40: Mitochondrial Eve, Climate Change CRISPR, and Telephone Music

Episode notes

Who is the most recent human we all share our DNA with?  How can CRISPR be used to help the climate crisis?  And what do telephones have to do with music?

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Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:04:22) Mitochondrial Eve
(00:39:21) Climate Change CRISPR
(01:14:56) Telephone Music
(01:47:57) Outro

Images we talk about:

Early Headphone Advertisement

We also learn about: Dartboard topics, Most recent common female ancestor, that’s actually the topic! endosymbiotically engulfing mitochondria, every animal now has this little friend, a fly gets caught in a photocopier and now we can’t live without it, mitochondrial DNA is only passed down the female line, mitochondrial DNA mutates once every 8,000 years, mitochondrial eve may have existed 150,000 years ago, eve wasn’t alone but she was our common ancestor, the eve of sperm whales was only 10,000 years ago, for squids it was 35,000 years, “won’t somebody think of the men”, Y Chromosomal Adam may have come from 210,000 years ago, concestor, simulating the concestor in a simulation, it’s not really a family tree it’s a messy web that we can draw a triangle around, GMOs vs Gene Editing, cool rad interspersed short palindromic repeats, tell them about how repairs happen! just some extracurricular learning, tom guesses cow farts in one, fartless cows without editing the cows themselves, we could eat less meet or just genome edit our way out of this, blue ribbon cow fart judge, is this a bandaid? making plants work harder to absorb CO2, photosynthesis labor laws, it’s not just “eat more carbon” it’s also grow deeper roots, “adapting the world to suit our misuse, rather than trying to improve our own behavior”, who needs pesticides when you have ugly plants, the scientific community is carefully thinking about these things, head phones, switchboard operators, that’s so gool, tom puts the podcast on hold, the devil invented hold music, hold music and temporal perception. no music makes time slow down, the fans of hold music, Tim Carleton’s stereo mistake “yeah… sorry about that”, the vocal encoder, mmm whatcha say, “it is the identity of our artistic project”, Ella’s Sherlock ringtone, Dark Blue, a book about making ringtones, 346   certified gold ringtones, Beyonce is the ringtone queen, ringtone podcasts, can only hope we’re causing as many people bodily harm as possible

Sources:
Headphone History from Smithsonian Mag 
Hold Music Technicalities from NPR
The Influence of Music on Temporal Perceptions in an on-hold Waiting Situation
This American Life Hold Music Episode
Tim Carleton’s Opus No 1 from The Atlantic
Opus No 1 in Mono and Carleton’s Comment
Vocal Encoder Patent
Logic Manual on Vocoder History
Daft Punk Vocoder Interview
Book on Ring Tones
CNN Ring Tone Interviews from 2006
RIAA Gold & Platinum Ringtones
CNN on Phone Music

More sources coming soon!  But hey look at you checking the sources so early 🙂