Are there any other innovations beyond the different recycling pathways that are helping us to make the most out of these very everyday things in our houses?

Yeah, absolutely.

There's been a lot of interesting research on the recycling front.

There's mechanical recycling when you unpick the fibres, but then there's also chemical recycling where you sort of take the substance and dissolve it completely and then re-spin it into something new.

And there's been quite a few companies that have been working with things like enzymes.

They've been designing...

these proteins that can break down the cellulose or even the plastic if it's a polyester fiber and turn it into sort of virgin materials.

We're getting away from towels here, but that idea of using enzymes to take synthetic fabrics, nylons, and taking them apart and being able to put them back together again, that's a fascinating one that would get into this whole microplastic waste problem.

Are there any other innovations beyond the different recycling pathways that are helping us to make the most out of these very everyday things at our houses?

Yeah, absolutely.

There's been a lot of interesting research on the recycling front.

There's mechanical recycling when you unpick the fibers, but then there's also chemical recycling, where you sort of take the, the substance and dissolve it completely and then respin it into something new.

And there's been quite a few companies that have been working with things like enzymes.

They've been designing these proteins that can break down the cellulose or even the plastic if it's a polyester fiber and turn it into sort of virgin materials, so either new textiles or you can make new plastics out of them, that sort of stuff.

So th- there's, there's interesting research happening there.

We're getting away from towels here, but that idea of using enzymes to take, you know, synthetic fabrics, you know, nylons, and taking them apart and being able to put them back together again, that's a fascinating one that would get into this whole microplastic waste problem.

What are the main scientific questions Roman is hoping to answer?

There's three big ones.

The first two are dark matter and dark energy, these very, very weird physics phenomena that we don't fully understand, or we don't really understand at all.

One of the ways we can learn more about both of them is seeing how galaxies are distributed across the universe and how they're moving, because that will give us information about what's sort of driving them to move, the gravity, and the energy that we can't necessarily see.

And so the Roman Space Telescope's gonna be really good for this because it takes these big pictures with its wide-field infrared instrument.

It's gonna have these, like, really large galactic panoramas basically that can tell us a lot more about how they're all structured and shaped, and basically theoretically build up this kind of three-dimensional map of the universe.

So that's one of the things it's gonna be really useful for.

This is what won Brian Schmidt the Nobel Prize.

[laughs] Uh, how does a male redback spider learn that this is a good idea? Do they see others doing it, or is this where we come to the genetics of the situation?

Yeah, so it looks like it's genetic behavior.

It's something that's encoded in the spider's DNA, and that's actually where this research came in.

They were trying to locate where the gene for this happens because there's a very close relation to the redback spider, the katipo, which is native to New Zealand.

They look quite a lot like redback spiders.

They're a little bit smaller.

And they diverged from redback spiders pretty recently in evolutionary terms, sort of 100 to 200,000 years ago, so they're pretty closely related.

What can they do about it in New Zealand to try and stop the redbacks from taking over these populations?

Okay.

So that's probably where the cannibalism first came in.

While they're mating, she starts eating the male partner so that she can then mate with another one and [laughs] make sure she's got a, a more diverse set of offspring.

But then the males have evolved a response to this, 'cause obviously it's in the male's interest to mate for as long as possible and essentially get as much sperm as possible into the female.

So if the male can fill both of those chambers, then he's pretty much guaranteed his chance of offspring.

As long as the female goes on to have babies, they're gonna be his.

So this somersault's actually a deliberate attempt to prolong the mating process-

[laughs] Uh, how does a male redback spider learn that this is a good idea? Do they see others doing it, or is this where we come to the genetics of the situation?

Should we be worried about this?

I think it's really interesting.

While I was doing research for this story, there are so many rules around food and cosmetics, knowing where the foods come from, what could be in it, what's tested for, what risks we need to be aware of.

And I think it's really interesting that when it comes to clothes, the fast fashion industry is huge and very complicated.

The supply chains are really, really long.

It's very hard to trace things backwards.

There's very little oversight.

So if there's no labeling about these chemical exposures, is there anything we can do in terms of our own awareness? Do we know anything about which clothes are more likely to have this sort of contamination?

So how do we actually separate this short-term pattern variability from the long-term trend and is like i was hanging out with my uncle on the weekend he said well the world gets warmer and colder in different cycles david so how do we you know determine this being different from these these other trends and how do we think about that

Yeah, and that's a really important question to ask as well.

Because also the way we've been measuring ocean temperature, the way we've sort of been doing it in this really thorough way only goes back a few decades.

And the way that humans have been doing it total goes back a couple of centuries.

We do have records that can tell us about ocean temperatures older than that, though.

They call them paleoclimactic records.

So you might have heard about like tree rings that can track CO2 in the atmosphere and global temperatures back over thousands of years.

so what happens if it just keeps getting hotter like is there a breaking point like what are we how's our relationship with the planet changed from that perspective

And so is it going to all parts of the world or are there some parts where the currents aren't as strong? How does that work?

Yeah, so there is kind of a broad system of ocean currents that are sort of followed around the world.

So all of the big ocean basins have what we call these ocean gyres, where ocean water tends to move towards the equator up the west side of the ocean.

Sorry, not the east side, east and west, correct.

We have these ocean gyres in all of the big ocean basins, so like the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, North Atlantic, the South Atlantic.

Along the eastern side of those basins, water tends to move up from the pole towards the equator or down from the pole towards the equator in the northern hemisphere.

And then down the other side, the western side, it tends to move down from the equator.

all right so on those solid guesses antarctica plays an important role what four percent of the world's ocean or whatever the anecdotal number that i remembering off the top of my head why is antarctica so important

So what are the other elements then, Ellen, that contribute to the other factors in not being able to predict the tides so accurately?

So there's a few things going on.

The first thing is you get two tides a day rather than one tide because while the moon is influencing the oceans, it's also influencing the earth underneath the oceans.

So it's pulling on the earth very, very slightly as well.

So if you imagine the oceans as kind of like an envelope for the earth, they're getting stretched a little bit by the moon and then the earth inside is getting pulled along a little bit as well.

So you get this bulge on the moonward side of the earth, if you like, and then also on the opposite side.

So that's why you get two high tides every day.

What are they actually measuring them? And what is water level zero? What does that mean?

How can you be more certain than virtually certain? Or are you going to be 100% positive, I guess? What does that actually mean?

Yeah, it maybe doesn't sound like the strongest vote of confidence ever in sort of layperson terms, but in terms of that's the intergovernmental panel on climate change is phrasing virtually certain.

And that is the most confident I have ever seen a body of scientists get about anything.

Peer review is a really interesting thing.

There's so much work that goes into scrutinizing and carefully trying to disprove the work you're doing.

across all science, but in climate science, it's a new level of thorough really compared to other fields because they really don't want to make these predictions or force these like really big economic changes that they're suggesting need to happen without being very, very confident that they do need to happen.

So, for instance, the IPCC reports, even just the executive summaries, the summaries for policymakers, they're gone over by 200 different people from 100 different countries in these kind of two-week meetings where they go through the reports sentence by sentence.

well I'm virtually certain that everyone listening here is listening to the ConnectSci podcast this episode part of our ultramarine series so if we know the sea levels are rising at Ellen the next question is always well how much and how fast are we seeing