Astonishing Science of 2014

to fruition in two thousand fourteen. We're recording this at the tail end often, so it's possible, uh, in the two weeks that follow that we'll make contact with aliens or or some other major groundbreaking thing will happen and we will have missed it just because they didn't occur or they didn't publish the study for some reason until the last two weeks of the year, in which case we apologize. Also, we want to say this is what

we're doing here. We're not trying to to to put out an exhaustive, perfect set in stone, launch it into space list of this is the science. It's more this is these are some of the big stories that impressed us that we think probably resonated with you. And also some of this is, uh, we have some smaller studies on here that you might have missed, and we're going to point out why they're amazing and worth taking a

second glance at. Yeah, I think you covered it. Um. This is a two part of the first is going to focus more on astonishing science, and the second part is just going to be more extraordinary science. So again, as you said, this is not an exhaustive list, but it's a couple of things that may be familiar to you, probably are, and a couple of things that will make you perhaps gonna you know, cock your head to the side and say, ah, has reframed my understanding of existence

or perhaps not. Um. In any case, let's go ahead and launch into it. And when I say launch into it, of course I am referring to the Mars Science Laboratory, also called Curiosity. Yeah, Curiosity was really really one of the m v p s for science. And uh, you know, even if it wasn't interesting, it wasn't a really fun topic to discuss. We'd have to mention it here because he's just snow getting around curiosity. Um never, no, never, now Now. Certainly, NASA's Curiosity rover has actually been on

the surface of Mars since August. But this was a very good good year for our eyes and ears on the Red planet. Um. We'll see I don't even know where to start on this one. You know, well, maybe we should just kind of say the main mission for Curiosity is to answer the question could Mars have one time Harvard life? So everything that it does, all the data that it reports back on is trying to scratch

at this question. So two years later, we're beginning to see some of this information put together from the pieces of the puzzle. And that's what's so fascinating about where we are right now, because it wasn't just the spec tagular landing that it pulled off, that in and of

itself was a milestone um. But now we are seeing Curiosity cruise around there like it's a little wally, kind of lonely looking on that planet and reporting back some things like, hey, there are some key chemical ingredients for life in the gray powder that it's been analyzing and it drilled out of the John Kline Rock outcrop. We're talking about sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and carbon and these, as we know, become really important in terms of building life.

And Curiosity has been assessing the Martian radiation environment, helping scientists to better understand the hazards that radiation may post. So we're talking about dangers that could be posed to indigenous microbes and human visitors should that occur. And it was determined that the amount of radiation the Red planet has exceeds NASA's career. That's for astronauts. Get to now, right,

good to know, Good to know. Now, I'm gonna go a little over the top here for a minute and say that just as Moses ascended Mount Sinai to receive the will of God, so too did the Little Rover spend much of two thousand fourteen en route to the Martian Mount Sharp curiosity that already had already two point discovered many of the key elements necessarily for life on on Mars in the past carbon oxytion, hydrogen, phosphorus, nitrogen uh in standing water, which we'll get to in a minute.

But the emergence of life also requires a great deal of time, and it's reported by Mark Kaufman in the New York Times, scientists previously only predicted a habitable period of mere centuries or you know, a few thousand years, which which is nothing basically, when you're talking about the window for life to emerge on a planet, but with curiosities findings, we discovered a strong new evidence here that gael Crater had large bodies of water for millions or

even tens of millions of years, to say nothing of lingering water underground. So this year, in among other other things from curiosity, the window for ancient life on Mars expanded significantly, giving us a vision possible vision of a of a blue Mars three point five to four billion

years ago, which is pretty cool. They also found an ancient stream bed where water once flowed roughly knee deep for thousands of years at a time, So again more mounting evidence that water had been present and perhaps for a significant amount of time now most recently. And these are early days so we don't have the full perspective

on this yet, this sort of armchair perspective. But methane was discovered on the planet mid December here, and this is really important because since uh, we know living organisms produce methane, then that gives sign to some pause to scratch their head and say, m what possibly could be the reason for this methane here found on Mars. So over the course of four measurements and two months on Mars, average methane levels increased tenfold before quickly dissipating. But this

cause of the fluctuation is really unknown right now. It could have been created by a geological process known as serpentinization, which requires both heat and liquid water, or it could be the product of life in the form of microbes releasing methane as waste product. Right now, according to Paul Mahaffy of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, it's too much of a single point measurement for us to really jump

to any conclusions. It's pretty amazing, though, and with a lot of these studies, especially when we get into water on Mars and UH, We've been gradually learning a lot about Mars and its history over the years, so it's it's easy to kind of, you know, ease into some of this information and not realize just how how groundbreaking it is and how much how much more we know

about the Red planet versus UH ten twenty years ago. UM. Out of that same press conference, UH, it was also they also broke down some information from May, some findings from May in which the rover drilled into a piece of Martian rock called Cumberland and found UH some ancient water hidden within it, and then the onboard instruments were able to analyze the sample, and uh I subsequently reveilt a lot about the probable history of water on Mars.

Measured the ratio of deuterium, which is heavy hydrogen um to normal hydrogen, and that that D t H ratio, as they got, allows us to gauge how long it takes for water molecules to escape because lighter HAWL hydrogen molecules fly towards the upper atmosphere fear more freely UH than the heavy hydrogen ones do. So the D two H ratio in Cumberland is about half the ratio found in the Martian atmosphere water vapor today and so NASA scientists believe that this suggests that the planet lost uch

of its surface water after this rock form. So the idea here is that most of the Martian water likely disappeared before the Convent Cumberland rock form about three point nine billion to four point six billion years ago. So again,

just another insight into the history of Mars. And uh I want to drive home with this uh and in another entry that we're gonna mention that with a with a project like Curiosity, you have a lot of stuff is done in advance obviously, and you're shooting the arrow off into the future, um, rolling the dice in some respect, um to see how everything's gonna land, sometimes literally. And then there's a lot of data you get back, and sometimes that data is crunched for you know, for for

for quite a long time afterwards. So just as curiosity is still ongoing the data that it's sent back and is sending back, there's a continual process of going over writ and comparing and figuring out exactly what it means. Yeah, and there have been some criticisms levied at the project to say that it's not as focus as it should be.

But I would say, here's this monumental uh project, that's that's the first for humanity, you know, for Mars, and and having this data collection rover, you're probably gonna have some unfocused moments as you try to figure out exactly what is present and how to interpret that data and what direction to go in after you interpret it. Indeed, I mean there are several different experiments on board, there are multiple tools that the scientists are able to use,

so it's it's gonna get pulled in different directions. Now, the most important thing I think that happened is that on Mars the rover took a selfie. Oh I forgot about this, Yeah yeah, sent it back like hey, look at me. Well in two thousand thirteen, it's supposed to drew a penis. Uh, well, and so did I. Yeah. Yeah, you know, we all get bored. We take selfies, we draw penises. It's just how it goes. So when we send a robotic emissary out there through the void to

an alien world, it's just gonna happen. Indeed, all right, we're gonna take a quick break. When we get back, we are going to discuss Rosetta. All right, we're back. Yes, the Rosetta mission from the e s A. This this is a big one. And if it rivals curiosity just and if not surpasses it in terms of the scientific findings, the the drama even of getting getting this little guy there, uh and and just the the audacity of the experiment as a whole. Yeah, we're talking about a ten year

mission in the making. When in two thousand and four

the European Space Agency launched the Rosetta spacecraft. Again, we're talking about a circuitous six point four billion kilometer trek across the Solar System, crossing the Asteroid Belt, and traveling into deep space more than five times Earth's distance from then on to the periodic comment known as Commet sixty seven P. And now, once the spacecraft got close enough to the comment, the idea was to do the unthinkable, which is just to throw a little lander on it

and on top of it. No big deal. Yeah, I mean this is this is this is like one of those just sci fi meats reality kind of scenarios, right that we were going to send this thing out. It's gonna spend ten years hibernating to get there. And then not only is it going to uh be the be the first mission in history to rendezvous with the comment, because we've had fly byes in the past. Uh and not only is going to escort it as it orbits the Sun, it's going to deploy a lander to its surface.

We're going to land on a comet. That was that was the plan, and uh, it mostly mostly came out Okay, Yeah, it had some um some sort of high stakes moments where it wasn't sure whether or not it was going to happen. The Harpoons does sign to attach to the comment from the lander did not fire, and so that was a bit of a problem in trying to get a bead on the actual comment and and um and find some stasis. Yeah, it's an issue with the descent

thrusters as well. And so what was supposed to be a smooth landing and in a very anchored landing, Uh, there in a nice area where could get plenty of solar radiation to repowers batteries. Instead it tumbles across the surface and it hits a crater wall. And here it is a position where it can only receive a quarter of the sunlight necessary to sufficiently charge its batteries once it runs out of juice. And how much juice? Sixty

hours of juice. So this was this was a fairly big blow to the immediate future of the of of it, so that the science just had to double down and say, oh, all right, we got sixty hours of juice. Let's figure out as much as we can about this comment. Yeah, there were so many zen moments I think that people had to tap into in the control room, I imagine, because by the time that it deployed from the rocket with something like seven hours right to make its way

to actually land onto the comment for seven hours. That's white knuckling, you know, hoping that it makes it, and then when it is bouncing around, saying, oh, I hope that it actually stays. And then look it's it's got some screws that is digging into the surfaces anchoring. But now it's anchored at an angle that it can't take advantage of the full sun spectrum. So, as you say,

we got sixty hours, let's get to work. Yeah, it landed on November twelve, and last contact was November um last contact contact as of now, and we'll get more into that later. But in the sixty hours, we did find out a lot about this comment. We found out things we didn't expect. Yeah, and why would you want to study a comment in the first place. Well, they are icy bodies that are regarded as fossils from the times when the Solar system was originating, So this could

provide scientists with some prime, mordial prime material to work with. Yeah, I'm sure everyone has seen the stunning images that we received back of the comet, you know, these sort of desolate, gray, dark images, but still very very inspiring. We found, for instance, that if this was not a smooth, whole shaped body like we thought it would be. Instead, it's an odd

shaped coal black lump. Possibly two commets that merge together at some point in the past, because it kind of kind of looks kind of looks like two things, just sort of two big awful rocks crunched together to a certain extent. Found out that the surface is hotter than we guessed and surprisingly ice free. The first inch of the surface crust is porous, dusty, and contains almost no

ice um. Now the commet is only two point five miles wide, but it expels so much water that it could quote fill an Olympic size swimming pool in about a hundred days. So bear all that in mind when you think about the challenges of landing on this thing, landing on the surface that you it turned out to be drastically different than what you thought it was going to be. Yeah, and then all of a sudden you have all of this information, like the isotopes, what do

they look like in that water? Do they match up with Earth? It could it be comments or asteroids or both that seated life on Earth. All of these questions hang in the distance, and it's possible that we may be able to answer them over a period of time sorting through that data. Now, something that I'm not sure if it was widely reported on is that this comment stinks.

It's got barnyard smells. Um. Sensor devices of the Rosetta spacecraft orbiting the comment sniffed out the gas molecules of and According to Katherine Altwig, she's the head of the Rosina project at the Center for Space Inhabitability, she says, the perfume of sixty seven ps quite strong, with the odor of rotten eggs, hydrogen sulfide, horse stable ammonia, and the pungent, suffocating odor of formalde hyde. This is mixed with a faint, bitter almond like aroma of hydrogen side

who knew? Nice. I'm always interested to hear what other planets smell like. There's a I think I can't remember if we did a video about this at some point in the past. I know we did a blog Stinky planets, Yeah, stinky comments. Yeah. Because the stats are out there, you know, people say this, this planet smells like this, this one like that. Sometimes the answer is a little more entertaining than other times. A lot of there's a lot of sulfur out there. Oh, I'm sure anyway it it might smell,

but it has a pleasant singing voice. And that's because the magnetic field of the comment oscillates at forty to fifty millet hurts and the sound is too low for human ears to hear it. But uh, the e s a increase the pitch a thousand times and they were able to make this song more hearable, and they actually put it off on SoundCloud. I'll make sure I linked to it on the landing page for this episode. But does it have no No, it does not. It's it's very very ambient in space music. And how do space

music post about this? Why not? Um? But they yeah, they took the data and then it was compiled by German composer Manuel Smiffed. Uh, so it's it's very pleasant, very space it seems it sounds like the kind of music a comet would have kicking around in it. Now, we should probably discussed a few cultural aspects of Rosetta

as well, including Filet, the name of the lander. Yeah, indeed, uh, Rosetta is of course named for the famed Rosetta stone, the pivotal Greek Egyptian hieroglyphic artifact um, which of course was vital in our understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphics and what they meant, because we had basically the same text in both Greek and Egyptian. And the idea with Rosetta is

that we would gain a better understanding of commas. We learned the language of comments in the same way that the Rosetta stone allowed us to learn the language of the ancient Egyptians. And the rover is likewise named for the filet obelisk, which bears a bilingual Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphic inscription as well. Now, Rosetta was not without its scandal, and it's not anything Rosetta did, but it has to do with a scientist who was wearing a particularly colorful

shirt when interviewed about Rosetta. That's right, Rosetta scientist Dr Matt Taylor UM wore a rather colorful um button up shirt with a lot of kind of pin up ladies on its scannily clad ladies, half naked ladies. Yeah and uh and then you know he's a he's a bearded dude. Uh, tattoos sleeved on each arm. And afterwards it was kind of an outcry from from some from some scientists and also people just observing saying, whoa, what's who? This is?

The guy's the voice of your mission, and he's he's dressed like he's in a he just came out of Margharitaville. What's what's going on? Yeah, historical moment. Uh, kind of a sexist shirt. That's that's the criticism loved at him. But uh, yeah, I mean he took the criticism to heart, and it would appear that he just he just was

a bit clueless about it. Yeah. He did a very heartfelt, you know, tearful apology about it and was sorry that he'd upset people and that the press had really dove into this a lot too, because, I mean, is if the science, if this wasn't fascinating and and mind blowing enough, they had to find another angled report on. But they even talked to his sister and she said, you know, basically, he he's a guy who's so devoted to his work, but he's also the kind of guy who will lose

track of where his car or his car keys might be. Uh, and so he can maybe be a little a little clueless about some of the uh. The finer points of life outside of the science environment, but didn't realize that his half naked lady shirt would be distracting. Yeah, but you know, Carl Sagan was putting just straight up naked pictures on other probs we've sent out into the Oh, come on, that is not He did not send a

bargain kin up out there on the Pioneer plant. I'm just saying, mind drawing possible a possible um foothold if one were to really, you know, get defensive about that shirt choice. Yeah, yeah, you know, we have a lot of young people that listen to this podcast. We have some middle aged people listen to podcasts. We have old people who listen to the podcasts. We have immortal people listening to You may very well be it's very possible that someone out there listening to this podcast could live,

if not uh forever for centuries. And it would be my dream if someone like say Aubrey de Gray we're listening to this and he is, of course the bio gerontologists that I have a slight crush on, who talks about maintaining the body like a classic car, and that the first person to live to five hundred years old has already been born. Yeah, yeah, I mean the degrays. The whole thing is like basically saying, all right, we have this war against death. Well, let's break that war

down into battles, because wars are fought in battles. So he divides it up into these these seven winnable battles engagements against the enemy. And if you can figure out how to knock off each of these problems, then you have the whole thing solved. Well, and what could could be better than replacing your blood with younger blood That

would actually have some very beneficial effects. And uh. In the nineteen fifties, Clive McKay of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, he was the first to sort of figure out that some of this might come into play. He stitched together the circulatory system of an old and young mouse, a technique called hetero chronic parabiosis, and he found that the cartilage of the old mice soon appeared younger than would be expected. That was the first sort of clue

that something could be going on here. And then in two thousand and five, Thomas Rando at Stanford University in California and his team found that young blood returned the liver and skeletal stem cells of old mice to a more youthful state during heterochronic parabiosis, and the old mice were also able to repair injured muscles as well as young mice. So here's the spooky thing about this too. They found that young mice that received old blood appeared

to age prematurely. Wow, so it works both ways. Yeah. Well, Now, one thing I love about about these findings, of course, is that it it just goes into that classic idea that that maybe old people could drink the blood of the young and sustain their life and opens the door that one to normalizing it to normalizing and one day making it possible that old rich men uh no longer have to just sleep with young women and marry them

and and take obtain their youth. That way, they can actually drink their blood or not will not drink it, but they can, um, they can take things from their blood and make themselves younger. Yeah. I think in the more recent news item that was posted this year that when I put it up on Facebook, I think I said something like, millennials, you in danger. You gotta run because more mounting evidence is pointing to your blood has been really beneficial. So then you fast forward to two

thousand and twelve, Yeah, that's right. This is when we're seeing UH researchers demonstrating that blood from a young mouse, or even just a factor known as g DF eleven from a young from young mouse blood can rejuvenate the muscles and brains of older mice. And the brain is key here because in that we're getting into possibilities for some of the debilitating of brain issues that that have received so much attention over the years, particularly Alzheimer's. Yeah.

So if you have this young blood plasma that that growth differential factor eleven, and you were to introduce it to a human who has Alzheimer's, you know what is that's the million dollar question? Would that actually help to reverse the effects of Alzheimer's? And this year team at Stanford School of Medicine did indeed start human trials on participants who received blood that was under the age of thirty and given to people with mild to moderate Alzheimer's. Yeah.

Professor's Amy Wagner's and Lee Reuben of Harvard's the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology. They report that injections of g d F eleven um improve the exercise capability of old mice that are about equivalent to a seventy year old human, and also improved the function of the old factory region of the brains and older mince so that they could they could smell more like a younger

mouse could smell. Now, I guess you'd have to sort of extrapolate that into the sense experience of human versus a mouse, but that you you get the idea and the h The theory here is that g d F eleven improves vascularity and blood flow that is associated with increased neurogenesis. Yeah, and the number of stem cells in the brain as well. So this is really exciting stuff.

Um Again, this this sort of plays into already Degray's idea that there are procedures out there, there is technology out there that can help to maintain your body like a classic car, and this would be one of them, exactly one step closer to immortality. Maybe we get to keep Patrick Stewart forever if only Yeah yeah, Ben Kingsley too, sure, why not? Maybe some more, but mainly those guys because they have the capital. Don't forget Oprah, she's listening to Oprah. Yes, Oprah.

I definitely am hoping Oprah lives forever as well. Yeah, I'm sure she's got some R and D out on that. All right, I'll see what else happened. Well, it was a big year free bola, of course. UM. Certainly not the first year that ebola has been a major issue, but it it certainly made more headlines, especially here in the United States, UM, as as as it became a hot topic of discussion, even a political uh topic. Yeah.

I mean we've known about ebil listens the seventies, but this strain, the zaire straight first was detected in March and Guinea, and the virus has now infected more than seventeen thousand people and killed six thousand people, uh, laying waste to the healthcare systems, communities and economies of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. UM. It looks like we may be coming out of this. Um, that this may not be a sort of world pandemic that's going to shut

everything down. But I feel like there were some really scary moments there, UM, and that this has had all of the elements of the human experience, because there's cultural aspects to it. UM. There's some biases, they're pretty rampant with it. And then there's just a huge amount of data and research um that has been thrown at this

in order to try to stem it. Yeah, we know, we devoted a whole topic to Bola earlier in the year, and that should be linked on the landing page for this episode, Sidal Understanding of Bola, where we just break on the science of the bowl of what we know, uh and and at the time, what what was happening and uh and so we're not going to go through all of that that information again here, but you know,

basically there you kind of had. You had the science, and then you had the politics and the media fearmongering on top of all that, uh, which made for an interesting overall experience of the Abola epidemic. Yeah, and initially

it was hard to sort out fact from fiction. But I feel like again there there does seem to be a stasis that has been reached here and now we do have these raft of studies to be picked through and to try to figure out what's going on and and to help researchers better deal with a deadly pathogen um. We do not have a vaccine or treatment right now that is proven to be effective. I should say that.

But here are two examples of some studies that came out of many, many, many many UH to get a handle on why some people survive infection, scientists compared mice resistant to below with those susceptible to it, and they discovered that a gene in charge of blood vessel leakiness may play a part in the disease severity. That's that's

one example. Another study published an m BIO found that THEA Bola virus can edit its genetic material, adding extra RNA building blocks, and then these changes may affect how the virus grows in humans. Again, there are a bunch of different factors that determine whether or not a person is going to survive this, and that's what they're trying

to figure out. And in the meantime, however, medical trials that would normally take years or decades to roll out have been fast tracked to a timescale of even weeks or months. So you know, we're going to see how all this rolls out. But you know, hopefully um with the with the with the trials being sped up like this and UH fire being lit u under the projects that we'll see what we'll see it come to fruition a lot sooner. Yeah, and that that is the hope.

But it does certainly feel better to be talking about this now in December, uh, than a couple of months ago when it was very uncertain as to what was going on. Now. The last entry is, uh, it's a doozy, and we've talked about it before, and we thought it was so important in terms of challenging our perception about gender or even morphology, that we'd bring it up again.

We're talking about sex reversed Genitalia. I remember seeing the embargoes release that was coming out on this one, and and I fell in love right away, and you almost broke that embargo for two seconds. You're like maybe I I certainly had to had to double and triple check to make sure I wasn't breaking em bargo on the story, because I was just just get accidentally, you know, out

of control and just push published. But but yeah, when I first saw it, I knew that this was we're gonna blog on it, We're gonna do I have to do a podcast on this, and and heck even refer to it in a second podcast as we're doing now. Um, we're talking about the Brazilian cave insects of the Eotrogla genus. This covers four distinct species and they marked the first

documented example of an animal with sex reversed genitalia. Uh. This was detailed in an issue of Cell Pressed Journals Current Biology came out earlier this year, and the researchers found that females quote insert an elaborate penis like organ into males the males much reduced vagina like opening during

forty to seventy hour love making sessions. Yeah. When they saw this in the act, they did see it lasting for forty to seventy hours, and this is thanks to the females inflatable spiny penis that anchors itself to the males internal tissues. And during this time, the female trogla gathers large quantities of sperm that she uses to then

fertilize her eggs. And researchers found that trying to pride the pair apart led the separation of the male abdomen from the thorax without breaking the genital coupling, which led them to speculate that the entire meeting process is controlled actively by the females, whereas the males play a more

rather a passive part. I mean basically the situation here, as many headlines referred as, you have a female penis, you have the I mean, technically it's a dinosome, So it's the it's the female sex organs, but they've taken on a phallic form to insert into the male sex organs,

which have taken on a yonic form. Yeah, it's it's pretty amazing, and I think it speaks not just to the fact that there's just rich biodiversity in caves that we're still learning about, but also um that when we do learn about it, there's a bit of cultural baggage

that's put on top of this. And the reason I bring this up is because one of the more amazing things to me in the way that this was being reported is that it was spun a is, hey there's a female organism with a painess and kind of glossing over the fact that, hey, there's also a male organism with a vagina, what you know, that's functioning like a vagina.

So that was that was curious. Yeah, it definitely plays into a lot of a lot of our cultural ideas about gender and is the title of our podcast episode In this uh suggested it forces to rethink genitalia, to rethink gender in a sense, you know what, what on a biological level makes this a mail on what makes

is a female versus what on a cultural level? Yeah, and we won't go back into it, but if you're curious, do check that out, because it is pretty astounding when you began to line up female and male genitalia and see how incredibly similar they are, especially in their functions, you know. And maybe that's what the Rover was trying to tell us into pousand and thirteen when it was drawing a penis, is that it's just it's a penis

centric world. And yeah, I mean, Rover can't even like skid sideways on a foreign planet without the press going or maybe not the US, but at least the Internet going crazy and saying, look, there's a penis on marks. I know they didn't even see the vagina that it drew. Yeah, all right, so there you go. That's a that's our

first episode. We're gonna do a second episode where we talk a little more about some of the science that occurred in or came to fruition in and uh and and well, we'll run through a few more bits that you may have missed during the year. Yes, join us for the next one, won't you. An In the meantime, you can check us out at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's right, that's the mother ship. That's

where you find all of our podcast episodes. Any of these episodes, past episodes we've mentioned before, they are all present there. You may not find them on iTunes, but you will definitely find them Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Also, we have tons of blog posts, we have videos, links after our social media accounts. Uh. Anything and everything we're doing, you're gonna hear about it on that website. All right, guys, what was astonishing to you

in the science realm this year? Let us know? You can send us an email at blow the Mind at house to works dot com. For more on this and that sense of other topics, visit how staff works dot com. H