. Um. One more

thing I wanted to announce space news. NASA's MAVEN mission launched UH, and that was the MAVEN stands for the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission that launched in November. And basically it's going to explore the upper atmosphere of Mars UH and the ionosphere and its interactions with the Sun and solar wind according to NASA's mission project page. And basically what they're gonna do there is they're studying the Mars atmosphere and one of the things they want

to learn is where it went. I mean, this is a planet that lost its atmosphere over time. What happened to that atmosphere? And could the same thing happen to ours? I think it went on holiday alright to Venus? Would how does okay? Um? December, I've got another interesting mice study. Um. We we had some research that indicated that bacteria can help reverse autism like behavioral problems in mice. This was research,

um okay. So so there's a whole body of research that's been done in both mice and humans that has indicated that that autism and gastro intestinal disorders are linked and um. But in this case, a team out of Caltech that it gave mice a gut microbe that decreased both bad gastro intestinal symptoms and also social anxiety kind of symptoms UM like obsessively repeating behaviors, are squeaking differently

than other mice when they were greeting uh stuff. And so you know this is this is a really important uh kind of proof of concept of the connection between the human microbiome and brain function and it could lead to some really awesome treatments in psychotherapeutic fields, right yeah, And of course you know we always have to state the again, the jump from road into human is not not a simple one. It's not necess sarily something that's going to happen uh quickly, but it is promising, which

is that's that's the key. Also, something that happened in December, So at the beginning of the month, China launched the chong A three spacecraft and it had a destination destination Moon. Great, they might be giants song and uh so the spacecraft went to the Moon and had the had a soft landing that means that it actually had a controlled descent and landed on the surface of the Moon, as opposed to hard landing, which is essentially crashing something into the surface,

which lots of countries have tried to do. So this made actually more fun, but but a lot less. Uh, it's it's a lot harder to do science. After the hard landing, China managed to be the third country to achieve this, behind Russia and the United States. And so uh, the chang A spacecraft ended up opening up and releasing the jade rabbit rover. So chung A is actually named after a Chinese moon goddess, and uh, the Chinese moon goddess has a companion named you two, which is a rabbit.

So the rover is called a jade rabbit. So it's going after that that mythology. And um, so they've they're now doing science on the Moon. It's kind of become a lunar station of its own right to study the regular on the Moon as well as some other elements. And it's kind of interesting that we're we're still uh sending probes up there to get more information. I personally find that really inspiring. Uh. It keeps that in mind

for scientists of the future. And I still think that the Moon is probably the I think men definitely way up there in the top ten. Uh other places. There's a bar down the street from where I live where I tell you you can't get rid of them. But the you know, the other thing about is that I think I think that a Moon base is as at least as likely, if not more likely, than a Martian base in the next few decades. Right, So, all right, I think that wraps up our our review of two

thousand thirteen. Like we said, it's not a comprehensive review. There is so much more that happened this past year. I could talk about things that people have done to mice all day. Yeah, there's there was a lot of things were done to mice in two thousand thirteen. You know what, I expect that we'll do some more things to mice in two thousand fourteen. But it's really been a lot of fun to to monitor the science news throughout the year and to talk more about some of

the exciting potential outcomes of this science. Knowing that even with the potential outcomes we've talked about, that's just scratching the surface. Stuff comes up that you could have never anticipated. And that's what I truly find exciting about science. So we're really looking forward to two thousand fourteen, doing a lot more episodes next year, and we wish you guys a happy new year. Remember you can go to fw

thinking dot com. That's where we have all the podcast, blog post, articles, and other information we need to go. Check that out, and you can always get in touch with us on the multiple social media platforms where we hang out all the time. That includes Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. Our handle is FW thinking and we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com. Brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places