The Science Pawdcast

Season 5 Episode 35: Neanderthal Genes, Pet Vaccines, and Gravitational Waves with Dr. Romero-Shaw

• Jason Zackowski • Season 5 • Episode 35

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Do you carry Neanderthal genes, and if so, how does it impact your pain threshold? This week, our fascinating exploration starts with this intriguing question. In Pet Science we also tackle a rising concern – dog vaccine hesitancy.

We are joined by our special guest, Dr. Isabel Ramiro Shah, who enlightens us with her valuable insights on gravitational waves.

Voyage into the mesmerizing world of gravitational waves, revealing their nature, detection methods, and the extraordinary efforts behind their discovery. Our exploration progresses into the exciting field of exoplanet research and the astounding advancements it has witnessed. The climax of our journey is an adventure into the world of giant African land snails, helping us understand why they are considered pests in Australia.
Dr. Ramero-Shaw's Links:

https://twitter.com/astrobel_rs
https://isobelmarguarethe.github.io/Website/


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Speaker 2:

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 everybody and welcome back to the Science Podcast. We hope you're happy and healthy out there. Knock on wood, no snow yet. In Alberta, canada, we always say if it gets to Halloween and there's no snow, you've won.

Speaker 2:

Shenanigans continue to occur with the beavers. If you've been following the Bunsen and Beaker accounts on social media, you've seen all manner of updates and our wildlife camera got a close up of our beaver and it is a cutie. We don't know if it's a male or female. I misspoke on pet chat and said that the male beavers are a little bit bigger. I read that from a site that maybe got their facts wrong. In actuality, male and female beavers are the same size, so we don't know if our beaver is a male or a female, but we'll let you know. And we know, okay. Well, what's happening on the Science Podcast this week In science news you might have some Neanderthal genes and what does that mean for you? Well, you'll have to listen to find out. And in pet science we're going to talk about, I guess, a worrying trend that a research team looked at, and that's dog vaccine hesitancy. It's not the greatest news, but we should talk about it anyways. Our guests and ask an expert is Dr Isabel Ramiro Shah, who studies gravitational waves. Super cool discussion. Can't wait for you to listen to the interview. Okay, time for the bad joke. What did the Neanderthals call the game Rock Paper Scissors? They just called it Rock. Let's do a twofer. Did you hear that two Neanderthals love partying? Yeah, they went clubbing. Okay, that's bad. Alright, on with the show, because there's no time like science time.

Speaker 2:

This week in Science News, some of you listening might have Neanderthal genes. We covered before on the Science Podcast last year that a scientist named Savante Pabo won the Nobel Prize for basically decoding the entire genome of the Neanderthal from. I think it was like a finger bone. He didn't have a lot to work with and from that it's borne a lot of fruit in the scientific community.

Speaker 2:

This new study, co-led by UCL researchers, looked at individuals that that are carrying three specific genes that are inherited from that Neanderthal genome. The main gene, scn9a, is associated with sensory neurons, specifically pain, and related to that gene are three Neanderthal variants. They have codes ones M9, 32l. Anyways, the study gathered up almost 2000 people from Columbia and checked out their genome. They looked at their genes of these folks to see if they had the Neanderthal variant, and they did. Within that population, one variant was present in about 20% of the chromosomes. Well, about 30% of the chromosomes carried a couple of the other variants, so it's not like everybody had it, but it's not like a small amount either, like 30% of your population. You're getting close to a third.

Speaker 2:

And as the main gene, the one that before the variant, was decoded for sodium channels that express in sensory neurons that help detect pain, that's what these folks were tested on. They were tested with their pain threshold. The individuals who volunteered for the study had their skin exposed to mustard oil and then they pricked the skin. The individuals are asked like how painful it was, and it was pretty clear that anybody with that Neanderthal variant had a much lower pain threshold. And the folks who had all three Neanderthal variants, gene variants, were even more susceptible to pain. Obviously are there evolutionary advantages to not really wanting to feel pain. Probably you might have a faster reaction time if you're getting eaten or bitten or you know simple things like that. You obviously don't want to have pain for small things, but there there had to have been a reason why. You know the Neanderthals had that gene. We do know that Neanderthals in our most recent ancestor had bi-bias, so that's why we have Neanderthal DNA genes within some human populations. So these folks are just a little bit more susceptible to pain. Now, when they looked at a much larger group from South America, like from Brazil, columbia, mexico so I guess Mexico is not South America, central America and they were checking for those three variants, it was very prevalent in the populations with Native American ancestry, like Peru. In Peru 66% of folks have Native Native American ancestry and there's a much greater linkage with between that and those three variants.

Speaker 2:

The biochemistry is also really interesting, like what would do those genes? Do them to make you experience pain Worse? It has to do with how sensitive the neurons are. It changes the threshold in which a nerve impulse is generated. Nerves require chemical stimulus. The impulse travels down things in your your body called axons, until it reaches like a certain electrical action potential and the axon terminal releases transmitters that carry the impulse to the next cell. All of this chain reaction, this is just biochemistry. All of this chain reaction just has a lower threshold to get going. If you have those Neanderthal variants. The team is looking into maybe some of the cons of having a lower threshold for pain in future studies and basically spitballing the idea. I'm sure some folks listening have Native American ancestry in the past. You may have these Neanderthal genes inside your DNA. That's science news for this week. This week in pet science we are going to look at a study slash survey that asked the question of folks about vaccinations for their dogs. If the pandemic has taught me anything, it's that way more people than I assumed are vaccine hesitant.

Speaker 2:

I grew up in a family that was very, very pro vaccine. My grandmother, my grandma Marion I only knew her in a wheelchair and that was because she contracted polio and lost the use of her legs. So anytime we met with her she always talked about you know, make sure you're vaccinated. She was a walking PSA for vaccines. She would have loved to get the vaccine for polio but unfortunately contracted it the year the vaccine came out. My mom was in medicine. She was a physiotherapist and a very pro vaccine. We got all of our shots. It's just something that our family did and in talking with a lot of doctors and other folks in my science degree, I just assumed most of the public was like, yeah, you get your shots and you move on with it and any like reactions to it is extremely rare, like as rare as getting struck by lightning or something like that. The pandemic opened my eyes. I would have loved for the COVID-19 vaccine to be a one and done thing, but the COVID-19 virus mutated and made the vaccine less effective. If you look at the data, the vaccines saved millions of lives, so they were really effective.

Speaker 2:

This is a science podcast so I'm not going to get into conspiratorial anti-vaccine talking points. It really opened my eyes. There are a lot of people very hesitant and if people are hesitant, this is more of a PSA. If you're trying to convince somebody, the worst thing you can do is to shame them. You give them the information. You hope they make the best choice, and the best choice Many doctors will say the vast majority of doctors and epidemiologists and virologists is to get a vaccine. Overwhelmingly, the vaccines we give kids are very, very, very safe. We had Dr Jen Gunter on the podcast. She talked about the HPV vaccine. It's literally a moonshot for. So if there's vaccine hesitancy in people and I get why that you might be a bit vaccine hesitant not a full-on vaccine anti-vaxxer. But like you're concerned about vaccines, you maybe don't know the science as well, maybe like me, or especially a doctor or a immunologist.

Speaker 2:

What's going on with dogs? Well, a huge survey from over 2,000 people answered a pretty important question. That survey looked at two stages. Are people hesitant towards giving their dogs vaccines? If they are, what is the effect of that with their decision-making during the day? This is a fairly recent study. It was conducted from March 30th to April 10th this year, 2023. And the results of the stage one the overall sentiment, was kind of shocking. I was reading it, I couldn't believe it. 37% of people in the study consider vaccines administered to dogs as unsafe, 22% said that vaccines administered to dogs are ineffective and 30% said they were unnecessary. So, of 100% of people, each question was like 37% for unsafe, 22% for ineffective, 30% for unnecessary Obviously you're not adding those percentages together and more than 50% of the people in the survey. So more than 1,000 people of that 2,000-person survey endorsed one of those positions and for a lot of veterinarians I'm sure that's not the greatest news.

Speaker 2:

Vaccines prevent so much suffering in dogs. Obviously, when your dog is very, very, very old and it's not going out to the park, you can decide not to vaccinate it. But there are vaccines that protect your dogs from like super fatal stuff like rabies and parvo, which is a terrible way to go, and it's just shocking that people have that percentage of people are like, yeah, the vaccines are unsafe, they will hurt my animal. The second part of the study took a look at people's viewpoints on certain public health policies, like should your dog be vaccinated to go to doggie daycare? Should doggie daycare places Mandate that you must have your dog vaccinated before they get to go? It should owning a dog if you own a dog, should it be vaccinated for rabies in order to like have a dog in an area? And Overwhelmingly, the more hesitant people were with their their viewpoints, the more they did not support those policies at all. So there is, of course, no, it's a no-brainer that the more hesitant or the more misinformation you believe about canine vaccines, probably less likely you are to support policies public health policies that make use of those vaccines.

Speaker 2:

Obviously, if you have any questions about vaccines, talk to your, talk to your vet, go to a veterinary doctor and just ask them. I'm I'm a guy with a podcast. I'm not a vet, I'm just somebody who parrots the the consensus of science. So if you know the five vets you go to, or like you know you probably should vaccinate your dog, chances are good. They know more than me and they probably know more than you, because they're a veterinary doctor, about the best course of action for your pet. I know waggles, the place that we train our dogs. You must show proof of vaccination of your animal to get it to go play and to get it to take classes. So slightly disappointing, but I think it's good to think about and talk about. That's pet science for this week.

Speaker 2:

Hello everybody, here's some ways you can keep the science podcast free, number one in our show notes. Sign up to be a member of our pop hack plus community. It's an amazing community of folks who love pets and folks who love science. We have tons of bonus Bunsen and beaker content there and we have live streams every Sunday with our community. It's tons of fun. Also, think about checking out our merch store. We've got the Bunsen stuffy, the beaker stuffy and now the ginger stuffy. That's right, ginger the science cat has a little replica. It's adorable. It's so soft, with the giant fluffy tail, safety glasses and a lab coat. And number three, if you're listening to the podcast on any place that rates podcasts, give us a great rating and tell your family and friends to listen to. Okay, on with the show. Back to the interviews, it's time for ask an expert, and I have Dr Isabelle Romero Shaw with me today. Doc, how are you?

Speaker 3:

doing. I am doing very well. Thank you, Jason.

Speaker 2:

How are you, I'm good, I'm good. First off, where, where are you calling into the show from?

Speaker 3:

I am calling into the show from Bristol in the United Kingdom, which is where I live. I work at the University of Cambridge, though also in the United Kingdom.

Speaker 2:

Okay, no, I kind of got the accent, but I'm not great with accents. Have you lived in the United Kingdom your whole life?

Speaker 3:

I have lived in the United Kingdom for most of my life, but I did move to Australia for four years during the course of my PhD. So I lived in Melbourne and I went to Monash University.

Speaker 2:

Oh, cool, I that is on my bucket list to get to Australia and New Zealand.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, they are there awesome places would really recommend if you get the opportunity.

Speaker 2:

Decent. My son has been to the United Kingdom with band he played outside Buckingham Palace. Wow, three years ago, I know, um they I mean like outside Buckingham Palace, I think quite a ways away. I don't think you can do it. They've advertised it as they were outside Buckingham Palace, but it was, like you know, a five minute walk to Buckingham Palace from.

Speaker 3:

They could see the palace, and that's right, I do believe.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I do believe it was in the background of the video. Um, very nice. But, doc, I introduced you as you have a doctorate. What's your training in science?

Speaker 3:

Yes, so I have a PhD in Astrophysics, specifically gravitational wave astrophysics.

Speaker 2:

Wow, Wait, okay, so we were young. I want to say Probably gravitational waves weren't on Little Isabelle's radar. But were you big into science as a kid?

Speaker 3:

I was big into a Lot of things. I was very curious about many things. When I was very small, my mom was doing a Like an open university degree in science while she was looking after me, and this would involve like getting up in the middle of the night and going into the garden and getting a torch and looking for wood Lice and then photographing wood lice from as many angles as we could, like balancing the woodlice on the camera lens and things. That's just one example. I also was. I loved reading as a child and I loved painting and Exploring and just yeah, just having a very curious attitude towards the world was, I think, what's led me to the place that I am today.

Speaker 2:

Okay. So you asked a lot of questions and you destroyed the library when you went and you took out all the books.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that was it. Yeah, they had to close.

Speaker 2:

Did the live this is. This is a fun thing for people that are avid readers. That's kind of ties people together. I don't know if you remember this or your. Your libraries did this. Did they have some kind of like reading program or there was like a bar chart for how many books you read? No, okay, so that's funny, that's sometimes. I asked scientists and their readers and I was a big reader and there was like bar charts. Wow, and like the readers were so far ahead. They had read like a hundred books in a month and it was like the end of the bar chart, wow.

Speaker 2:

And they said you win at reading, go away, you know.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, we didn't have that, but at school we did have different bands, like different colored stickers would be on the different books that we could take out from the school Library for to indicate how advanced they were. And I do remember getting to the level of like purple dot, which was which was supposed to be too advanced for whatever year I was in at the time and feeling very happy about that.

Speaker 2:

Sounds like a double black diamond ski hill. So one of the things you you study, you're an expert about you mentioned was Gravitational waves. I swear every week there's some new thing coming out about gravitational waves and since we have an expert, could you tell us a little bit about, like what they are? How are they detected?

Speaker 3:

Yes, I can tell you about those things. And, yeah, you're right there, there's a lot of stuff happening with gravitational wave detections and Generally just excitement about black holes and things at the moment, which is which is awesome, and it's very exciting to be a part of science at this kind of yeah, this sort of this moment in science where we're suddenly able to learn so much more about these objects. So to get back to your question, gravitational waves are Kind of ripples in space times. That might not really mean much to you, but the reason that we are Attracted to the earth with gravity is because the earth kind of Effectively makes a dent in the fabric of space time with its gravity. So the the space time is like this four-dimensional field and if you put a mass in that field it distorts that fabric and Then a mass that is near to the first mass will kind of follow the contours in that fabric.

Speaker 3:

So the reason that the moon, for example, is orbiting the earth is because it's following the contours that the earth is making in that fabric of space time. And so if you have two masses that are much, much more massive and much, much more dense than the earth and the moon that are orbiting each other, they will cause these distortions in the space time fabric, that kind of ripple away from that system. And that is what we detect. We detect those ripples coming from binary black holes and binary neutron stars. So these are very, very dense objects that are the kind of remnants or the, the the corpses, if you like, of the stars that have gone before them. And these stars are more massive than the Sun, usually kind of More than eight times more massive than the Sun, in order to become a black hole or a neutron star. So these are the gravitational waves that we've detected so far.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so do we feel these waves, like we've detected them? Do we feel them? Is it like? All of a sudden, you, you're like, ooh, I feel like I'm in an elevator and it's going down. And that was a gravitational wave, or or no?

Speaker 3:

No, we don't feel them, because, it turns out, the fabric of space time is very stiff, so it doesn't really wobble very much, even when a very, very powerful gravitational wave is passing through it.

Speaker 3:

So to give you an idea of how little this, this effect, is, so if you imagine that two objects are kind of on on this fabric and they're wobbling and the distance between them is Changing as the wave passes through their vicinity, when we first detected gravitational waves in 2015, the distance between the earth and the Sun changed by only the same width as a human hair.

Speaker 3:

So this is very, very small, these changes that we're detecting, and in order to detect these things, we have to have these instruments that are so incredibly sensitive. They're the most sensitive Interferometers is there is the name of the instrument they're the most sensitive interferometers that have ever been built and they they work by measuring the change in the distance between two test masses, and in order to do this you have to. These test masses are Four, so three or four kilometers away from each other and they shine a laser in between these test masses and when the distance between those test masses changes, they're able to figure out the amount that that's changed by looking at the interference pattern Existing within the laser light as it reflects back on itself essentially. And in the next step we're going to look at the laser light as it reflects back on itself essentially and in this, this is LIGO like that.

Speaker 2:

Is there more than just LIGO that's doing this now, or is all the data coming from this thing?

Speaker 3:

So there are two LIGO detectors, there's one in Livingston and there's one in Hanford, and then there is one detector near Pisa in Italy called Virgo, and there is also a new detector Well, it's not, you know, brand new, but it's just just joined the observing runs Called Kagura, which is in Japan, which has been built kind of underneath a mountain, which is pretty cool, yeah, I know. And then there is also an older detector called GEO, which is in Germany, but that one is it's smaller, so it isn't as sensitive as the others, and so it isn't really we're not expecting it to see anything, but it's very useful as kind of a test bed for the instrumentation and the various procedures that are used in the other telescopes.

Speaker 2:

If the German one picks up a wave, you've got, we've got something to. Yeah, you might actually feel that I don't know. Okay, so the laser is pointed and the laser moves, like it gets messed up by the wave.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so what actually?

Speaker 2:

Is it affected by other stuff? Like what if somebody's beside it like going, ah, and they're screaming? Like would sound, mess it up.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3:

So there is actually a lot of modeling that goes on that is essential to making these detection.

Speaker 3:

So we have to make these very, very accurate models of the environments around the interferometers.

Speaker 3:

So we have to take into account things like the motion of the tides and things like if there's an earthquake or even just any movement within the ground, it changes the density of the ground near the detector and that causes a very slight change in the gravitational field and that means that that causes some noise in the detector because it's so sensitive that it can actually feel that.

Speaker 3:

So we have to model that as well. And then we also have to measure, on the other end of the scale, noise that comes from quantum effects in the laser and other things like noise coming from the suspension cables that hold up the test masses and things like that. So there are a whole lot of different noise sources. There have been things like glitches or large spontaneous sources of noise that turn out to be helicopters flying over the detectors, and you can model things like trains using some kind of local train timetable and you can see the effects of those in the data. So they're very sensitive to a lot of things and modeling these noise sources is essential to be able to subtract those from the data and then be able to look for the gravitational waves that we care about.

Speaker 2:

Oh, my goodness, what a comp. Is there, like a whole bunch of people in charge of that? Or is there just like one person in their stress of their mind all the time? Yeah, bill, you forgot about the train he's like. Oh, the science is ruined.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's Bill.

Speaker 2:

You know Bill, yeah, bill you forgot about the earthquake thing. I don't know.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, no, there's. So the LIGO Virgo Kagra collaboration is. This is this kind of global group of people and there are thousands of people in this collaboration and the group is split into all of these subsets and there's a subgroup for interferometer modeling and there's a subgroup for instrumentation and all of these people work together and detector characterization and all of these things and they work together to make sure that we understand the detectors as well as we do and as well as we can.

Speaker 2:

Because that's the main thing. I swear. Oh, it's probably over a decade ago. Some physicists said they found a neutrino that went faster than the speed of light, and then they went back and it was just like a calibration error on whatever detector they're using. So, like I can imagine, the first time they announced it, they're like we need to triple check.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, they had to be.

Speaker 3:

We need to be sure. Yeah, they had to be so careful, and also because there was quite a few years previously that we thought that we had actually detected gravitational waves for the first time using a different detector, which was the BISEP telescope in the South Pole, and I was looking for gravitational waves in a different way, using the effect that they have on the cosmic microwave background. But essentially, those people thought that they had seen a detection and they were really excited about it and they actually had a bunch of press releases and things. And then it turned out that it wasn't real. It was caused by dust in between the detector and the cosmic microwave background, which is most of the universe, and, yeah, then they had to retract it. So when we made the first detection from the, it was just the LIGO detectors that made the first detection. They spent a whole year just making sure that this gravitational wave was really what we thought it was, what we hoped it was.

Speaker 2:

Decent. Okay, Now here comes the super annoying question from like a science lay person like myself why, why, why is this a thing? Why, like I get it because I've been, I have the podcast, but somebody listening might be like why is this a thing? Who cares? Yes, it's a big deal.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, somebody asked me this the other day actually oh really, oh, no, yeah, it's fine. It's something that you get asked all the time like, like, what is the use behind your, your science and the? The first answer that always springs to mind is is always to say like well, there have been so many inventions and things that have come out of science and and like there are so many things that we use in our everyday lives that have come out of scientific research that just have have led to these kinds of things that are of commercial value. But I I don't personally find that inspiring. I don't think that that should be a reason to do science For me.

Speaker 3:

I think that, using the example of gravitational waves, this is a completely new way of looking at the university.

Speaker 3:

We, we only know anything that we know about space because of the observations that we've made since you know the, since humans have been looking at the stars, which is since humans have been around and, and that's just using using lights and using kind of, yeah, using using our eyes, and then using telescopes and using mirrors and using these sensors that we've always had, but just kind of enhancing them, and now we've, we've worked out how to detect something that we would have we've never seen before over the course of human history, and I think that that's, that's just amazing, and it allows us to see these whole new regions of the universe that are completely invisible to us or even to our kind of enhanced eyesight, using telescopes and things, and it just it expands our knowledge of the universe, and humans have always been explorers and have always been looking over the horizon and have always been thinking like what is, what is next?

Speaker 3:

How do I, how do I, discover more about my environment? I use that to my advantage and I think that this, like all science, is doing that and particularly in the case of gravitational waves, we're we're enhancing our senses to to discover some things that we would would never be able to discover otherwise, and it's to me that is incredibly exciting.

Speaker 2:

I I read an article where I forget where it's from. I have to go back to my notes but from the gravitational waves. They're calculating how fast black holes are moving as they do their little spinny spin around each other. Is that that's not something you would have been able to calculate before?

Speaker 3:

I believe no, Um, so we, we would not be able to detect binary black holes at all before.

Speaker 2:

Oh okay, they're invisible entirely.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah, cause they're. They're invisible unless they are, unless they have some reason to have produced an electromagnetic signal, like maybe they are interacting with an agaceous environment and that's causing some kind of some kind of electromagnetic counterpart, due to some friction or something. We can't observe those things directly at all without gravitational waves. And then, as soon as we are able to detect gravitational waves, we are able to sense so much more stuff about these objects that we previously just had no idea about. So, for example, how fast they're moving, but also things like their masses and whether those black holes themselves are spinning, and, yeah, just all kinds of things that we just previously had no idea about.

Speaker 2:

Is this sort of along the lines of like we're answering questions, but also the first person to figure out that there were, like radio waves was part of the spectrum of light. It could lead to like us talking to each other over a computer, like we just don't know where this is going to go, how profound it will be.

Speaker 3:

Potentially, potentially. Radio waves are a lot easier for humans to create than gravitational waves. I don't envision that they're going to be used for communication anytime soon.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, some weird invention though that we can't even think of.

Speaker 3:

So yeah, well, a lot of the science that's gone into building the detectors has actually been useful, because there are all of these really sensitive accelerometers and things that need to be there to measure the response of the detector and to measure the various noise sources. And actually I think that there's been some application of some of that equipment to self-driving cars and things like that. So there have already been some yeah, some forays into things that might be useful to your everyday human.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think if I was a hop in a self-driving car, doc, I'd want it to have like some kind of like LIGO level precision around, yeah, me too. Yeah, especially in like Western Canada or through the mountains of British Columbia.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I basically want the LIGO brain to drive the car.

Speaker 3:

The amount of glitches that we get, you might not be so sure.

Speaker 2:

Oh no, okay, yeah, okay. Can I ask like where do you fit in this great big puzzle Like use yourself? Hopefully that's not a dumb question.

Speaker 3:

No, that's a completely sensible question. There's so many pieces of the puzzle. So I primarily do data analysis. So I get that data and I use these models of the detector that other people have already created and I remove that from the data and then I analyze and compare against simulations of what gravitational waves should look like from various different systems and I try and work out what the characteristics are of the system that produced this gravitational wave. And then from there you can go on to do things like okay, what are the population characteristics of the entire population of binary black holes, slash neutron star binaries and things like that.

Speaker 2:

I've talked to exoplanet scientists on their show before. I don't know if you know Dr Jesse Christensen. Anyway, she's an exoplanet scientist and I feel like it's kind of the same story for you. It's like early in her career it was impossible, or almost like very difficult, to do exoplanet research because the data just was from like unreliable, you know non-replicable sources, and now she has like so much data they need, like the public, to help sort through it.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, exoplanets has exploded.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, do you feel your career is going in the same path, like 10 years ago it was. There wasn't a lot of data, if any, and now it's like, oh my, we can do stuff.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I mean. So. For me this is it's very personal actually, because my first encounter with with the field of gravitational waves was actually during my undergraduate degree and we just had to write an essay about a science topic and I for some reason chose to do gravitational waves and at that point gravitational waves hadn't been detected, or the announcement hadn't been made, at least. So I wrote this whole essay about gravitational waves and how they were predicted and how people were looking for them, but they hadn't found them yet, etc. Etc. And then, three days before the essay was due to be handed in, the announcement of the first detection of gravitational waves was made, and then I had to rewrite this whole essay. Oh no, but no, it was good, because that gave me a real sense of like what it's like to be working at the forefront of the science, even though I didn't do any of it myself, it was just. It was very exciting.

Speaker 2:

How wild is that You're? Like this thing and you turn on the news and it's like gravitational waves discovered, yeah, and you're like what.

Speaker 3:

I know I was like, for God's sake, no, it was, it was good.

Speaker 2:

So then, you know, I wrote an essay about the about Sasquatch, in high school. And there was no press conference three days later, telling me that Sasquatch was discovered.

Speaker 3:

So that's unfortunate.

Speaker 2:

Oh, that's a cool story. Well, this was. This has been a brilliant discussion. Thank you for sharing your knowledge about gravitational waves.

Speaker 3:

I feel like every year.

Speaker 2:

Every year we're going to know more and more, and we might have to reach out to people like you every couple of months or something, I don't know. But we have standard questions on the podcast, and one of them is to share a pet story with us. A pet story from your life.

Speaker 3:

Okay, I have several interesting pet stories. Actually I'm not sure which one to go for. Maybe I'll just I'll tell you them both. They both involve the death of a pet, which I'm not sure if that's if that's okay, but it's kind of. They're kind of funny, so maybe maybe it's all right, I don't know. I'll tell you them and you can always cut them out if you don't like them. So the first one is actually to do with my mother's freezer. So she has this like this, this chest freezer, and because it's quite hard to organize the chest freezer, she just kind of labels all of the things that are in the Tupperware that have been stored for later. And one time, while I was away at university, my goldfish died and I and I wasn't there, and so I just thought that somebody had kind of done what you do with a goldfish when it dies, you know, flushed it down the toilet or something.

Speaker 2:

Okay, yeah.

Speaker 3:

And I got back from university. I was visiting home for a weekend or something and my mom asked me to get something out of the freezer to defrost it for dinner. And I was going through the Tupperwares and I found one that was labeled dead fish for burial. So I had been going through all of the things in the freezer, like lasagna, bolognese, like whatever and then I see dead fish for burial and turned out that she had frozen it so that when I got back from university I could go and bury it in the garden, which meant that I then had to defrost my pet fish and then tip it into the ground outside. So that's story number one.

Speaker 2:

I feel it would be way less, way more traumatizing if you weren't coming back from university, if you're coming back from like grade two.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah, that's true. I think I was better able to deal with it at that point. That's true. The second story is a bit more, I guess, a bit more interesting, because it involves a giant African land snail, which is my preferred pet.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Speaker 3:

I'm really into snails. I think that they're really cool and the juxtaposition between their kind of completely morphable body and then they're completely rigid and beautiful shell is just. It's really interesting to me and I really love them. And I've had two giant African land snails as pets so far in my life. Cool, yeah, that's super cool. When I moved to Australia I couldn't take them with me because in Australia giant African land snails are considered pests because if they escape they can like they can actually, I don't know rampage through the streets.

Speaker 2:

I'm sure they don't do that Australia why does everything that gets brought there just go everywhere yeah?

Speaker 3:

Things that go there. They just become like I don't know amputation.

Speaker 2:

And then there's no Canadian moose that get over there, because they exploit that entire country.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah, but yeah, so I. So this was before I moved to Australia. This was also when I was at university and I had my first giant African land snail, which I had named Juan. When I got back from university, my dad was driving me home because I didn't drive at that point and he said by the way, I just wanted to let you know that your snail died.

Speaker 3:

And I was absolutely devastated. I was way more upset than I was about the goldfish and I was really, really sad and I planned this funeral that I invited all of my friends to. So we had a very, a very sad funeral, but also we had kind of a Mexican themed feast to honor him and I played one hour of sad Mexican music compilation on YouTube, which was very, very fitting. And then we put him in the garden and my brother, who was, I think, probably maybe 10 or 11 at that point this was his first experience of death, and so he was really, really affected by it, even though it was just a snail that he hadn't cared for at all, and he put on I think it was like a like a straw farmer's hat and his dressing gown, and he wanted to do a reading at the funeral. But he didn't have anything like poetic to read, so he just read like an extract from a comic book from the Bino. Well, it's so sweet, it was really sweet. It was very, yeah, it was very meaningful to me.

Speaker 2:

Oh, that is so good, that is so wonderful that your family came together. Yeah, Didn't you know, didn't poo you or say you know, this is silly. The loss of a pet, of any kind it can affect you.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, absolutely I agree, and I'm very happy to say that I kept the shell of Juan and I still have that today and it's very, it's very beautiful.

Speaker 2:

So yeah, oh yeah, I googled giant African land snail while you were talking. They are not small, they are giant. Yes, it fit in your hand, like your whole hand.

Speaker 3:

Yes, I used to. I remember having some very lovely evenings sitting watching television with Juan in my hand, and because they they can't really see very well snails, but they can sense light, so he would turn his antenna towards the screen and it would be like we were watching TV together and I was like what is this?

Speaker 2:

What did? What did they eat Like? Did they eat like? Do you just give it lettuce like turtles?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, they eat vegetables. So, yeah, lettuce, you can give them cucumber. Sometimes they do a really funny thing where they, if you give them a slice of cucumber, they eat the center of the cucumber and put their head through it. So it becomes like a little like a rough, like a Shakespearean rough what Funny? And they eat mushrooms and tomatoes. But you can also give them toast and you also have to give them cuttlefish shells. You can give them toast. Yeah, a little bit, you can give them a little bit of toast.

Speaker 2:

Oh, okay, this is like one for me, one for you. Snail, yes, yeah.

Speaker 3:

Exactly. You can share your breakfast with them, but you also have to make sure that you're giving them cuttlefish shell, because they need to build their own shells. They have to have enough calcium and stuff.

Speaker 2:

That is, you are the first guest we've ever had that has ever talked about any pet like this. This is amazing. Of course I'm very sad that your pet died, but thank you for sharing its life with us. You're very welcome. The other standard question we have on the podcast is the super fact. It's something that you know, that when you tell people, it blows them away a bit.

Speaker 3:

Do you have a super?

Speaker 2:

fact for us.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so I only was told this recently and it kind of blew my mind, so I'm going to share this with you, okay.

Speaker 3:

When you are falling into a black hole and you pass the event horizon, the directions of space and time reverse. So if you imagine how we are now and space is kind of like, we can move around in space, we have some kind of control over that, but we're just going forward in time and we can't really help that at all. It becomes the opposite when you cross the event horizon and you go into a black hole. It's very weird.

Speaker 2:

So you become Matthew McConaughey and you can move through time.

Speaker 3:

Yeah Well, I don't know, because clearly you can't go back to where you can't leave the black hole, you can't go back over the event horizon. But, there's some kind of weird effect. Essentially, this is just me restating the fact that physics becomes physics that we don't know how to deal with when you go across the event horizon and get close to a black hole. But yeah, wild, very weird stuff.

Speaker 2:

So time sort of becomes a dimension like space, that theoretically one could move through.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, but on the other hand, space becomes a direction that you don't have any control over. So you're falling towards the black hole and you're just moving in that direction and you have absolutely no control over that at all. The black hole just becomes your future. That is where you are going to go. It's a terrible future, yeah, yeah, just pray that you don't end up in that situation, I guess.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I do hear tell that what happens in a black hole stays in a black hole.

Speaker 3:

That is absolutely true.

Speaker 2:

That is a wild super fact I saw that. Before we get to the last question, I just wanted you to maybe talk a bit about you wrote a book, hmm.

Speaker 3:

Yes.

Speaker 2:

What's that about?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So during lockdown, as many of us found, I had quite a lot of extra free time and I ended up getting really into etymology, which is the history of words Yep, and how do words evolve. And I ended up getting really interested in this because I think it is an interesting way to trace human history, like anthropology like is to look at the way that language has changed and evolved over time in different language groups and like how these different language groups have evolved over time from one original kind of source also traces how humans moved over time. And because, obviously, if you go back to the really early days of humanity, when language was as we know, it was just kind of getting started, this was also when kind of like space exploration, or at least space observation, was just getting started as well. So there are lots of things in our language that actually tie into those early space observations which I just found really interesting.

Speaker 3:

And so I started, just in my free time, doing a lot of research into how various space-related words had evolved and I ended up doing a kind of public outreach talk that was based around this and then I turned that public outreach talk into a book about the etymologies of the names of the planets. It's called Planetomology. You can find it on Amazon. The tagline is why Uranus is not called George and other facts about space and words. Okay, I love it. Yeah, so that was a really interesting little time for me just writing that book and then designing it and learning how to publish a book and things like that as well.

Speaker 2:

Cool. Okay, well, we'll make sure a link to your book is in the show notes, everybody. So there'll be a little hyperlink there. You can click on it. Take a look, very cool. So the last question we've been talking about gravitational waves and we've been talking about snails. The last thing. I think we can tie it together, because gravitational waves are maybe a little wiggly and snails are maybe a little slimy, but you have started making pasta which is a bit of both wiggly and somewhat slimy.

Speaker 3:

Yes, yeah, this is true. This is a very recent hobby for me it's only in the last kind of two weeks, but I wrote a book out of my last major hobby, so maybe this will lead to something better. But yeah, I didn't realize I'm making leaves in pasta, it writes itself. Yes, yes, detect gravitational waves by detecting the stretch in a spaghetti or something like that.

Speaker 2:

Best seller, I'm telling you best seller. We'll have you back again when it's on New York Times bestselling list.

Speaker 3:

Thanks, that would be great. I'll have a lot to say about it. But yeah, I just didn't realize how easy it is to just make pasta yourself at home. You just need any old flour and then some eggs and mix it together and cut it into whatever shape you want, cook it till it's done, mix it with the sauce. It's just so easy. I didn't know it was so easy, and now I'm going to be branching out into using different kinds of flour and cutting different shapes and things. But it's so nice and homemade pasta is better than not homemade pasta. You could probably guess that, but as it turns out, that's true.

Speaker 2:

Don't you need a musher? Doesn't it go through the? I don't know. I watched Chef Ramsay shows and I was always yelling. This is how you make pasta.

Speaker 3:

I can't do the accent but He'd shout at me for sure.

Speaker 2:

Do you have a roller? Do you know what I'm talking about? The machine that thins it out?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I do know what you're talking about.

Speaker 2:

Do you just roll it flat?

Speaker 3:

So I haven't been making long pasta at all. I've literally just been making a ball and then cutting it with scissors to into shapes. Oh, okay, yeah, it's a very easy way to make pasta. I think I would maybe like to get one of the rollers, but then that's a commitment. That's a commitment to pasta making. I'm still at the point where I can drop this hobby.

Speaker 2:

You're dabbling. You're not all in with both feet. Okay, I got it. That's cool. Well, who'd have thought, at the start of the interview, everybody we'd jump from gravitational waves to try your hand at pasta folks? That's Well, Doc, we're at the end of the interview. This has been such a treat talking to you. Thank you so much for being a guest, for one. Can people find you on social media? Do you have a website?

Speaker 3:

I do have a website. Yes, if you just Google my name, you should get to the website. I also am on X. Oh, I don't like this. I don't Previously thanks, Mitter. I don't know, though, because whenever I log into it it still says Twittercom. I'm not sure really how that's going to go.

Speaker 2:

I do not think they want any URL with X in it that people would be typing. I think that would be a problem, so I think they're going to keep Twitter.

Speaker 3:

Okay, that's confusing. Anyway, I want that website at astrobell underscore rs.

Speaker 4:

Okay.

Speaker 3:

Considering moving to Blue Sky or the other places that various astro people seem to be going, but at the moment just on Twitter and have a website.

Speaker 2:

Sounds good. We'll make sure those are linked in the show notes, Cool, Okay. Well, thanks again for being a guest. Best wishes in the future. We are proud to have barkandbeyondsupplycom now as an official sponsor of the Science Podcast. Barkandbeyondsupplycom 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 barkandbeyondsupplycom. You'll see a link in our show notes and use the coupon code Bunsen for 10% off at barkandbeyondsupplycom. Click the link. Skip the big box stores. How about the little guy?

Speaker 1:

Okay, it's time for Storytime with me, adam. If you don't know what Storytime is, storytime is when we talk about stories that have happened within the past one or two weeks. You know what I will start. I haven't started in a while. My story is about Ginger.

Speaker 1:

Ginger, at night, is active, but then also the least active. Ginger is always sleeping During the night. She will find and it's only been recently where she'll go in Mom and Dad's room for a bit and then eventually wander down to my room and then sit down on this chair that I have set up by my computer and lay down and then fall asleep. But she won't sleep for the whole night. She'll sleep for most of the night and then go away for a while, and I don't know where she goes. I don't know if she goes back up to Mom and Dad's room, yep, but she sleeps in my room for a while like a good good while.

Speaker 1:

I remember I woke up at one point at 2 in the morning because I was thirsty and then I got up and Ginger was still there. So she sleeps in my room for quite a bit, but she also. Whenever I play my video game, she comes into my room and then sits down on that same chair and goes to sleep, which is pretty surprising, because sometimes my game can get a bit loud when I have it on my speakers, but she sleeps right through it and I pet her and she goes, and then she goes back to sleep. But yeah, that's kind of my story. Is Ginger getting sleepy? She sleeps all the time, though, and I don't understand what time she isn't sleeping, if at all. But yeah, that's my story. Is Ginger is starting to like my room again? Dad, do you have a story, I guess?

Speaker 2:

I do. I can talk about the ongoing Beaver saga. So while the beaver isn't a pet, we do take Bunsen and Beaker on walks and Chris and I are just marveling at what the beaver is getting done down in the creek. The newest development is a really big tree was knocked down, I'd say a week ago. It kind of fell across the creek and was hung up in some trees. It's a very tall tree. I don't know how many feet or meters tall it is 20? Tall or maybe I don't know but it was falling across the creek because the beaver saw it down with its face and it was just there and I'm like, well, I guess the beaver miscalculated, it's just going to be there forever until the wind knocks it down or it gets kind of like old and decayed and falls apart. But no, today on our walk the beaver ate the entire tree down. I don't know how the beaver did this, but there is sawdust. There's a perfect like shadow of sawdust and chewed chips on the floor where the tree used to be, and this tree is gone Now.

Speaker 2:

We didn't get down to the creek yesterday because it got dark and I had a podcast interview, so the dogs didn't get to go on a walk yesterday, so the beavers had a day of like nobody messing with it or being around. And man, I don't know how I wish we set the trail camera up, how it knocked the tree down. That was like hung up on a tree, like did it saw it down in pieces. I don't know. They're so mysterious and so amazing. That's just really fun to check on the beaver every single day. That's my story.

Speaker 1:

Mom, do you have a story?

Speaker 4:

I sure do. I thought Adam was going to talk about the story where he was petting ginger this morning and beaker came over and was jealous and ginger snake took her little paw and smacked beaker about 60 times in about oh, that happened last night.

Speaker 1:

Oh, that was last night.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, yeah. So that's a funny story, snake. Anyway, I've been home a couple of days this week. I have a bit of an illness, so I've been hanging out with the dogs and I've got to witness couch wars. I've got to. Well, okay. So beaker got to be on the side of the couch, the coveted side of the couch, and I was sitting on the other side of the couch and ginger strolls in with her sauntery walk and she looks from beaker to me, back to beaker, and of course beaker has her eye on ginger and ginger went jump and she jumped on me, well, basically sat beside me on the couch, and then beaker was so dejected she's like oh, I have the coveted side of the couch, but ginger, oh no. So she was really fluckstemmed on what she was going to do. But then they also do bed wars, so ginger at night will sleep by Jason's feet, and then once ginger, she might grab me.

Speaker 2:

sometimes scares the crap out of me.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, once then beaker is like oh, I need to be in that spot, so I'll see. You're on the bed where ginger was. The other thing is ginger has been super excited about going outside, like it's revved up, like her little escapy personality is 15 out of 10. But now I'm wondering that there's a stray cat outside. Yeah, adam said that there is a stray cat outside and I'm wondering if she's picking up on that cat scent.

Speaker 2:

Maybe she's telling it when she's been in the patio.

Speaker 4:

Well, that's what I'm wondering, right, because we put her in the patio tonight and I didn't even think once about the stray.

Speaker 2:

She's safe in the patio, the stray cat?

Speaker 4:

Well, she's safe in the patio? Yeah for sure From the stray. But then maybe she just wants to make a friend. You got a friend in me. Anyway, that's a lot of stories for me and those are my stories.

Speaker 1:

All right, that is. That is it for story time this week. Thank you so much for listening to my section of the podcast. I hope to see you on the next podcast episode. Bye, bye.

Speaker 2:

That's it for this week show. Thanks for coming back week after week to listen to the signs podcast, and thanks to our guest this week, dr Isabel Ramiro Shah, who talked to us about gravitational waves. They're so fascinating. We'd also like to give a special thanks to the top dogs. That's the top tier of the pop pack, our paid community that helps support Bunsen and Beaker content. If you want to hear your name, check out the link in the show notes to sign up as a member of the pop pack. Take it away, chris.

Speaker 5:

Bianca Hyde, mary Ryder, tracy Domingu, susan Wagner, andrew Lynn, helen Chin, Tracy Halberg, amy C, jennifer Smathers, laura Stephenson, holly Birch, brenda Clark, Anne Yuchita, peggy McKeel, terry Adam, debbie Anderson, sandy Brimer, tracy Linebaugh, mary Ann McNally, Fun Lisa, shelly Smith, julie Smith, diane Allen, breanne Haas, linda Sherry, carol McDonald, Katherine Jordan, courtney Proven, donna Craig, wendy, diane Mason and Luke Liz Button, Kathy Zerker and Ben Rathart.

Speaker 2:

For science, empathy and cuteness.