The Butterfly Effect

**Kiki Sanford** (0:00)
This is Twist. This Week in Science, episode number 1074, recorded September 2nd, 2026 The Butterfly Effect. Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki, and tonight on the show, I will fill your head with butterflies, dark matter, and raindrops. But first, thanks to our amazing Patreon sponsors for their generous support of Twist. You can become a part of the Patreon community at patreon.com/thisweek in Science. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer.
The future depends on today. Make no mistake. What you choose has impact. Ripples from each of us expand and interact. We are not isolated islands, but a massive Venn diagram. Let's act like our lives depend on us. And enjoy This Week in Science coming up next.
Good science, everyone, and welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. I'm back, Dr. Kiki, here to talk about science with you. I mean, really, it's all about what's happened, what we're curious about, and what other questions we can come up with. So I'm really glad that you have decided to spend your time with me this week. All right, Blair is out tonight because she's got some new school stuff for her child and also some possible job stuff. But, you know, she'll be hopefully back next week. We'll see. We'll see what comes of all of this. We don't know. The future is still in store. So let's be good to each other and let's have questions and let's explore. All right, what do we have tonight? I've got a big eye on this guy. We've got some big dark matter, got some beauty bias, little gut brain connection, also some raindrops on car tops, and anyway, corrosive actions. And maybe I care if you're Alzheimer's in mice. But before we get to all those stories, I do want to remind you that as we jump into the show here, subscribing to The Twist Podcast is the best way you can get twists wherever you are, whenever you are on your favorite podcast platform. We're on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch every week broadcasting live around 8 p.m. Pacific time-ish. And you should hit those notification buttons if you want to know when a new episode is published or when we're going live. If you want show notes and links to stories and those fun things, well, I want to make sure that you get to twist.org, our website. All that information is there in addition to links to our Patreon and our Zazzle store. So that's great. And now it's time for the science. You ready? I don't have Blair's voice here going, yeah, okay. All right, let's dig into the science.
Quick call back to last week. We talked with Weather West and had a wonderful conversation about El Nino last week. What a great, great conversation that was.
Just a day or two later, a new study was published by researchers who have been studying coral records outside the Galapagos or from the Galapagos Islands. And from these records, this is published in Science. What they were able to say is that, hey, recent strengthening of this Eastern Pacific Enso-El Niño oscillation, right? This is the strongest over the last decade or so. It's the strongest it's been in a thousand years. So they were able to go back using the coral record off the Galapagos from the Eastern Pacific Ocean to be able to look at the history of ocean warming and cooling based on oxygen events. And what they were able to show is that, hey, it's been going on since about 1100 AD, right? Yeah, AD, until about the Industrial Revolution, where it evened off for a while, until about from about 1850 to 1984 And then there was extreme increases from 1984 to current day. And so as a result, where we are is unprecedented. Woohoo! Yay! Thanks, Coral Record.
Anyway, I just thought I'd give you a nice reminder of our conversation with Daniel Swain last week. And hopefully get you thinking about putting any weather stripping or weather precautions into your homes or other properties that you might have that might be appropriate. I think that would be appropriate. Our optimistic, wonderful news for this week.
NASA has launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope successfully on its journey to the L2 Lagrange point, four times the distance the moon from the Earth, but out there where it has a nice gravitational dwell point that it will be able to sit along with some other spacecraft. That's not the only one out there. But this telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, otherwise known as or priorly known as the WFIRST Telescope, was launched on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket this week, and it was able to... It's going on. It's going to take three months to get to this Lagrange point. It's not going to be doing anything really till it gets there. Once it gets to the Lagrange point, it's going to undergo similar start up, you know, making sure everything works similar to what we saw the web go through. This telescope, we're very excited about it because it's spy technology. Well, I mean, that's not why we're excited about it, but it is repurposed spy telescope technology. The National Reconnaissance Office or Surveillance Office had two of these amazing telescope mirrors that it wasn't using because of funding that got cut for some surveillance program in the past. And so prior to the whole COVID kerfuffle that we went through, there was money and a mission put together, and a bunch of people have been able to get this telescope going. Whereas the web took decades, it went over budget, it had all these issues. The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope named after the first chief astronomer for NASA. Who is a woman? It's wonderful.