FFP break + science headlines

51:54And so with that, let's let's do some housekeeping. So for those of you watching us on YouTube or Spotify, welcome. As always, watching the pod is one of the best ways to capture all of the overlays and graphics we talk about. Be sure to like, share, comment, and subscribe. It helps us in our battle against the billionaire algorithm. For those listening on Apple Podcasts, it is out of our hands, but we are awaiting the announcement for Spotify Creator Videos to be available as video on Apple Podcasts. Allegedly, Apple and Spotify are collaborating on this launching late 2026. So, keep an eye out for that. For

52:38those who catch our clips on Tik Tok and Instagram on a regular basis, put them in those group DMs. Share the best science show on the planet with your friends, co-workers, bring it to Journal Club. If you are watching this full episode from the f for the first time from our clips, welcome. Every episode is like this. And so we are super excited to continue to have you all today. A couple of uh announcements or uh housekeeping notes for our merch giveaway. We are going to be sending out the emails to the winners over the next week here. So, keep an eye out on your email. Thank you for everyone for submitting for our oneyear anniversary.

53:18You may have noticed behind us there are gold balloons representing 250. And while we talked a lot about America 250, the gold balloons Yeah. are not necessarily here to celebrate our America 250 episode, but they are here thanks to the loving wives Anna and Joanie who've provided us a way to celebrate our 250 Instagram followers, which is already now at 267. So, we are just growing unbelievably fast. We want to thank the upcoming cast of The Real Housewives of FFP for supporting us so greatly. Uh, we love you both so much. And I'm just going to

54:00hit one last note before we get into some quick headlines as a pallet cleanser before we dive back into our quantum episodes. If you would like to support the show, fivestar reviews, like, comment, share, subscribe. If you would like to donate to the show, you can head to ffpod.com/donate. Again, we are on all platforms. Our website has a great way to watch the videos, chapters, full transcripts, links to all the research papers we talk about are all available there. But now we want to quickly just get into some of the top news stories from the week just to give you an idea of what's going on

54:41out there in the world of science. Our first story came out breaking today. It's been all over the news related to pharmaceutical giants Maderna and Merc saying uh today, Wednesday, which will be likely a day before you all watch this podcast, that an experimental vaccine treatment has shown signs of preventing cancer from returning or spreading in a study of high-risk melanoma patients. uh this was a combination of madna bringing their mRNA vaccine structure and merc bringing their kruda and the idea is they you know we've talked about the immune system in the past on the pod and part

55:21of the tough part about cancer cells is our immune system is not really able to identify them so it's like our police our immune system is looking for the criminals and the criminals are kind of invisible apparently the combination of these two things makes it able the immune system able to identify uh what was previously not visible to them. However, uh they've not published their results, >> okay, >> in a peer-reviewed journal or released the new data, saying instead they will be presented at an upcoming medical meeting and shared with regulators. >> Oh, okay. >> However, there does seem to be um some real there's there does seem to be a there there. >> Okay. Um and so according to their news release, the mRNA based vaccine was

56:02tested in a latestage trial involving people who had had uh surgery to remove a melanoma, one of the deadliest forms of skin cancer. Apparently, this same methodology is also being applied to a few other types of cancer, and it there's potential that it generalizes. >> Interesting. >> So that their stock price, >> both of them went through the roof. >> Oh, I bet. >> Around that. So, we'll see. >> A cancer vaccine. the data. We'll see when the data comes in and we'll keep an eye on that. But that's an interesting first story from us that's uh that's out today. Our second story in the news headlines that was interesting. This is from UC Berkeley. Uh this idea of a new uh technique called trace that pinpoints

56:43human DNA inherited from ghost ancestors. Uh there have been a lot of uh videos and hype things about oh the missing link to humanity's ancestry. So the idea here is that and we've talked about some of these stories before previously as well Neanderthalss and Dennisovven's uh interbred with modern human ancestors leaving behind a telltale DNA in our genomes. And so if you do 23 andme or ancestry.com you can kind of know and see where those ancestry is from. Um but now the researchers at UC Berkeley have found out that we may actually have evidence for uh modern human interbreeding with

57:24two much older unknown ancestors that have not yet been recorded in any of the genomic records specifically. Wow. >> And the time period in which the interbreeding started was prior to the the sort of the migration out of Africa which I believe was about 800,000 years ago. And so this is a very big it would be a very big deal in terms of the >> Yeah. Yeah. If it happens before the out of Africa event >> Yes. >> then it's much more widespread, right? >> Yes. >> Yeah. Then it's like literally everyone who's not in Africa and maybe some in Africa. It appears that I believe the data point was 0.5 to 1% they found uh

58:05traces of these two uh ancestral lines across every uh the Eurasian the the like Denisova and Neander it's it's present across everybody. >> Oh okay. >> And so now there's obviously going to be followup around this but is it it is an interesting and the thing is it started uh there was this breakoff. It started prior and then there was apparently a reconnection right before uh the rise of homo sapiion and so there there seems to be some interesting >> there's some interesting genetic history uh to come out of that story. So interesting fascinating if you would like us to cover that in more detail let us know. Our last quick uh story

58:46reference point here uh we are always going to talk about funding. Yesterday the NSF announced $1.5 billion of the foundational research. This is the idea that uh every year a couple of different times they will have their new notices for funding opportunities which define what their funding under what dynamics and the requirements to submit your proposals. Um there's a lot of kurfuffle right now around funding uh because there's uh significant cuts that the current Trump administration is trying to make around funding generally as well as changes to how grants are actually um uh how grants are awarded themselves

59:26which currently has expert review panels. They want to move it into being more aligned with whatever the agenda of the administration, the political administration of the time is, >> which we covered in a previous episode about how politics is now getting intertwined into um yeah, the the peer review panel of um experts and scientists no longer have final say. It's just an opinion >> which um again we can talk about iterating on the process. Um, but I think this is a a hammer approach to something that requires a scalpel. Um, the $ 1.5 billion uh uh new uh proposals that were announced cross all of the fundamental hard sciences. Okay.

1:00:07>> Uh so this is not the social sciences per se. We're talking about things like uh biological science, expeditions and computing, electrical communications, bioengineering, uh manufacturing. One new area that I think was allocated about $30 million was emerging frontiers in wavebased computing. Um, which has maybe some kind of tangential relation to what we're talking about. And so the thing is one of the issues people have about this is a lot of this is being framed around the golden age of X that is the overarching political narrative that is trying to be applied to a lot of research and development and the emphasis on the technological uh you know bolstering from a

1:00:48geopolitical perspective. Obviously, we want to be able to do fundamental research as we've talked about a lot that does not necessarily have a direct throughine to a practical commercial application because some of the biggest things we have discovered in the US that have had the biggest financial impact were not decided at the point of research. It was figured out after the fact. And if you are curious about learning more about the history of funding in general in the US, we have an incredible interactive explorer for funding over the last 60 years in the United States. you can understand how research and development funding uh has

1:01:29been allocated across agencies even including last year's FY2026 and this year's still ongoing FY2027 funding debate looks like instead of just talking about things without knowing the information we've given a very easy way to look at what money has actually been allocated to science and where and big shout out to AAS who've provided the historical data sets that we've been able to build that off of. Now, last quick note in our break before we return to our quantum fantasticness. What is the can't remember the Marvel movie quantum uh quantum mania? There it