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The Science Pawdcast
The Science Pawdcast breaks down the latest science happening in the human world AND the pet world.
Each episode will also bring you a guest to enthral you with their area of knowledge.
You'll learn, be captivated, and laugh along with host Jason Zackowski.
Pets and Science, it's the pawfect mix.
You'll also get episodes of PetChat which are the live shows from social audio.
PetChat is a live community gathering updates about the animals in our life, but also the animals in the wonderful community that supports us!
Heart and Hope.
Science and Shenanigans.
The Science Pawdcast
Season 5 Episode 28 Innovations in AI, Dog Training Debates, and Dr. Jan Eldridge on Binary Stars
Unlock the mysteries of the universe and the mind as we traverse through the cosmos, from the brain's intricate functions to the enigmatic workings of binary star systems. In a fascinating turn of events, we explore how UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley researchers are using AI to revolutionize lives. They've developed a brain-computer interface that has given a paralyzed woman her voice back. This miraculous feat of technology underscores the ever-growing prevalence of AI, a feature that's swiftly becoming a part of our daily lives.
This episode is not just about the cosmos and technology. We also tackle the hotly debated topic of dominance training in dogs, with enlightening research from the University of Bristol. The study reveals surprising facts, debunking some widely held beliefs about dog training. We discuss the merits of positive reward training, a method that not only improves your dog's behavior but also strengthens your bond with your furry friend.
Lastly, we have the pleasure of hosting the brilliant Dr. Jan Eldridge from Auckland. She shares her remarkable journey from being a science-fiction enthusiast to a leading professor of astrophysics. We uncover the explosive world of binary stars and supernovae and their importance in our understanding of galaxies. From the formation of exoplanets to the Fermi Paradox, Dr. Eldridge's insightful tales will leave you starry-eyed. Tune in and get ready for a journey that will stretch your horizons and enrich your understanding of the universe.
Dr. Eldridge's links:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/astro_jje
Brain to A.I. Avatar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTZ2N-HJbwA
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Hello science enthusiasts. My name is Jason Zekowski. I'm a high school chemistry teacher and a science communicator, but I'm also the dog dad of Bunsen and Beaker, the science dogs on social media. If you love science and you love pets, you've come to the right place. Put on your lab coat, put on your safety glasses and hold onto your tail. This is the Science Podcast. Hello and welcome back to the Science Podcast. We hope you're happy and healthy out there.
Speaker 2:The release of this podcast will be the day that Chris and I have to go back to work as teachers. So we had a great summer. We've got tons of projects ready to go, we've had some rest and relaxation, but it's time to get back to teaching the kids. So all of the excitement with the start of a school year, with some of the melancholy of missing the summer Aww, but you know what that means for Bunsen Winter's coming.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, what's on the show this week In Science News? We are going to look. This is a wild story about how UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley researchers there gave somebody who had a problem speaking from a brain stem injury her voice back using artificial intelligence. What? And in Pet Science. As a bit of a response to some of the drama llama stuff happening on TikTok with dog training. We are going to look at some of the debunked ways to train a dog using something called dominance or to using dominance to explain dog behavior. Our guest and ask an expert is Dr Jan Eldridge, who's from Auckland and the professor of physics there. And wow, are we going to blow your mind? Well, I'm not. Dr Eldridge is with the mysteries of the universe.
Speaker 2:Okay, the bad joke. This is a topical one and it's a new pun. That's right. New puns, people. All right. I was trying to get chat GPT to write a post for my food blog but it kept refusing. Apparently, it already had a bite to eat.
Speaker 2:Okay, on with the show, because there's no time like science time. This weekend science news, we are going to talk about a story from the University of California, san Francisco, specifically, where artificial intelligence somehow gave a paralyzed woman her voice back. That's the lead. I think it goes without saying that in the last six to eight months, artificial intelligence has gone from like science fiction, like Terminator two, like that kind of stuff, to something that is blended into nearly everything that we use or do online. So this is so topical for things that people are are having to deal with, like, artificial intelligence is everywhere. It's in photos. Now your phones are using it. Chachi BT, of course, is in the lead joke.
Speaker 2:So what's going on with this study? As mentioned, this comes from UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley, and researchers there have developed some kind of brain computer interface, which they're calling a BCI, that has allowed somebody who has severe paralysis to speak again. Now the data for this comes from a previous study that one of the lead lead researchers, edward Chang, did in a in another study where they found that they could take brain waves and decode a bit of it of somebody who had a injury as well. They couldn't physically speak, but they could read, so they could form in their mind the words and then somehow they found a way to read that. So this new study, the thing that they did, is way more ambitious. And as I explain this, you will go from like, okay, that's plausible to what to oh, my goodness, this is potentially going to change the world in five to 10 years.
Speaker 2:First off, this lady did have a stroke, a damage to brainstem, and she really has trouble speaking and she's paralyzed. The team implanted a whole bunch of little, tiny electrodes over 200 of them onto the surface of her brain and the part of the brain they put them on they determined were critical for speech. The idea is that these electrodes would take brain signals. If not for the damage to the brainstem, those signals would have gone to muscles in your face like your larynx, your jaw, your tongue, even like the muscles in your face for facial expressions. Like those signals can't go anywhere because the pathway to get there is wrecked, but the brain is still making those signals, if that makes sense. It's wild, but from all these electrodes there is basically a port on the back of this lady's head and a cable was clicked into her head and connected to computers. We're talking like the matrix, if you've seen the matrix.
Speaker 2:It took a long time, weeks, but the team worked with this participant and a host of researchers to basically train the artificial intelligence program to recognize the signals coming from her brain into words. It required repeating words over and over and over again, phrases over and over and over again, but eventually the computer started to recognize the brain activity patterns that the woman was trying to make to make words. The big problem before was, instead of trying to recognize an entire word. They created words from phonemes. I'm not a language person, but phonemes are subunits of speech. Basically, hello is can be broken into like oh. So the problem before is that the they were trying to be too ambitious. Instead of trying to recognize hello, they recognized the parts of speech that were little chunk. They chunked it, and that way the computer needed to start to recognize less complicated language, because it was able to build the word from the Lego bits Genius.
Speaker 2:So once they nailed down what this lady was trying to say, this is where it gets even wilder. They took samples of her speaking from her wedding and this is you've said okay, this is terrible, but I got addicted to. I don't know if they're popular anymore, but I got addicted to these videos of the presidents of the United States playing video games. There are AI programs now that, if you have enough audio, it can pretty much perfectly mimic the voice of people, and these goober's on YouTube figured this out and, as presidents have a lot of spoken word, they copied Joe Biden, barack Obama and Donald Trump's voices and they made them play like Mario Kart against each other. It's totally dumb. Please don't look these videos up on YouTube. There's a lot of swearing, but the whole idea is that it's possible and it's only getting better.
Speaker 2:And because this lady had a speech, they took her speech and they recreated her voice using this AI program and then they plugged it into an animated avatar of herself. So she had like a computer of her face and they animated it to work with her vote, like the computer made voice and all of her brainwaves, and it was animated to talk and it could look angry and happy, like it is bananas. So when this lady, who could not speak, thought to speak, the avatar that looked like her and sounded like her took her words from her brain and turned it into actual words. This is bananas. Okay, now the lady still had to be clicked up from the back of her brain. You remember the cable that was clicked up to her brain. It still had to be clicked up to the computers, the BCI, to make this work. So the next step guess what? The next step is to make a wireless version. Wow, so people who have lost their voice but they can still think words and it just doesn't come out right.
Speaker 2:Where do you think this is going to go in the next five to 10 years? Where do you think this is going to go in the next two years. You know I papood Elon Musk's neural link stuff, probably because I don't necessarily trust Elon Musk. I know he's done a lot of great things, but I've kind of seen how he acts on Twitter and this study and the the how well it did this potentially changes everything for people who are in that situation. Now, before you say, you know I, is there evidence of this? Like, is this just a document? No, there is a YouTube video of the researchers working with this lady. This lady and I will link the YouTube video in the show notes. It will blow you away. And that's science news for this week. This week in Pet Science we're gonna take a look at some of the misunderstood dog behaviors and how training perhaps was going down the wrong path or went down the wrong path because of that it stems because there's a whole bunch of drama. Llama on TikTok. I follow some dog trainers on TikTok and one guy I don't forget the guy's name dog daddy or something like that. He's a trainer from the United Kingdom Was forcefully training dogs with a lot of dominance, training like being domineering over them and very aggressive and hurtful, and a lot of the dog trainers spoke up against it.
Speaker 2:This is wrong. You shouldn't do this. It's that's the wrong way to train a dog. There's new research out and anyways, I was like, okay, I do agree with that because we've talked about this before. But where, how old, how long ago? When did that switch? That's what I was thinking. That was what was going through my brain.
Speaker 2:So I went back to a bunch of different science journals online and I found a study from the University of Bristol in 2009. This study is probably one of the first ones to show that there is a, that there's a. The people who were looking at dominance training it was misplaced. What they found was that aggressive dogs are not trying to assert their dominance over the pack. And I want to say there was a very popular dog trainer, caesar Milan. Maybe you've heard of this guy. You know very looked like he was doing wonders for families and probably was. I don't know much about Caesar Milan. I just know he used like that little training thing. He would poke the dog and he talked about how the dog wanted to be the alpha and assert their dominance over the pack. And you have to assert your dominance over the dog to train it. So even as far back as 2009,.
Speaker 2:The study from Bristol questioned that. How did they start to question that? It's not like they just had a good idea. No, you got to do some science. This comes from their veterinary sciences department. They spent six months studying dogs interacting at this rehoming center called Dogs Trust. They also reanalyzed data from Feral Dog Studies and from all of that they concluded that the individual relationships between dogs are learnt through experience rather than motivated by dominance. They found that a lot of the training techniques of asserting your dominance over a dog didn't affect the dog in the way that people thought, because the dog wasn't wanting to assert its dominance in the first way, like dominance reduction. Maybe you've heard this before when we had Kallen. I did some of this stuff because I think I watched some Cesar Milan stuff. Like you eat before your dog, that shows you're the alpha. You eat, then they eat, or you go through the dog. You go through the door first and the dog follows you. Their conjecture was that all that you were training the dog to do was like in that situation, this is what they're supposed to do, not that it's a dominance thing. They found also through looking at the data and looking at, through observations at the rehoming facilities, any techniques that you use, like pinning a dog to the floor and being dominant over it, or grabbing their face or some dominance training I guess had these air horns, so if a dog was being dominant, you just blast the air horn at their face. It may stop the behavior, but it definitely increased the anxiety in their dog and in a lot of cases it led to an escalation of aggression and that aggression sometimes was reflected back to the owner.
Speaker 2:I think the conclusion by one of the lead authors is probably the most damning. Dr Rachel Casey, way back in 2009, said the blanket assumption that every dog is motivated by some innate desire to control people and other dogs is frankly ridiculous. That's her quote. Frankly ridiculous. Dogs are complex, as is their learning ability. What they found from looking at all the dogs at Dogs Trust, where the dog was brought in to be rehomed, when they asked if a dog had been through dominance training, the dogs were the most fearful. They were scared of everything, so they suppressed all of their natural behaviors out of fear and it just doesn't do anything except have anxiety. And also the most aggressive dogs were trained with this dominance training.
Speaker 2:If you look at most training today, or almost all training today, it is you reward a dog, you work with them. They're your partner, obviously, like if a dog's losing its mind and it's gonna bite somebody or another dog, you stop that from happening. So you do add a negative, you add a punishment. If you wanna call it a punishment, call it there on the leash. You make sure they're out of the situation. But dogs train through positive rewards train nearly as fast as adding something negative. Giving dogs a reward also strengthens your bond with the animal, and that bond with the animal can be broken quite easily through punishment and fear. So even back in 2009, dominance training there were questions about it, with the head of the veterinary department in Bristol's, from the data they gathered, saying it was frankly ridiculous. So that's Pet Science for this week.
Speaker 2:Hey everybody, before we get to the interview section, here's a couple of ways you can help the Science Podcast out. Number one if you're on any place that rates podcasts, give us a great rating. Tell your friends and share it with people who love science and pets, like teachers. Number two think about signing up as a member of the Paw Pack. It allows you to connect with people who love our show, and it's a way to keep the show free. Number three check out our merch store. We have the Bunsen Stuffie 2.0, there's still some beaker stuffies left that they're adorable as well Warm, cuddly clothes and adorable drinkware. The link is in the show notes. Now on to the interview. It's time for Ask an Expert on the Science Podcast, and I have Dr Jan Eldridge, professor and Head of the Physics Department in Auckland.
Speaker 3:Doc, how are you doing tonight?
Speaker 2:Hi, jason, I'm doing fine today, yeah thanks, Right, because I mean it's not evening for you because you're in New Zealand.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, that's right. So it's just lunchtime and it's even better because it's winter here, where I know, it's summer for you folks up there and it's gonna be quite a lot colder down here.
Speaker 2:That is a thing to be in New Zealand, because many people know New Zealand from the Lord of the Rings movies, oh yeah, and people fall in love with it and they want to go there. And then they see how far away it is and they're like maybe not.
Speaker 3:I mean, it's only 12 hours from the US if you fly from LA, so it's good, but it's a long flight and whenever I go to Europe to go to conferences that's a 24 hour flight and I used to hate flying now so I used to it, although we haven't done it for a few years now, but yeah, so it's tough.
Speaker 2:I would hop on a plane tomorrow to go see some of the Hobbiton in New Zealand. Very cool. But anyways, I introduced you as Dr Jan Eldridge. Could you talk a little bit about your training in science?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So when I was at school I didn't know what I wanted to be and we had to go and meet a careers advisor and I thought, well, I wanted I'd seen physicists on television, because in the United Kingdom, where I grew up, they have these Royal Institution Christmas lectures where you have guest lecturers lecturing five days on something different every day and there was physicists and they were talking about the universe and I thought that's really exciting. And also, when I was younger, I read a lot of science fiction. So you know, I was born in the same year Star Wars came out. I watched a lot of Doctor who, a lot of Battlestar Galactic, a lot of Star Trek, and so I kind of wanted to do something in that region. And the careers advisor basically explained to me oh, you need to go to university, you need to do a degree, you need to then go and do a PhD, then you need to go and do some postdocs and you become a lecturer.
Speaker 3:And at that moment my career was really set in, not stone, but like the pathway was clear, because I was the first in my family to go to university. Oh, wow. And I ended up going to the University of Cambridge. And you know, there at Cambridge you actually take four subjects in your first year. So I did maths, physics, chemistry and geology, and geology was this kind of one that you know. I'd done maths, physics and chemistry at school, but geology was something different. You get to run around in the countryside of a hammer smashing rocks, which is actually really good fun, so fun isn't it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. So I very nearly became a geologist, but you had to write essays in the exam and in those days I couldn't write essays because I loved maths and physics so much, which was all equations and also computer coding. So you know, the other reason I really like maths and physics and astronomy is, you know, you have to use computers and most of the science I do is really making computer programs that model the universe and that's kind of exciting and so, yeah, that's my science training. But then, you know, I did a PhD in how stars evolve and die and explode in supernovae and I was lucky enough to go to different postdocs around the world in Paris, belfast, in Northern Ireland.
Speaker 3:And before getting this job in Auckland. So you know, it's exciting to work in all these different places and then end up in New. Zealand.
Speaker 2:That is so cool. Well, congratulations, what a cool trajectory. Did it start with Star Wars, like you were born?
Speaker 3:No, you were born when Star Wars came out, so you would have not seen it to your older, well, no, so, but I would have grown up with it right, because when Return of the Jedi came out I would have been six and I have vague memories of going to see either I can't remember if it's Empire Strikes Back, it's probably Return of the Jedi with my brother and my dad, and I don't remember much of the movie, I just remember going to see it, but that kind of excitement and it's worthwhile noting. When you're a professor of astrophysics, you know you really are almost adventuring on that science fiction. I kind of always say I'm a bit like Doctor who Because you know, the doctor explores the universe, tries to understand it, takes people with them to try and show them how wonderful that universe is, and also tries to make it, the universe, a better place to help people as they go around, which you know they're the three things you do as a professor at different degrees. So yeah, so Doctor who, I think, is probably the one thing that really drove me. But also, you know I have a report from one of my primary schools when I was very little and the headmistress would see all the books that all the students at the school were reading and she would keep on telling me off because I only read science fiction and so literally on my report it says thank you for not reading a science fiction book for once. That's on my report card from my headmistress back when I was at school.
Speaker 3:So yeah, so you know, I've read all the old authors, all the new authors, and so I love reading science fiction as well, because you know, when you're reading it I know some people say like, ah, it can't happen. That's not how science really works. It's actually fun in science fiction to think how could it happen without understanding? And that's you know. That's what I like about science and science fiction and trying to blur the two together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's just so creative. I don't think I've ever told this story before, doc, but I was in grade nine and my mom, on a whim, got me for my birthday this book. I'm trying to remember the exact name of it. It had a long title but it was a fantasy book in the Dragon Lance. It was a famous fantasy book within the realm of the Lord of the Rings. I grew up in a really small town and I had never read the Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit, but I got this book and it was like, oh my God, there's like elves and there's one guy using magic. I was like what is this world? I was literally in grade nine kid reading this for the first time and I just couldn't believe. The whole world opened up to me after that point, because up until that point in my life it was sports and hockey and things like that.
Speaker 2:So, science fiction is equally as creative, even if it's not entirely possible, but maybe it could be Probably a little bit more possible than fantasy, but anyways.
Speaker 3:Well, just remember that there's a famous Clark's law, that is, any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And Doctor who pointed out that the reverse is true, that any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Speaker 2:Oh, maybe Maybe, I'm a big MCU nerd. That's like the tech on Asgard, right Like the Thor tech. It looks like magic, it's just advanced technology.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so back to science. I have to ask you about you study. First off, you've studied binary stars and they're blowing up or something. Could you? Could you give us like, what's a binary star? Why are they exploding and why is this the coolest thing I've ever heard of before?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so it's a binary stars. I mean, so when we look at our son, our son is our star right, and you shouldn't look at the sun with your naked eye because you're damaged your eyesight, but you know our son's on its own. I mean, it's got us orbiting around itself, but it's not got another star orbiting around it. Most stars in the universe have actually got at least one other companion. You know, some even are in triple stars or quadruple stars.
Speaker 2:Really Like it's more common. It's more common really.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. So when we look around our Milky Way stars, like our son, it's about like I think about 40% are in binaries, 60% are single. But as you go up in mass, the more massive stars. They're all in binaries, and you know binary stars are different. Why are they different?
Speaker 3:Well, our son will one day become a red giant and get very big and then eventually it'll use up all its fuel and all it will leave behind is this cold, dead white dwarf. That's the remnant carbon oxygen from all the nuclear burning over its 10 billion year lifetime. We'll just sit there doing nothing else in the universe, but I think we'll go next. But then if it's in a binary star system, then you've got this other star nearby. So when that star tries to become a bigger giant it can't, because the other stars too nearby and they might get in each other's way. For stars like our son, maybe about 40% of them are in binaries and 60% are single, like are in sun. But as you go up in mass they all become binaries and so there's very few single stars with the more massive stars.
Speaker 2:That's wild. And why do they blow up? They hit each other.
Speaker 3:Well, they do so. This is the thing. So when we look at our son, what will happen is, over its 10 billion year lifetime, it'll burn up all the hydrogen in the center to helium by nuclear fusion to make heavier elements, and then it will take that helium and burn it into carbon oxygen, and so eventually you'll get all this core of the sun, where all that nuclear fusion is made will just be exposed. All the other stuff gets thrown off and it'll become a white dwarf, which is just this carbon oxygen remnant. And that's not an explosion, it's just a very gentle process of hundreds of thousands of years which it's formed. But before that it's become this really big red giant which is, like you know, thousands of times the size of the sun, is now unlike the size of the solar system. So you're right.
Speaker 3:What kind of is interesting about binary stars and this isn't what necessarily makes them explode is, if you've got two stars all putting around each other and they're quite close, say where Earth's orbit is. When that star becomes a red giant, the gravity of the other star can actually interact with the material and start stealing some of the mass, and so you can take off some. Yeah, so the other star, which is normally the less massive. One can actually become quite massive and you can actually rejuvenate it, so it actually becomes like it goes back to the beginning of its life cycle, but as a more massive star, really, yeah. So this is what confuses us when, why it's important for understanding, say, galaxies, because if you've got a large number of binary stars and you try and work out the age of all the stars in the galaxy, you're going to get the age wrong, because one could actually be very old, but because of these binary interactions it's been made younger and so it's like maybe a billion years old, but you think, oh, it's maybe only 10 million years old.
Speaker 2:Oh my God, that's literally like a life drain spell. Going back to fantasy, you know sucking the life of somebody to make yourself 20 years ago. 20 years yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so it's just like a vampire. But what happens to the other star that's had all that materials stolen? That will become a white dwarf, just like our Sun. Will was a single star. Okay, jen, so how does this explode? Well, what can happen is that the other star that's just stolen all that mass will actually evolve itself, and either it will become a red giant and try to put mass onto the white dwarf or it will become a white dwarf itself, and in both of those cases you can actually make those white dwarfs explode.
Speaker 3:We don't. The embarrassing thing is we're not too sure exactly how it works because we haven't actually seen it, but we know it's one of those two ways. It has to be stars like our Sun in a binary system where they formed a white dwarf or two white dwarfs, and somehow the two stars come together and then explode and convert all that carbon and oxygen that was made during the lifetime into about one sun's mass worth of iron, and most of the iron right now in your hemoglobin, in your blood was formed by stars like our Sun in binaries exploding to make all that iron, which is kind of like why I like exploding binaries. I mean, there's many types of other exploding binaries, and we can track different elements to different types of exploding binaries, more than just what goes on with stars like our Sun.
Speaker 2:Okay, oh my God, what so? All right. So these the white dwarfs, they smash into each other. Yep, they, they form a super planet made of iron. And does that blow up too, or like, or that just.
Speaker 3:It's even better. You just, you just destroy the white dwarfs completely. The reaction is so explosive when they splash together and it produces so much energy that you know you get nothing left. Those stars are completely ripped apart.
Speaker 2:Wow, and it becomes a hot space, iron or.
Speaker 3:Exactly Hot space iron. That's a good one. I have to use that as a future. Okay, I don't know. Yeah, all that material gets thrown out across the universe and then goes into the next generation of stars.
Speaker 2:Oh, my God.
Speaker 3:And so you know, if our Sun and planet, yep, if our Sun and planet are four and a half billion years ago, four billion half billion years old, it was the stars dying a few that many billion years ago. That then, when they died, that material went into our proto solar system and has ended up in our bodies today.
Speaker 2:Huh, well, I guess, like you're talking like a Sun's worth of iron, like that's big, that's a lot of that is a lot of iron.
Speaker 3:Yeah yeah, it's why iron is one of the reasons why iron is so abundant. The other element that's really abundant, in the Earth at least, is oxygen, and the other type of exploding binaries are where you get more massive stars. They're too massive to produce those white dwarfs, and so the nuclear fusion in their cores doesn't stop at a carbon oxygen. It goes all the way up until it forms an iron core, and that core will come become a white dwarf and it collapses down to something called a neutron star, which is a big board of neutrons or a black hole, and in that process that releases a lot of energy and these massive stars that are more massive than our Sun explode. And there a similar process doesn't make iron, it makes oxygen, which is another really important element because you're breathing it right now.
Speaker 2:Just a little bit. Yeah, I was going to say that's kind of important for me and you Well iron too, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, so, and we can trade, as I said right, so that's a different explosion, and you can trace back all the different elements to these different kinds of explosions.
Speaker 3:The carbon and nitrogen in your body, though, does come from single stars, and so our Sun will produce lots of carbon and nitrogen at the end of its lifetime, and that's important because that's in your amino acids, within your body, and so, yeah, the really exciting element that you people might like to know about is that, okay, so you've got these two massive stars in a binary that both explode, producing lots of oxygen, but then you can have two remnants, which are two neutron stars, and so then you can ask well, okay, so if the two white dwarfs smashed together and produced all that iron, what happens when you take two neutron stars and smash those together in the, in the binary in a similar way, and they produce most of the gold, silver and platinum in the universe, like the super heavy metals, the super heavy metals, you know.
Speaker 3:So you know, and all of this basically tells us, is that we're all made and this is why I like studying stars because we were made of stardust. Love it, but you know, when you're wearing jewelry or you're, you're, you're proposing to get married to someone you know, then if you've got a gold ring, that gold ring is made of neutron stardust. Oh my God, I'm wearing my wedding gown right now You're making.
Speaker 2:And I have this whole story I tell my students because I was so poor. When I proposed to my wife I only had a few hundred dollars left for my own wedding ring and it's just the cheapest thing. But you know, now I can say you know what? It's freaking, freaking, neutron star death. That is bananas, doc. Yeah, I don't even know where to go from here. My brain is just jello.
Speaker 3:I don't, you get used to it.
Speaker 2:So do you? You're a professor. Do you tell kids this? And they just sit there and drool trying to like figure out what you just told them, like it must never get old, it must never get old. You're like, you just walk into the lecture and you're like boom space facts. And they just, you know, sit there like they. They're in the FX theater and the blast of sound is blowing them back.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. And because you know everyone wants to be connected to the universe, right, and you know you can read your horoscope, which we know doesn't work. But then we can study the science and we realize that we're all made of stardust. And you know this, this, this literally. We could not have existed because when the universe was created 13.8 billion years ago, there was only hydrogen and helium, the two simplest elements.
Speaker 3:All the elements around you that aren't hydrogen and helium have been made by stars in different processes and trying to piece together which elements are made from which stars and how much is really exciting. And it means that somehow, you know, it took the universe 13.8 billion years to have all the elements created for us to exist, for us to evolve and then for us to try and then look back and understand the universe. You know, and then you realize well, hang on, we're also part of the universe. So, while it's really cool to try and understand the universe, it's also really cool to actually try and understand ourselves and each other, which you know. And yeah so, yeah. So I just blown my mind. Now I need to go think about that.
Speaker 2:Can I ask one more question?
Speaker 2:I've got 20 follow up questions here in my notes, but that's too many. Okay, binary stars are common. Did not know that. That's crazy weird. So them exploding into each other probably common. So white dwarf smashing into each other probably common. So does that mean that how our planet has formed is similar to all of them? Exoplanets that are out there, like they're? They're a good likelihood. There's planets like Earth, not necessarily with water and humans and stuff like that, obviously, but the the makeup of them Like. Does that possible?
Speaker 3:It's. It's kind of really complicated, but the short answer is yes. If you've got a star like our son, the planets around that star will have a similar composition. What are the things? That's really cool, though, is that, you know, so massive stars die really quickly.
Speaker 3:It takes somewhere between three to 40 million years from their birth to their death for them to produce lots of oxygen, you know, and the major element in the earth is actually quite surprising to people is actually oxygen, because you have rock is just silicon oxide. Yeah, so you know, if you go back in history through the universe, oxygen would have been one of the first dominant elements, but not much iron, because it takes a lot longer for the two white dwarfs to spiral in together. Okay, because it you lose these by gravitational radiation, which we can detect now via the gravitational waves with these gravitational wave observatories, and so that takes billions of years to produce much iron. Yeah, and so when we actually look back at you, we can look at old stars within our galaxy and we can see they have much more oxygen than iron. And so recent planets being formed, recent in the last few billion years, will be similar to our Sun, those formed tens of billion years ago. The first planets may be very different, composition that is.
Speaker 2:That has been. Oh my god, I've been wondering about, like okay, this is just me speculating, but there's the whole Fermi paradox, like why aren't there aliens everywhere? Well, maybe life needed an Earth-like composition planet and just hasn't. There hasn't been a chance to make it yet.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I mean that's true so. But then it can be more complicated because then you've got to go and look at so, for example, in our solar system, we know that you've got to have the habitable zone. You know you've got to be just the right length, that's our distance from the Sun, so it's not too hot, not too cold, yeah. But what about in the galaxy? You know so we've got to be at the right temperature. But within the galaxy and within galaxies there's many different ways that galaxy can kill life Because you can have those supernovae.
Speaker 4:If you have a supernova going off.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly that can wipe off all life. I mean, if it's within a few hundred light years, we're not too sure exactly, because we can see evidence for supernovae having gone off nearby the Earth. We can actually detect the radioactive elements they've produced in some sediments on the Earth. So we know that we've made it through that. But say a star was, or a planet was, closer to a supernova, it'd be bad. Say the black core at the centre of our galaxy was a creating material, it would be producing lots of x-rays and gamma rays, which would also be bad.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and so when you look at that, as one of my colleagues has, Elizabeth Stanmary from the University of Warwick in the UK she took the same models where we try and understand all the stellar explosions and said, okay, when did galaxies become habitable? And it turns out, you know, with the stuff going off in galaxies that can also wipe out life on planets. It was only about four or five billion years ago where galaxies started to become habitable. And then you realise, well, hang on, our planet is about four and a half billion years old. Hang on, that's a really strange coincidence. Okay, we've got a sample size of one. But, yeah, an answer to the Fermi paradox could be that maybe it's only just recently that the universe or galaxy has become habitable, because you know where we are quite far out is quite safe If you were closer in then also. So it's really complicated. And yes, certainly the different composition of planets and everything probably plays into that in some effect.
Speaker 2:Oh, this is so fun to talk about. I'm just enjoying this so much. I just tickled my brain thinking about this. Yeah, it's a more wholesome thought to me that you know, I've read about the Fermi paradox and watched videos and they're like, you know, we. You know there's the great filters are coming and that's probably what wiped out all life. And I'm like, oh dang, maybe we are alone and maybe this is I just like this better. Maybe we aren't alone and we've just we're the first. You know there's a whole bunch of firsts out there, because it was just the only time that things could survive.
Speaker 3:Yes, no, there's also a time for being the first and a time to actually get to a point where you can travel and communicate. And I think I did, because we know about so many planets around. There's basically a planet around every star. Now you can start doing the, using that Drake equation to work out what the density of different civilizations could be. And actually, even with the rough, reasonable estimate, there's probably quite a few civilizations, but like on the order of 10s, but they're spread out over the galaxy and so, yeah, and so who knows how close we will are. But yeah, it's more hopeful to say you know, I think you're right, you know, maybe we're just one of the first, not going to be the first, but one of the first. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I like that better than everything else is dead. Yeah, yeah, before we get to some of our standard questions, doc, like what are you? What do you? What else are you working on? Like this, I would just like think about this all day long if I had a brain like yours. But what else are you working on, jen?
Speaker 3:Most of the time when I'm an academic head, so that means I have to do a lot of HR and everything else that you're meant to do in managing a department. Oh, OK.
Speaker 3:But in terms of the science, you know, when you talk about binary stars, our big problem is that many of the models that people use to understand galaxies and other things that we've just described are all based on just single stars on their own. So it's really trying to relearn how to do astrophysics when you take account of the binary interactions, of those effects that you can, where you've got the mass transfer, so stars can appear younger than they really are. And actually what's really good is all the work we're kind of doing to try and understand what goes on. We always get a better fit because, you know, stars and galaxies tend to be quite complex, but when you think, oh, we've got this natural complexity because of the binary interactions, everything's actually become simple, which is kind of weird, but you just know more.
Speaker 2:Like it's just more variables, that instead of like guessing or getting it wrong, you just have a better picture. It's less fuzzy yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, because you're going from the physics that you know you're predicting forward so you can get closer and closer to the observations.
Speaker 3:And that's really what we're doing.
Speaker 3:It's trying to do synthetic observations of the same binary models to predict the number of supernovae, to predict the number of gravitational wave transients, which are like where you see two black holes spiraling in together, but also then trying to understand the galaxies and the stars in them and how they formed and evolved. And you know, I'm in some projects that are using JWST to, like study stars in our own galaxy, but then also stars way back at the very edge of the observable universe, to actually understand those galaxies across all of cosmic time and try to make this one big picture of understanding everything. It's really quite exciting, but also brain breaking because you have to think about everything in different directions and you go, and so I do have this. I've started putting a memo about being a conspiracy theorist, or sounding like a conspiracy theorist in my model, because I'll talk about things. For example, those binary black holes we detect merging because they're spiraling in together through gravitational waves. Today we're actually being formed in the galaxies or in galaxies like those we see in JWST, billions of years ago.
Speaker 2:I read something about that that like how did that even happen, right, like that's a weirdo thing, yeah.
Speaker 3:But it's just that they have other implications, because those two phone black holes you have to have a really massive star, something like a hundred times or 20 times that of mass of the sun, and they're really bright. And so they actually are so bright and so hot. They produce photons which ionize hydrogen and actually, when you look back, the universe became transparent way back billions of years ago because of these hot stars, and so you know you're linking these things you're seeing together in the remnant black holes to stars. You can see all the way back billions of years ago at the edge of the Earth's Earth or universe, and then you're also pointing out that they would have created supernovae that create the elements. And actually what this is trying to make, the point is why.
Speaker 3:There's lots of facts. They all come down to actually telling you something about the stars that either made that light, made those elements or made those black holes. When you have those three observations that tell that your models have to do, you can actually really constrain your physics in these extreme stars to a very strong degree, and that actually tells you something much more deeply that you know your physics is correct. Your model must have something mostly right going for it and it's like kind of fun to take in all these different observations rather than just concentrating on like one sun that we see. We can understand everything else about the universe if we only try to understand that sun. We need to understand all these different things.
Speaker 2:Oh, my goodness, I could talk to you for like 20,000 hours I have. This is just so amazingly fascinating. Wow, you know, I thought I had an OK handle on space. And then the very first sentence you said was like you know, binary stars are the more common, and I was like what? Everything's going to go apart.
Speaker 3:So yeah, I'm stuck in.
Speaker 2:What is that thing where you think you know more than you do? Like, what is that called? Like you're, you're actually an idiot. But because you are overcompensating for what you know, I was like oh, I was in that when I'm talking, as soon as you said that sentence yeah, can I ask you, like a very pedestrian but wholesome question Do you mind about space?
Speaker 3:Okay, yeah.
Speaker 2:I love asking people that study space this question and it's it's something because I'm a high school teacher that my kids would connect with quite a bit. Do you have a favorite planet?
Speaker 3:Oh, that's a good question. Okay, I'd have to say I can tell you my favorite planet and I'll tell you my favorite star, which is maybe a bit more useful for me. So my favorite planet is Jupiter, and that's because just one of the books I read growing up and movies I saw was 2001 and 2010. Like 2010, space Odyssey was one of my favorite movies for ages. Yeah, but they go to Jupiter and you know, and Jupiter being a gas giant, and it's got these Galilean worlds, you know, and I've just watched Avatar 2 and you know that's a planet going around a gas giant and you know that kind of imagination that you've got these whole worlds that are quite different because they're next to this gas giant. Yeah, so that's my favorite planet. My favorite star is QZ Karini because it's a binary of binaries, so it's actually two binary stars which are both binary stars orbiting around each other, and there's four stars in the system and they're all going to explode in supernovae. So it's kind of cool. Oh, my goodness, that is cool.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, thank you for answering that question. You know it may seem very simple, but I love, I just it. Just, you know it's what. It's what the average person who's curious about science thinks about. You know, I love this planet, I love that planet.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I mean because otherwise you think a scientist, you don't worry about things like that. But you know, we're all human still and we can still like things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, cool, cool. Well, doc, we have some standard questions. We asked our guests on the science podcast and bring things from the cosmic sense down to stuff on Earth. Do you have a pet story you could share with us, a story about a pet from your life?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I mean, it's just that I used to have a cat called Beauty. We actually bought her or my parents bought her, I should say because we had a mouse problem in the house and so the cat was very good at getting rid of mice. But we had a few ages and I was the one who named her. I never knew this, and I found this out a few years ago that apparently I woke up after sleep and after a dream or something, I said we're going to call the cat Beauty, which I think is a lovely name, and she was. And then I had to rationalize this years later, like why did they call her Beauty?
Speaker 3:And I found out about the quarks, which are these subatomic particles which are called up down strange charm. And now we call them top and bottom, but they used to be called Truth and Beauty. And so my excuse is oh yes, I named my cat Beauty after the bottom of a beauty clock, not when I'd been about five or six. I wouldn't have had any idea about the quarks, but that's my excuse now. I must have dreamed it Very cool.
Speaker 2:Well, that's a. That's a cute pet. What color was the cat it's?
Speaker 3:one of those tortoise shell type ones. So yeah, but she had a white tummy, so yeah, so like a black and brown and yeah, she's great.
Speaker 2:I love it. Well, thanks, doc, that's a cool pet story. Okay, this next one, I don't even know if we need to do I've been asking this and it's just I feel like it. I feel so stupid asking it because, like, literally this entire interview has done this, but anyways, we asked her guests to share a super fact, something that will blow our minds. Yeah, do you have anything left in the tank, doc?
Speaker 3:Yep, I do, because this is this is one of the ones I got prepared for. And so a supernova exploding style whether it comes from a massive star or a star like our son in a binary from a white dwarf produces as much energy and emits as much energy over a few days as our sun will over its entire 10 billion year lifetime. So if you go out and you feel the sun on your face and you go, well, that's hot. Imagine adding all of that up over 10 billion years. And yet that's the amount of energy when a star dies in a supernova. Our sun won't die in a supernova, by the way. Everyone we're safe, it's okay, but when a star explodes in a supernova, it's all that energy from 10 billion years in a few days.
Speaker 2:I think I saw that happen to somebody who opened the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's even more, 8 more than that, billions of times more than that. That's why we can see these supernovae across the universe. We can detect them to see exploding stars because they pump out. So when a star dies in one of these supernovae, it can outshine all the stars in the galaxy because it's got all this energy that's pent up, that's just being released, and there's things which can be even a bit brighter than that. And actually, when you see things brighter than that, you have to start worrying because it's like, yeah, physics can't really get that bright, and so there are ways we get there, but you have to really think hard.
Speaker 2:Okay so but question there's another astrophysicist that studies beetle juice and she was tweeting that it's acting weird and it couldn't have blown up already because it's so far away and that one does go supernova. Is that correct? That's going to be a supernova thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so well, okay, so beetle juice in Orion is a red supergiant. It's massive enough that it will explode in a core-clap supernova, so it will form a neutron star in its core and then produces much energy in a few days, as the sun will over 10 billion years, so we'll actually see that. Now this is actually one really thing, because I know everyone kind of always thinks like, oh, but it's already happened if it has exploded because it's so many. But we actually always, when we're looking at the universe, astronomers always just looked at the rate, at when we actually see it, because we can't travel faster in the speed of light and so we can't actually get there to see if it's exploded or not before the light comes to us. But beetle juice is weird for so many reasons and it could be variable and it could explode tomorrow or in 100,000 years.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah.
Speaker 3:And there was a recent study that actually came out and they were one of the first people that analyzed the oscillations, because it is actually variable. So if you were to go out night on night and look at beetle juice, you would be able to see that it's actually changing in its brightness Quite visibly. It's one of the brightest stars in the sky and it is slightly orangey as well and it may even change color a little bit.
Speaker 3:Yeah it's true and yeah so, but in this study they were saying it's towards the end of carbon burning. So it's actually taking carbon atoms, smashing them together in the core to form neon and magnesium, and you know, when it gets to the end of that, it's like a few hundred years before it actually explodes in a supernova. So well, okay, tens or hundreds of years before super, so it could explode within our lifetimes. But it's much more complicated than that, because then other people have pointed out well, they didn't take account of other things that other people have studied. And actually one of the reasons why beetle juice got so dim recently was actually because it was producing dust in its atmosphere.
Speaker 3:It's so big and cool because it's you know, it's a star. That's the size of the solar system. So you know it would take if you was in a to give a scale of things you know our earth is like takes 24 hours to fly from pole to pole in a 777 jet. It takes a hundred days to fly from pole to pole in our sun If you had a 777 and if you didn't burn to a crisp when you was doing it. But on these kind of stars we're talking of hundreds of thousands of days, so you know, like tens or hundreds of years to fly from pole to pole in these red giants because they're so big, if you could live that long in a 777. Wow, and that because they're so big they're really cool and they can actually make dust, and this is like cigarette smoke. Most of the carbon in your body probably comes from stars like these red giants most just because they're so cool that actually form molecules in their outer atmosphere. And then you've got this dust. Dust is like, you know, when you look across the city or like, I think, as you maybe had in Canada and America recently where you've had all the dust storms coming over from the forest fires, you know everything becomes opaque and looks orangy, and so it's that same thing kind of going on in stars and it can make the star look dimmer, and so that's kind of what can happen with beetle juice.
Speaker 3:And if you take that into account, maybe beat reduce isn't near the end of his life. But the problem is we don't know, because it's really difficult to model these stars at the end of their lifetime and there's so much we still don't understand. But yes, beat reduce will explode. Can't tell you when, but if you go to Wikipedia you can actually see there's a list of other stars that may explode that we'll see, and the one that I would put my money on to explode sometime in our lifetimes would actually be a different kind of starts, but it is a binary star called Gamma Valorum, and you know that one is maybe also close to its lifetime end of its lifetime but again, we just don't know. But there's many where we may see one more in our galaxy within the next few years. Wow.
Speaker 2:Doc, do you have to go in two minutes? You said you had an hour and we had a slow start and then a tech problem.
Speaker 3:I've got, I've got, I've got enough time, don't worry.
Speaker 2:OK, ok, I didn't. I want to honor your time. I mean you're you're doing this out of grace. So thank you. So real quick follow up with that. I just have one more question that we'll get to the last one. Ok, let's say. Let's say Beetlejuice does explode, even though it may or may not. Boom blows up. How, how bright would that be to us on earth? Like, would we notice a big change? Would it like turn into another moon? Like? I've heard so many crazy things about Beetlejuice.
Speaker 3:Well, it would still so far away that you would still see it as a point of light, but it would be very bright. So I'd have to go and look it up and we don't necessarily know how bright it would get. Ok, but saying something like the brightness of the moon is probably reasonable. And it would last that and have a constant brightness for about three months and then it would slowly fade away. Crazy, yeah, that is crazy.
Speaker 2:Exactly this happened to ancient people right Like stuff like this happened to their ancient humans.
Speaker 3:Yeah yeah.
Speaker 3:We do know from the historical record Tyco and Kepler both had supernovae they observed and the earliest records actually go, I think, back to 1006. Back in Chinese and Arabic records where they both saw a supernova exploded. And some of these observations from those early astronomers are so accurate. We can actually look at what we term the light curve, so how the brightness changed over time, and we can work out what type of star it was that exploded. And the really exciting thing is now we can actually go back with radio telescopes and see the remnants of those explosions, because they're still really hot but now they're like light years across and we can actually study them and we know exactly how old those supernovae are. Wow. And so we can actually kind of understand the explosions even at this late stage. And actually I really like talking about that I think it's the 1006 supernovae in my lectures because you can show the Chinese records and you can still read them today.
Speaker 3:If you know traditional Chinese. The characters are still mostly the same. You can recognize numbers of the days and the months. With the Arabic records it's probably similar. But again, for a historian this is great because you've got two records of the same event and you can check each against each other in case there was some bias in the reporting. Oh, wow.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, even the studying of these, and it's quite rare that we haven't had. The last galactic supernova that was observed was in 1604. So you might say we're overdue for one, but of course it just you need to have a star nearby exploding, and when the next one does explode within our Milky Way, it's going to actually be so important for science Because if it goes off today in quotation marks we would be able to detect neutrinos coming from the neutron star formation. We detect gravitational waves from the neutron star being born as all the mass in the middle that's, extreme densities and temperatures swells around, and we'd actually know about it from them, because those gravitational waves and neutrinos come from the very core before we actually see this, so before we see the actual star explode.
Speaker 2:And the biggest morning right Like that, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3:Okay, yeah, so Betelgeuse would take two days to explode. We would know from neutrinos and gravitational waves the star was dead before we actually saw the light coming off the surface.
Speaker 2:Well, how exciting would that be if you're like the neutrino person and like your meter go, I don't even know what it is. I don't even know what it is yeah, you'd be like the doodly, doodly, doodly neutrinos coming and you'd be like, oh yeah, gee, it's happening Everybody.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah, you can sign up. So you can sign up to get those neutrino alerts, that there's an email alert list and it's. Yeah, I haven't had one yet, haven't had an email yet.
Speaker 2:Would you be running around Auckland like oh my God, oh my God, two days from now, like a little bit?
Speaker 3:I mean, the thing is, this was also going to be really where amateurs come into play, because all the world's biggest telescopes are too big, they're too sensitive If a supernova went off within our Milky Way because it's so nearby. And actually one thing people would kind of forget is like, oh oops, we've made our telescopes too good, but we'd be able to, but yeah, so we'd have this. I mean, it also depends on the type of supernova that we might have more warning or less warning. So we really don't know. We just have to wait to see what happens. This did happen, by the way, in 1987 when a supernova went off in one of the nearby satellite galaxies at the Milky Way. So we did detect neutrinos from that. So we know this kind of will work. We just have to play the waiting game.
Speaker 2:That's so very cool. Well, thank you for indulging me on all my very curious and sometimes annoying questions. I appreciate that, doc. The last thing that we, the last thing I'd like to ask you, is to share something that you, that you have as a hobby or cause that you're passionate about. We really like to know that. On the science podcast.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I can kind of join two things together with this, because I've already mentioned how much sci-fi is important to me, you know. So I'm really glad to actually there's new Star Trek strange new worlds out today so I can go and watch it later on, because I like finding these stories. That she one of the things that I've only just come to realize recently, you know. So I became an astrophysicist because science fiction is all about space and going and exploring the universe. That that's really exciting. But Star Trek and Dr who also have a strong moral component. Right, they're real. Some episodes are like almost like thought experiments of what happens if you go to a world of indigenous aliens, but you want to mine it to get this real element, just like in Avatar.
Speaker 3:There's also Dr who episodes that have the same kind of story, and I didn't realize that when I was watching Star Trek I thought I was just learning about space, but no, I was learning about right and wrong and morals as well, which goes back to my comment about like being Dr who, because you try and make it the world a better place, and I mean one of the things that the cause I'm kind of know.
Speaker 3:So, while I've talked about. I study exploding binary stars. I also try and explode this myth that gender is a binary, because I'm transgender and all that actually means is that my gender does not align with the sex I was assigned at birth, which kind of makes sense because after 40 odd years of being alive, I understand myself a bit better than the doctor did. If you would have looked at me after the third five seconds and gone like, oh boy. And what's really interesting is people some can go for all the spacey stuff that I've just described and go like, as you've done, like wow, this is so complicated, it's so great. But they kind of don't assume that people are really simple and that biology is really simple and it's it's. We're hideously complicated biological beings.
Speaker 2:Oh you are.
Speaker 3:And when you go into the science correct, and you know, and how our brains and our biology, and actually it's amazing how our bodies, even though they're so complicated, still kind of end up all looking kind of the same, because we know that there's variations in between the two binary sexes which can actually be quite serious biological conditions. But you know it's, it's amazing how complex our biology is. You know there's so many great episodes of science fiction where they play with this and that they play with sex and gender, and it's just, you know, always that thing that you think about. I said it earlier as well.
Speaker 3:You know Carl Sagan said we're away for the universe to know itself because we're made of stardust. But you know, we have to remember we're part of the universe too, and actually in trying to understand all this cosmic history about stars, we should also not forget that. You know, we need to try and understand ourselves and each other, and that's one thing I really like doing is just trying to understand people and like how society and culture comes together and try and make sure that we all try and get on, which I think is really important today in so for so many different reasons. So yeah, so I was just trying to wrap together the causes I kind of do, to try and make people aware that you know that people are complicated and that's okay because you know. It just means it's more fun to try and work out how we all come together, and it's also science fiction's fault for me having this viewpoint.
Speaker 2:I love it. I have been on my. I have goosebumps. I'm not going to lie, I have goosebumps this entire interview listening to you talk, the passion that you have. You're just the Jason. I just have so enjoyed this conversation and what a wonderful way to end it, doc. Thank you so much for what a cool kind of bookend to our conversation. I so appreciate that.
Speaker 3:You're more than welcome, Jason. Thank you very much for inviting me. I always love to talk about things, especially science.
Speaker 2:So yeah, and before we wrap up, are you on social media? Can people find you somewhere?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. So you can find me on Twitter and Instagram on Astro underscore JJ E and on blue sky on astro dash JJ E. They don't allow you to have underscore on blue sky, but yeah, I'm there to.
Speaker 2:OK, we'll make sure some of those links are in the show notes, everybody, so you can. You're more than welcome, jason. Thank you. We are proud to have bark and beyond supplycom now as an official sponsor of the science podcast. Bark and beyond supplycom is a small family owned company that started off making joint supplements for dogs, but now they sell toys and treats and a whole bunch of other goodies. Skip the big box stores and check out the amazing deals and awesome stuff at bark and beyond supplycom. You'll see a link in our show notes and use the coupon code Bunsen B U N S E N for 10 percent off at bark and beyond supplycom. Click the link. Skip the big box stores.
Speaker 1:How about the little guy? Ok, it's story time with me. If you don't know what story time is, story time is when we talk about stories that have happened with and, oh, happened within the past one or two weeks. I will start. So, if you all didn't know, I went on a bit. I went on a bit of a vacation with Annalise to the mountains we went to. We went on a four day excursion to the mountains. We did some adventuring. We went in the hot springs in Banff. We did some hiking in Canmore. We did some shopping downtown in both Canmore and Banff. Yeah, we just had a fun time.
Speaker 1:Camping there in Banff I saw a Bernice Mountain dog and a golden retriever together and it was like Bunsen and Beaker's doppelgangers, except for not really, because the golden retriever was full sized and did the same thing that Beaker does to me. I started petting it and it leaned into me with its butt, which is what Beaker does she turns around and then leans into you a little bit. And then the Bernice Mountain dog had two different color eyes, which is pretty cool, and I had food in my hand and it made the same face that Bunsen makes when I have food in my hand. It does a little air nibble and he did the little air nibble. I don't know what the names were. We didn't have enough time to get really introduced to the dogs, but there's a lot of dogs in Banff.
Speaker 2:It's very dog friendly. Was the burner about the size of Bunsen, bigger or smaller?
Speaker 1:Yeah, about the same size, a little slimmer, so not like a pure bread burner, ok. But yeah, it had the mark up its face and it was cute. There was another dog that looked a bit like Bunsen, but it was a cross and it was very cute. It was very, very nice too. It was a very good listener. But yeah, that's my story is finding Bunsen and Beaker's not quite doppelgangers, doppelgangers. Mum, do you have a story?
Speaker 4:I sure do. I have a story. I have Bunsen and he won't go without him right now to allow me to speak into the microphone. Effectively. My story is well, want, want, want. We went for a walk today, Jason and I earlier to the Beaver Dam in hopes that we would catch some footage about the Beaver's being busy Beaver's during the evening and there was nothing, no movement. So we're going to leave the trail cam there in that location for one or two more nights and then move it into a different location If we are unable to see anything but Beaker was so wanting to go outside with us.
Speaker 4:This morning she's like huh, this is a weird time. This is a weird time, but I can jump around, I can be excited to go. And we said, no, we're just going to go down and check quickly, because when we take the dogs they like to get into things, beaker especially. And that's my story, dad, do you have a story?
Speaker 2:I do. So Chris went to our school today and Adam was still, I believe, driving back from the mountain, so I was home alone with the dogs and I was. I've been recording the audio for text from Bunsen to all of my parts and feeling like I was slowly going bananas because I was talking to myself. So I took the dogs for a walk and the last three or four days it's been cool I almost want to say cold. It's been rainy and in the morning you could see your breath, and in the summer Bunsen is not really thrilled or does not want to go on a walk with me without Chris. But because it was so cool, guess who came on the walk with me without any need for, you know, putting him on a leash to make sure he comes or bribing him with treats. It was Bunsen. He came on the walk with me.
Speaker 2:So we got stuck in a huge rainstorm. It was kind of spitting when we left which is a great temperature to go for a walk, and then it poured and we all got soaked. Beaker was told. Actually the dogs don't mind walking when it's pouring, but we got back and everybody was soaked. I remember when Adam came home the first thing he said was why are you wet? And then he said why are you also wet? Because both of the dogs were soaking wet and was probably kind of confusing. And that's my story of the week.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's your story, but did you put ginger in the patio?
Speaker 2:I did, and she also got wet.
Speaker 4:Really, I wonder how scared she was. Was it thunder and lightning?
Speaker 2:No, no, it was just rain.
Speaker 1:Oh, ok, yeah, ginger hates the lightning.
Speaker 2:She does not like storms at all.
Speaker 1:Yes, For anyone on the podcast who doesn't know, ginger is like deathly afraid of thunder. Yes, she'll go downstairs in this one spot behind these boxes and just hide. Yes, and I feel so bad because I try to have fun with her and I try to distract her and then it thunders again and then she runs away from me.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anyway, that was story time. Thank you so much for listening to my section of the podcast, and thank you for listening to this episode of the podcast. I'll see you on the next one.
Speaker 2:Bye, bye. That's it for this week's show. Thanks for coming back week after week to listen to the Science Podcast and to all of our new listeners who are maybe tuning in for the first time. We really appreciate you listening to us, and special thanks to Dr Jan Eldridge, who talked to us about oh my goodness, binary stars so cool. We'd also like to give a shout out to the Top Dogs. The Top Dogs support us on our paid community called the Paw Pack. You can join up to check the show notes, and we'd like to give them a little bit of an acknowledgement. Chris, let's read their names.
Speaker 4:Alicia Stanley the Heard, wendy Diane Mason and Luke Linda Sherry, tracy Halberg, carol MacDonald, Helen Chin, elizabeth Bougiois, peggy McKeel, mary LaMagna Ryder, holly Birch, Sandy Brimer, brenda Clark, andrew Lynn, marianne McNally, catherine G, jordan, tracy Domingu, diane Allen, julie Smith, terry Adam Shelley Smith, jennifer Smathers, laura Stephenson, tracy Linebaugh, courtney Proven Fun, lisa Breanne Haas, bianca Hyde, debbie Anderson and Yuchita Donna Craig, amy C, susan Wagner, kathy Zercher, liz Button and Ben Rathart.
Speaker 2:For science, empathy and cuteness.