Season 6 Episode 22 Exoplanet Sunsets, Parrot Problems, and The Cool Science of Refrigeration with Nicola Twilley

Ever wondered what it’s like to explore a gas giant located 700 light years away from Earth?

Buckle up as we unpack the mysteries of exoplanet WASP-39b, a fascinating celestial body larger than Jupiter.

Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, we reveal groundbreaking insights into its atmosphere, including the presence of gases like carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, water vapor, and sodium. Discover how this tidally locked planet experiences dramatic temperature differences between its day and night sides, painting a vivid picture of the extreme conditions that exist far beyond our solar system.

If you've ever considered bringing a parrot into your home, you won’t want to miss the heartfelt stories and valuable advice shared in this segment. From the mischievous antics of a budgie named Oshkosh Bagosh to a comprehensive study on parrot-owner relationships, we cover the emotional highs and practical challenges of parrot ownership. Learn about the common behavioral issues that parrots and their owners face, such as aggression and excessive vocalization, as well as the deep emotional bonds that form in these unique relationships.

Our special guest, Nicola Twilley, takes us on an enlightening journey through the world of refrigeration with her latest book, "Frostbite." From the origins of cold storage facilities to the intricate science of preserving produce, Nicola’s curiosity and firsthand experiences offer a fresh perspective on this often overlooked facet of our daily lives. We also explore her other works, including the podcast Gastropod, and gain insights into the broader implications of our refrigerated food system.

Frostbite!
Nicola Twilley on X
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Gastropod


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Transcript

Speaker 2: 0:08

Hello science enthusiasts. My name is Jason Zukoski. 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 on to your tail. This is the Science Podcast. Hello and welcome back to the Science Podcast. We hope you're happy and healthy out there. This is episode 22 of season 6.

Speaker 2: 0:41

Western Canada is sitting right in a heat wave and again, I mentioned this last week, but the oppressive heat continues, much to Chris's delight and my dismay, along with the burners. But the two golden girls, Chris and well, Chris isn't really a golden girl, she's as funny as the golden girls but Chris and the golden beaker have really enjoyed the heat. Well, the men, the burners and myself have hid in the shade and inside um, waiting for this oppressive heat to go, waiting for this terrible heat to go away. I hope wherever you are in the world, it's a little bit cooler, Okay, Well, what's on the science podcast this week, since it's so hot and we've had some weird weather around the world? We are looking at a bizarro exoplanet with some neato completo weather.

Speaker 2: 1:30

In Pet Science, we're going to be looking at a study about parrots. I don't think we've ever talked about parrots as a pet in Pet Science before. Expert is author Nicola Twilley, who wrote the book Frostbite, which is a deeply researched and entertaining dive into how food and drink are kept cold. It's an amazing discussion and if it's up your alley, please check out her book. Okay, the bad joke. So my buddy told me he got frostbite last winter and he had to have part of his foot amputated and his girlfriend left him. She was lactose intolerant. Okay, that's really bad. All right, I'm with the show because there's no time like science time. This week in science news, Chris and I are going to be talking about a wasp, but not the annoying insect that stings for no reason. It's a planet in outer space. Has it been a little hot lately, Chris?

Speaker 3: 2:31

Jason, it has been so hot outside. I love it and you absolutely do not love it.

Speaker 2: 2:38

No, I do not.

Speaker 3: 2:40

You are the opposite of love of this weather, but it was glorious. Today it felt like 35 degrees Celsius, which was amazing. We took Beaker dock diving so she got a huge swim in and you were ready to get into the car, into the air conditioning and cool off.

Speaker 2: 2:59

Bring on the snow.

Speaker 3: 3:02

Absolutely not. The snow? Absolutely not. Please, let me enjoy this brief window of warmth before minus 50 degrees Celsius, with the wind chill arrives.

Speaker 2: 3:14

Okay, maybe I'm not a fan of that, but what I'm a fan of is what the JWST literally finds every single day, and researchers using the data from it confirmed models that predicted the atmospheric differences on this exoplanet. And the exoplanet is called WASP-39b. Now, if you've heard the term or if you've heard the name WASP before, this is an exoplanet that data has been brought back from the JWST that folks have been looking at for a while, and what's really cool about this planet is there is eternal morning and eternal evening. What kind of planet is WASP Like? Is it Earth-like?

Speaker 3: 3:57

It's a giant planet actually. And it has a diameter 1.3 times greater than Jupiter, so not even comparable to our earth, and it has a similar mass to Saturn. So we're talking about the gas giants.

Speaker 2: 4:11

Right, and it's bigger than our biggest planet 1.3 times greater than Jupiter, which is amazing.

Speaker 3: 4:19

How come it's not its own star, though, like Jupiter, was so close to becoming a star itself?

Speaker 2: 4:25

yeah, I've talked to other cosmologists before about that, and it has to be quite a bit bigger to become something like a brown dwarf, that's like a the nearest star-like planet that you could possibly get. Jupiter's close not quite. And can we hop in a rocket and fly to this planet?

Speaker 3: 4:43

Absolutely not. It is approximately 700 light years away from Earth.

Speaker 2: 4:48

So if you could go the speed of light, it would take you 700 years to get there.

Speaker 3: 4:52

The other interesting thing about this planet is it's tidally locked and it has a constant day side that is exposed to the star and a constant night side shrouded in darkness.

Speaker 2: 5:06

How did they? If it's so far away, how do they know this? Like, how do they know about all of this?

Speaker 3: 5:11

The James Webb Space Telescope has a near infrared spectrograph, so near spec, and using that astronomers confirmed the temperature differences the Celsius hotter than the morning side. What they noticed was different cloud cover and the morning side was likely cloudier than the evening side.

Speaker 2: 5:34

They also looked at the transmission spectrum of WASP-39b, and this technique studies the Terminator. So no, not a killer robot from the future. The Terminator is the boundary between the day side and the night side, and the transmission spectrum compares starlight filtered through the planet's atmosphere to unfiltered starlight, and this is a common technique that JWST is using to determine what gases are on the planet, what the atmosphere is made of, and what's really cool is they're using this now to predict temperatures and weather patterns. What helps this planet out is it's classified as puffy. You know, that's a maybe nice way to say that. It's kind of fat. It's got a robust atmosphere and because its atmosphere is so chunky, it gives strong signals for the filtered starlight. So there's a lot of data of the starlight going through its puffy atmosphere.

Speaker 3: 6:29

Absolutely so. There's some new analysis and findings. Previously, the spectra of WASP-39b's atmosphere showed carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, water vapor and sodium, but did not differentiate between the sides. So this new analysis splits the terminator region into two semicircles, showing that the evening side is significantly hotter. So earlier I said there was a difference of about 200 degrees between the morning and the evening side, but now they can measure the actual evening and morning temperatures. So the evening temperature is 800 degrees Celsius, or 1,450 degrees Fahrenheit, and the morning temperature is 600 degrees Celsius, or 1,150 degrees Fahrenheit.

Speaker 2: 7:18

And what's really cool about these two semicircles. What I think is neat is that, depending on where you are on the planet, you will either be in an eternal sunrise or an eternal sunset, because the planet itself is locked with its star, and as we rotate away, the sun has a sunset and we come around the other side, we have a sunrise, but because this planet is locked, you could just sit in an anirondack chair, as long as you didn't melt, and watch the sunrise forever, which is kind of neat, hey I think that's pretty romantic yeah I guess if you're sitting in some like unmeltable bubble, well, I guess there's a.

Speaker 2: 8:03

There's a hitch, chris, there's a hitch to my romantic plan to take you to wasp 39b in an unmeltable bubble, and you know what that is what is the hitch? Okay. So because it gets so hot on the day side and it gets so cold on the night side, um, it creates this crazy powerful jet stream of gas like wind, and the high speeds that it causes between the morning terminator and the evening terminator mean that, due to the calculations, within this model the wind speeds might reach thousands of miles per hour.

Speaker 3: 8:46

Interesting.

Speaker 2: 8:47

Do you know? The strongest hurricane winds ever recorded?

Speaker 3: 8:52

No, can you enlighten me?

Speaker 2: 8:53

Yeah, it was Hurricane Patricia, and it had 345 kilometers an hour wind, so that was the strongest winds recorded in a hurricane on Earth, and WASP-39B would be thousands of kilometers an hour, so magnitude's more powerful.

Speaker 3: 9:12

Jason, this is awesome research, but can you tell me a little bit about what's going to happen with it in the future? Why is it important?

Speaker 2: 9:19

The team that looked at this data is going to use the same kind of analysis to study other tidally locked hot Jupiters, and this is just one of many. The easiest planet for JWST to find are those big ones like Jupiter, because they're huge compared to the little, tiny, rocky planets like us.

Speaker 3: 9:38

I just am excited about the future research and finding more planets and maybe there'll be one just like us when they can hone in using their JWST instruments to realize its full potential.

Speaker 2: 9:51

But 700 light years away means that any kind of thing we find it will be 700 years old. That's not too bad, like 700 years ago. Well, here's the more data from JWST coming in and finding more hot Jupiters and maybe a nice, cool but not too cool, not too hot rocky planet like us. That's science news for this week. This week in pet science, we're going to be talking about parrots and I guess if you've listened to the science podcast for a while, you might have heard me talk about parrots. But I adore parrots. They're one of my favorite animals on the planet.

Speaker 3: 10:32

Remember when we went to Vancouver Island and there was that parrot refuge.

Speaker 2: 10:35

Yes, that was one of my favorite places I've visited in my entire life.

Speaker 3: 10:41

It was so amazing and awesome.

Speaker 2: 10:43

People don't know how much work a parrot is. I think they get into it and parrots are very long-lived like. They can definitely outlive somebody my age easily. So a lot of the parrots were either rescued or they were. They had nowhere to go because they outlived their owner and this place took them in. There's a picture of a very young me somewhere with a parrot on my shoulder and I'm looking at it like a goofball because I just think they're so neat.

Speaker 3: 11:11

We talked about getting a parrot for a pet, but then we didn't.

Speaker 2: 11:15

No, and I think the reason why is that I like dogs equally as much and I'm not. I don't think I'm cut out for the parrot upkeep the same way I'm cut out for dog upkeep because we got a tester bird, a little budgie named oshkosh bagosh, and that was maybe not my favorite pet we've ever had oshkosh bagosh was evil.

Speaker 3: 11:44

He wasn't very friendly. He exhibited problematic behaviors like what we're going to talk about in the study.

Speaker 2: 11:51

Yeah, Parrots are a really popular pet, but there is limited knowledge about the relationship between parrots and their owners and for people getting into it. What's the frequency of problematic behaviors that parrots have? And this is where we come in with the study.

Speaker 3: 12:06

The study collected data using an anonymous questionnaire that was shared on social media, which yielded 354 respondents, and there were three parts of the questionnaire basic questions about the owners and their parrots, a parrot owner relationship scale, which is the P-O-R-S, which actually was adapted from the dog owner relationship scale, and questions about the frequency of behavior problems in parrots. So they analyze those three parts.

Speaker 2: 12:37

I read into this a bit. They took the dog, the dog ownership scale questionnaire, and they just did like a search for the word dog and replaced it with parrot and they only had to change six questions.

Speaker 3: 12:51

So it's very similar to the same one that another research team did with dogs a data collection took place through an online survey, um, from march 25th to may 5 2020. And the participants were asked for their consent and the participation, like I said, was anonymous and respondents provided answers based on everyday situations before the COVID-19 lockdown taking place in Denmark in 2020.

Speaker 2: 13:21

The questionnaire had three main parts. They wanted to know about the owner and the parrot, so like age, sex, all that kind of stuff for both the PORRS which you mentioned, which is adapted from the dog one, and then specific questions focusing on owner perceived problematic behavior. And there's 13 there. And what's really interesting about this is it gives a pretty good snapshot of what's going on with people and their parrots. Because if you think about it and you, if you were to say, hey, what are some problems that you might have with owning a parrot? You may not have any idea, but now there's data from this big questionnaire study.

Speaker 3: 14:00

So the analysis showed initially there were 355 parrot owners completing the survey, but one respondent had extreme and non-informative answers and so that survey was excluded. So I was talking to Jason, I said, hey, I wonder what could be extreme and non-informative, but they definitely removed that data set from there the guy had a penguin, Chris.

Speaker 2: 14:24

He was in the wrong study.

Speaker 3: 14:26

Probably so. I did some data analysis when I worked on my master's and this study used a principal component analysis and it was performed on the relationship questions and the problematic behaviors. So they included the 27 MDORS questions and they added eight additional questions which identified three components or three major themes owner interaction, emotional closeness and perceived cost. This principal component analysis for problematic behaviors identified three components aggression, fear and non-social behavior.

Speaker 2: 15:08

So that's interesting. The problematic behaviors aggression, fear and non-social behavior. There was a note in the study that it was very similar for the same themes in the dog study aggression, fear and non-social behavior. There were some other. There were some other behavior problems too excessive vocalization, and this is my favorite. One problematic behavior was stealing human food, because we've got a little counter surfer on our hands right now with Bernoulli we sure do, I'm really and he's little and he can reach up to the counter.

Speaker 3: 15:47

And because Jason's a tall human being, we, when we built our kitchen stand or kitchen Island, we went with the six inches taller, I believe, for you to accommodate your height. But that means Bernoulli is actually standing on his hind feet and touching the counter and still able to counter surf. So he's only 30 30 pounds right now, but he's gonna be 100 pounds of dog who's gonna be able to maybe even jump on our counter?

Speaker 2: 16:21

I'm a little concerned about the future so the prs captured the relationship between a parent and it's, between the parrot owner and their parrot, and those three themes kept coming up again. And those three themes that you mentioned, chris, were owner interaction, emotional closeness and perceived cost. And the scale that they had to respond on was like a one to what. Was it A one to four scale or something like one to five, where one is never and five is always? Those themes showed that people were very close to their parrots, but there was also a lot of perceived cost in owning a parrot. And that's one of the drawbacks too, when I was doing research into looking at getting a parrot. If your parrot ever gets sick, there's not a lot of small animal vets that are specialized to keep your parrot alive and it can be an extremely costly vet bill with your parrot.

Speaker 3: 17:22

Absolutely. The behavioral problems were also associated with stressful situations. So leaving the parrot alone for too long or having multiple owners.

Speaker 2: 17:33

That brings a full circle because if you go back to the parrot refuge that we went to, those parrots all had some behavior issues like plucking out their feathers, and that was one thing that they said is a lot of the parrots had four or five different owners and they wound up at the refuge, which is really sad.

Speaker 3: 17:50

But the study also suggested that providing cognitive enrichment and a stable environment for your parrot can help mitigate those issues.

Speaker 2: 17:59

So, to close, I think what's really interesting here is that a parrot isn't a dog right, it's a completely different species but they use the same kind of like survey and analysis on that they use on dogs, on parrots, and ironically got much the same kind of general themes in behavior issues and the overall themes with dogs. So I just think that's really interesting, that maybe there's not that much difference between having a parrot and a dog when you look at the data, aside from the fact that one can fly and the other one cannot, though I've seen Beaker jump pretty good to catch things out of the air that are flying.

Speaker 3: 18:39

That would bring a whole other can of worms into our house.

Speaker 2: 18:43

If we got a parrot.

Speaker 3: 18:44

I don't think.

Speaker 2: 18:46

I don't think Bernoulli would respect it.

Speaker 3: 18:48

No, and I think the prey drive of Beaker would be definitely problematic.

Speaker 2: 18:53

If you've got a parrot, there's some food for thought. Polly want a cracker. That's Pet Science for this week. Hello everybody, here's some ways you can keep the Science Podcast free.

Speaker 2: 19:04

Number one in our show notes sign up to be a member of our Paw Pack 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 too. Okay, on with the show. Back to the interviews. It's time for Ask an Expert on the Science Podcast, and I am super excited to have author Nicola Twilley with me today to chat about her new book Frostbite. Nikki, how are you doing?

Speaker 1: 20:05

I am doing very well, thank you. How are you?

Speaker 2: 20:08

I'm great, I'm really excited to talk to you about this really interesting book. But one of the things I love just asking guests about is where are you in the world? Where are you calling into the show from?

Speaker 1: 20:21

Oh, I'm in sunny Southern California, in Los Angeles, specifically Highland Park, even more specifically, have you lived in California for most of your life?

Speaker 1: 20:29

Oh, I've moved around a lot and I grew up in England. I went all the way through a university in England and I came to Chicago to go to grad school and I met an American. I brought him back to London with me. It was very rainy summer. He did appreciate the free medical care in the NHS. He did appreciate the free medical care in the NHS. He did not appreciate the TV license fee you pay to get the BBC. He was not a fan of all the rain and we eventually ended up coming back to the States.

Speaker 2: 20:59

So there you go. The one thing I always tell Canadians because I live in Alberta, canada if you're going to try and snag somebody from the southern states, make sure you snag them up in our summers, don't try to bring them up in our winters.

Speaker 1: 21:12

I feel like the British summer wasn't even good enough Some years. You know, the sun doesn't. I mean, the thing about England is it's never very, very cold, the way that a Canadian winter is just brutal, but it can also just never be very warm either, so it's just sort of damp.

Speaker 2: 21:33

Very damp and temperate, from what I hear. Yeah, yeah, exactly, you know, vancouver, seattle has kind of that same rainy weather, but it's maybe a little chillier, and parts of England.

Speaker 1: 21:43

Exactly Parts. I mean, I was in the South, so yes. But yes, my family are still there, so I go back all the time.

Speaker 2: 21:56

But yes, Los Angeles could not be more different and I have to say it is pretty nice having sunshine year round. It is somewhere around the clock, as I hear tell in California. You're an author, nikki. What was your journey to become an author? I love the origin story of guests and if you have time, could you talk to us about it?

Speaker 1: 22:13

Yeah, mine is a long and slow road, so don't give up, kids. I started out. I mean, I've always loved reading. It's my favorite activity. I used to take out the maximum number of books that the library allowed. My favorite gift at birthdays and Christmas was books and tokens for books. We had book tokens in England, so I am 100% a book person. But I thought that writing was something you needed. You were just sort of it was like being an artist, you were just kind of different. And so I tried to get into publishing. But I failed the copy editing exam so I didn't get in and so I switched track and went the sort of museum route instead, figured I could be a curator, landed an amazing job as the director of public programming for Ben Franklin's 300th anniversary, which was especially exciting because I had never really heard of Ben Franklin because I grew up in England and we don't study the founding fathers.

Speaker 2: 23:16

There's a little bit of a disagreement between England and the United States that led to.

Speaker 1: 23:22

You know it's so funny. I did history A-level, which are our, you know, leaving school exams in England, and I studied this period. We never learned anything about the War of Independence. It just didn't come up. It was all about the issues with France and blah, blah, blah. You know a lot of internal politics deal with Ireland. That's wild, just not important. What happened over here? We won. You know it's like, don't mention the war, but but yes, so I, I didn't know anything about ben franklin and I, he's, he's a cool guy. I was like cool dude, yeah, yeah, I, I. So it was a really funny job because I was just so. I was like, have you heard of this guy? He, he did this, he did this, came up with his own alphabet.

Speaker 2: 24:13

Have you heard of this guy? Pretty interesting, by the way.

Speaker 1: 24:20

So that was a fun gig and involved a lot of. We came up with a special Ben Franklin birthday beer because of his beer is proof that God loves us. That's nowhere written down in his papers, sadly. I hate to bust any bubbles here, but he may not have said that, but it's a good quote, so whatever. And we had an autobiography project where we published people's 300 word autobiographies on bus shelters around Philadelphia. We had so much fun with that. I've stayed a big Franklin fan. Actually I sneak him into whatever I can and readers of Frostbite will see that there are some Ben Franklin Easter eggs in there.

Speaker 2: 25:04

I saw in my research. This is ringing a bell now.

Speaker 1: 25:08

Yes, yes, exactly, he was the first person to write about he electrocuted a turkey to see if that was a better way of slaughtering meat, and did manage to electrocute himself in the process, which I think was uncomfortable. But he says in his letter you know, it seemed uncommonly tender the meat and funnily enough, as I discovered in my research, that's actually what happens to all meat today because of refrigeration. So once again, ben Franklin was there first.

Speaker 2: 25:41

I love it. Have you seen the Office?

Speaker 1: 25:46

Of course the British version, the US version is. Is I got to stay true to the original?

Speaker 2: 25:52

Right, I'm speaking about the US version. There is a really funny scene where a Ben Franklin impersonator comes in. So, as a fan of Franklin, if you haven't seen that scene, it's probably on YouTube, you might have.

Speaker 1: 26:10

I'm a fan of all things Franklin, but yeah, that doesn't really lead us to being a writer. But I realized actually, when I got the Franklin job I was like, great, I'm just going to celebrate Founding Fathers 300th anniversary is, this is going to be my career. But unfortunately Ben Franklin was a generation older than all the other guys. So I was like, well, this is a very long career break. So I switched to various other. I got jobs in various other museums, smaller and smaller museums. Basically, the bigger the museum, the less freedom you have to do interesting things, I tend to find, just because of the layers of sort of bureaucracy and expectation and audience. And so I just went to smaller and smaller museums until eventually I was like, wow, this is sort of a downhill track.

Speaker 1: 26:54

And at the time blogging had just got started, so that was a way for me to write without needing to under. I didn't go to journalism school, I didn't know anything, so that was a way for me to write without needing to know editors or how to pitch somebody. And so I did that. And then editors started reading my blog and hiring me to write without needing to know editors or how to pitch somebody. And so I did that and then editors started reading my blog and hiring me to do things. So it was, like I say, long, slow road.

Speaker 2: 27:20

That is a cool origin story. I love that. Thank you. One last question Did you have a relative that was a writer, or a parent or somebody in your life?

Speaker 1: 27:33

No, absolutely not. None, yeah, none at all. And I actually really should give credit where credit is due, which is my husband. He always wanted to be a writer, Also didn't have a writer in his family, but he was the one who started blogging and I saw him doing it and I thought, well, he could do it, I could probably do it. And then he started writing for magazines and and so I thought, well, you know, if he could do it, I could probably do it. And he wrote a book and I was like, well, here we go, so I have it's definitely. It's an interesting question, your question, because you're right, you definitely need a or at least I'm the kind of person that really needs someone sort of role modeling. How do you do this? And I didn't have that in my family at all, but I did, fortunately with my husband.

Speaker 2: 28:26

Aw, that's a good one so yeah, he's been the.

Speaker 1: 28:31

He's. Yeah, and he came up with it. He's, very honestly, a very handy guy to have around. Came up with the title for my book, edited it, you know. I think I'll keep him.

Speaker 2: 28:42

There you go. I'll tell you that the Bunsen and Beaker social media empire wouldn't be what it is without my wife's help. So yeah, spouses are kind of important. So let's talk about your book. It's got such a catchy title Frostbite.

Speaker 1: 28:55

All, jeff, like I say, that's right we have a little T there.

Speaker 2: 28:58

That it may be you weren't the one that came up with it, but that's okay. The writing's yours, In your own words for people that are listening. What's the book about?

Speaker 1: 29:12

The book is really about kind of what it says on the tin, what the subtitle says, so how refrigeration changed our food, our planet and ourselves. And I think it helps to sort of understand back in when I started writing this book, which a very long time ago also, people were just starting to talk about farm to table, farm to table, farm to table. There were farm to table restaurants. People were writing about farm to table food. There were movies like Food Inc, writers like Michael Pollan, eric Schlosser it was sort of a big deal and a lot of people were talking about the farming piece, how we raised our livestock, how we grew our food, where it came from, what the impact of that was, etc. But no one was talking about the two, the word in between, and that's the part that I got obsessed about. And so initially it was just actually out of pure curiosity and wanted to see these spaces that we'd built for our food to live in. There was this entire distributed artificial winter that we had constructed for our food to live in and people didn't get to see it. And you know, people like Michael Pollan were going to, you know, these concentrated animal feeding operations and seeing them and reporting back and it was exciting, like, oh, this is a peek into behind the scenes of our food system.

Speaker 1: 30:34

I was like, well, what happens behind the scenes of these refrigerated warehouses, these spaces where our food goes and hangs out, sometimes for months, sometimes for years, on its way to our table? No one's telling me what those look like. I want to go see them. So that's how it started. And then it turned into like, oh wow, these aren't just weird spaces, they have actually reshaped everything about our food what we eat, what it tastes like, how good it is for us, how good it is for the planet. They just have remade our food system just as much as changing how we farm has. And yet no one was talking about that. So that's when I realized, oh, this is a book.

Speaker 2: 31:18

I love that. That's so fascinating, was it? Did you have to call some of these places up and say, hey, would I be able to poke around? And you know like obviously part of the research was maybe going to those places. Was that tough?

Speaker 1: 31:35

yeah, a ton. I have been to a ton of these places and it again just to give you a sense of how important a spouse is every family trip, every vacation. I was like we're gonna go visit the local cold storage and my husband, who hates the cold, really hates. It was like we're going to go visit the local cold storage and my husband, who hates the cold, really hates. It was like can you make your next book about saunas or tropical islands or something, because we'd be traipsing around these places and obviously they're freezing. But yeah, so I visited a lot of them.

Speaker 1: 32:04

People for the most part were really I had no trouble, I think in part because no one had asked to come and see these places. That was kind of what got me curious in the first place and certainly I think the people who ran them were like great we are. There's this sense that I really got because for the book I actually went and worked a few shifts for a week in some of the cold storage warehouses here in Southern California and there's a real sense among these folks like listen, there wouldn't be food on your grocery store shelves without us and no one knows we even exist. No one knows these places exist. No one knows how hard this work is Some of the hardest working conditions, most dangerous working conditions in America and so I felt like people actually kind of wanted me to see the effort and the ingenuity and just the sort of the yeah, the sheer scale at which this work goes on to enable America to eat, and it's invisible.

Speaker 2: 33:13

Oh, that's so cool, so I felt it might have went that way, like nobody talked to them about what they do. It's critical, and they're probably like you want to talk to us? Yeah, let's go, let's go for it. Nobody's ever asked us that question before.

Speaker 1: 33:30

Totally, and you know what? Also, I think I came in curious. I had no judgment. I wasn't trying to prove a point or anything. I was just genuinely really curious. And so I think when you are really curious about someone's job and what they do, that's you know it's. I mean you know it, that's your whole thing here is to be curious about things and ask questions, and people love it. So I feel like that's. That was sort of the key. There were very, very few places that people didn't want to show me eventually, especially once I'd had a conversation with them about why I was curious.

Speaker 2: 34:13

Oh, very cool, yeah. And then you make a good point If you come in with an open mind and you're very curious. Generally people who are passionate about their work they're more than happy to tell you about all the widgets that are involved in their daily life. So totally in your book. Where were there some things that you found super interesting? I know you don't want to give away everything that's in the book, but I would just be curious, like what was maybe one or two of the things you found the most interesting?

Speaker 1: 34:42

Oh my gosh, I mean everything. I mean this is the funny thing about it because I had written about food for a long time. At this point it was one of the things I spent a lot of time writing about, reading about, thinking about reporting on, and so I thought I knew a lot about food and I kept having my mind blown. I mean, one of the things that is extraordinary is, for example, produce when you harvest it, it's still breathing, respiring, breathing. It's taking in oxygen, it's breathing out and it has a certain number of breaths left before it dies. That's basically it.

Speaker 1: 35:23

And cold slows down how fast it's breathing. That's how cold preserves perishable fruits and vegetables. But you can also sort of enhance that effect and slow down the breathing even more by changing the atmosphere that fruit and vegetables are breathing and so discovering, first of all, the story of how that was figured out, but then how it's used, and this is something that will just you will never look at things in the grocery store the same way again. Because a salad bag you've all bought a bag and a salad right like a salad in the bag bought one yesterday.

Speaker 2: 36:01

It was a mexican street corn. There you go. So this is right on point, nikki.

Speaker 1: 36:07

So you know people get it all the time A spring mix or a seasonal lettuce blend or whatever, all the time pre-washed, ready to go. That bag looks like a plastic bag. The perfect atmospheric blend to the leaves and veggies inside that bag by using different layers up to 14 layers of different plastics that let gases in at different rates, so that it's delivering exactly the right blend to those veggies to keep them breathing as slowly as possible. And not just that, those veggies are also blended to try and even out their atmospheric needs. So take a mixed salad baby spinach breathing really fast. It's so young. They're harvesting it when there are just five true leaves on the plant, so it is breathing hard. Mix that with a little bit of radicchio. That's breathing much more slowly and you can just kind of even out your leaves. So you think they're mixing it because this is a nice and tasty blend. No, they're mixing it so that they can average out how fast it's breathing.

Speaker 1: 37:27

You just buy a salad bag. You think it's just a container. No, that's a life extension technology that was developed incredibly recently. I spoke to the guy who invented it. It's this fantastically cheerful guy who's now retired here in California. He is the man who transformed bagged salad.

Speaker 1: 37:48

They thought it couldn't be done and he invented it, and that was one of the things that also was amazing about this whole process is so many unsung heroes who had figured out. You know, there's in the book I meet the woman who spent her 20s traveling around the world in a refrigerated shipping container so that we could ship perishable produce around. Before then you couldn't do it. You would put some cherries in Washington state and they would show up in China as mush. She spent her twenties floating around the world in a refrigerated shipping container, figuring out what was going wrong, redesigning the air circulation, designing all the protocols so that we can have the global food system, and no one's ever even heard of her. No one's heard of her name. So that's part of what I do in the book is, like all these people who are behind kind of the miracle of this. They call it permanent global summertime in the grocery store because it's just this seasonless abundance, but it's not. It looks natural, but it's not, and the stories of how we figured it out are fascinating.

Speaker 2: 38:57

That really is profound and I think a lot of like Alberta, where we live, and when it's in the middle of the winter and it's minus 40 degrees Celsius out there and you go into your supermarket and there's apples like a lot of us get that. That's kind of like magic, like everything outside is dead, it's super frozen outside would kill you and you can go into a supermarket and there's bananas. How are they there? It's magic and I think that's so cool that there's all of these and you brought that to light. There's these people that made it possible and we I think we should think about it a little bit more.

Speaker 1: 39:35

There's people that made it possible and there's also costs, and I think that's part of what I also wanted to do with writing this book, because it's such an invisible world that the work is invisible, but also the costs are invisible. And so you mentioned bananas. I mean that has had a huge. The banana was a tropical fruit. You would never have ever tried one A hundred years ago. A banana was so rare that it would have an armed guard around the banana palm, so the people didn't steal a banana, so it was a special, rare thing that most Americans would never have ever tried. Now it's the most popular fruit in the world.

Speaker 1: 40:18

That's great, but the impact of that, which was all made possible by refrigeration, can be seen in, for example, the monocultures just growing one type of banana that we know how to refrigerate and ripen. That now mean the banana is threatened with extinction, because when you only grow the one variety, pests and diseases come along that can take it out. You don't have the resilience and the diversity. And similarly, that same sort of reliance on one crop is what created the situation in Central America with banana republics, these political systems that were essentially so dependent on these banana companies that they were vulnerable to US interference and weakened by that, and so you don't have strong democracies, and that's the fault of the banana system too. So, on the one hand, you up in Alberta have a banana in the winter. It's amazing.

Speaker 1: 41:19

On the other hand, there really are real costs of developing a system that can bring you that banana in winter, and for me it's like well, we have a refrigerated food system here in the US right now, but the rest of the world is building one. So sub-Saharan Africa is much of Southeast Asia is building a US style refrigerated food system right now. They are literally getting started on it and no one has said, hey, is it a good thing? Could we do this better? Are there costs as well as benefits? What should we try and avoid?

Speaker 1: 41:56

I really thought it was important to write this book now, because it's actually not a perfect system. It's the system we have. We implemented it in pursuit of profit. It wasn't done for any other reason, like health or the environment or even flavor, and if those things are priorities, maybe it would look a little different. And so, yeah, it's an interesting time for, if you're a refrigeration nerd, because we're poised on the brink of this huge expansion in the refrigerated space in the world, and to my mind there's a real question of why aren't we then looking at how we could do that better?

Speaker 2: 42:38

Yeah, it isn't lost on me the whole banana sag. I was very lucky. This is more than a decade ago. We took a group. I'm a school teacher. I teach high school chemistry. That's my day job.

Speaker 5: 42:52

Oh cool.

Speaker 2: 42:53

Yeah, we took a group of kids to Costa Rica, if you can believe it on a marine biology trip.

Speaker 1: 42:58

Amazing.

Speaker 2: 43:00

And we went to a banana farm, a banana place, where they were growing the bananas. The guide also said there's a lot of exploitation. There's a reason why it's so cheap compared to other fruits said there's a lot of exploitation.

Speaker 2: 43:13

There's a reason why it's so cheap compared to other fruits and I know I'm probably speaking to somebody who knows more than me about it, but it's not lost on me. There's all these different costs and I think that's so important for people to know about everything. I maybe know a little bit about the banana, but other stuff I don't know anything about. Getting some of that education from an author like yourself is really important.

Speaker 1: 43:30

getting some of that education from an author like yourself is really important. Yeah, I think most of us have forgotten. Here in the US, we've had a refrigerated food system for so long that there's no reason why you would know. I mean, it's amazing, when refrigeration was being introduced there's an editorial in a Chicago newspaper that says listen, this food is. They say it's fresh. It's not really fresh. The good news is basically our generation will die and the next generation won't know what fresh food is really supposed to taste like, and when I read that I had chills because we're the ones who don't know what it's really supposed to taste like. They were right it's like the matrix.

Speaker 2: 44:10

Do we really know what tasty wheat they were right, it's like the matrix. Do we really know what tasty wheat tastes like?

Speaker 1: 44:15

Exactly. We actually don't. We know what you know. Our banana is this one variety that everyone in tropical regions will tell you. This is not the tastiest banana, far from it. It just happens to be the one that you can harvest while it's green and hard and you can refrigerate to ship it. It's very sturdy like that and then it responds very well to this gas we use to induce ripening artificially. It's the standardized banana of commerce. It works well in our refrigerated food system. That doesn't mean it's the tastiest at all, far from it, sorry. I mean a banana is a great thing when you have. I mean there are bananas that taste like vanilla ice cream. There are bananas that taste kind of almost like apples or more citrusy. There are more bananas with some more mango notes. The vanilla ice cream ones are wild. There is a world of delicious bananas out there and we don't have them. We have the one banana that works in our refrigerated food system farm and he's like you'll never get these in Canada.

Speaker 2: 45:43

The ones you get are they're not like this and it was like five times bigger than any mango I've ever seen and it tasted like, like, like there's a party in my mouth and everybody was invited. I'm starting to. The curtain is being pulled back the longer I talk to you that it's not just bananas and mangoes, it's probably everything.

Speaker 1: 45:57

I hate to say it. It is everything the whole section in the book on tomatoes. Tomatoes, again, have to harvest them before they're ripened. They ripen differently off the vine than on the vines. You're never going to get the same flavor as you would if you let it go ripe on the vine. And then tomato breeders bred them so that they were sturdy and didn't squish and could be shipped around the country in the cold and on the way. They literally bred out the genetic machinery that makes flavor. It's gone.

Speaker 1: 46:35

You cannot get good flavor from a commercial tomato, and so I met this scientist based in Florida who's made it his life's mission to breed that back in, because it didn't even have to go. They just it just got lost in the process of breeding a sturdy tomato. So he was like I'm going to breed it back in, and he did years of tomato taste tests, figured out what the ideal tomato was or actually ideals, because it turns out women like more complex tomato and men just like a sweet tomato. And I know, read into that what you will. He came up with these are the flavor chemicals we'd like to have in our tomatoes, which, by the way, are also associated with higher nutrients. So it turns out, the tomato that is tastier is also higher in the things that are good for us, and he then went about just using conventional breeding, breeding that back into a tomato that was still sturdy enough that you could harvest it before it was ripe and ripen it off the plant. And he's emeritus now, he's retiring, but he sent me some of his tomato seeds and they are there. They are good, so it's fun.

Speaker 1: 47:52

Of course, there's another problem which happens if you put a ripe tomato in the cold for more than four days. The machinery that makes flavor shuts down. So do not put your ripe tomatoes in the refrigerator, just eat them. You that makes flavor shuts down, so do not put your ripe tomatoes in the refrigerator, just eat them. We're just ruining the flavor.

Speaker 1: 48:06

So yeah, it's an interesting thing. It's a human instinct to want to store and have this abundance and have the food not go bad. Most of human history is our big counter species war against the microbes and fungi that want to eat our food before we can. This is one of humans most fundamental jobs is to preserve food so we can eat it and other little critters don't before us. But that instinct doesn't serve us particularly well in terms of health, flavor and also the huge carbon impact of refrigeration, which we haven't even talked about. So yeah, it's a funny thing, you know, refrigeration it seems so convenient, seems so great, and it is. No one can argue in the middle of winter to be able to eat a strawberry or a blueberry. It's a delight. And, and prior to refrigeration, people were stuck with endless root vegetables and whatever they managed, exactly my grandpa talks about that.

Speaker 2: 49:08

He was a farmer and, yeah, like it was all winter. I'm like what did you guys eat when it was like minus 40? He's like a lot of potatoes a lot of.

Speaker 1: 49:20

There's an amazing sort of anthropological study People in a town in Indiana pre-refrigeration and post-refrigeration done by these two husband and wife the Lins and pre-refrigeration people talk about the ubiquitous, endless, eternal coleslaw of winter. That is all they're eating, because it's just. You know, you can keep a cabbage forever, you can keep, you know, carrots in your root cellar forever, and then spring would come and people would go nuts and start eating everything green, and so we don't have that. We are certainly not lacking in opportunities to get our fresh fruits and vegetables in winter, but we have lost some things and the point of my book is let's have an accounting of that and let's not just smooth that over. This was a system that we built and it's a system we should look at what are its costs and what are its benefits we should look at what are its costs and what are its benefits.

Speaker 2: 50:24

Oh, I'm so excited to read this book. Yeah, that's kind of a great exciting synopsis of what it's about. I appreciate you sharing that with us thank you, it's fun.

Speaker 1: 50:31

I also feel like there's just an awful lot in there where you're like what, um, you know you, you're reading it in in bed. You just turn to the person next to you and you're like can you believe? And everything from sort of how they test the cold rating on jackets I mean, the hoodie was invented for cold storage workers. There's just a lot of weird science and history in there. So yeah, I hope people enjoy it.

Speaker 2: 51:00

You mentioned the hoodie.

Speaker 1: 51:04

Many Alberta Albertans that's like the thing they wear all winter is a hoodie invented by the knickerbocker knitting company, which became champion, the sportswear company, yeah, I'm wearing a hoodie right now actually they started out making warm clothing for cold storage workers.

Speaker 2: 51:21

Well, I worked a stint in the oil patch outside in the winter in between teaching contracts when I was young and any of that technology that kept me warm. I'll tell you thank you right now. Seriously, it's pretty brutal working 12-hour days out in the freezing cold. Oh yeah, right, type of clothes on.

Speaker 1: 51:41

I mean after my shifts working in the freezing cold, if you don't, oh yeah, right type of clothes on. I mean after my shifts working in the freezer, it. I just had such a huge respect. I mean, it's so cold, it's painful and after you know, three hours, four hours, you just you start shutting down. It's terrible.

Speaker 2: 52:01

I don't want to extend this any longer. Did the people acclimate to it? Because I found, like myself, I acclimated to that horrible weather, with the exception of when it got like super cold and we weren't even allowed to go outside, kind of thing.

Speaker 1: 52:17

And so what the folks that I worked with here in Southern California told me is what's really important is you have to stay cold. So they just blast their AC on the way home. The one you know, one of them had his car in the shop and he was like I'm going home on the bus and it is hell because you warm up and then you have to cool down. So for them they were just like it's really important essentially just to stay cool and and yeah, I think you get used to it Some people I mean they have a lot of you know people who show up, who want to work, want a job, and who leave at lunchtime because they're just like, wow, this is just not for me and I think if you can stick it out, you can is just not for me.

Speaker 1: 53:00

And I think if you can stick it out, you can, you know you can, you can gradually make it works. It's a sort of combination of you know where your fat is deposited on you, how much brown fat versus, you know, white fat, how many slow twitch muscles versus fast twitch. So everyone has a slightly different cold tolerance. I do think there are people who just can't acclimate.

Speaker 2: 53:21

I guess I'm lucky. I'm a person who loves the cold. I'm out there snowshoeing and skiing when it's super cold, so perhaps I've got the right amount of fat.

Speaker 1: 53:31

Well, they're always hiring. It's hard.

Speaker 2: 53:33

I'm okay in my classroom teaching chemistry. I'm well done with working when it's that cold out.

Speaker 5: 53:40

There, you go.

Speaker 1: 53:41

Increasingly. They can't find people to work in these conditions and so a lot of warehouses are automating because it is just such a tough environment and people are like you know what? I could work in at least room temperature in an Amazon warehouse. Instead, if I'm doing warehouse work, why also make it freezing? I remember one of the guys who actually makes the clothing that is used by a lot of refrigerated warehouse workers. It's called Refrigerware the company, and the guy had previously worked in a cold storage warehouse and he said when he switched to the Refrigerware company, he said you know, at least I'm going to be solving problems at 70 degrees from now on, at Fahrenheit. And he was just like that was his. You know, he was like this it's whatever happens, it's going to be great.

Speaker 2: 54:32

That is the worst part of working in the cold. When I was on the oil patch, when stuff breaks down in the cold, it is the worst. Yeah, I hear that. I hear that. That resonates with me.

Speaker 1: 54:43

And I get into the science of why it's so hard to think. You know they call it cold stupid mountaineers, because you are, your performance is impaired in the cold. Doctors talk about the umbles. You mumble, grumble, stumble and fumble, and you know the work plans that these companies create take into account that cold slowed performance, because it's real and there's a variety of different biological mechanisms going on that people are still teasing out. You know how our body reacts. Cold is a really interesting area in science, and so that's something I get into in the book too. I could talk about this all day.

Speaker 2: 55:20

I could too, but I do want to respect your time. It is absolutely fascinating. Thank you, nikki, are you okay if I skip a couple of the questions? Of course, maybe we'll just briefly talk about Gastropod, the pet story, and then wrap up, is that okay?

Speaker 1: 55:36

Yeah, let's do it.

Speaker 2: 55:37

We can give you a shout out whether you could talk about your book and the other book in the wrap up. Great Nikki, could you talk to us about Gastropod? That's a podcast that you run.

Speaker 1: 55:46

Yes, I too have a podcast. It is called Gastropod. It is food through the lens of science and history. New episode every other week and my co-host is Cynthia, and together we will explore one topic through this lens of science and history. So our most recent one was food allergies.

Speaker 1: 56:07

Like the whole history, did ancient people have food allergies? When did we figure them out? When did they start happening? Are they really on the rise? If so, why? What do we know about it and what's the science? What's really going on? Is an allergy the same as an intolerance, et cetera, et cetera?

Speaker 1: 56:23

So we just kind of take one topic and really dive into it. And sometimes it's a more abstract thing, like the calorie. Who invented the calorie? What's the history there? Is the calorie really a calorie? Are all calories the same? How do you measure them, all of this stuff? And sometimes it's something that's like a food.

Speaker 1: 56:43

So we'll dive into the history of the bagel or the science. That means that I cannot, for the life of me, get a decent bagel in Los Angeles, whereas New York is full of them. Is it really the water? What's happening? So that's what we do and it's really, really fun. We've been for a while. We got started just when podcasts were getting going, when Serial for those of you who are around got going, and before that, people used to be like what's a podcast? And you used to have to explain where you could get a podcast and how you downloaded a podcast and you would say it's like radio, but you can listen at any time. And now, of course, everyone has a podcast and everyone knows what a podcast is, but we're still going strong, so we have a good time with that.

Speaker 2: 57:28

Gastropod can be found on all podcast players.

Speaker 1: 57:31

Spotify everywhere. Everywhere you get your podcasts and it's free.

Speaker 2: 57:36

Very cool have you done. One on poutine yet Very cool have you done one on poutine.

Speaker 1: 57:41

yet we have not, and that is an interesting. That sounds like a good gastropod episode because people have feelings about that.

Speaker 2: 57:49

Oh yes, People up here. They have opinions on the poutine. Yeah, they do. Very cool, all right, we'll have a link link to gastropod in our show notes. Everybody, one of our questions we always ask our guests to share is a story about a pet from their life or an animal, and, nikki, I was wondering if you could do that for us yeah.

Speaker 1: 58:15

So it's been a while since I've had an actual pet. I had a adorable, adorable Tibetan terrier growing up, but she is sadly long gone from this life. But instead here in LA, where we have some outdoor space, we have a pair of morning doves that made a nest the worst nest. I Googled it because I was like how is this even a nest? And morning doves are famous for making the most slapdash nests there are. They're just renowned for how terrible they are in this building.

Speaker 1: 58:52

But they are extremely devoted parents, both parents, and also just incredibly beautiful birds, and they're related to pigeons and I feel like pigeons are one of those birds that they get a bad rap. But they're actually very tender, Watching them with each other and with their little baby, and the delightful wooing where they coo at each other. It's just, I have to say, they also you know how birds in a bird bath they kind of it's like this frenetic splashing right Usually looks like kids in a paddling pool. When morning doves sit in a bird bath, they just sort of sit there and occasionally they raise one wing and then they put it back down again. Then they raise the other wing, put it back down again, but they don't flap about. It's a very sort of zen bath time moment, and so I like that too. So I spend a lot of my time looking at morning doves these days because I can see them out of my window and you're procrastinating from writing. It's kind of fun, very sweet.

Speaker 2: 59:55

Yeah, birds don't get enough credits for credit. They're very charismatic creatures, for sure.

Speaker 1: 1:00:01

Oh yeah, and sparrows love to play. I'll watch them hide from each other and then jump out and scare each other. You don't give birds credit for being playful or having a sense of humor, but they have a lot going on, so I've become a big bird fan.

Speaker 2: 1:00:20

Love it. That's great. About an hour ago, I finished talking with a scientist who works with the bbc on walking with dinosaurs. One thing they mentioned was that birds are dinosaurs right essentially, I know which is nuts, isn't it?

Speaker 1: 1:00:33

um, although you look at them now and I'm like, well, it's not exactly jurassic park out there. Take a look there.

Speaker 2: 1:00:41

Take a look at an emu's feet, and then you'll think differently.

Speaker 1: 1:00:45

That's a thing I remember when I was in Australia. They have this bird, the cassowary, which is sort of gigantic like shoulder height and one kick can kill you, and that is essentially still a dinosaur as far as I could see.

Speaker 2: 1:01:03

Some of those big birds don't mess around. There's one on Sesame Street.

Speaker 1: 1:01:09

Exactly.

Speaker 2: 1:01:11

Well, nikki, we've come to the end of our chat. I want to thank you so much for giving us your time to talk about your book. This has been an engaging, entertaining and educational chat. You have a second book as well. Where can people find out more about you and the work that you've done?

Speaker 1: 1:01:28

Yes, for my books. You want to go to my website, nicolatwillycom it's just my first name. Last namecom, I did have a previous book which I co wrote with my husband. Amazingly, we're still married even after writing a book together. It's called Until Proven Safe. It was best book of 2021, according to the Financial Times, npr, a whole bunch of places, the Guardian, etc.

Speaker 1: 1:01:53

It's about the history and science of quarantine and we pitched it and sold it a long time before the pandemic. We pitched it and sold it a long time before the pandemic. When COVID started, we were like, oh, we had just been, you know, talking to all of these CDC and Chinese CDC experts about what they would do and what would happen, and that was playing out in real time. We had sort of gone around telling people you know, we are overdue a pandemic, we're going to experience quarantine in our lifetime and suddenly it was happening. So but it's also about other kinds of quarantine, like lunar quarantine when you bring the space rocks home, and things like that. Nicolatwillycom is where you can find it, gastropodcom or wherever you get your podcasts for gastropod. And my new book is called frostbite, available wherever books are sold all right, so everybody, so everybody.

Speaker 2: 1:02:42

not while you're driving, but we'll have links to all of that in our show notes. You can make one click away, just please don't while you're driving.

Speaker 1: 1:02:52

I second that I ride my bike around Los Angeles and the quantity of people on their phone. I'm like well, if you're all buying my book, I forgive you, but otherwise put the phone down. Yes, of people on their phone.

Speaker 5: 1:03:02

I'm like well, if you're all buying my book, I forgive you, but otherwise put the phone down.

Speaker 2: 1:03:05

Ooh yes, nikki, thanks for joining us today on the science podcast. It's been a treat. Do you have like a tagline like stay frosty?

Speaker 1: 1:03:11

Stay cool. Stay cool is what I say.

Speaker 2: 1:03:15

There we go, so stay cool, everybody and check out Frostbite.

Speaker 1: 1:03:19

Thank you, it has been such a pleasure to talk with you about it.

Speaker 4: 1:03:22

I had a lot of fun hey, it is time for story time with me, adam. If you don't know what story time is, story time is when we talk about stories that have happened within the past one or two weeks. Uh, dad, do you have a story?

Speaker 2: 1:03:34

I do so. The last week, uh, this last week has been extremely hot, meaning like way too hot to have the burners outside. They cook, they hide in the shade, but the dog that is taking all of the sun in is Beaker. So every day I make sure Beaker gets out outside. She either goes on a walk with me through the creek or she romps about in the back digging a hole, um.

Speaker 2: 1:04:03

And what is really funny is that chris has these two kiddie pools. They're like for toddlers, like they're not for an adult, unless you want to, I don't know, you do the homer simpson thing in there, where you lay in it with your body barely covered and your legs out of it and your arms out of it, and you enjoy a beer, I don't know. But what Beaker does, which is hilarious, is she works, having fun, digging a hole, running around, and then she comes to the kiddie pool and cools off. So I fill up the kiddie pool and she goes back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, so she knows when she's getting too hot. And she comes back and, like, lays down as low as she can in the pool, covering up her body with as much water as possible.

Speaker 2: 1:04:48

Um, gets cool, has fun, and then she goes back to whatever nonsense she was doing. So it's just been really fun to see her do that Like. She's like, ooh, it is kind of hot out here and she's got her own way to cool off. Thanks, thank goodness. Aside from that, we've got, uh, some footage of norbert, thank goodness. So he's still doing good, or she's still doing good, and more moose footage on the trail cameras we've put down by the creek. That's my stories.

Speaker 4: 1:05:14

Uh, I have a story about the heat as well. Um, so there are, like, I talk about my grandpa's house all the time but uh, papa has four cats and they're all in the house and they all lounge about. They don't really do a lot of anything. We've talked about this on the podcast before. The cats are kind of useless. They don't catch mice. When there was a mouse in annalise's room we put, we locked like three of them in there and they didn't do anything. They didn't catch the mouse. They like watched it move around the room and then didn't do anything. Um, but they're fun and they're funny and they're super cute. Um, so I guess that balances it out.

Speaker 4: 1:05:55

But it's been really hot at Papa's house because he doesn't have air conditioning, so it's been boiling in that house. It's been very hot and the cats have definitely been feeling it. So what they do now is they don't lay on, like the couch or on the chairs or like like on the beds in the house. They lay down, they go downstairs, because upstairs has a carpet. They go downstairs and they lay on the, on the linoleum floor or the like the tile floor in my grandpa's kitchen or like the wooden floor, cause it's so hot and the ground is a little bit colder. So they just lay on the ground and usually they're. They're up high, cause that's where cats like to be, but now they're just in the way all the time whenever you want to move somewhere and laying down on the ground. But if you sit on the couch they give up their cold ground to come say hi to you, because they're nice cats. But they're feeling the heat too and they're laying down on the cold ground to mitigate it.

Speaker 4: 1:06:57

But yeah, that's my story is the cats at Papa's house are getting hot. Mom, do you have a story?

Speaker 3: 1:07:03

I sure do. Bernoulli is getting into everything. He is very mischievous and tries to jump up on the counters and everything, so Jason and I are looking at ways to mitigate this. The good news, though, is he's not jumping on the cat as much. So you may have seen on our social media, where we had one day where he wasn't attacking ginger or mauling ginger, and then Jason had to. He posted that, saying yay, and then, oh no, there has been zero days since ginger cat maulings. Um, so we're working on a few things with for newly, and that's my story we have a special guest on the podcast again.

Speaker 4: 1:07:57

Uh, special guests, get over here. Special guest is annalise. Annalise, do you have a story?

Speaker 5: 1:08:04

the first one is that we have ducks now and they are so funny, so silly. I love them with all my heart. Um, they are a black duck and they look so pretty in the sunlight. They kind of have this iridescent color to them. Adam said they look like an oil spill.

Speaker 2: 1:08:24

They look like they're goths.

Speaker 5: 1:08:26

Yeah, exactly, I didn't know. Ducks came in that color. I'm hoping that I'm not allowed to name the chickens, but I can name the ducks hopefully.

Speaker 3: 1:08:35

Anyway, that's the first exciting thing.

Speaker 5: 1:08:37

Anyway, that's the first exciting thing. The second exciting thing that's happened is that we actually had one of the hens. She actually like sat on her eggs until they all hatched. And so now we have a bunch of like actually natural baby chickens and they are so cute and she gets very defensive and she like blows up like a big balloon. And Adam's papa the other day said go look in the green shed and I was like, oh okay, and I thought she was a turkey. So I went back into the house and I was like, did we get a turkey? He's like no, she's just being defensive. And I was like, oh, her tail fans, like a turkey's does. But yeah, those are my stories, All righty.

Speaker 4: 1:09:27

Thank you so much for listening to my section of the podcast sticking through to the end. Yeah, I'll see you all on the next podcast episode. Bye, bye.

Speaker 2: 1:09:35

That's it for this week's show. Thanks for coming back week after week to listen to the Science Podcast. Thanks to Nikki, who talked to us about the book Frostbite definitely picking it up. I can't wait to read it. And also, if you are a top tier patron or pop hack member of our community, a perk is you get your name shouted out by Chris at the end of every episode. Check our show notes to support the show that way. All right, chris, take it away.

Speaker 3: 1:10:08

Bianca Hyde, mary writer, tracy. Check our show notes to support the show. That way, all right, chris, take it away and you cheetah. Piggy McKeel, terry Adam, debbie Anderson, sandy Brimer, tracy line bar, marianne McNally, fun. Lisa, shelly Smith, julie Smith, diane Allen, brianne Haas, linda Sherry, carol McDonald, catherine Jordan, courtney Proven, donna Craig, wendy, diane Mason and Luke, liz Button, kathy Zerker and Ben For science, empathy and cuteness.