 Mole rats, there are so many different kinds of mole rats. We need a musical theater full of rodents who dig in the ground and have big front teeth. It's like cats, but kind of rumbly-tumbly, it's like bitey scratchy immune to cancer. That's our buddy in scratchy immune to cancer. Mole rats. Alright, we are live. We are live. Hello, everybody. We are just, you know, moving on down the road. Hey, co-hosts, are you ready to start this show? Born ready. Well, actually, I was ready about 20 minutes ago, but let's do it. We had to learn to read and write and type and all that stuff before- all that stuff before and I only finished that 20 minutes ago. So let's do it. Okay, start in the show in three, two, this is Twist. This Week in Science, Episode Number 656, recorded on Wednesday, January 31st, 2018, under the super blue blood moon. Hey, everyone, I am Dr. Kiki and tonight we are going to fill your heads with genetic jitters, gold microbes and rooster rotis. But first, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer, what you put in determines what you can get out. And it doesn't really matter what stuff you are putting in, or what you are putting that stuff into, putting in a decent effort will get a result different than putting in no effort at all. Inputting reliable data will result in more reliable data out. Placing potatoes in a pot of boiling water is much more likely to get you a pot of boiled potatoes than if you had filled your pot with onions. And while this may seem obvious to all, it's not what we often practice. For all around us all the time, people are placing onions into pots of boiling water and expecting boiled potatoes as a result. Like relaxing your way to getting fit or eating junk food and still wishing to lose weight or staying up too late and still hoping to be well rested or tuning into nonsense shows yet still wanting to become more intelligent. But they all end up with boiled onions, which if covered in melted cheese with a dollop of sour cream is still a great snack to relax to late night Netflix binge on your couch. And yet, you have found your way here to the place that will put potatoes into your pot, or in this case, science into your brain so that you can achieve the result you actually desire to know what is happening this week in science coming up next. It happened every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to know what's happening. What's happening? What's happening this week in science? What's happening? What's happening? What's happening this week in science? And the good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of this week in science. We are back again on the day of the super blue blood moon and International Zebra Day. I know. Blair. Well, everyone with a twist calendar new, right? That's right. So super blue blood moon, it doesn't really roll off the tongue as nicely as you'd like. But did anyone wake up at five ish? Well, I mean, if you're on the West Coast at five ish this morning, 530 this morning to see the super moon, meaning that it's actually slightly gravitationally closer to the earth than usual. Blue moon, meaning that it was a second full moon in the month of January or, you know, in any month, but this is January. And a blood moon, which means it was an eclipse, a lunar eclipse, wherein the moon passes through the shadow of the earth. I wish I'd seen it. And the light from the sun as it passes through the atmosphere of the earth imparts the light with a red shifted hue. So then we see a ready bloody moon. And it signifies a month of pain and suffering. Well, yeah, February, I mean, I think goodness, it's the shortest month of the year. It was wed for Valentine's Day. Oh, ready. That moon, it's just bloody with love. Yeah. Yeah, that's what's fully your heart. It's all up in your heart is blood. Yeah, well, I tried to get up this morning. But you know what? I live in Portland, Oregon, and clouds rain. That'll happen. But no view of the moon whatsoever. But NASA was nice enough to put a feed. You know, it's probably out there still lots of images people took of the beautiful moon and all its big blue and red glory. Yeah, it was there. But we have other awesome things going on this week. Science news, you know, I got it. I think stories about jittery jeans, muscle memories and long lived rats. Justin, what you got? I've got a vaccine for cancer. Why Lady Luck is no lady. And there's golden number of microbes. I want to know more about that. Is this a new gold rush? Yeah, Blair, what is in the animal corner? I have some cockadoodle rooster rodies. And I have some zebra toes, actually, in honor of zebra toes. Really, zebra tootsies. This is maybe something you should keep to yourself. I mean, I was telling you for the show, you know, zebra toes, it's just a little bit of barbecue sauce on them. They're just oh, dear. All right, everyone, these are the stories and more that are yet to come in this show. As we jump on in, I want to remind you that you can subscribe to This Week in Science, the podcast on iTunes, in the Google Play podcast portal, Stitcher, Spreaker, tune in, all of those wonderful places where podcasts are found. You can also find us on YouTube and Facebook. Look for This Week in Science. You can also look for us at twist.org, T-W-I-S.org. But now it is time for the science. So let's jump into the show with some naked mole rats. Yes, well, naked mole rats, we know them as the, well, I think they're cute, but maybe some people don't. They're hairless. For the most part, they have like little hair spines that help them find their way around in the tunnels under the ground that they dig. And these naked mole rats have big old teeth. They're blind. And I think they're pretty cute in a strange kind of way. But the thing that we like about them scientifically is that they are fascinating for their health. Turns out they don't get cancer. Their immune systems are amazing. And they don't seem to get those diseases of aging that a lot of other species get. And that is what this study that I am going to talk about right now pretty much is all about. On elifesciences.org. So Elife is an online open source publication journal so that everyone, that is linked will be on our show notes. Everyone can read this article if they're interested. Researchers published a paper called Naked Mole Rat Mortality Rates Defy Gomperzian Laws by Not Increasing with Age. So Gomperzian, Gomperz, Gomperz came up with a rule for mammalian aging. And basically, that rule is that as you age, especially humans, past the age of 30 years old for every eight years later that you live, your mortality or the probability of you dying increases by like double, it doubles. So pretty much it becomes an exponential curve upwards where you start out young, fairly healthy, low mortality from most causes. And then as you age, the chance of death is greater and greater and greater from all causes. And this happens in a cross species. And we know that for rats and mice, but rats, which are related to the naked mole rat, the naked mole rat, as Blair has told me is a kind of rat, even though it doesn't really look like a rat, it is a kind of rat. And most rats will live only a few years, maybe four or five, six years tops for a good healthy rat, naked mole rats will live upwards of 30 years. And so the researchers have been studying this longest lived rodent for in the laboratory in captive care for over 30 years. The researchers have been doing their work and taking notes and numbers on these animals the entire time and have come at this point to be able to actually say some interesting things about them. So the maximum lifespan is five fold greater than predicted by this comparison law for a similar sized rodent. And these even in the wild naked mole rats are considered to be long lived and breeding females last up until about 17 years. So very long into the late into their life, the females are able to breed. And other rodents only usually last about a season. So the these analyses that they did and mole rat lifespans of over 3000 individuals found that a substantial portion of the population survived to at least eight 30 years of age. And this is regardless of whether they're male or female, whether they're breeding or non breeding. And there's something that's going on that allows them to continue a aging without aging, they get older without aging. So what usually happens in the study of gerontology or the study of aging is that individuals come to a point where senescence starts to begin. And that that probability increases as you get older. And once you hit senescence, senescence or somewhere around there, things just start to go wrong. Your body starts to fall apart. And it just doesn't keep itself up anymore. And these mole rats keep themselves up for a very long time. And the question now really is how it's got to have to do with their telomeres. Right? I mean, that's ultimately what what we usually credit with old age and dying of old age is DNA replication malfunction because your little shoelace tips have come off on your DNA strands. So I think we've got to look at their DNA. So the DNA and people have looked at are looking at their telomeres and are looking at their DNA. And so they they say in the discussion of their paper that that what they think might be going going on is that there are negligible negligible. There's been not much literature documenting it systems based senescence in these mole rats. And the and they think that maybe there's delayed comparison aging but not non existent so that instead of this aging curve starting early in life that it just happens a lot later in life. And if that's the way that it works, that's kind of cool. And we want to learn how to do that too, so that we can live longer healthier, just like them. So I don't know though, aren't we're our humans along that curve. Like I feel like we live a pretty long time. Like, we're not a tortoise. Well, just about other other apes have a fairly similar aging processes we do. They definitely chimpanzees and gorillas often live into their late 50s, which is probably pretty standard for us before a lot of our major medicine breakthroughs. Yeah. So I don't think we're that with all the medicine that we can throw at, say an ape in the zoo. Yeah, but well, but the difference is that an ape can't say my foot feels funny. Will you look at that? Yeah, but they're also not smoking and drinking and driving cars. Like, I don't know, I feel like we've been I think we're but if you start thinking about the diseases of aging and when they start hitting people, usually it's within the 30s to 40s is when diseases of aging cancer neurodegenerative diseases, muscle problem, you know, these things start to start to kick in, you know, reproduction reproduction in females declines in the 30s to 40s. You have I mean, even though we are long lived mammals, the body begins this aging process at an early, early stage at an early point. My question was more about where do we draw our baseline where we should fit. If we're already double what the, you know, what the lifespan should be for an ape of our size, that's fine. What we learned, we might not get five fold, which by the way, I hate folds. Nobody should ever talk folds. That folds makes no sense to me to this day. Nobody can ever explain folds multiplication factor. It's not though. It's not. A two fold increase is the same as tripling something, times it by three. That's, that's just not you can't folds and it's different. Anyway, tangent station boarding. Five fold increase six times. That's what I'm saying. Anyway, it I think I think if we could unlock these mysteries and apply them to humans, it would do really wonderful things for some of us. But then there'd be so many of us for so long, like our reproduction rates, our everything else rates, our consumption rates are are already ahead of our curve. Well, and that's, that's, that's the question we keep talking about with, you know, I later we're going to be hearing about potential solution for cancer. So every time we talk about that, we all know people pretty much everybody knows somebody who has had some kind of cancer at some point. And it would be great to be able to take care of that and to reduce the amount of loved ones lost from cancer. But every time you cross the disease off the list, even way back when they crossed off polio is a problem that changes the population that we are likely to have on our planet. And it changes the way that we stress our planet. So of course, there's a lot of things to be considered with that. But of course, as you would usually say, you would just send those people to Mars. What I would suggest is actually far more logical. I think everybody should be here on the planet and we should be more, more, more respectful of the limited resources we can pull from the planet. I think we need to get to the point where genetic modification allows people to be no more than three feet tall. And once we get there, we could have twice as many people on the resources we are going to use now every floor into two of them because we'd be smaller. Yeah, I mean, think of the real estate boom. I'm going to put a second a second floor in my one story house now because I'm only three feet tall and it will work. So easy. The study does raise interesting points. What is going on in the DNA of the and the metabolism and the mechanism cellular machinery that keep these naked mole rats alive and not just alive on on life support, but very healthy and able to survive in extreme conditions at that. And then based on kind of jumping off from here, I found another study that is talking about the chemistry of DNA, and it's published in Nature this week. Researchers have been since about 2000, well, before 2015, but in 2015, they reported that they had discovered this shape shifting, or that DNA vibrates things vibrate and move around a little bit. And when that happens, sometimes they're these jitters, these quantum jitters that allow the bases, you know, the G, the T, the C, the A, all these, the numbers that we use to make up our letters that we use that are actually the molecules that we use to make up our DNA, that they can shape shift. And so whereas a G normally likes to line up next to a C. Sometimes it there's a mutation that's wrong, and something gets gets added in incorrectly, and you have a G next to a T, an accident, you know, and how do these accidents happen? Why if we have this wonderful cellular replication machinery that fixes its errors? Why do we have mutations? Why does this even happen? And so when actually Francis and Crick came up with the concept of DNA and the DNA helix, the alpha helix structure, the helical structure and how it all zippered together and work together, they postulated that there was some kind of shape shifting that takes place, and that molecules for split seconds might change their structure or vibrate into a different form so that they can line up and then get overlooked as a mutation. And in 2015, some researchers from Duke University came up with some evidence that this seemed to be right. And just this week, they have published again in Nature, saying they have been able to replicate the one in 10,000 timing, the clock of mutations that occurs in DNA, they've been able to replicate that in the lab. And it indeed, when they when they use this their process, they are able to make these molecules, these DNA bases line up incorrectly so that G lines up with a T and creates these incorrect mutations. Now, one of the interesting aspects of this is, so the question this researcher, the senior author on the paper Hashim M.L. Hashimi, he said increasing or decreasing the rates of spontaneous mutations could significantly alter the ability of an organism to evolve or like we were talking about cancer, alter its susceptibility to disease. An interesting question is what determines the mutation rate in a living organism? From there, we can begin to understand the specific conditions for environmental stressors that can elevate these these errors. And so in their laboratory conditions, what they found is that when these quantum jitters occur, and the shape shifting happens for a split second, this one out of 10,000 times that leads to a mutation, they found that the rearrangements have different varieties. Sometimes they form anions, which are negative in charge and other times they're more positive and they have these different isomers, they're called tautomeric. And they found that when these these conditions take place, they're the different alternative states contribute to these errors. So in normal conditions, when there weren't any environmental stressors, the tautomeric forms dominated. But when the conditions changed in the presence of cancer causing mutagens and environmental stresses, the mutations took the anionic form. And so now not only have they supported the timing clock for mutations taking place in DNA, and the mechanism by which mutations form, they also can show a direction for us to start looking for disease causing mutations with these anionic structures. And so this might lead to a much better way of looking for mutations within our DNA, with a very specific form, and also potentially to treating. Because it's a very specific molecular structure for a specific DNA target that we could use, you know, something like, you know, CRISPR, other things that we're looking at these days. But it's a very interesting line of study that these researchers are working on. That's, yep, lab based proof of mutation is pretty cool. Yeah. And, and 65 years after Watson and Crick suggested this idea, it's supporting it, it's proving it, which is that's just so this is exactly why this kind of research is so important. This is why revisiting old studies is so important. This is why continuing on these lines, you know, the whole idea of replicating the primordial soup, right? That was something that was just something that someone theorized you could potentially do in a lab when I was learning about it. And now people have actually done it. This is exactly those things that that are what young minds need to hear about to really be able to understand the mechanism of our world. Yeah. And so amazing. And even this question of well, how can mutations arise on their own in the DNA? This answers that question. It is a mechanism, the quantum vibrations in our proteins, in the molecules that make us up, these quantum vibrations jitters. Yeah, it's not a mistake. It's not a free, free accident. It's, it's part, it's part of the superstructure of life. Yeah. But it's these reverberations and vibrations that lead to slight structural changes that then, because they happened at just the right moment, get locked into place because the zipper got zipped. That is the coolest. This is, this is the coolest. This, we might have to hear about this again at our end of 2018 show. Honestly, this is great. Right. So fascinating. I was like reading through it. I'm like, what is this? This is kind of exciting and interesting. This is the chemistry of life, yo. Kinetics. That's right. The kinetics of chemistry. This is life. Life and the variety of life and our universe is amazing without having to make anything extra up. Right? This is what science is about. Yeah, we didn't make it up. This is just just looking at what's actually happening is, is awesome in the true meaning of the world. Word. Yeah. And, and if you experience that thing firsthand, you might even say, Eureka! Time for Justin's story. What you got there? Which is a phrase explained by Archimedes as he unlocked the laws of displacement while stepping into a bath. In fact, he even said it twice. Eureka! Eureka! Though it is possible that the bath is also too hot. And this is always what he said on some occasions. But never had previous cause to then run about telling everyone about something other than boiled toes. Eureka is also the motto of the state of California. It was exclaimed the exclamation Eureka was made at a mill, Sutter's Mill by operator James Marshall and Coma, California 170 years ago upon discovering a negative gold in the American River. While the world is science is filled with Eureka moments like these. The next story seems to fit that mold perfectly. For Eureka, there's gold in them. There are microbes. What? Bacterium cupria vitus metallurans to be exact. High concentrations of heavy metals are usually toxic to living things. But not cupria vitus metallurans, which is adapted to survive in heavy metal environments. One interesting side effect of this rod shaped headbanger of a bacterium, the formation of tiny gold nuggets within it. A team of researchers at Martin Luther University, Howell Wittenberg, the Technical University of Munich and University of Australia have discovered molecular process that takes place inside this bacteria. And this is going to be if you're looking for it's in the journal, methylomics by the Royal Society of Chemistry, metallic bronze primary lizard soils that are enriched with heavy metals. Over time, these minerals break down in the soil, and they release toxic heavy metals and hydrogen into their environment. Copper is one of these metals. And it's a vital trace element that metallurans needs, but too much of it. And it becomes toxic. So it needs just the right amount. When copper and gold particles come into contact with the bacteria, there's a range of chemical processes that take place. Copper is usually too difficult to actually be taken up the form that's in the soils too difficult to be taken up. So is then converted into a form that is easier for the bacteria to import and reach the interior of the cell where the cell wants it to be bacteria wants it to be. And it happens that same process also brings in a little bit of gold. When too much copper is accumulated, it normally gets pumped out. But when there's gold in there as well, it sticks around. And this is according to Professor Dietrich Nye is microbiologist MLU when gold compounds are also present, the enzyme, which is cup a is suppressed and the toxic copper and gold compounds remain remain inside the cell. Copper and gold combined are actually more toxic than when they appear there on their own. So to solve this problem, the bacteria activate another enzyme, cop a force cup a this is copper a this enzyme transforms the copper and gold compounds to their or back into their organically difficult to absorb forms, showing that fewer copper and gold compounds enter the cellular interior bacteria is then less poisoned and the enzyme that pumps out the copper can dispose of the excess copper unimpeded and the gold and just sort of sticks around in the difficult to absorb form in the outer area of the cell and becomes a gold nugget, which is not like a really big nuggets nanometers, it's really tiny, but you get enough of them. And it turns out this is what's called a secondary gold formation. So we have the whatever the supernova that took place and these things fly on that they become part of the planet and then they melt with the lava and they get moved around things happen. This is another way where these teeny tiny little bits can collect and be transformed into gold ore, essentially, by the bacteria. So maybe a little too soon to start the bacteria gold farm. Just yet, but they are looking at this as a way to remove gold from from ore. So this bacteria is already used sort of like super fun sites or an industrial sites where they're trying to sort of clean up the heavy metals in the soil. But if this can be used as a as a way of removing gold from from soil or ore formations as a replacement for for mercury, which is definitely toxic. Super toxic. Yeah. As as we had used previously up and down the state of California. And which is still highly in use across Africa. Yeah. Yeah. So bacteria gold miners. I love that idea of using using nature to do to do the job that it does. Usually. But maybe we can superpower it, soup it up a little bit. Make it be a little bit more efficient for our needs. Yeah, I love stuff like this. There's a I mean, isn't isn't bacterial activity where iron bog iron original originates from as well? You know, the Vikings got all of their iron from bogs. And all of that iron is due to bacterial activity in the bogs themselves. So you just like saying the word bog. I like it. Don't get bogged down on the details. Bog, bog, bog, bogety, bog, bog, bog. Yeah, this is this is cool. Yeah, let's keep using the bacteria. And I mean, this just sits. I mean, we can use the bacteria as they stand but understanding how the enzymes in the bacterial systems work and how how they get put together to become the machines that they are. We can maybe figure out how to use them also and incorporate them into synthetic bacteria. Making more making more bacteria. Oh, does that bring us to certain time in our show? What time would that be? I think it's time for where's animal corner? I have some zebras and some horses and some other animals that are on who's. Now the conventional wisdom, it behooves you to talk about them now. It does indeed. So the conventional wisdom about hooved animals such as horses is that they started out in jungles and places that were kind of soft on the ground. So they had their five digit foot that was kind of more similar to how a rhino foot or a taper foot looks where they have individual little toesies coming off kind of a big flat foot. And then these animals moved on to planes like lands where the soil was very heavily packed. It was very hard ground. And they had to make ground quickly because there wasn't a lot of cover. And in that process, evolutionary pressure led them to the hoof. And the understanding is that that hoof is actually their middle toe. And they have a singular toe. And that's all that's left. They lost the other four. Well, all equestrians and equestrian related enthusiasts hold on to your saddles because a new study published this week in the Royal Society Open Science from the New York Institute of Technology says those quote unquote missing digits, all four of them are in fact still there. They didn't go away. Yes. And I hope that's not a mocking shocking gasp, Justin, because this is huge. I have another kind. Modern horses don't just have one toe. No, they're saying they have all five. So really what's going on is their four feet are just big middle fingers. So that's a the original expectation was. But now they think that all five fingers have fused into a kind of mitten hand. So they actually think all five digits have merged to form a compact forelimb with hooves. So they looked at bones, fossils, arteries, they looked in embryos, they looked in every stage of development. And they really found what they thought were traces of toes. And they found that they're actually splints on the outer edges of the metacarpal, which is the the main the toe, right? In modern horses, those splints are remnants of second and fourth digits developmentally. So that seems now for sure. They also argue that the equivalent of the toe and and and or sorry, the little toe, the little finger, the pinky kind of and the thumb digits number one and number five, they have not entirely disappeared. This is really the new information they look. And they see ridges on the back of those two kind of lessened number two and number four digits that look like these other the pinky and and the thumb that have fused with those. So what they see actually, they think is a fusing of like the equivalent of just going to talk in terms of hands, because it's easier, the thumb and the first finger, those fused, and then the ring finger and the pinky, those fused, and then the the fused clumps, then fused into and reduced so that the middle finger was still the main one poking out of the bottom of the foot. But they're looking and they see evidence for all five toes. They also traced the gradual metamorphosis over 55 million years of evolution. They went into the fossil record. And they found a developmental process that would actually show this line of thinking in terms of the the different kind of morphs of feet over the years. And they also looked at they did dissections of fetal and adult horses and looked at neurovascular networks. And those neurovascular networks are consistent with animals with five digits. They said they should be able to find 10 primary nerves and 10 arteries. And that's exactly what they found. So this is so all of the nerves and blood vessels for five digits are still there and have not gone away. Yeah, the there is evidence within the bone structure itself. And additionally, there is developmental evidence. Yeah, so pretty, pretty solid. Horses got five digits. Yeah, so this is something that once again, we're looking at people have been studying animals for so long before we knew about genetics, before we knew to look at fetal stages of animals, and that a lot of the time, a fetal stage of an animal will give evolutionary clues. Before we knew how to trace things properly in the fossil record, people have been just looking at the the shape of animals and drawing conclusions from that, right? And, and now over the thousands and thousands of years of this animal observation and categorization, we have to now go back and kind of parse out, wait, what is evidence based? And what is completely observation based? And what can we add to this? And how can we find out more? I mean, the, the whole dinosaur categorization mess is a perfect example of that. That's something that they just looked at morphology. They said, well, they look like reptiles. They're reptiles. They're like lizards. They're like giant lizards. It's fine. They're lizards. And then over time, we find out more and more and more. So as we go on our human quest to categorize things, which I won't go off on now, listeners to the show know what I'm alluding to. But as we try to categorize and therefore understand and care for wild things, we have we get new pieces of evidence and we have to adjust our expectations. And this is something that has been conventional knowledge for a very, very long time. Think about horses, think about how deeply involved they are with our history. Yeah, and and now completely changes a lot of things. I mean, of course, this does have a lot of impact on how we care for horses too, especially if you think about if you think about injuries to the feet or the legs, you think about vasculature, you think about nerves, all these things. Our care might change as a result of this, which seems crazy. So yeah, well, very, very often, I think that is true that we have certain levels of care because of our observations and our observations lead to our understanding, which then informs our actions. And as our observations improve and our understanding changes, so too will our actions. Absolutely. Yeah. And an animal that is responsible for a lot of our successes as a species, we know no more about. It's pretty exciting. And maybe understanding this, I mean, especially with the nerve and blood vessel information, I mean, maybe this is the kind of stuff that's kind of research, it's going to lead us on a path to being able to help more horses who break legs. Yeah, absolutely. That is a big problem is is is healing broken legs in horses. Yeah, maybe the reason a broken leg is so devastating on a horse is that there's broken bones or or injured nerves that we didn't know were even there. Yeah, that we had attention to. Yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty exciting. And it's pretty interesting. And I, I can't wait to see how it changes changes so much of a mammal classification. Pretty interesting. I've got 10 right here. Five, five, five and five. Five I think I'm right when I'm sure that bats are more closely related to horses than they are to rats or foxes. It's, you know, there's a lot of, if we all came from little furry shrews at some point, shouldn't those digits be everywhere? Like, like what like, and the reason I honestly wasn't super surprised that they made this discovery really like they found toes on whales. I mean, these elements that are going to be preserved. The way they found it's pretty amazing though. I hadn't, I hadn't thought about the tracking backwards and just seeing the existing nerves that would have been assigned. Yes. That's, that's pretty, pretty awesome way of doing. Yeah, absolutely. And that's definitely something your body would trash if they didn't need it. That's, it's a lot of extra energy you want to get rid of if you don't have those toesies. Anywho, moving on to another fascinating discovery in the animal world is a, you know, the age old question, would a rooster make a good roadie? And the answer is yes. And let me tell you why. I didn't even know that was a question. I got it. I was surprised by that one. The age old question. Well, you might run into some problems with him if he starts cockadoogledo and during your set. But usually they do that in the morning, right? And you need some help getting up anyway from those late nights on the road. So when they do that, you would expect a rooster with their extremely loud crowing. And I think both of you having lived in Davis are very aware of how loud roosters can get. I love this. Yeah, Davis. Because it's far enough from San Francisco. It must just be all barns and roosters at that time. Actually, there's a rooster in San Francisco at a house sitting house I used to stay at that neighbor had a rooster and I that was a very rude awakening pun intended. I grew up in the country. We raised chickens. We had roosters every morning. Yes, they loud. Not even only in the morning, all during the day. All the time. So the the the bizarre sciencey question out of all this, that honestly, I'm surprised has not yet been answered, is how does a rooster not go deaf from their own crowing? Well, maybe they are. That's a rooster. So here's the answer. Finally, coming from Belgium from University of Antwerp and the University of Ghent, both in Belgium, they found first, they, they actually recorded with a tiny microphone near the ears of roosters, they recorded how loud the crowing would sound to a rooster based on where their ears are. They found it was actually louder than they projected about 100 decibels, which is about the same as running a chainsaw with unprotected ears. And people who use chainsaws without protecting their ears would go deaf and people do. And that's because of damage to their tiny hair cells in the inner ear. We talked about these last week or the week before we've talked a lot about these inner ear hair cells, and how we just wish we could get those back because a couple of those concerts and our teens and twenties just weren't worth it. Well, this 100 decibel sound coming straight from the roosters, they, they are not going deaf. They are not losing inner ear hair cells. They actually, these Belgian scientists performed micro computerized tomography scans on the skulls of the bird to figure out exactly what was at stake mechanics wise. They just wanted to see kind of what was happening physically on that bird's head. And they found that half of the bird's eardrum was covered by soft tissue that was essentially a dampener. It dampened the incoming noise all the time. So half of their ear. The other half they found when the rooster tilted their head back to crow. This other material kind of flapped back and covered the second half of their ear so that their ears got completely covered like some earplugs. And so they, they equate this to sticking your fingers in your ears while making big noises or trying to avoid noises. So kind of like setting off the fireworks and then sticking your fingers in ears. It actually does help. And yeah. And so these guys have their very own earplugs. What's more birds can regrow damaged hair cells. So even if they had damaged them, they could recover them. In this case, it sounds like it's really not hurting them. The last bit they wanted to see about the study was what how the hens and the chicks are being affected by the crowing. Because if dads outside yelling all morning, that might affect those growing ears in the little chicks or the females may not have these mechanics who knows. But they also found in this case that roosters are very particular about their vantage point. And they want to find a vantage point with maximum reach. And they pretty much always are pointing their crowing away from hens and chicks when they crow. So that the they want the most as many people to know that those are their hens and their chicks and this is their territory. But it also reduces the amount of decibels hitting the hen house. That's just really nice of them. Yeah. Roosters to turn the other way and grow outwardly to the world as opposed to turning around into the farmyard and yelling at the ladies. Hey Janet, get up. Get the kids up. Oh roosters you did a good work. This is I wonder how I mean this is such another interesting avian adaptation. I mean built in ear protectors, the hearing protectors, but they don't even really I mean, it takes a lot. You and I were talking very briefly before the show about the fact that birds can regenerate their hair cells. So even if they damaged their hearing, the hair cells would regenerate but you'd still be at a loss for those hair cells in the time that they were dying, had been dead, and then regenerate it again. Just constantly be regrowing your ear cells. It's like you're hearing it being constantly on low power. Yeah. So I didn't know that about birds. I didn't know they could regrow their ear hairs. Yeah, the hair cells, they can regrow them. And so they don't have a problem with hearing loss like humans do due to sound damage. But at the same time, it's going to be a costly process to regrow them. And if you're crowing every day, you don't really have you want to be able to hear other roosters and behaviorally, you don't want to have hearing downtime. So the ear protection adaptation is really interesting. It just makes me think of woodpeckers who have similar adaptations to protect their brain. Right, because they would just constantly be in concussion mode all the time. Yeah. So I find it I think it's very fascinating. These very creative adaptations. Yeah. So how could these behaviors really cool? Yep. And again, an animal that has been with us for a very, very long time. And we are still learning what secrets it has for us. Oh, thanks chickens. So many secrets. Little chickens. Don't you love you so much. All right, everyone. This is Week in Science. We have reached the halfway point of our show. We'll be back in just a few moments with more stories. I've got more genetics. This is like my genetics week that's happening this week. Justin's got some cool news as well. We'll be back. Stay tuned. Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of This Week in Science. We are glad you are here and we hope to be here week after week after week for, you know, years to come. But we need your help to be able to do that. So everyone I'm going to direct you to our website twist.org is where you can find all the things you would love to find out about twists. There is a huge subscribe button on our website now twist.org. If you click on that subscribe button, it gives you options for the Google Play podcast directory for iTunes and for YouTube. So if you have not subscribed to those things, if you're an Android user, click on that Google Play button. If you use Apple and iTunes, click on the iTunes button to subscribe to our podcast. You want to watch us in video every week? Click on that YouTube subscribe button. I want to see the numbers going up. I would love to have you subscribing and never miss a show. If you're subscribed, it's like a magazine subscription. It comes to you every week. You are let know. You are let know. The internet's let you know about our new episodes as they come up. So that subscribe button is very important to us. And we hope that you will subscribe and become a part of our growth are growing. Twist minion community. Also no longer preorder your 2018 calendars. We are pretty much out. I think I've only got like a couple of calendars left. So really, pretty much out calendars. Thank you for buying the calendars. Yet again, Blair put an amazing, amazing bunch of work together into drawing all of the art for the calendar and putting everything together for us. And I hope all of you who have gotten the calendar, enjoy it. Also, if you want to help support twist and to help keep us going, because if you've noticed, other than me talking right now, we don't have ads. We don't have sponsors. This is us. And it's you. You are the people who keep twist going. And so in order to do that, there are a couple of things you can do. You can buy our merchandise. Or you can. You can sponsor us. Basically, you can you can donate to keep us going to buy our merchandise. Click on the Zazzle store link in the twist.org website and find all of the awesome items that are in our store. We've got lumbar pillows. We've got twist polo shirts. There are art based shirts from previous Blair's Animal Corner calendars. There's even wrapping paper, tote bags and stamps. There are hats and mugs, all sorts of things with a twist logo. A portion of all of the proceeds comes back to help twist. If you're not into things, if you've already got yourself a twist hat, well, please consider supporting us financially through either Patreon or PayPal. If you want to try PayPal, you can click on the yellow donate button that's on the sidebar of the main page, or you can click on any episode page, scroll through the show notes and down at the bottom, there are pink buttons that'll give you the option of being a one time contributor, $10 a month recurring contributor, $5 a month recurring contributor, or $2 a month recurring contributor. And if this is your preferred option, please go and do that now. However, if you're interested in supporting us through the Patreon community and click on the Patreon link on our main header bar and then click on that become a patron button that shows up when you get to our page. Become a patron and choose your level of support, whether it's $2 a month or $100 a month. Your support helps keep this show going helps us pay all the bills and basically be able to do this show. So we need your support. And we thank you for your support. And those of you who are unable to financially support us to be able to click either of those links. If you're just like, I just can't do it. Tell your friends about twists, get them to subscribe. Because if you can help us grow our community, that'll help help everything overall. It really does. So for all of you out there, thank you for all of your support. Thank you for listening in the first place. Thank you for being here. We really couldn't do this without you. I can't believe you believe in that show. We disagree, but I still give a damn. The ramification of treatments from Holy, and we're back with more this weekend science. Yes, we are. We are back. Hey, Justin, is we have another thing right now? Oh, we do do we have the show that we need to do? This weekend, I always do now because I put it in the second half of the show instead of right off the top. This is my problem. This weekend, what has science done for me lately? All right, Jerry Salem, PhD writes in to say science gave me a frame of reference in which to view the world. I was trained as a biochemist and eventually became a database designer. For me, I am able to view an entire system and break it down into individual components. When something goes wrong, I use the scientific method to analyze what is working and not working. I use enzymology to view data flow like enzyme reactions in a biochemical pathway, finding optimal paths and identifying bottlenecks. The tools I learned as a scientist helped me identify problems and figure them out. This helps me every day. You don't have to be a scientist to think like a scientist. Jerry Salem, love the show. I mentioned it at least once a week to my friends and family. Awesome. Thank you so much, Jerry. Thank you for mentioning the show to your friends and family. We do appreciate that. But more so thank you for writing in and thank you for sharing this because I think you're right. So many people, there's this idea of the ivory tower of science and that scientific thinking is this thing that's the domain of scientists. Well, you know what? Everybody, the scientists sound good. Scientists and ghosts? They have a lot in common, it turns out. It turns out in my world. Well, it turns out that everybody has the capacity to think like a scientist to be able to observe the world, to follow the scientific method where after you make an observation, you make some educated guesses called hypotheses about how things work. And then you know, you can even test different options, you know, oh, is it going to be better for me to melt the butter or not melt the butter before I put it into the chocolate chip cookie dough recipe? You know, you can test all of these things. You test whether or not you like a certain color lipstick or whether or not you like driving your you know, if you drive your car fast on the freeway in a certain stretch of freeway, if you're going to get a ticket on a regular basis, we test things constantly to be able to inform our world, right? And so you can make informed guesses, you can test those guesses. And then you can use the data, as long as it's not little anecdotes, but multiple points of data, you can use them to come to conclusions. And so the scientific method is something that's available to everyone to use. We can all be scientists every day. Alternatively, alternatively, we can just assume that everything is faded. Whatever will happen, what will happen, whatever will be will be the future is not ours to see. Hey, Sarah, Sarah. Do everything. Turn, turn. You've ever been a lady to begin with. Wait, wait, wait, but before you jump into that, I need to remind everybody that I need your letters. So write in, let me know what science has done for you lately. Leave me a message on Facebook, facebook.com slash this week in science, or you can email me at kirsten at this week in science.com. Come on. Tell me what science has done for you lately. I want to know. We've almost gotten through a year. We just have to go until like Earth Day, I think. And we'll have done a year of these. Come on, you guys, you're out there. You're thinking these thoughts. Write them down and send them to me. Okay. All right. Luck be a lady tonight. Hmm? Yes. People have been rolling the dice for over 1000 years, letting the fates decide the gamblers result. In Roman times, dice were visibly lopsided. It really didn't matter to the average Roman after all the dice were just a device to let the divining decisions of the gods come into play. Early medieval times, dice were often unbalanced as well. The arrangement of numbers where one appears opposite two, three opposite four, five opposite six, it just didn't really matter. Some were symmetrical in form, others not so much. But again, who cares? It's just dice. They're just there for the fates to be employed. All that began to change around 1450. When dice makers and players seemingly figured out that the form of the dice affected their function, explains Yelmer Erkins, University of California at Davis, Professor of Anthropology, and the author of the study on dice. Amazing. He had time to do this research with all the roosters growing. I mean, I'm surprised they had electricity. Yeah, there's evidence that people who believed in fate didn't stop leaving it to chance alone, at least a new worldview was emerging. The Renaissance, people like Galileo and Pascal were developing ideas about chance and probability. And we know from written records, in some cases, they were actually consulting with gamblers, says Erkins. We think users of dice also adopted new ideas about fairness and chance or probability in games. Standardizing the attributes of die, like symmetry and arrangement of numbers may have been one method to decrease the likelihood that an unscrupulous player had manipulated the dice to change the odds of a particular role. Dice are not common finds in archaeological sites, typically found in garbage, domestic areas, cemeteries frequently are recovered as the lone objects in a site. So maybe there was, you know, nice places, nice flat spots to go roll dice. And so you would find a few errant lost dice there. And many of the finds that we have, aren't very accurately dated. So after looking at hundreds of dice and dozens of museums and archaeological deposits across the Netherlands, Erkins and his co author, Alex, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, were able to assemble and analyze a set of 110 carefully dated cube shaped dice. The findings are published in the journal Acta Archeologica in December. The result, the researchers found die made before 400, grow many times, are highly variable and shape size material and configuration numbers. Dice are very rare between 400 and 1100 during the Dark Ages. Dice reappear around 1100 where they're predominantly in the primes configuration, or opposite nallies, opposite numbers tally to prime numbers. So one and two, three and four, five and six, number styling was also popular in ancient Mesopotamian Egypt. And then around 1450, the system changes to sevens where the opposite sides of the dice all add up to seven. And dice also became highly standardized in shape, and were made larger standardization, they think might be in part a byproduct of some mass production of dice that was starting to take place. Yeah, but it's sort of interesting, he sort of ties this to a changing ideas of fate. Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's like, you don't understand if you don't understand that the asymmetry can actually be affecting the role, it's like, oh, it's the gods, but then you start becoming more methodical. And people start looking at quite at things and asking these questions. And all of a sudden they go, Oh, wait, why is it always coming up three? Okay, it's not okay. God's just like the number three, which just happened to me this weekend, we have a we got some new games in the house. And I'm sitting down with my husband and son to play Catan Jr. Roll the dice, the dice the dice is very important for your game in this in this game. threes come up a very disproportionate number of times. And so we're looking at trying to look at this dice. And I think there's an air bubble in there. I think they're this thing is loaded wrong. This is there's something wrong with this. No, we were not we're not we're not thinking that the fates were changing our fate in this game. No, somebody made this dice this die wrong. And I needed defective. It's defective. This die is defective. And I need to go get a new one. How about this one? Too many numbers. That's a big, that's a big die. How about this one? That's an animal die. You have a you have a die with animals all over it. I sure do. How about this one? That's a very large regular die. Why do you have so many dice? It's a die in a die. Oh wow. Did you guys not know I collect dice? I this is the this. Nope. Did not know this one. Blair secretly is a dungeon master for events. Dungeons and Dragons. Dungeons and Dragons dice. Of course you do. San Francisco Zoo. Oh, I'm loving this. Of course. It's and you still have more dice. How many dice do you have? I have like 50 here. This is like even my entire collection. There's a point when you've collected too many of anything. This one has a rabbit. It is a squirrel and a raccoon and it's a skunk. That looks like a story dice. Oh, it is a dice dice. There's a beaver. The beaver's number one. That's what they say in Canada. Yeah, for sure. For sure. For sure. Oh, Possum. Oh, Possum is number six. Yep. Sorry. Anyway, continue with the size. Not another train. Trained boarding once again at dice station. Oh my goodness. Well, now I know what to get there for her birthday slash Christmas onica. It's that or what hippos hippos more hippos always more hippos always more hippos. I mean, I have six within reach right here, but definitely more. All right, Blair is a collector. She's a collector people moving on forward. Blair might remember exactly where all of her collections are. But you know what? We talk sometimes about things like muscle memory. What kind of muscle have a memory? Well, when you talk about muscle memory, it's like, oh, you have these nerve pathways that get trained in from repetitive use and they fire faster, you know, because nerve cells that fire together wire together. Hey, hey, that's right. So but but is there actually memory in the muscle itself? Is there? Well, researchers at Keel University have published in Scientific Reports Nature that muscles may not have memory of, you know, of how to move specifically, but they do have a sort of genetic memory that is retained after they are trained. So muscles that are trained and built have genetic changes, epigenetic changes. And these researchers from Keel University along with universities of Liverpool, John Moores, Northumbria and Manchester Metropolitan looked at 850,000 epigenetic sites on human DNA and found the genes marked or unmarked with these epigenetic tags when muscle grows following the exercise, following exercise and then returns back to normal and then grows again following exercise later in life. So they followed this process of muscle growth, shrinking and then growth again and looked at all of these epigenetic tags during the process. They found that the genes in muscle become more untagged with the epigenetic information when it grows following exercise in earlier life. And importantly, once they've been untagged, the genes stay untagged even when muscle atrophies or is lost. But the untagging helps switch the gene on at a greater extent later in life. And so it's associated with a greater muscle response to exercise when you start training again. And so this muscle memory is there as an epigenetic fact of muscle life. So basically, the take home for this that how is this going to be applied and used is to figure out how it can be used in a couple of different ways. If athletes are using muscle enhancing drugs, understand that once their muscles have been enhanced, their muscles are always going to have an enhanced response of sorts because of these epigenetic tags or untagging in this particular case. And so if you've ever used performance enhancing drugs, would that necessarily keep you from ever being able to compete again even if it was a short acting drug because the effect is long acting? So these are now questions that might need to be raised. Additionally, this could be applied to the concept of muscle damage in athletics. And so what can you do when when muscles are in when athletes sustain injuries in their muscles atrophy and then in the rebuilding state, how can they rebuild them in the most efficient way possible? And maybe understanding how the epigenetic factors work could be applied to this. I don't know, but I'm fascinated by the idea of these semi-permanent changes because of the the tags that go into the genes. Once you started working out, it never quite goes away. It's like riding a bicycle, right? Well, I think about when I think about muscle memory, the thing that comes to mind for me is playing a musical instrument. That's the thing for me that even if it's been two years since I've picked up my saxophone, I can do a scale. And my brain isn't really doing any of the work. It's just my fingies. Right, but that's like that's the nervous pathways that have all been that have all been activated. Who knows? Maybe there are epigenetic tags for all of those finger muscles. That's honestly what I'm wondering. I'm serious. I think that if muscle memory has this effect on a larger scale, there's all sorts of small scale things that might be there. Interesting questions. Hey, Justin, do you have another story? Oh, yeah. There's a vaccine that cures cancer. Wait, what? Yeah. If you are a mouse. No, no, no, no, but well, they got to try it there. And here's the thing, though, it worked remarkably well. All right. So what they did was they injected minute amounts of two immune stimulating agents directly into solid tumors and mice. And it eliminated all traces of cancer in the animals, including distant, untreated metastases to use elsewhere in the organism of the mouse. This is a study led by researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine. They're saying it works for multiple types of cancers, including those that could just arise spontaneously. So what they what's pretty amazing about this is that cancer is one of the reasons it's really difficult to fight is that it figures out how to combat the T cells, which is tasked with going out and finding them and attacking them. What they've done here is by by injecting this into a cancer cell first into a tumor site first, is they've actually primed the T cells that made it inside to fight that cancer already, and basically armored them up to go and fight more battles elsewhere after defeating. So it works to reactivate cancer specific T cells by injecting microgram amounts of these two agents directly into the tumor site. One is a sort stretch of the T cells, and the other is the T cells. One is a sort stretch of DNA called CPG olinonucleotide, which works with other nearby immune cells to amplify the expression of an activating receptor called ox 40 on the surface of the T cells. The other an antibody that binds to ox 40 activates the T cells to lead the charge against cancer cells because the two agents are injected directly into the tumor cell. Only T cells that have infiltrated are activated and therefore pre-screened as T cells that will recognize and attack specific cancer proteins. Then some of those T cells leave that specific tumor, and they can find and identify and target that cancer anywhere else in the body. Wow. Yeah. So if it's metastasized, it's going to attack it no matter where it is. And it's not one ops. It's not a whole body treatment. It's not taking your T cells out, genetic re-engineering them, putting them back in, which is costly, time-consuming. Yeah, they say the approach worked startlingly well in laboratory mice with transplanted mouse lymphoma tumors in two sites in our bodies. Injecting one tumor site with the agents caused the regression not just of the treated tumor, but also the second untreated tumor. In this way, 87 to 90 percent of the mice were cured of the cancer, although it did return in three of the mice. So not perfect, but far and above results that you would expect. Yeah. I mean, it's still, it's mice, but it's a very dramatic effect. Yeah. Mice genetically engineered to spontaneously develop breast cancer in all 10 of their mammary pads also responded treatment treating the first tumor that arose often prevented the occurrence of future tumors. Wow. That's a vaccine. All right. Yeah. Yeah. There's the current clinical trial is expected to recruit about 15 patients with low grade lymphoma. If successful, a little heavy lead researcher believes the treatment could be useful for many tumor types. He envisions a future in which clinicians inject the two agents into solid tumors on humans prior to surgical removal of the cancer as a way to prevent reoccurrence due to, so due to the unidentified metastasis, right? So these are cancer cells that are no longer hanging out at the tumor site. It might be in some other location undetected. It might be in the blood. They might be in the brain. They could be anywhere else in the body. So by first injecting this and targeting, you can remove the big tumor fine, but let those T cells go look for the stragglers. Yeah. It says, I don't think there's a limit to the type of tumor we could potentially treat as long as it has been initially infiltrated by the immune system. And so, and that's the story of cancer, too, is that it's not just that your body can't fight it. It just can't fight it well enough. It does make the attempt. So if you've got T cells that are out there, and they are looking to fight your cancer, this is a little bit of juice. This is a little bit of T-cell steroid, sounds like. There you go. Get them pumped. Get them out there. Get them motivated. Come on. Let's go get some cancer. Come on. Go get them. So the hope is now that the clinical trial that they're recruiting, that it's successful. Usually with the first of the clinical trials, it's just to see that people can take the therapy well, that there's no negative results that are significantly more negative than whatever they are already affected by. So if they're already working to get to the phase one, phase two clinical trials, it's all money and getting it happen. But I mean, this could be a fast track kind of thing. And it's likely to be, I think just the, so this is not his first rodeo apparently. So this is Ron Levy, Professor of Oncology at Stanford University. He's also, he's, he was involved in the development of another antimonclonal, I don't know how to say it, antibodies that were approved as one of the earlier cancer, anti-cancer treatments in humans. So he's been part of a development of an anti-cancer treatment that worked in the past. So if we're betting, right, not rolling the dice, but if we're picking a pony who says they found something big and new and it's going to work and he's got priors, got a track record, that's, that's a, you know. He's a repeat cancer killer. Yeah. Good. I hope he is. Keep it going. The kind of serial killer we enjoy in our society. We'll celebrate him. And then we'll all really have to be three feet tall. It'll just, you'll have to get on the bandwagon, Blair. I mean, you could be three feet tall. I'll be the tallest person in the world. Oh my goodness. Okay. Speaking of traits that make you who you are, I got more genetics, more genetics, more genetics. So a study was published this last week in Nature Biotechnology by researchers using a little tiny kind of cell phone sized and shaped device that is called a mini ion nanopore DNA reader. The mini ion is created by Oxford Nanopore Technologies and it is used to sequence large strings of genetic data. However, it is highly error prone. Lots of errors to it. So people have been like, I don't know about the usefulness of it really in looking at whole genome sequencing of the human genome. For instance, well, these researchers said we've got this mini ion nanopore. It only costs $1,000. And it's available with the, and the company is making it available with the entire community behind it as well with all of the documentation that people have been developing for their various uses of this, of this device. I, and I believe this device is, one of them was taken up under the International Space Station to do genetic sequencing on the space station as well. So this is a well used device. It's limitation though, really is the fact that lots of errors. You can sequence a big long string of DNA, but lots of holes in it. And so these researchers put together a protocol to generate ultra long reads and to map them over and compare each other to be able to sequence the entire human genome. 2867 million bases in size. It covered 85.8 of the reference genome. And then they increased the accuracy by incorporating complementary reads of shorter sequences of DNA. And we're able to get their coverage up to 99.8% of the, of the genome. So it's pretty close. It's not actually making my genes. It'll be. It's not accurate. It's not actually making your genes, but 99.8% is good enough to be able to get into the sequences to piece it together as, as it, as it, as it really is for the most part. That's pretty much there. And for a little tiny device that's portable, you can attach it, you know, if you have a computer that can run the data, if you can get the data up to the cloud to run the, run the data analysis in the cloud, you know, this is a device that could make genetic genetic sequencing for disease and for diagnosis available to anyone anywhere, even the International Space Station or Mars. You know, this is tiny. It's a little device. And this is, it's amazing. And the price is, is, is not out. It's not a crazy price. I mean people buy compute, buy computers for a lot more than $1,000 these days. Yeah. But anyway, human genome, the entire genome sequenced on a little tiny handheld device. And more along those lines of genetics, what's, what's in us came from our parents, right? All of our parents. And in the conversation related to nature versus nurture, we got 50% of our DNA from our mom, 50% of our DNA from our father. There is 50% of each of them that's not represented in you. How much of that unrepresented DNA actually has an effect on you? Because it affects how they act around you and yes, affects your environment. Yes. And so this is the genetic what they're calling what they are calling the genetic environment that is influencing you. And they published this week in the journal Science, a data set from 20,000 Icelanders part of the decode Icelandic company project looking at the Icelandic populations genetics. They were able to get genetic and data information about educational attainment. So how far people went in school and able to have DNA from the children and both parents. So DNA for all three individuals in a reproductive relationship, which is not necessarily possible in all other parts of the world. So having the environmental information, the behavioral information and the genetic information is an essential part of what they were able to do here in Iceland. And what they found there is that the variants that do not get passed down. So the genes that are in your parents, but not in you had an effect. It's about 30% as big as the genes that were passed down when it comes to how far you move ahead in life in school. That's a lot. It's a very large effect. But I mean, part of this, I mean, this is like you said, this is environment, right? And we know in my environment has a huge effect already. So it's not just nurture, this genetic nurture. I guess it's the proportion of nurture that's genetically related. But it's like a quagmire though, because it's a chain from their parents and their parents parents of this genetic nurture. Well, and if you have siblings, then they're reflecting different genes than you have from your parents and they are also part of your environment. Yeah. It's again, nature versus nurture, it's always both. But of course, we can't just leave it at that. We need to know exact details. Exactly how much proportions for everything. Right. But of course, there's probably there's all these variables that we're not controlling. The fact that it's Iceland, the fact that parents are not split, the fact that both of your parents that you're living around are actually your genetic parents. There's all these things going on that could have huge impacts on that data. Yeah. One of the interesting points that's brought up is that how in places like the United States where we don't have this kind of data for entire relationships like this, we use adoption studies to be able to separate the effects of nature and nurture because you can get the information of a person and of identical twins who are separated at birth and they go off to live in different environments and get an idea of this nature and nurture influence. But one of the researchers says in this study, they're basically dividing the parents into two parents and one of them is genetically an adoptive parent because these are genes that your mom has that you don't share. So it's a new method around disentangling why parents and children are similar. So it's like you have your mom, which is the genetic mom, and then you have your adoptive parent mom, which is the genes that you don't share. So it's it's an interesting relationship there. Blair, do you have another story? I do. It's pretty short. Plastics are bad. That's it moving on. No. And next, in what way and what way this week we found from James Cook University, they actually had an international team studying coral. They examined over 120,000 corals. They measured if they were in plastic free environments, or if they were in plastic present environments. They were on 159 reefs in Indonesia, Australia, Myanmar, and Thailand. And they found that the chance of disease in the coral increased from 4% to 89% when the corals were in contact with plastic. That's not corals were ingested, ingested the plastic, and plastic was embedded in their system. No. Just being around plastic went from 4% disease, 89%. That's huge. Yeah. Just a massive, massive increase. Plastics are bad. So as I wrote in the show notes, don't take that disposable straw, Karen. No more. No more people. No more single use plastic, or at least reduce. Reduce your single use plastic. Bring your grocery bag. And there are ways. Tote bags. There's a twist tote bag over there on Zazzle. Mugs. We have lots of mugs. Yeah. Have any travel mugs. And promote companies that use biodegradable plastics made from corn and potatoes. And there are companies. There's one, I think it's called Trex, maybe. I don't know if I'm remembering that correctly. But there are recycling companies that collect plastics, like the plastics that are not usually recyclable through recycling programs, like plastics, bread bags or plastic bags from the produce section of the grocery store, plastic wrap, all these plastics that just kind of end up in your life that you don't really know what to do with the plastic from your cheese stick. Yeah. There's one called TerraCycle. And actually, if you... What I was going to say is that these companies, they work through large chain grocery stores to collect these otherwise non-recyclable plastics. And they sell them to companies that recycle them and use them to create various products out of plastic. Absolutely. And so you can, when you go to the grocery store, take your plastic bags that you've been collecting and take them right to the recycling and they'll make you feel better. And check your local recycling policies. In some neighborhoods, they've started to accept soft plastics and plastic bags like grocery bags in the blue bin. So those are things to check for. But ultimately, all of that stuff, we'd be better off if we just weren't making it because so much of it still ends up in the ocean. So really reducing the production of plastic is going to have the greatest impact. But just here's yet another reason, plastics in the ocean, we know it's a problem. It's increasing disease in corals. And corals are keystones for aquatic ecosystems in the ocean. They're already under a lot of stress from climate change and ocean acidification. And this is another stressor. So we don't want to see these stressors piled on top of each other. And we won't because corals make 50% of our oxygen that we breathe. So if the corals won't survive, we probably won't either. So we need corals. Let's keep them alive. Let's do what we can. I think that's a yeah, I think that's a pretty good note to finish on here as we can science. Yeah, we've done another episode. Yay, we made it to the end of the show. You guys got anything to skip my favorite story that you thought you were going to bring? I'll throw it in here. I was gonna and only because I thought this was absolute junk because I've heard this as a as a crypto file of sorts. Okay, no one knows what you're talking about. He needs to introduce the story. Boynich manuscript. We've talked about it on the show. Occasionally for years and years. It's 240 pages long. It was discovered over 100 years ago and it's this encoded document that people have been pouring over it trying to translate it to decode it. It's got these illustrations through it. People think it's something of a medical textbook or some kind of document. Some people think it has something to do with with a female female health and reproduction. Turns out it's just undecipherable nonsense. Good night, everybody. There we go. So the researchers, the newest paper on this is a group of Canadian researchers have taken a new tack on trying to decode the document. Artificial intelligence. They used an artificial intelligence algorithm to try and figure out if there were any commonalities and figure out if it was like there was a code in there somewhere. And the AI came back and said, hey, that's coded Hebrew. And that was news to everybody because they thought it was Arabic or something. So now knowing that it's Hebrew, they decided to try and decipher it and they were able to come up with a phrase that doesn't really make any sense. The first sentence is, she made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people. So the part that got me is they said 80% of the words they could find in a Hebrew dictionary from what they pulled out. But they're thinking this is not just your run of the mill average modern day Hebrew. This is like an ancient Hebrew dialect. So it's going to be, you know, we're going to have to go not just pull out the dictionary, you're going to have to get people who've researched ancient texts and see if there's similarities. This is fascinating to me too because this has been like one of those things that people have been working on cracking for the longest time. And then let's put it in the computer and see what happens. Spits out the, oh yeah, first of all, this is Hebrew, not Arabic. No wonder you're having trouble. And it is coded. It's an alphagram where they jumble up the words in a certain manner. But it's 600 years old, right? So that's not that ancient, really. Uh, I don't, is it 600 years old? I don't know if it's, I mean, well, that's what the headline says. But that's when the book was found. No, it was only found about over 100 years ago. So they think the thing's only 600 years. So that's not, so there's there's written Hebrew that looks pretty much the same as modern day Hebrew that's way older than 600 years. Yeah. This is just really, it's a book. This is a book with paper pages. It's, but really old paper pages that are, you know, fragile old book. Who knows? But the big thing here, yeah, Hebrew? Who knew? And now they're going to be able to use this AI methodology on other difficult crack texts and see what we can, what we can get. What can we find in history of the unreadable texts? It's really pretty. The, the, there's so many loop-de-loops. All the, the manuscript code. Yeah. I think it kind of looks like Elvish. Yes, it definitely does. I'm like, oh, look, it's the Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Rings. These women are making wine, I think. Isn't it in the main picture in this article, it looks like women are stomping on grapes. And then if you scroll down another picture, it looks like a series of tubes that they're, they're pushing wine through because we all know what's important. Yeah. Well, according, you know, according to the, never mind. I'm going to stop. I'm going to And let's just call it right here. We're going to stop right here. We got the story in artificial intelligence, ancient Hebrew. It's all good. Bringing the past and the future together. And as we get out of the show, have you guys heard of the Mars Desert Research Station? No. No. Well, it was, it was created by the Mars Society in 2001, quote, to better educate researchers, students and the general public about how humans can survive on the red planet. And they have occasional, they have crews that rotate through and they do, they, they, they pretend they simulate living on Mars. And right now crew number 188 from the International Space University are in a two week rotation to simulate living on the red planet. And in a few weeks, February 21, we're going to be talking with the mission commander, university professor, Ryan Kubrick. And so in the meantime, I invite everyone to take a look at the Mars Desert Research Station. And they've got a Facebook page. They are team ISU on Mars. And let us know if you have any questions for the crew, for the commander that we can, that we can include in our interview. We would love to have questions for you, for our conversation. And that brings us to the point in our show where I say, thank you to people. Thank you to everyone who, for watching first and foremost or listening. And thank you to Identity 4 for helping to, excuse me, record the show, tickle, tickle that came out of nowhere. And to FATA for helping with the show notes and to Brandon for helping to simulcast us onto Facebook and to our Patreon sponsors. I would like to say thank you very much to those of you who support us on Patreon. Thank you to Aaron Luthin, Alex Wilson, Andy Grove, Ben Rothig, Burt Latimore, Bill Cursey, Bob Calder, Brendan Minnish, Brian Condren, Brian Carrington, Byron Lee, Charlene Henry, Christopher Dreyer, Christopher Rappin, Craig Landon, Deepak Chopra, the Woo Master, E.O. Edward Dyer, Eric Knapp, Flying Out, Gary Swinsburg, Greg Briggs, Greg Guthman, Greg Riley, Jacqueline Boyster, Jason Olds, Jason Roberts, Jim Drapeau, John Crocker, John McKee, John Ratnaswamy, Joshua Fury, Ken Hayes, Kevin Parachan, Kurt Larson, Lisa Slezowski, Matt Sutter, Marjorie Cohen, Mark Hessenflow, Matthew Litwin, Mattrick Cohn, Paul Disney, Paul Samson, Richard Hendricks, Richard Onimus, Robert Aston, Robert Coburn, Rudy Garcia, Sean Lamb, Steve Lessman, Steven DeBell, Tony Steele. Thank you so much for your support of This Week in Science on Patreon. And if you would like to support us on Patreon, you can find information at twist.org or at patreon.com slash this Week in Science. And remember that you can also help us out just by telling your friends about twists. And on next week's show, we will be back once again with more great science news on Wednesday at 8 p.m. Pacific time on twist.org slash live. You can watch there and join our chat room. Hey, chat room. But if you can't make it there, you can find past episodes at twist.org slash YouTube or just at twist.org. Thank you for enjoying the show. Twist is also available as a podcast. Just Google This Week in Science in your iTunes directory. Or if you have a mobile-type device, you can look up Twist, the number four droid app in the Android Marketplace, or simply This Week in Science in anything Apple Marketplace-y. For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes will be available on our website. That's at www.twist.org. When you go there, you can also make comments and start conversations with the hosts or the other listeners. Yeah, or you can just contact us directly. Email kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com, Justin at twistmeaning at gmail.com, or blare at blarebaz at twist.org. Just be sure to put twist, T-W-I-S, somewhere in the subject line where your email will be spam-filtered into oblivion. You can also hit us up on the Twitter, where we are at twistscience at drkiki at Jacksonfly, and at Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback. If there's a topic you would like us to cover or address, a suggestion for an interview at Haiku that comes due tonight, please let us know. We'll be back here next week, and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news. And if you've learned anything from the show, remember, it's all in your head. This week in science, this week in science, this week in science, it's the end of the world. So I'm setting up the shop, got my banner unfurled, it says the scientist is in, I'm gonna sell my advice, show them how to stop the robot with a simple device. I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hands, and all it'll cost you is a couple of grand. This week science is coming your way, so everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientific method, and I'll broadcast my opinion all over. It's this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science, this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science, I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news, that what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations, and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science, you may just better understand that we're not trying to threaten your philosophy, we're just trying to save the world from jeopardy. This week in science is coming your way, so everybody listen to everything we say, and if you use our methods, better roll and I die, we may rid the world of Toxoplasma, Gandhi Eye. It's this week in science, this week in science, science, science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science, I've got a laundry list of items I want to address, from stopping global hunger, to dredging Loch Ness, I'm trying to promote more rational thought, and I'll try to answer any question you've got, but how can I ever see the changes I seek, when I can only set up shop one? This week in science, science, science, this week in science, science, science, science, this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, and we have come to the end of the show. Once again, it's time for us to be done. Well, not done done. It's the after show, everyone. The after show, it's time for the after show. Oh, please don't go. Oh, please don't go. It's time for the after show. Or, yeah, if you have to go, go right ahead. I mean, I guess. You guys, if you gotta go, you've gotta go, and then okay. Sorry for that coughing fit there. I don't know what happened. It might throw it in the coffin. Things happen. Oh, I've got the yawning now. I think I'm tired. I was tired before the show, and I upped my energy. I was like, here we go. Showtime, everyone. And now I'm like, let's go read my book. Books are good. I read, I have read the entire, uh, Expanse series. Oh, dang. Oh, seven books. And they have novellas and whatnot. It's really good. Nice. I would recommend it for those of you who like the science fiction reading. What did I recommend last week? Reincarnation Blues. For those of you I read that recently. For those of you who are interested in books of a more, I don't know, humorous yet biblical perspective. Same author wrote a book called Up Jump the Devil. Also quite good. Very entertaining. What am I reading now? I'm reading a book now. The first book was called Authority. Second book, Annihilation. It's a trilogy about a weird area. I think they're making a movie or a TV show out of it or something. I didn't realize that. I'm reading that book. And, oh, I just started reading Being a Beast, which I think, Blair, you might be interested in. If you haven't heard about this book, a British naturalist wrote a book about literally trying to live like various animals. So trying to live like a badger. So like eating earthworms. That is ambitious. And rubbing your butt on things to scent mark them. Yeah, so all of them. I'm still trying to learn how to live like a hairless ape descended. Yeah, that sounds hard enough. Yeah. Yeah. That's fascinating. The concept, I understand, it comes from the idea that we tend as humans to anthropomorphize or to look at the lives of animals through our human lens. And so in order to help imagine how these animals might live their lives, that he had various chapters on different, like I think one of them is a fox, a deer, an otter, a badger, a bird. There's some kind of bird that he has. Anyway, all these animals he tries to live like them to be able to capture their mindset and imagine. Imagine. Really, what their lives must be. So he's badger, promorphizing himself. Fox, promorphism. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty. And his writing style is pretty fun too. So recommended as a book. Ed from Connecticut, yes. They had expanse books are awesome and great. Absolutely. Anybody have any? I'm going to finish this trilogy pretty soon and be looking for other recommendations. I kind of after the expanse, I kind of burned myself out on science fiction for a while. I think so I'm looking. I think I liked reincarnation blues and up jump the devil because they kind of had a Tom Robbins feel to them kind of that fun. I want more books that are like that service kind of absurdist and fun and just, you know, these creative ideas and these great characters that you're like, what are they doing? I want more books like that. So if you have any recommendations for me, I just reread my favorite book, Slutra House five. That Vonnegut is always a good choice. I never I never tire of him. Never. Oh Artemis you like Ed from Connecticut likes the new book by Andy Weir. Artemis. Mr. Nice Howard Marks an autobiography. Oh, he sounds cool. True story absurdist yet true story. That could be fun too. I love it. Yeah, I've read I read Tom's most Tom Barrett's most recent book, but I haven't tried J.F. Dubot. A God in the shed. I'll check that out. There's so many there's all sorts of good books. I there's a sticker on a bus stop down the street for me that I walk past and when I walk past it it makes me smile every single time. Because it's just this kind of it's like a punk rock sticker in its in its text style. And it says read books all the effing time. And I was like and I walked past and I go yeah. That sounds great. Parlin does have my favorite bookstore I've ever wandered around in. Powell's. Yeah, that place is so awesome. Yes, Powell's books is amazing. Good place to get lost in the books for sure. On a rainy day, which is like every day important. I know like I mean it used to be like nine months out of the year. Maybe now it's like seven months out of the year. Steadily decreasing rainy proportion of the year. But oh something that was interesting I saw I follow William Gibson on Twitter. And the the recent story about the the the the Dutch. Cyber security this baby basically the Dutch cyber intelligence. Catching the Russian spies doing stuff in Dutch cafes. They like basically found the evidence for the Russian tampering. Intellections and stuff but it was the Dutch intelligence that sent this information. Anyway they they set up a sting operation because the Russians were using this like cafes internet and the cyber intelligence found it. Anyway like William Gibson posted he's like it's a really strange world to be living in that I'm seeing things happen in the real world that I would have put in one of my books. I thought that was interesting. When our writers tell in the stories of the future they're here they're here at that. Ron Chernell's US grant. Yeah and lots of new science fiction are using really good science it's true. That's what it is they hacked cozy bear that's what it was. Thanks Bleak they hacked into their IP cams in the lobby and watched them coming and going. Thank you. Yes they watched the Russians coming and going that's the detail of it. Thank you. Eric and AK yeah that is the basic problem with cyberpunk stories we're there now. It's not like a futuristic thing it's actually oh that's actually happening now so it's not fiction of the future which was made it really fun once upon a time now it's like oh this is just really happening is there anything no anything going on no we need to discuss we don't have any shows coming up other than our weekly show we're in a quiet spot right now thank goodness it's good yeah we're gonna have a little a little quiet a little quiet for a little while. Oh nice yeah like like lists like that Smithsonian's best science books of 2017 thanks Ed um and I think I don't know if Smithsonian put it on their list uh let me check but cannibalism I think was one of the best science books was it no maybe not for Smithsonian oh the evolution of beauty we interviewed him Richard Crum yeah yeah there was a big chicken maybe we should get Maren McKenna on here to talk about antibiotics yeah chicken pharma great I'd love to talk with Maren oh here's another let me I'm just going to go through this list of books and figure out how many of them we interviewed the authors for magnitude the scale of the universe we interviewed we Megan Watsie and Kimberly Arkand so that's cool we did not interview numbers in the making of us counting in the course of human cultures that looks fun code breakers American women code breakers of World War II why time flies gravities kiss the detection of gravitational waves oh do I have that I may have that book in a box paleo art visions of the prehistoric past the evolution of beauty we interviewed Richard Crum what it's like to be a dog and other adventures in animal neuroscience what future the year's best idea is to reclaim reanimate and reinvent our future this book's tone according to publishers weekly is worried but optimistic is it avoids cliche and blind optimism in favor of unflinching realism does my audio always seem quieter I don't know why that is I have it I have my audio like all all pumped up I keep pumping it up there just because me and Blair are unusually loud people what are you talking about I don't know I think you're just a normal person and me and Blair yeah we're shouty wow shouty people yeah oh and I need to check right right Eric about the February national geographic bird intelligence right Blair is loud because she's a big city girl she has to be heard over the din of all the cars and people and huh sounds going on whereas I live surrounded by roosters apparently yeah it must be loud to be heard it's hard for the technology to get to you you know so you have to you have to really you have to shout to get it Blair's just having to always talk over the sound of the rolling dice oh yeah yes where so I am on the national geographic website and why is it not telling me about bird brains hello hello are they making it so hard to find the most recent episode most recent issue issue it's so hard you know I don't want to subscribe to your magazine right now I'll find it it's why birds matter is that what it is I tell you why birds matter that's January though I like the birds Eric says it's the February all right I know I need to start shouting I'm not much of a shout or not all the time maybe I need to talk right into my microphone like this my microphone all the time like this then everything will be loud and happy but see kiki you're the most you're the most like qualified to be on the show so you don't have to over compensate with volume wait a second wait a second hold everything I like that thanks Blair everything yeah yeah yeah it's a it's a it's a direct graph of like number of degrees earned and decibels it's kind of like an inverse so that's so we're compensating with loudness for our lack of general knowledge if you're loud you're right well in that case you're much louder than that awesome sure I'll talk about bird brainiacs all the time I love the bird brainiacs um volume volume volume I don't need to be louder I'm not going to be louder the problem we've had and it's we've had it for as long as we've been doing this without being in the studio together is that we don't have a central level check nope yeah we have to go are you can you hear me do I sound loud enough yeah yeah and it's annoying and it and it varies like I've been quiet players being quietish I mean over time it does seem like it changes which one of us is not being heard as well and so we make a little tweak to the sound board or this and that but we still can't tell from where we're sitting if things are at all in in life I have absolutely rely on you the listening audience to give us this sort of feedback we'll be lying on the feedback of our chat rooms oh Jamie Hall on YouTube is saying the first time you've ever watched a live stream but you've been listening for years hello Jamie thanks for watching glad you're here thanks for saying hello yeah so identity for you're right yes we could each record our own microphone and then somebody combine all the tracks afterwards yes and yes the SGU does that or we could just like listen to the show ourselves once in a while and see if the volumes are I didn't value I do volume matching post production stuff so I'll take it and I fix it later I take it and I say match loudness I want it all to be minus 16 lofts lofts lofts are what is this a dr. Seuss looks are loudness units for sound I'm not I think I think I'm not making it up my memory is just failing me a little bit but it is lu is loud loudness units but it's loudness how loud does it sound and for podcasting it's recommended that you have a minus 16 lofts level for radio you want it to be minus 24 lofts okay lofts stand for loudness units relative to full scale okay relative to full scale there we go there we go for sound I like for sound better sound loudness units for sound as opposed to for for color let's get me loud that's really loud colored there you go hello yes identity for I have the magic make it better button I wish I did I wish I did yeah so recording each of our streams it does take more equipment it you have odd I mean it's not terrible we could each have audacity I don't know if we could do it though using hangouts or if you have to have something yeah anyway but each of us could record our own and then but then I'd have to rely on everybody sending me all the files and not forgetting to send me all the files and not going to work without sending me the files and all that kind of stuff I much prefer to have it all on my own um and I like having video which is really great because there is another new option for uh audio only which is amazing which um it makes recording really easy it's a new and it's like through the browser it's great but um I'm totally blanking on what it's called right now but it's a really great great uh great platform what is it called hold on let me find it Zencaster that's what it is they advertised at the podcasting conference I went to yeah Zencaster Z E N C A S T R if you don't have a need for video and just want to record an audio conversation Zencaster is the bomb until you read now it's good stuff makes it very easy you don't need a lot of extra equipment it's great yes identity four that's exactly the hard part getting the mic signal to the google hangouts and the recording software because especially when you're on mac I mean I know I think pc is a little bit easier because you can line direct things a little bit more easily but um especially on mac it's like once one program takes priority for the audio it's like nobody else can use it you got to work you got to work around things and sometimes it's janky and when I tried to do workarounds in the past it ended up I ended up having a delay in my audio related to my video and they're all as trouble given up simple the simple route identity four at the gobbledygook language version of dynamic range yep pretty much but it's the standard now in the audio world the luffs how loud is it you're a luff and I get it confused now because I have to think about the luffs in audio and I'm doing video production and doing color correction and I have to think about the lutz wait we have color correction I don't do color correction for us no but when I produce videos for my other job that I do I'm a video producer don't and editor don't you know I'm making the videos yeah and um lutz lutz lutz are uh now I'm forgetting what um now this unit's for television no no transfer now I'm forgetting what that is luffs and lutz I'm getting confused yeah but okay lutz if you have a lutz it basically gives all of the color information for an image so you can use a lutz and apply it to a video or an image to change the color makeup look up table thank you Dave shorty all these terminology things I did not say sluts growly bear I said lutz I said lutz slutty lutz all over the place all right kids uh it is now Dave shorty yes there you go define defining mapping for color space we had a short elegant definition there I'll see y'all next week soundflow night minions good night years around roosters yeah we we need earplugs around roosters roosters do not need earplugs around us I wonder when that trait first developed how long have birds been doing this a great question and why are they doing it I mean I get that sound is so important to a bird that you know that might be something that's a high priority but how long have they been doing it were dinosaurs to dinosaurs like does it go back that far the dinosaurs have dino song did they have or were they so loud that they had to plug their ears to prevent those hairs from breaking or well why are they deaf yeah we gotta learn these things wow good night dad good night identity good night hot rod good night everyone in the chat room I'm going to spend tomorrow playing with luffs and lutz I love luffs you all lots girls you all right everyone we will see you next week thanks for joining us yet again Blair and Justin thanks for another great show it was fun it was a fun one wise and then Justin says but they're all I don't even need to be part of it I don't actually need to do my running commentary anymore Blair you've got you've got my side of everything covered over there yeah Blair know what you're gonna say I will I will point out this is not the first time at the end of the show that we've mentioned it was a fun show or a good show or a great show I just I'll point that out we seem to be pretty pleased with ourselves every week as as I think we should be every week that's right everyone take a bow everyone in the chat room take a bow thank you hey we'll see you next week say good night Blair good night Blair say good night Justin good night Justin good night