 CERNFISC, what? Yeah. CERNFISC, oh, everyone, we are live on the internet. If you're watching right now, this is This Week in Science's live broadcast of our podcast recording. Whatever happens in the next couple of hours is just here on the internet for you who are watching right now. If you want the edited, prettied up version, then you should join the podcast. Subscribe to the podcast and that'll get you what you want. So are we all ready to start the show? Check, check. Justin, say a couple words, check, check. A couple words, check, check. There we go, Blair, a couple words, check, check. Happy National Dog Day. Wonderful. We're celebrating Sadie today. Of course. Perfect. So we are going live in three, two, this is twist. This Week in Science episode number 788 recorded on Wednesday, August 28th, 20, no, yes, 26th. Who even knows what day it is anymore? Last week I said it was April, so this is where we are now. Starting over in three, two, this is twist. This Week in Science episode number 788 recorded on Wednesday, August 26th, 2020. Where's the brief? Hi everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight we will fill your head with locusts, livers and lots of science, but first. This is Cool Lamer, Disclaimer, Disclaimer. Following program covers knowledge about topics that many listeners may find mentally or even physically overwhelming, objectionable, thrilling or all of the above. As it contains factual information derived from science, the topics may include politically controversial topics such as global warming, COVID-19, and spermia and cuttlefish. If you have not been previously exposed to scientific knowledge, you might have a pre-existing belief in how the world ought to be. When confronted with facts that refute these beliefs, most people change their minds. Many continue to believe the thing not supported by science and a few die immediately on the spot, the shock of learning being at times violently traumatic. Despite our best efforts to filter the information to a less lethal format, it is still possible that listening to the show will be the last thing you ever do, which means we really appreciate you dropping by and hope you enjoy another episode of This Week in Science coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I'll meet, there's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. Good science to you, Kiki Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back to talk about science because we love it and we're glad that you're here with us because we just have a really wonderful, curious science-enjoying community. So let's all learn together, okay? Tonight on the show, I have Space Bacteria. Yes. Oh, I brought that too. Oh, well, we'll talk about Space Bacteria. I've got some new livers for all of us who are drinking away our woes during the pandemic. And I've got the locusts. I do lots of locusts. A swarm, you could say. Justin, what did you bring? I've got Pudding Pants for me to the test. Why the worst of global warming might come sooner than expected and how to stop the next big California wildfire season with a simple device. That would be pretty helpful. Is it a rake? No. That would be the simplest. No, but it's the size of a tube can. That's the only hint you get. Bigger than a bread box? No, smaller. Okay, Blair, what is in the animal corner? Oh my goodness. I have Playboy Cuddlefish, one of my favorite animals on the whole planet. I also have Coral Reef News and some information about the rainforest. We'll talk about it. Love it. We will talk about that. And we are also going to be speaking with our guest, Dr. Jeremy Faust, who talks a lot about COVID-19 online. And I will introduce him in just a few moments when we have an interview. He may pipe in a little bit in the following quick science news stories. But first, as we jump into the show, I just want to remind you that if you're not yet subscribed to This Week in Science, you can find us very easily by looking for Twis, TWIS, or This Week in Science on any podcast platform available, YouTube, Facebook. And now we're broadcasting on Twitch. That's right, Twis Science. Look for us there. Our website is twis.org. Okay, story, story, stories. Let's start with those space bacteria. You ready, Justin? Oh, absolutely. Yes, space bacteria. They are fantastic, awesome. Wait, space bacteria? Yes. Researchers have put bacteria on the outside of the International Space Station. On purpose? On purpose. Well, there were tales of funguses and bacteria existing on spacecraft. And they wanted to test the hypothesis of whether or not bacteria could exist in the vacuum-ish of space. Because that's the reason is, of course, banspermia. This is the idea that bacteria can travel through space and seed other planets from one source of life, spreading out to other planetary sources. And they need to find out if that's actually feasible because space is big. It is really big. And there's a lot of space between things. So, for instance, if a comet or a meteor hit Mars and there had been life on Mars, could that life have made it here to Earth to seed the life on our planet? Well, it would have to be able to survive the trip from Mars to Earth, which could take anywhere from a couple of months to several years, depending on where Mars and Earth are in their orbits and the speed of whatever that chunk of rock happened to be. So, publishing in frontiers in microbiology this week, researchers are talking about their microbes, little balls of dinococcus bacteria that they stuck on the outside of the International Space Station back in 2015 and have been sampling once a year ever since. So, three years on, do they survive? Yes, they do. How do they survive? Well, they wrap themselves in a cocoon of their dead. Basically. Of course. The outer layers of bacteria in these bacterial balls, these spherical balls of bacteria, died. They were radiated and desiccated and they didn't last very well, but they provided protection for bacteria that were huddling internally within the bacterial colony. So, what this suggests after three years is that, yeah, bacteria could potentially make a trip and if they can make, if they could exist even longer, they've extrapolated to think that bacteria could last as long as eight years. If you started from a 1000 micron micrometer pellet that it could survive floating in space for eight years. Oh, the version I'm looking at, it's just a thickness. It's long enough to get places. If it's a millimeter thick, if it gets to a millimeter thick colony, you could be talking 15 years. You can extrapolate it out. What's interesting about this too is, this is bacteria in the open space on its own. So there's another version of this that has, is being considered, which is where that bacteria is attached or encased in some sort of rock material. So this is, which would then. You could have evidence of that as well. Yeah, which would then massively prolong. So this research was fascinating because he first found the bacteria that we're talking about in the upper atmosphere of the earth that was floating there. So that's the other great thing is that this one doesn't actually need to make complete landfall to have a viable place. If it gets into the atmosphere alone, it's just still tough. But yeah, so the travel portion apparently isn't an issue. You still have to figure out how to eject it from the surface of a planet, get it up. You still have to see the survivability of re-entry. But the trip itself, the trip itself, and yeah, it has to find the right planet, but the trip itself is doable. That's pretty amazing. It's very amazing. Panspermia, we've been talking about it for years and the support is racking up. Justin, do you have the next short story or should we move on to Blair? You're sorry? I don't think it winds next, but yeah, let's go to Blair. All right, Blair. Oh, sure. Tell me about video since we're here. Yeah, yeah. So this is a study from Japan. It's actually from Nagano Environmental Conservation Research Institute, any CRI, Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, and five other Japanese institutes sent out a survey to 86,000 people and they wanted them to learn more about coral reefs and see kind of what type of engagement would result in the largest WTP, willingness to pay. So basically what inspires people most to give money for conservation topics? So they had a few different options. So one, no information at all. They just asked them for money. Two, 12 slides containing 300 words and 15 photographs. Three, 14 slides containing 700 words and 20 photographs, so that's a short and then a long version. And then a two and a half minute video with music, words, and photographs in slides. So the short and long audience groups, the kind of slides that they clicked through on their own had a higher WTP than the no info audience, but the video audience actually had less. No one who watched the video wanted to give any money to coral reefs. Wow. I would not have thought that. Yeah, so over 10,000 people actually participated from the 86,000 that got a survey, which is actually not bad. And so a couple of things from this study. One is that the video demonstrates that they think it's actually less the type of media, but more the quality of the presentation. So they were actually saying, we made a bad example. One of them says, quote, the video was too long and did not summarize the main points well, which reading the study of kind of like, did you not talk to anyone in communications or education or anything like that before you made these videos? So that's something. But also about 25% of the video audience didn't even watch the entire thing. In fact, everybody only engaged for about one minute, which gives you a little bit of an idea how much people are willing to engage with this stuff, which we know our attention spans are insane right now. But the other, the second kind of point of this was that they think it was the interactivity of the slideshow. So the fact that you could read it at your own pace and advance when you wanted, go back if you didn't understand something. So they think these are kind of the two things is that the quality of their video they think was bad, but also that interactivity is better. Yeah, the participation aspect is the one that jumped out to me right away is when you're interacting with a thing versus passively having it on, which we're used to having things passively on all the time and noise all around us that we're not necessarily paying attention to, the fact that you are doing that participatory interaction thing is as light as it might be clicking and reading makes a big difference. Yeah, so everyone, click that subscribe button right now. Right. Nice fucking. Join the chat room because then it's interactivity, people will be more intrigued. So it's not just the type of the communication, it's the length of the communication and the interactivity. But I think the only reason you might expect that the video might have done better is depending on what kind of music and images they picked, it could evoke an emotional response with it, which in terms of WTP willingness to pay, we know that emotional response is pretty good at short-term fundraising. It's not good for long-term change, but it's really good for short-term fundraising. So there's something there, if you made a good video that was short and concise and had an emotional appeal, it could potentially be good for this. But I think it's an interesting start looking at how best to engage people for this particular metric. Yeah, but I think the interactivity, it primes people, if you're already clicking, you are primed to click. You're primed to take, you're already doing things. Yeah, so I think that's going to be huge. How can we do that with videos? That is the next big question. All those interactive videos, hmm. I just wanna know if they had like a feedback session, you know, like in medicine we're always like, let's do feedback, like how did that go? We're teaching our residents and the students, and I just wanna know if they were like, so video producers, what went wrong? What can we do better? That would be, I feel like that would have been an offer. Well, I feel like we didn't make a good video. Okay. That was definitely, that was the response I had, kind of a visceral response reading the story is, as a conservation educator in my day job, then also doing this, it's like, oh my God, why didn't they call me? Why didn't they call? Oh, well, you know, you could drown your sorrows when you don't get called people, or you know, there's a bit of alcohol drinking since the pandemic, yes. Well, you know, if you were worried about your liver, maybe you don't have to be for long. About 10 years ago, some researchers found that if they used hepatocytes, these are regenerative liver cells, they relocated these hepatocytes to a lymph node in a mouse, that the lymph node actually grew the hepatocytes into another liver. And the researchers went, whoa, that's interesting. I wonder if we can do that in larger animals. That'd be great to have two livers. Make this a thing, and what they have discovered in the intervening years, these are researchers from the University of Pittsburgh publishing in liver transplantation this week, is their research finding that in a toxic liver environment, the hepatocytes can't get the nutrients they need, they don't get the support they need to continue regenerating and to continue growing a new liver. But if you have a nice, healthy place to put these regenerative liver cells, they just want to grow. They want to make a new liver. And so they took hepatocytes that they isolated from pig liver and then they injected them into the lymph nodes of the pig and the lymph nodes of the pig grew ectopic livers, which means that the livers grew on top of the lymph nodes and they were happy, healthy livers that replaced the damaged liver function. So future for damaged livers may be that you don't have to get a liver transplant. It could simply be a cellular injection into a lymph node and the livers took over the function completely of the damaged livers. So as someone that wants to live to be 200 years old, I am very interested in this because the liver is one of those darn organs that will self-destruct before then it will learn liver. Well, if you know, you can maintain your lymph nodes and your other general health for a good period of time, maybe those lymph nodes will be happy, healthy harbors for hepatocytes. I think I'm probably the only person here who has scrubbed into a liver transplant surgery before. Yeah, I believe you would be. I'm gonna just go on a limb and say that probably I'm the only one here who's had that charming experience. Yeah. And let me tell you, as a medical student, I was integral in that procedure, okay? Because I held the instruments in place for a solid two hours. Wow. Let me tell you, it's an amazing thing that no one should have to have happened to them. So this is very interesting. The thing that sticks out to me the most, well, two things. One is the blood supply to the liver is unbelievably complicated. So just getting everything to stop so that the patient doesn't bleed out is really complicated. And the second thing was just the difference between the liver going out and the liver coming in. The one going out looked like it had been through a life of enjoyment and other bad things. And the one coming in, it literally looked like foie gras, just like the smoothest kind of thing. And I was just like, I was like, wow, you don't need to have, you don't need to be a hepatologist. You don't need to be a liver specialist to see. Which one of these looks healthy? Yeah, which one you want. But yeah, no, this is, but it's a very complicated procedure. So, you know, any way to get rid of that. Yeah, any way to, seriously, not having to go through a transplant where you're also going to have to deal with anti-rejection drugs, which can be kind of like poison themselves, you know. Any time you can hack the body without needing to hack into the body, it sounds like a good thing. I did also see a face transplant last year. Wow. Oh my goodness. Which will not be replaced in the laboratory of mice, unfortunately, I don't think. Yeah, no. I don't think so. That's, yeah, transplantation, it's intense. I mean, there are the fringe researchers who suggest that we could transplant entire heads onto bodies, but I don't know that we're there yet. Not yet. Yeah, not yet. We have that thing about the two heads. Blair's gonna have to remain in the jar a little longer. Yeah, it's fine. I'll go in the jar. Go in the jar. All right, tell us how we can prevent forest fires, Justin. Yeah. Oh my goodness. California is burning again. Their response has been a little bit slowed, more so than usual due to the lack of care, actually in the state prison population in the wake of the pandemic, because there's a steep rise in COVID cases in California state prisons, and thus a steep decline in the state's first land defense once a wildfire gets going, which is technically slavery and involuntary servitude according to the constitution, AKA prison labor. Yes. But why do these wildfires keep getting so out of control? Why don't we just put them out right away instead of letting them turn into these monsters? And California is very big. This time of year, it becomes a very dry state and it hasn't rained in a long time. And whether it's errant campfires, sparks from cars, seasonal lightning strikes like we had this year, these fires have happened in the past and they're gonna continue to happen into the future. The real trick is catching them quickly. California is a very big state. It's the most populated state in the United States. However, it's really, really big and mostly rural. So a big fire starts as a small fire and places where people are not there to catch them and time to keep them from becoming big. So this is a scientist, Cheng Yong Cao, a mechanical engineer, Michigan State University, and his team have a solution, which is great. That's what engineers do to help the solutions for things. They say they have found an easier way to detect fires where the people are not. It's a tree breeze powered forest fire sensor. The device itself is the size of a soup can and it costs around $20 to produce one of these. It's very cheap, which is important because we would likely need somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 of these things to be deployed. Oh, fun fact. There have been more than 37,000 wildfire fires in the United States this year. That's not really a fun fact. Okay, a cowfire, typically it's monitors, outbreaks of fire in California. They have everything from manned watchtowers where you would have a forest ranger or volunteer go up on a platform and stare at the forest every day looking for smoke. They also use aircraft that do flyovers looking for such things. There are satellites that can find them, usually a little bit after they've gotten big. And then there's also just good old fashioned somebody calling it in, seeing something reporting it. This new prototype fire detector is pretty cool because it doesn't need batteries, can be placed out on a tree limb somewhere in the forest. It has a, what is it called, a triple electric generator. It harnesses motion energy. So you put it out on a limb and as the breeze comes by, it charges it up. Also, if there is no wind, which is sort of odd to get a really big fire with no wind because they kind of usually go together a little bit. But if there is no wind, as a fire is close enough, fire itself creates air currents. And that would be enough to wake it up if it was completely out. Very simple device. Basically, the next step is just getting it to developing the sensors, communication where it tells a relay center or maybe communicates to the next one down to relay the message that it has two sensors. It's basically temperature and carbon monoxide that's being released from the wildfire that it's detecting. But this is a great solution because that's the big, that's the big obstacle. Really is just knowing that this fire is happening. If we look at the really big fires that are taking place at least right now in Northern California, it all happened in this stretch of hills between sort of the central valley and the Napa area. And in between, there's not a lot of people. There's a lot of just sort of wilderness and dried out grasses and shrubberies and that sort of thing. When these fires started, there was nobody noticed until it was really, really out of control. Yeah, because it has to really get a big enough smoke signal or a heat signal signature for either satellite to pick it up or for somebody who's in one of those fire towers in those rural wilderness areas to be able to pick it up, like you said. Yeah, so being able to get these sensors all over the place. A lot of people are trying to make it a very sensor-filled world where the sensors will pick up on things for us. That could be cool. So the important thing is, there've been other proposals too for doing these sorts of things. Usually they include batteries of some sort. Right, yeah, it's a big question. The problem is these things impact the environment when you start throwing a bunch of batteries out into the wilderness, they can be great. There's no components of this that are environmentally harmful, that sort of thing. And then what you're pointing out too, when the fires happen overnight, which they can just as often as they can happen during the day, all those spotting mechanisms, all those visual mechanisms usually get lost. So it also gives us eyes in the night that we wouldn't otherwise have. But what about rain? Rain, so... That would help. This is a study looking at the ecological significance of rain. And I know what you're thinking, rain, that impacts plants. So obviously it's ecologically important, but there is a new call from University of Illinois and Kansas State University to make rainfall a piece of an animal's niche. So how does that work? Yeah, so basically when we look at rainfall effects in studies, it usually has to do with, okay, that's gonna affect plants, that's gonna affect food, that's gonna impact the food that their food eats, that's gonna impact shelter, all these different things. But it actually has direct physiological consequences related to feeding behavior, predation, pathogens, and more, which makes sense. The more we think about it, we know that there are disease vectors that hang out in water, that if you have reduced water in your system, that can impact your immune system. So there's all sorts of things happening there. And so this new theory is to completely change the way we categorize animals for conservation, considering rainfall as a piece of that framework. So it would change the way we study distribution, physiology, and demographic responses in endotherm, so in warm-blooded animals specifically. I'm sure that that's what this study was looking at, but I'm sure if it was expanded looking at all animals, I'm sure they would all be impacted. So the next step would be to test key assumptions and predictions of the model of how rainfall impacts a wide swath of animals. And one of the hardest but most important tasks would be to understand whether rainfall affects different animal species for the same or different reasons. And is it mostly about food? Are there less obvious physiological costs? Answering all that will help reorganize and better augment our conservation practices. Yeah, I'm imagining, I mean, there's always the question, where do the animals go during a big rainstorm? They're just, you know, little birds are out there hiding under leaves, under the story of the trees, furry animals, where are they going? They're gonna get wet, maybe they could get hypothermia. I don't know, is this an issue? If you think about rainforests, the wettest habitat on land, a lot of animals actually count on rainfall and the sound of rainfall as sound camouflage. Oh, interesting. So if there is a dry spell, they can be heard better and could get caught by predators. There's all sorts of things. So sometimes more rain could be a problem, sometimes less rain could be a problem for different reasons. Fascinating. Thank you, Blair. Well, sometimes you just need to camouflage things with paint. Like wind turbines. Like the stripes? Or what do we say? No, just one of the blades, just paint it a color. Researchers looking at lots of evidence that birds die very often in where windmills are involved because windmills are often put in flyways because there's lots of wind, and so that's great for windmills. However, these giant power generators are not, for whatever reason, something that birds are able to see. They don't notice the spinning blades and so will impact the blades and it has a massive impact on mortality for lots of migrating birds. That's another issue, but this specifically looked at taking one of the three blades of a wind turbine at a Norwegian wind farm, painting it black, and they found it had a massive reduction, a 71.9% reduction in annual bird fatality rates. If this were a medical study, you'd be like, okay, just go paint all of the windmills. Go do that. Oh, I have an idea. What if you paint it with solar paint? Because that's also dark, right? Then when it's really bright out, then you can be collecting solar at the same time. Yeah, I love you. Well, this was in Norway though, I don't know. I mean, it's sunny sometimes. It's a couple days of the year, I'm sure. For the whole day, right? Yeah, the whole day. That's a short period of time in the summer, yes. Yeah, so researchers looking at this, it is just one study, but it was such a massive impact. There's kind of no downside to going out and painting wind turbines. So, you know, if you have a wind farm, maybe buy some paint, it could help. I love it. Help save some birds, an easy way to do it. This is This Week in Science. Thank you for joining us tonight. If you are interested in a twist shirt, or a mug, or some other item of our merchandise, you can head over to twist.org. Our website, click on the Zazzle link, and peruse our store. We have all sorts of items with twist art. Oh, Justin's pulling up a twist logo shirt. Yes, we have so many things. Support This Week in Science, and enjoy shirts and hats and mugs and face masks and things. It's great, thank you for listening. All right, time to introduce our guest. I would love to further introduce Dr. Jeremy Faust. He is an emergency physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in the Division of Health Policy and Public Health, and an instructor at Harvard Medical School, and the Editor-in-Chief of Brief 19, a daily review of COVID-19 research and policy. Dr. Faust, welcome to the show, thank you. It's wonderful to have you on the show. One of our show volunteers, Fada, had recommended that we speak with you, and so it's great to have you here. The timing worked out perfectly, as you had a paper that came out last week that we mentioned on last week's show that I hope to talk about. But just to start, how, just let's find out more about you, how did you end up choosing emergency medicine? What led you to this career choice? I love my career choice. Emergency medicine is sort of like the doctor that everybody thought you would be when you went to medical school. It's somebody comes in and they don't know what's going on and you're supposed to figure it out. And that sort of to me was the, that was the model. And then as you get further and further along in medical school, you realize that most people specialize. So that by the time that they come, the patient comes to your office, your clinic, your hospital or whatever, it's already sort of been differentiated. And so it's down to a couple of things. And so you're the knee person or you're the cardiac person who does just the, just this kind of cath procedure. And so what I liked is this idea that if someone yelled out, is there a doctor here? You'd be like, yes. And I am ready to do absolutely nothing because I need my toys, but I will babysit you until the EMS gets here. So actually that was kind of it. I love this idea that we sort of have to be involved in everything or sort of someone once said that we're the most interesting 15 minutes of every other specialty. Okay, because now I'm picturing, I'm picturing to somebody saying, is the doctor in the house? It's like, can you be more specific? What type of doctor do you need? And on the planes, it's like always this whole, like scrum, right? And so like in first class is like the dermatologist and like the, the radiologist and like back in steerage, like, you know, economy plus, okay? We don't, we're not poor emergency docs. You know, we're like in the middle. So like there'll be an emergency and like the person in first is like, no, not me. I haven't seen a patient in years. And then, and so everyone's freaking out and you're just like, all right, all right, all right. You know, so you do it. And it's kind of fun because we were used to that where we don't get nervous. Oh, I wouldn't say that we get nervous, but you sort of take all the nerves of the moment. And I kind of, I kind of picture like a singularity, like Stephen Hawking, you know, like, it all gets like put like right here, you know? And it's hold all that anxiety and tension like right here. And it's like smoldering. And the rest of me is like very calm and it's okay, let's just figure this out and move forward. And I just kind of like that part of it. I like the ticking chaos and mayhem and possibly fear and just sort of working your way through it. So yeah, I just love that aspect of it. I love that there's no pager. So you go home and you never get like a patient. Yeah. And we work weird hours, but you know, that's cool. I'm not really a nine to five kind of person. So it all worked out. I literally was sold on it. Like second or third year of medical school, I was at a conference and this guy said, what do you want to do? And I said, well, this, that is an hour later and you know, five drinks or something like that. And I thought, I like the way these people think, you know? I think, I think like these people. Yes. You've also done a lot of, you instruct and you also do a lot of writing and you've recently started Brief 19. Can you explain what led to the evolution of your COVID news site? Brief 19 was basically started on like a whim. I think I want to go back to my emails and find it. But sometime in March, it just occurred to me that this was not going to go away. And I really needed a way to keep up in a way that I trusted. So I kind of needed it a little, I was thinking, what if I were like the president but I cared about what was going on and I needed to be updated daily on what was happening in the world of medicine and policy. I bet there's like a presidential daily briefing or maybe Fauci has like an assistant who like hands them like a thing and it's like, okay, here are the stories you need to know. And I thought, you know, I'm trying to like work on policy and also see patients. And can I make my own daily briefing for me but can it be kind of like written simply enough where if I'm really tired and not thinking about it, I could read it and not have to be all sciency like sort of reading a journal. So it just occurred to me that I needed it in that language. So I reached out to basically two really, really smart docs that I know, one on the policy side, one on the research. And I sort of said, let's try this out for a couple of weeks, see what happens. And if it fails, that was fun. And if it takes off, we'll see what happens. And, you know, two weeks later, it was like mayhem. It was the sort of everyone needed this thing too. And so we were like breaking news and people at the CDC were like giving me scoops and like we were just, it was this crazy moment. But now it's more of a just a, I feel like now we just sort of try to link the world of emergency medicine frontline docs, policy docs to everyone else. Like it shouldn't have to go through news cycles. Like we want to have a direct line to the public. So they don't have to sort of wait for the spin. We sort of want to remove that barrier. And even without meaning to have spin, I have been noticing a huge lag in things that we talk about on this show. We talked about the aerosolization, I think back in March that that was becoming, and then it's like maybe July before it's being like a conversation in the news cycle. I mean, there's like, it seems like there's a huge gap between the science that's being done and figuring out how this thing is operating and anybody knowing about it. Yeah. And some of that is because it's totally unclear at any given moment like what's going to play out. So there's 10 things that get thrown out there. And it turns out that none of them are just dead ends and that one of them is like the thing. So some of that's just natural vetting. I think that we are, I share you're impatient, but we're impatient, right? Like that we want to know everything now. And it's amazing to me that on, I think it was like January, like eight was the first CDC communique about coronavirus out of China, right? And like we had the RNA, we had the sequence within like a week of that. And so it's just remarkable achievement in that way. And then it's, we're trying to figure out, and they didn't even think at that point it was contagious. Like, oh, it's not a contagious. Oh, oops. No, oopsie, it's a coronavirus, it's contagious, we have a problem. And then so we learned things in this very rapid way and but it's in fits and starts. So people were sort of onto this aerosol droplet thing. And honestly, I think part of the delay in that is nomenclature, it's like words. People who would normally just say, let's take a look at that and work it out. Some of them were very resistant to the idea that it's airborne because that just has all kinds of implications. So what I started saying, I don't know, pretty early on was, well, I'm not like a, I'm not an airborne droplet guy, you know, that's not my thing. But I'm figuring out from reading all this, that this thing is airborne enough. It is around us enough. So I'm not gonna like, I'm not gonna come in like and solve this problem or take, pick a side. But I didn't tell you is like the sort of like inter-cortile range is like, there's a problem here. And so I think that it just took time for that to kind of play out. So some things happen quickly in other things, take, you know, eons. I think, yeah, there was a, I think a poor of a Mandevili was tweeting about this use of language a week or so back. And it really is, you know, aerosolized airborne. There are specific jargon uses of these terms, but then there's the public use. And I think that there's a, when you're talking to the public to get an idea across of you should wear masks that these words sometimes need to be used in a different way. And people in science and medicine have to calm down a little and let the communication happen. Yeah. And there's, there's this dogma thing. This is really interesting. Again, I'm not a, I'm not a, a modeler, but I was helping math modelers do some work. And they, these guys, Juan Gutierrez and Jacob Aguilar, they're like grilling guys. And what they bring to the table is they can track their models for, for spreading really does take into account the asymptomatic transmission. These, the, they figured that out because malaria is contagious between people, which I didn't even know as a doctor. You could catch malaria from your roommate because mosquitoes will take it from one person to the other. Which is essentially an asymptomatic transmission event. It's very similar to spreading SARS-CoV-2 asymptomatic. So they're like, oh, that's kind of similar. So they modeled that. And back in March, they came up with the fact that the, that the R naught, the reproduction number, how many people each person gives the virus to. They, they actually thought it was more like in China, they were saying, oh, it's like two or three. And they were like, no, it's probably more like 12 or 15. And the CDC now thinks it's like almost six. And they're still having this debate, but I'll tell you this is so interesting. And the goal, the goal for that number too is to have it below one. Right. That's, that's, that's when you're doing okay. It's below one. And so we're talking really high numbers. And to put that into context, you can get it below one because the R naught is a combination of biological things of the virus and also sort of behavioral things that we do like wear masks. So you can alter the R naught, right? Or the R. And so what's interesting is so Juan and Jacob come up with this thing and they send it to Science Magazine and it gets expedited for review and it gets rejected. And the comment says, this is back in March. There's no way the R could be that high. This thing is not in the air. And we were like, we don't know if it is or not. We're just saying what the math is. We're just saying what the model says. So it's like always examining your assumptions. I'm not saying that Juan and Jacob have the exact number or who knows. I think they're closer than most, but I just thought that was interesting that someone sort of dogma idea was the thing that they found so impossible to understand. The math was fine. Well, I mean, a lot of that was us. Just nobody wanted to believe it was going to get this bad, right? I mean, nobody wanted, we all kind of wanted to just go, oh, it's like a flu. It's not going to be too bad. It's don't, we don't want to raise the alarm. We don't want to be the bringer of bad news. But sometimes you have to be. I was bringing bad news from the very beginning. I'm just gonna, I'll admit it. I'm like, this is going to be bad, everyone. No, I didn't know, I didn't think so. And if I had read the full CVC communique back in January, which I should have done, I would have been really freaked out because there's some details that make no sense, which I won't put time on. But what I think is interesting is that no one knew. The stock market was at all-time highs in late February, right? The only person I know who sold their stocks is the guy who I just told you about did the math. I said, well, if you're so smart, why don't you sell your stocks? And he goes, Jeremy, I did. I was like, okay, okay, all right. That's pretty cool. So we didn't know. And I'll tell you, I went to work one night and well, two shifts back to back. One was, I was at work and someone came in from some Asian country and they're like, oh my God, they have a fever. It must be coronavirus. I was like, oh, come on, use xenophobic jerks. Give me a break. We're going to do this now. Oh, great. This is going to be a terrible experience. So I was like, okay, let's just be rational. Then the next day I went to work and I worked an overnight shift and I had three patients in a row who had this pneumonia all over their lungs. Young people, people a little older, but they shouldn't have this. It's like, I'll see that once a month. And I saw three in one night and I said, okay, let's test these folks for coronavirus. And they said, no, they don't need the definition for testing. Test them, test them. And I was like, we are so screwed. So that was when I realized that we were just toast. And I went from being a little worried to a lot worried very quickly. Okay, let's talk a bit. Blair brought up the, it's just a flu. And this is a comparison that has been made over and over again. And you just had a paper come out with a couple of collaborators comparing the flu virus of 1918 to the New York City's pandemic, the part of the pandemic. Can you explain a little bit about why you looked at that and what the implications are? Actually, I wanna answer, I'm gonna get to that by doing another study which you may not know about. And which is back in May, same senior author, Carlos Del Rio and I, I called up Carlos and I said, Carlos, we've had about 60,000 deaths almost right from this thing, right? He says, yeah. And Carlos is an infectious disease like professor at Emory University, like he's kind of mid-late career. He's been around, knows what he's talking about. 60,000 deaths pretty soon Carlos, right? And that's the same number of deaths as seasonal flu. Does this feel like seasonal flu to you? He says, no. I said, how many people do you see a year who died of seasonal flu to straight up? And he says, not that many actually, now that you mentioned it. And it occurred to me that 60,000 flu deaths a year, this number that gets thrown around, made no sense. Yeah, everybody no sense for me. It's estimated. And I'm like, wait a minute, that's the same number of people who die from opioids. That's like gunshot wounds a little more than that. It's like more than motor vehicle accidents. And I, as an ER doctor, I give, we call this a death towel. I give those death towels all the time. Like it sucks. Part of my job is to tell people. And I was like, wait a minute, I can't remember too many flus. And the numbers should be the same. And so then I decided to dig into this whole thing about whether they're counting the deaths and estimating it. It turns out they're estimating it, as Justin said. And we calculated that COVID in April in the United States was like 20 times worse than flu at its worst over the past several years. And I think that's probably a low ball on it, but that's what we found. So that was the first thing. So how does this thing compare to seasonal flu? Answer, it's a lot worse. We need to stop talking about them another flu. And then the second question sort of led to this. Like, okay, well, how does it compare to like the worst flu, the one that we all talk about? And so I just wanted to know, and because no one had lived through this. So we just go back to the old CDC data. It's actually from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the Census Bureau, and that the CDC scanned all this. It's on the website. You can go through and like see, it's so beautiful. You know, you can just sort of see line by line, every counting in the country by month, the numbers. And there it is that in April and April, basically in the first 61 days of 2020 COVID-19 in New York, the all cause death rate is 70% as bad as 1918 at its worst in New York. And so that was sort of the side-by-side comparison is that this thing can be, even with modern medicine, 70% as bad per capita per month as 1918 H1N1 or Spanish flu. And one thing that I looked at that I thought was interesting is that even though the death rate is similar, modern medicine potentially is making the outcome that seem better, that we have better preventive measures, we have general sanitation and health that's better in cities, even though cities are more populated. Do you think that it's going to be a lot less overall? I mean, there were millions dead by the time the 1918 flu took its path. Yeah, so a couple of things there. The sort of the first thing you're mentioning is sort of this baseline mortality difference, which is that if you're living, let's forget about the pandemics for a second. If you're living in 2015 versus 1915, 2015 is a much healthier time to be alive. The average number of deaths per month in New York was half of that, you know, went down by half. So it was great to be alive in 2015 and not in 1915. And then the pandemics happened and they both skyrocket, right? And what's interesting is for us, the change is actually bigger because we're coming from a lower place and we actually leapfrog. It's now worse to be alive today than it is to be alive in 1915. And it's 70% as bad as 1918. And so, and then the question is what if we didn't have the ICU? What if we didn't have the ability to treat secondary infections that are bacterias that we can stave off with antibiotics? What if we didn't have innovative, you know, intubations, the numbers would be higher. But then to your question is like, okay, but we haven't had millions of deaths yet, right? Where's what's going on with that? So what I would say is a couple of things is let's hope it doesn't get there. I don't know what's gonna stop us from getting there. It's not as if we've had 200,000 deaths and we know that the country's been exposed. What percentage of the country's been exposed? I mean, it could be 10%, 20%. If it's 20%, there's no reason to think it wouldn't just be multiplied by five or whatever it takes to get to herd immunity. And in 1918, 675,000 Americans died of the flu. So, you know, we're a third of the way there. I mean, it's actually, it's much less than that because we actually have three times the many people. But so it could be that what we saw in New York was a sort of anomaly in this worst case scenario. Or as I say sometimes it's just a scenario and that scenario could play out in other places. It could play out again. So we don't know where we are. Are we, was that first wave the big one? Was that, or was that like 1918 where the first wave was kind of mild? We have no clue where we're at with this. I'm kind of hoping that that was the worst. I'm very much hoping that was the worst because it was kind of earlier in the year we had a March sort of late winter, late flu season. So these respiratory viruses tend to be a little worse that time of year. I'm hoping that if there's a resurgence in New York that we've already had that sort of big spike, but we don't know. Dr. Foss, I got a quick question here. This has been the thing I've talked about a couple of times on the show. Isn't the thing that would work? We're working on vaccines. We're doing all of this, trying to social distance by still probably being way too close. Doing masks of varying levels of efficiency. Couldn't a three week mandatory stay at home everywhere just get us past the point of having to do all of the other things? So here's the thing. Yes. That would do it. Not quite three weeks. It's so back to the math modeling even with our best efforts, it looks, well, with the kinds of efforts that people are willing to make, we can calculate now, if we couldn't do before, how long we think we need to stay closed to get the R, the reproduction number under one. So my team, my colleagues that I mentioned, they looked at San Antonio and said, look, at San Antonio, with what we're willing to do apparently, whatever we're willing to do in phase zero or phase one, that level of shutdown, not the sort of like actual like real shutdown where like one person can leave the house, but like the early stuff, 83 days and you get there. So it's not three weeks. It's a lot. But if you start with a lower situation, if you start with an R that's like five or six or seven or four, it's different in different places, then you can get there in 30 days, 20, 30, 40. And what's interesting is, you can actually use math to kind of churn out, like, okay, here's a plan. So you're willing to do math, you're willing to get rid of bars and you'll do this thing where we only have certain people go out. Okay, we'll prescribe three weeks of complete draconian shutdown, three weeks of sort of like what we all thought with the shutdown was in April, and then we could do three weeks of math and we'll see how we do. So we could actually kind of churn it out. No one's asking anybody. No one's asking any experts what to do. They're just kind of, as you have probably observed, they're just sort of winging it. So that's why we're in the situation that we're in. Yeah, too much winging it. We need more evidence-based practices, but this is the first major pandemic, really since 1918, there was another flu pandemic in the 60s, but it wasn't nearly like this. So we're 100 years later and everyone's like, I don't know, what are we supposed to do? Do masks work? How long is it taking for the research to end up changing or hitting treatment in the emergency rooms where people are first coming in when they're sick? It's pretty quick. I think that the preprints, these are the publications that aren't peer reviewed, but they're on the servers, can range from really confusing and misleading to really helpful. So the dexamethasone study out of the United Kingdom was preprinted. Well, as first it was press released and there were people who thought there was enough information there. I did not. And then a week later, they preprinted it. And I thought the preprint was pretty good. It didn't give us enough, oh, you usually want to see, but it was enough where I think immediately everyone said, okay, if you're a real sick patient, oxygen or innovation, you ought to be giving this medication. I think that the uptake on that was instantaneous. And then I think what's been a little more difficult are things that aren't so clear. Like, okay, should we be pruning patients which is putting them on their stomach? Should we be holding off on intubation? It's where we don't quite know as much. That's where it gets really hard. I think we've made some incremental changes, but a lot of it's kind of word of mouth. You call up your friends in New York and they just say, here's what we did. And that didn't work, so try this. So there's a little bit of a combination of the old grapevine network and also actual medical literature. But I think that on the dexamethasone, the steroid, that was instantaneous. I think that for me, I was never giving hydroxychloroquine, but I hope anyone who was, was pretty much once they started seeing the real studies come out, that was pretty much the end of it. So yeah, I think we're moving quickly in that, in that way, I think this is the first time that we've had a response like this quickly. I can't think of another situation. Yeah, there is a, would you say that you have a toolbox of tools that you use as an emergency physician to address particular symptoms and things that you see and then over the course of this pandemic, as the research comes in, that's become more honed and the tools have potentially become better? Is that how it's worked or? Yeah, I think so. I think there was probably some degree of intubation, it was a little bit aggressive. I don't think any of us had ever seen, this is, it makes total sense. The kind of oxygen levels we were seeing were so low while the patients were awake and totally not going like mentally, their mental status was intact. So this was confusing. So we'll frequently put a patient on a ventilator, if they look short of breath, they look like they're kind of tiring out and their numbers are kind of going from 100% to 95 to 90 to 85, that's like, uh-oh, there's not much room to go. In this situation, we started to notice, patients will be sitting there at 60, 70, 50 and just like chilling, they call them happy hypoxics. And this was just never been seen before. And it's just, it's a younger population of folks for the most part. And so the urge to intubate those people, I think probably was too delicious to resist, so to speak. And so there's a little bit of extra of that. I don't think that killed too many people, thankfully, because I think that most of the people who were sort of intubated too soon were pretty easy to get off the ventilator. There's this easy come, easy go. But I think we've learned to tolerate a lower number. I mean, I've intubated patients with COVID with numbers that like, I literally like bragged to my friends. I'm like, yo, I intubated a patient and this was their oxygen set and they're like, come on. And I'm like, no, no, no, I never would have believed because I heard the same war story from New York. And then it happened to me and I was like, yeah, I'm pretty cool. I saved that guy's life. It's amazing that our bodies work the way that they do and we're able to withstand these low numbers. I mean, it's not good for people, but the fact that, I mean, it's different. It's really fascinating. Convalescent plasma, not plasma. Yeah, I'm gonna say plasma, really. Plasma. Nuclear on me. Yes. With Atlantic pronunciation. Convalescent plasma. We've talked about it on TWIS and talked about the idea of using it. This is an old idea using the plasma from recovered patients to be able to treat patients who are newly diagnosed. Now, what is the evidence saying? Last week, we reported briefly on the study out of the Mayo Clinic looking at like 35,000 individuals. It was an observational study, had some benefit. And at the time, the FDA had backed off and they said, oh, we're not going to give it give convalescent plasma a emergency use authorization yet. We're gonna back off of it and look at this study. And then, boom, Sunday happened and we have a press conference with the president and suddenly it has 35 out of 100 patients are going to be healed by convalescent plasma. What went wrong? A lot. A great many things went wrong. The first thing is that what we learned in medicine is that should work and do work are very, very different. Like plasma should work, right? It's a great idea. And there's all kinds of chemotherapy and there's all kinds of other treatments for other diseases that really ought to work because we think we're so smart we've got it all figured out. And then we try it in people in trials and they don't. And that's just, it's a very humbling thing to realize that we're not, we don't have it all figured out. And that's why you do a trial. You could have a medicine and you have no idea why it works but if you do a randomized controlled trial and it does go for it, just have at it. So I think that that's a big thing. So plasma should work, but it doesn't usually and it was in any case I can think of for in terms of an infection. And I'm not sure we know why but I've been talking up to a lot of docs about this and there were a lot of different theories about it we can kind of delve into it. But as you mentioned, this observational trial, this is not true, excuse me, it's not a trial. I need to like never say that. It was just observational. Yeah, it's a study of people's outcomes who we already knew. And those studies, all I could tell you is they very, very frequently have this kind of a thing where you can find in a subset of a subset of a subset something that looks real promising. And if you query that database enough in the right ways then pretty soon you hit something that looks great. And then you need to test that in a trial and verify it. And most of the time we were disappointed but it was worth the effort. It was totally worth the effort. So that's where I think we're at with plasmas that looks like there might be some signal here that's worth pursuing, not ready for prime time. And then like you said, we wake up one day and it's like, okay everyone, time to use plasma. And there's the head of the FDA who went to medical school, like went to residency and is literally saying, oh yeah, out of a hundred people, 35 wouldn't die. That's totally not true based on even the evidence they produced. And so it's just frustrating. And the big thing that I was concerned about is that plasma is not benign. People I think have now heard that hydroxychloroquine can make your heart explode. Yeah. I mean it's used for malaria treatment but it's still not great. Right. And it's a great example of a risk benefit profile. So that you, once you've established that it works this much, a lot, you can tolerate a little bit of badness on the other side because on how you're getting it's better. And so I was actually reading in the New York Times like a couple of weeks ago, oh yeah, plasma is considered safe. And I was thinking, by whom? And there's all these experts quoted and it's like, I called one of them up. I was like, wait a minute, you're quoted in the story. Like yeah, they didn't ask me about that. And I said, well, plasma is not safe. It's not, of course not. No, no, they didn't ask me that. Okay, this is interesting. I was under the assumption that nothing bad could happen from that. It's a blood transfusion, right? I mean, it's, right? And so what's interesting is the same folks who produced this Mayo article also produced a study about adverse outcomes. And same thing is just, we don't know if it's real or not. It's just a retrospective kind of observational thing. But they said, oh look, only 25 bad reactions out of 5,000 happened. That's like, that's one in 200, that's a ton. And so they're packaging it as only 25 out of 5,000. And they said, well, only four people died. And I'm like, four out of 5,000, that is a ton of people. And they said, but we're not really sure if all four were related to the plasma. And I'm like, no, I think you are. Because tons of people in the study died otherwise from COVID, or other stuff. These are the four who like gave the plasma to and then they ended up dead shortly thereafter. And you don't give plasma to the people who were out to die. So I was like, wait a minute, how come we're having different standards for what's considered dangerous? And so I actually wrote this piece for the Washington Post over the weekend in which I sort of pointed that out. And all the blood transfusion people are like, yeah, pretty much. I think it's back to what I said before. Somebody just wants something to work. Just like we wanted to believe that it wasn't gonna be bad. Now it's just like a shotgun with like shrapnel ever. Just like, what's gonna, we gotta grab something, something's gotta work. Yeah. And you know, we, so why doesn't it work? It's like, it should work. And so I was talking to a friend, I had this like idea that maybe like, maybe antibodies in my body are like hockey players. They're like, they're playing hockey and they're playing, they're really good at hockey. But then I put them into your body and they're like, I'm not in a hockey rink. I'm in some football stadium. I'm in the wrong place. I don't have my teammates. I don't have my equipment. Like, I don't know what to do here. Interesting. You know, I just floated that. He's like, yeah, that's not too stupid. You know, that's not that dumb of an idea. It's kind of dumb, but I'll give you something. I said, thanks. You know, he's an immunologist. They're very wonky smart guys and women. And so I was just like trying to think about this issue. And is it a dose thing? So now we're trying to correct for how is the concentration of antibodies enough? This study that came out of Netherlands is so fascinating because that's a trial that got canceled. And they canceled it because they found out that the recipients had high antibody levels already. So it's like they're fighting. Why give more? Yeah, or why take them away? Yeah. So we assume that like the people who are having trouble fighting the disease don't have enough antibodies. That's why the theory is to give them plasma. But these researchers said, why don't we just check that? And they realized, oh, oops, like these patients don't need any more antibodies. The antibodies just don't work enough. COVID just coronavirus is just kicking its ass. I wonder if there's a, but then there's the question of timing. So it's not just dosage, it's also timing. And we know that there is a timing of when antibodies and different immunoglobulins are produced by the body over the course of the infection. And so at what point would the convalescent plasma actually be effective? And then at what dose? And, yeah. Right, no. And this is exactly the, this is the Bay Area. Yeah, no, no, yeah, the Bay Area comes out of me. Here we are, I'm back at home. No, yeah, I know. So the, we can learn that. We've been trying to give plasma for a lot of viruses and infections for, you know, 100 years or longer, right? This is not a new idea. But we've never had a situation like this where we have a lot of people to try it on. So we have this opportunity to study this technology, which is plasma, to answer just that question. I don't think we had enough plasma and enough Ebola patients in the right doses at the right time to randomize the studies to do it correctly. I actually think, I'm not a nihilist on this treatment the way I am about other things like hydroxychloroquine, which it's never gonna work folks, like give it up. It was a pretty bad idea to begin with and all the trials are negative and it's just a terrible idea. This one could work, right? And so what I wanna know from these, that Mayo Clinic study is, forget all that. Okay, that's a good theory, just show the theory. And let's find out the answer to your question. Let's randomize- Let's do the randomized control. Let's randomize to find out when, what dose, is it the high antibody people, the low antibody people, early, late, age, all these questions that actually we might find the people who would benefit from it. And let's give all them the plasma and not waste it on everyone else, right? Because you're all gonna end up giving it to the wrong people, you're gonna have shortages. So yeah, it could, it actually might be the case. We just don't know yet. And now that we have an emergency youth's authorization, the likelihood of that randomized controlled trial is less because it's going to just be used. And so there won't be that situation where you can choose, where someone can choose to be part of a study or not. Totally important point is that the studies are ongoing, but they have trouble recruiting. And this actually, and I just wanna give a little kind of example. This during COVID, another study came out that had nothing to do with COVID, but I think it's such a fascinating example. And it was to study in randomized trials, whether this very inexpensive drug called TXA can stop gastrointestinal bleeding. And this trial was a huge study all over Europe. It's just gigantic study. And the rumor that it was such a good treatment was so prevalent that they had trouble finishing the study because doctors were like, I'm not randomizing my patients to placebo. I know they gotta get the study, but they finally did the study and it was negative. It was completely negative. So all of these doctors who were like, yep, I've seen it work a hundred times. It's like, and you've seen it, and you've also seen placebo effect. You don't know because you are my own little experience with a few tiny little segment of population that I see. It's just a little sliver. So it's a very humbling to realize that what we see means nothing. And that's why we need science. Yeah, to get rid of our observer bias, to get rid of the way that, yeah. What we see is not necessary. It's a pretty pattern, but it's not necessarily the right pattern. Exactly. For people who maybe aren't in an area where COVID is particularly widespread or maybe you, your life, you don't feel particularly impacted by what's happening. Can you give our listeners a picture of how life in the emergency room has changed? Yeah, one thing I can also maybe transmit is that nothing really rattles me as an ER doc. Like I'm kind of, you see it a lot of garbage and you begin to think that nothing exists. And so you just end up like, oh, that's a rare thing. That never happens. Everything will be fine. And if you, when I look at my body of writing over the past five years, it's like literally one slate pitch after another because I write for slate all the time. And it's like, that doesn't matter. This doesn't matter. That's not true. This is not a big deal. Like like the general, like the general, like my brand is like, yeah, don't worry so much guys. That's like sort of my general brand. So when all the started, I was like, okay, asymptomatic spread, that's a good thing because that means lots of people are getting it and not even noticing it. So the case of Italian rate must be much lower. It's gonna be low. It's fine. Totally true. I was glad that I made that observation. Totally did not understand that that was gonna cause a pandemic. So there you go. You learn because that's what it is, right? It's the asymptomatic transmission part. Yes, it means a lower case fatality rate but the number is bigger. So you're in trouble. Second piece was about that. So what I'll say is I tend to not get rattled. And so when I started to see this thing and started to talk to my friends in New York where I trained and we were all, we just lived through everything. That they were just like, oh no, no, we also realized this, we'd never seen anything like this before. And it really freaked us out just for a hot second because we didn't know what we were gonna deal with. And especially with the PPE issue, I was a little concerned. Like what would I do if I didn't have PPE and I had to intubate somebody? Fortunately, I never came to that but like we don't get scared about that kind of stuff. Again, a patient has HIV and needles stick and you're like, yeah, the odds are zero. I'm not gonna be, I'll be fine. No one gets upset. So the fact that we all are like taking this real seriously I think is probably the biggest message that I could send is that we all don't want this virus. And I've had friends who've had it and they, and I was like, okay, come on. So what was it like? Am I a really good mentor of mine? He's like, it's not a good virus to have Jeremy. I don't recommend it. Don't get this one. And he's like the most like, even killed guy. And what he means by that is like, he almost died. You know, that's his version of saying that. And stories like that. So when we started to see the volume of every other patient go down. So the heart attacks started to stop showing up. The weirdly, the appendicitis stopped showing up totally weird, but only COVID all the time. It was like the beast. I had a guy come in with a kidney stone and the cat scan hit the top of the, against the bottom of the lungs. And I'm like, oh, by the way, you have COVID. He's like, what? It was just like, it was like some kind of like science fiction movie where it was like everyone has it. And then you just start to see the numbers cropping up and the ICUs are overflowing. So it's a very scary disease to see break out. My friends in New York, again, some of them who went to West Africa and treated Ebola. I have one friend who was in Iraq fighting ISIS as a doc on the ground and they all said, this was worse. So there you go. So can I ask for an opposite side of that message just because my fiance works in the ER as well. And so I've been dealing with, you know, the stories and at first it just didn't seem like a big deal like you were saying. And then I started asking how many cases did you have last night, how was it? And it just got to the point where I just stopped asking because it was so many. And it's just, I would just like to hear, like, do you think it's inevitable if you're working in the ER that you're probably gonna get exposed to it? Do you feel like you're well protected and it's not so bad to be in the ER as long as you're careful? It's funny, now that you asked that, you're like, could you like throw us a little sunshine here? Yeah, please. Cause that was a little over the top. But like, I think like, I just saw like Kiki like started to fill out her like last will and testament over there. I'm like, okay, it's not that bad. And it's funny, cause again, I started from this place of like, we'll be all right. So it's so foreign for me to like be a worry ward, you know, but yeah. So individual personal risks, I think for people, you know, the age adjusted rates are super duper low. I still believe as I did back when I first wrote about this that the case fatality rate is well under 1% for everybody. It's gonna be a 10th of that for people under 65. Still means a huge amount. I mean, 0.01 or 0.1% is just a gigantic number if everyone gets it. That's the key number too, is the mortality rate of something that a few people get may not seem like a big number. But if it gets to the point where everyone has had to go through the gauntlet of COVID, that number is really significant. Right, exactly. And that's the, so on the individual level, like if I were to get coronavirus, I would be a little nervous, but I would just be like, okay, the odds are pretty good here, I'll be all right. You know, I think, so I think that I tend to be a little bit like, just I'd love to have antibodies. I'd love to already have it, but I don't know if I do. But in terms of exposure, so this is actually, I think another way to answer your question is like, what's we do? Because, you know, I have to go to work and your fiance has to go to work and people have to go to the hospital and they have to do their jobs. And I don't think people have picked this up, but I think it's a really important distinction. When we first started talking about closing the economy and doing a shelter in place, it was really packaged as flat in the curve. Because if you had too steep of a curve, that you, there's the top numbers that we would die, unnecessarily because it's the mechanical ventilators and the secondary infections that we could have saved their lives. So, flat in the curve was sold as a way to deal with capacity. It was never really sold as a way to save lives overall. Or to hot things, yeah. Right. But if you really do think a vaccine is coming, then it's more than flattening a curve. It's keeping it low and just decreasing case counts so that when the vaccine comes, it just helps more people. And so I've kind of at some point when I began to see the vaccine data and feel like, okay, I don't know if for sure it's gonna work, but there's really good reason to believe that it's not a fool's errand here. Then let's think about that now. So, now I'm willing to do whatever it takes to protect myself for the next couple of years or whatever, it could be six months, but it could be a year and a half, who knows, right? To keep myself safe. And I think that we're seeing in the ED and in the emergency departments, just doing the basic stuff and the rates of infection go down. Early on, I think there was a bunch of infections that happened that way. And now I think we saw that once we do the basics pretty much, I haven't heard of anyone I know recently get it who works. Whereas early on, I knew half a dozen people who got it. And I think that's just a matter of vigilance. It could be the vigilance or it could just be that everyone got exposed, right? Some of that, but no, but I friend who were who were in antibiotic studies and they know their outcomes and they know who has antibiotics and who doesn't. So yeah, I think, so I mean, there's some of that I'm sure, but yeah, I think that interestingly enough, we can slow this down to a crawl. New Zealand just shows that, right? I mean, if New Zealand just does what it's doing and everything just ends up the same way and they get a vaccine, like they win. They win, yeah. The top health official in Denmark recently came out and said that if everyone wore face masks in Denmark starting right now, it would save one life. Because then they did an immediate shutdown, they did a really hard shutdown, shut down schools, shut down everything. Right now restaurants are open, schools are open. The only place that they really suggesting wearing the mask is in public transport. That's the only place where you have to put it on. But they address things quickly. They have these white tents that are set up all over the city. You can go in, you can even do a drive-through. You can get a corona test, a COVID-19 test. You get results back in about 24, 48 hours. So if you're concerned, you go in, you take the free test, you go home with yourself quarantine until you get your result. They've been very aggressive about tracking and about shutting down early. It's very weird because I've only been here for a week or so. The contrast to everyone needing to wear masks and keeping these distances and all the businesses that are shut down because of how aggressive the virus, how aggressively we did nothing. Well, and the test here can take a day, four days, or seven days. A week. Seven days to find a two-week incubator is ridiculous. And to get access to it is also not easy. Do you think that there are people who are writing about paper strip tests that could take 15 minutes? They wouldn't be incredibly accurate, but if they were very inexpensive, like a dollar or two dollars a test, that do you think if those were available and everywhere that that could change how we approach this pandemic moving forward? Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think, so first of all, to enter the earlier kind of thinking about the masks, I see masks as part of a suite of behaviors. There's all these studies, all of the masks is the thing that matters the most. I've not yet seen a study that really says that. I've seen studies that say, hey, look, when people take this thing seriously and masks are a part of that, when there's a outbreak, it goes better than in places where people say it's a hoax. And I bet I should clarify too, the reason I'm totally pro-mask was wearing one everywhere behind the stage. The reason I was pointing that out is because they have so few cases right now in Denmark that the mask isn't the point where it's, yeah, exactly. So yeah, so that's that thing. And then in terms of testing, look, I did that as I mentioned before, like I had that moment where I realized we weren't testing anyone in early March and I just literally, like I went for a run with my wife and we were just jogging on the Charles River. And I said, God, we just need to have a test for every American and it needs to be out of hospitals because it can't be in the ER, this is like early March. And she's like, and my wife's a journalist and she's like, you should probably write that up and we get home and just like send it somewhere. So I did and I sent it out and I got it in the Washington Post, my first big Washington Post piece and I was like, test everybody now. And people agreed with that. I don't think I was the first person to say that but I somehow snuck that in there. And it occurred to me that, it never occurred to me that that wouldn't happen. I actually thought it would, I actually thought it would happen. And I wrote like a memo to Vice President Pence and they responded and they said, this is really interesting and important. And I thought for a minute, we were gonna be testing everybody or not. And so then what happened was, as you know, so I do think that testing, this whole idea, it's interesting. Actually, I don't wanna dismiss the idea of what Trump said about, when you test more, you find more cases. That sounds so idiotic. I know that sounds idiotic, but there is a certain logic to what he's saying in the sense of, well, look, all the cases we need to know about are the ones that show up at the hospital, everything else is out of our control. We're never gonna test enough people to really track this thing. So let's just worry about the ones who are sick and then we'll get a vaccine and we'll be done. That's, I think that's actually what they're saying when they're saying that. I don't agree with that, but I think that's what's driving that thought. I would not reinterpret any of these. I think that's a bad, because the optimism within human rationality is like, there's a way that could make sense if I do a little gymnastics with where it might've come from. I don't think that's what's happening. At one point, maybe it wasn't, yes, maybe if our tests had, if we'd gotten on top of it, if we had tested everybody, if we'd really gotten it out there, yeah, maybe it would have been possible, but maybe what, I mean, maybe you're right. Maybe at this point, he's like, it is out there, and how are we ever going to get it back to a point where the testing makes sense? Because this is before Florida though. This is what I'm saying though. This is because before Florida became the global hotspot is when this was being said. Part of it is, yeah, you're not gonna maybe get away with contract tracing in the United States, but if you know, if people are allowed to go in and just take a free test once a week if they feel they need it, or to go in, do it, or have to get a quick response, now the CDC knows, now their local hospitals know, hey, we just got a 20% jump and the number of people who are about, we need to be more proactive, we might need to shut down a city, we might need to do a stay at home for the state. Well, if you don't know, what's your op again? Well, that's where the sewer testing comes in, right? Yeah, sewer testing is hard. You don't have to do, you don't have to test each person individually. That's a serious pooled sample. Yeah. No, really. Yeah, so then you can find it. My friends are the ones doing this research and it's totally amazing. It's a great example, by the way, of science being repurposed. They were actually trying to trace bad, like car fentanyl and fentanyl-like use. They're like, oh gosh, we wanna make sure that we don't have some bad stuff going through the community, we can pick it up on the sewage and then COVID happened and they said, why don't we check for COVID? So yeah, it's a great thing. I didn't know about this, this is brilliant. Yeah, it's pretty cool. This problem is it lags, but not as much as you'd think. So, and it also, it lags and it also- So four hours. 50 hours. 50 hours. Depends on what you're talking about. So like the thing is, yeah, so overall, I still think that you're right. I actually, even though I did the mental gymnastics to try to explain like why they wanted to do a test, I actually think that they're wrong on the human nature piece and the human nature is, the more they know, the more they're confident. So early on, I said, look, we test everyone. We'll know where the ball is. We'll play the ball. We don't play as zone defense. You go to like where the problem is. You shut down that place really hard, like real shut down, like China, one person leaves the house, like really, you know, really get that thing under control. And the rest of us can like still go to school and like on the plane and all that stuff. Like, you know, in March, I took early March. I actually, I think I took a trip to New York, you know? I still thought that was dumb by the way, but I thought at that time, I thought that was fine. It's fine. Everything's fine. I was in Disneyland in early March. Yeah. Do you think that was dumb? And so, but so I think that there is something to be said for people who, if they, if they're worried and they're negative, then they can go back to work. They can go back to school. You can know that your preschool can open. You can know that your pod has not been infiltrated, you know, but, and so I think that actually, paradoxically they think that lower tests will actually boost people's confidence in going back to work and all this and going back to school. And I think that's the other way around. I think that you shine a light on the problem. People deal with it. They know where it's at. And then they say, okay, look, we're all testing and like no one has it. Like right now in Boston, I feel pretty good. Well, I thought good of two weeks ago and now I'm getting worried because there's little spikes. But so I think we should respond. And I think that's how you kind of get through this next few months is through this kind of, as you say, a massive sort of either antigen test that came out today or the saliva tests. So people can really like know where they're at. Where can people find you online? They want to follow you. I'm on Twitter like 24 hours a day at Jeremy Faust. And I stopped being professional a while ago. I used to be really professional out there. Now you are sharing opinions. Now I'm telling it how you see it. Shouting facts. Shouting facts is very... Trying to determine which are the people at trolls and which are the people who I need to correct. So that's there. And then at brief underscore 19, brief19.com is the daily briefing, which I'm really proud of. It's basically like at this point, like six to 12 frontline physicians who literally just take time out to write about what's going on every day and in the policy and the medical side. And those are the big places I think, yeah. Cool. And if there's one final message that you'd like to share with our audience, what would it be? Or what is it? What is the, what would it be? What is it? What is it? Okay. So while I don't think if one's gonna just die, I'm not worried. You know, I want you all to feel like you can go about your life and all that. I was worried that I scared Blair. No, no, no, I'm sorry. Well, I think that it really helps me to know how unusual and historic this moment is so that doing things that, enduring things that suck is a little more palpable. I think that it makes no sense to people who haven't seen it to one of your other questions or makes no sense to people who don't get it why we should just like ruin our economy and upend our lives, not see our loved ones, not go to the bars, which is the main problem, not see live music, all these things, wear masks and not travel, all the things that make life so fun and great for nothing. And I think it really helps me to have to realize through the paper that you've talked about as well that we're living through something truly extraordinary and unusual and it's going to end at some point. And I think we'll do okay. I'm just in really tough times ahead, but I think if we know that it's like a finite period of badness that we can sort of like put our heads down and just get through this. Really, really rapid. We can do it together. Somebody in the chat room is asking you whether or not you think schools should open. They're specifically talking to Massachusetts, but just generally speaking. So about this funny, I thought of this talking point live on an interview a few weeks ago. So I'll repeat it again. But it was one of those things where it's like, oh, in real time, I thought of me of this. I never thought for a second it was a question if schools should open or not. That's the wrong question. The right question is, how long do you want them to stay open? Because at some point they're going to open. Today, tomorrow and month, whenever you decide. And I actually think that if we really sit down and look at local case counts and how much testing there is and who's in the community and how people get around, you can say, okay, look, as long as our cases are this low and we have these measures in place, we anticipate that we'll be able to, if we open today, we'll be able to stay open for six weeks. And that's our goal. Six weeks at a time and then a four week off or something like that. Whereas, or maybe you say, look, I just want two weeks on and three weeks off. Whatever you want to come up with, then figure out from there what the, we'll tell you or experts will tell you like how to make that condition. How to do it. Yeah. And that's the flip I want people to do is like to think, okay, what am I willing to do to get four weeks of school, to get six weeks of school, eight weeks of school because it's gonna shut down at some point. So the question is like, how do we delay that? And next is, is there a way to get a voice? I mean, you're doing it. You're going out there and you're publicly talking, you're getting information out there. It seems strange to me that there isn't a medical organization that has the loud microphone that is separate from government, that is able to show up there as the authority on health issues that's not being politically influenced. Or is it just we've never had this much political influence to the, oh, that's not true, Secretary. How do you get good information direct to the public bypassing all of the political will one way or the other? Okay. So there's some organizations that do great work. I mean, I think the American Medical Association is doing some really good work right now. I haven't always been a fan of things they've done but they're doing well. I think the WHO has just been doing great work as well. Especially considering their whole budget is $4 billion, that's nothing. The CVC's budget's 12 billion or something like that. That's ridiculous. But my fantasy would have been that the 50 docs that I know and trust every day have an hour briefing and here's what's going on and that's what we'd like. And the problem is though is we are all seeing patients and we have to go to work and we have other things going on and no one's like, we can't just, so we're all sort of helping each other amplify but there's no like organization like, okay, like we're gonna have at noon every day like we're gonna just like come up with the idea. Oh man, like, you know, the super friends or whatever the ex man, whatever. Right. So, because my vision of like what would communicate best to Americans is something like a mini schoolhouse rock little cartoon public service announcement type thing that's put out by a medical organization that here's the latest a little cartoon showing somebody putting on a mask and here's what, something that simple that gets thrown out to the American public past the biases of all of this political wrangling over people wanting their businesses open versus people who are, you know. That would take leadership though. Yeah, but that's what I'm asking for. I'm asking for leadership from the medical community. Yeah, I'm curious to see, like, look, I don't want to talk about the election too much but like the Biden team, you know, at this point I have a pretty good feeling that the Trump people aren't gonna put that group of people together or people that I trust. We were, I will say this, we were available and willing. I went to them and I interacted with people in that network and willing to just be an American and like not worry about it. That moment is no longer apparent. So, but the Biden people, you know, I think they take it very seriously but I think they haven't really reached out to a lot of people that I know and I think it's probably a combination of, well, I don't know everybody. I mean, I know a lot of people but I don't know everybody. But I think there's also some degree of like they, if there's, if Biden wins, I have a feeling they'll put together a team that of people who ought to be in the room and there's, you know, so many options to choose from. So this country has an enormous wealth of expertise that as you, I think you're pointing out is essentially right now it's all kind of like, it's sort of every person for themselves or sort of like a little pause of like. Kind of, yeah. Oh, say what? It's like guerilla tactics. You have to like get around it. You have to get around it, you have to get around it. Yeah. Right, yeah. But I think that, you know, it would take some kind of major, major organization government or nonprofit to say, look, we're gonna give the resources for this kind of thing. Because other than that, we're just, we're literally just amplifying each other on social media. That's what we do. Thank goodness for social media because at least that's a channel to get out there. There is some good in the social media. Depending on who you're listening to on the social media. That's right. If you can get it out of those echo chambers especially. Thank you so much for joining us tonight, Dr. Faust. It has been wonderful getting to speak with you. We are going to move on to the rest of our show. I will have links to your Brief 19 website, also to your Twitter links on our website so that if people didn't catch that, there'll be a place they can go to go find those things and follow you if that's what they're interested in doing. It's getting late for you. Are you gonna stick around for more science or no, you're out. Okay. Thank you so much. I will say the instinct is to stay and to join this little pod cult. But I won't be so... Science is fun, stay up late with us. It's like Mystery Science Theater, sort of like the urge to make content, the urge to make like snarky comments was like so impossible to resist. But yeah, this is meant to be that conversation where you get to have fun talking about these things. So next time you're here. I hope that our audience is Mystery Science theatering us all the time. Have a nap beforehand, have an extra cup of coffee and then you can stay up late with us next time. And you know, I have new papers coming out that are some of which are almost as depressing as the first one and some of which are more optimistic. So, you know, we can go a different way as depending on which one comes up. Fantastic. You're going into the round of the climatologists. Oh, a new paper. Have things improved? Oh, never. I don't need to tell me. It's okay. I actually have some good news out there. I do, I do. Oh, teaser, teaser for next time. Thank you once again. It was really great to get you on the show tonight. Thank you, you guys are awesome. Have a wonderful night. All right, all right. Bye, and everyone, you are listening to This Week in Science. We are going to, well, I'm not going to take a very big break. I just want to tell you one thing, actually. You're the reason that we do this show that we're able to do it. Honestly, your support keeps us going, bringing you science and hopefully a sane-ish perspective on the world that's out there. Interviews like this one with Dr. Faust and the time that we have with you every week. It's really thanks to your support. So if you want to continue to help This Week in Science, bring more science to more people and to do it more, more, more, more, more better, more science, please head to twist.org. Click on the Patreon link and select your amount of support. You can choose any level from $10 and up per month. We will thank you by name after the show. There are some fun levels that also get you art from Blair and t-shirts from the show, but regardless, your support at any level does help keep this show going and we thank you for that. Thank you for your support because we cannot do this without you. You're listening to This Week in Science. Kiki, we just talked about a plague. Do you want to talk about locusts as well? Oh yeah, yep, plague of locusts. Well, this isn't really about a plague, although there are researchers currently talking about how to predict and stop future locust plagues, but I'm not really interested in that. I'm interested in how locusts are going to help us have self-driving cars. That's not where I thought that was gonna go and I can't wait to hear. I know, I did a little switcheroo on you there, but it's true. Researchers at Penn State have developed a system to basically keep cars from driving into each other, help them avoid obstacles by using locust neurons. Apparently locusts in their big plague-like swarms are really good at not running into each other. They have a couple of neurons that are involved and there's one in particular very specialized called the Lobula Giant Movement Detector. I wish I had that Lobula Giant Movement Detector. It pretty much just makes sure that it sees big movements and then the neuron responds. So the researcher, Darsith Jayashandran, who's a graduate student in engineering science and mechanics at Penn State says, when a locust sees another locust, so you have the stimulus going into the eye, there's a neuron that goes boop-boop, locust, and the closer that locust gets, the image gets larger and so there's more of an excitation signal in the neurons and so there's another input that happened that changes as well and that's angular velocity. So the incoming locust then needs to be avoided and the neuron, the Lobula Giant Movement Detector has two branches and there are changes in the inputs for the size of the locust and its angular velocity and there's a computation that takes place within this single giant neuron that then tells the locust what to do. So they've published in Nature Electronics that they have developed a nanoscale collision detector using a photo detector made of a monolayer of molybdenum, I really like saying molybdenum, molybdenum. It's a fun element. It's like a challenge. Molybdenum sulfide, it's got lots of molybdenums. So they put it on top of a chip, this photo detector compound and they have what they use a programmable, what they call floating gate memory architecture and it mimics the neuron, the locust's neuron response. This photo detector acts really quickly. So locusts, their neuron reacts to incoming locusts at like 500 milliseconds. Now this is not that fast, but it's still very fast at under two seconds, which means that this kind of a collision detector could really help vehicles quickly avoid approaching impacts. And yeah, it's the molybdenum sulfide based sensor. It's task specific. It really can't be used for anything else. So it would just really help vehicles not run into each other. They only so far can get vehicles that are on a direct collision path. They haven't figured out how to have the sensor work on different angular velocities for different collisions, but yeah, locust brains helping us have autonomous vehicles. I mean, I've come a far way in my opinion on self-driving cars. I used to be so against them and knowing what I know now makes me feel better about it, but still this kind of autonomy still scares me. I still feel like we're gonna end up the only way to survival. What, you don't trust a locust neuron to drive your car? It just, if you're depending on any sort of computer to keep you from running into other things, there's always an opportunity for a hiccup or a glitch or any number of things. I just feel like the only way in the near future this is gonna happen is if you have that situation where you have the roads are part of the software. And it has to be part of the software because currently there is a lane-keep technology that's using a camera and it's tracking lanes. Now, if those lanes aren't there, it doesn't work. If somebody paints a lane off the side of a cliff, the car will go off the side of the cliff. Right, and how many times have you been traveling and seen new paint lines or they are doing road construction and they shifted the lanes temporarily? It's useless anywhere in San Francisco. Because everything is repaved and repainted all the time. There is technology, of course, that already exists that does collision warnings. It'll alert you that somebody's decelerating, even if they're a long way up, they will break for you. Honda has this low-speed follow-up so it will slow down with the vehicle in front of you all the way down to like a one-mile-an-hour crawl. And there's emergency braking that are built into these vehicles as well. But yeah, for it to go beyond that, you're right, where it has to be incorporated to the roadway itself. Now, I will also say that the fear of the computer is we are used to using technology that is built so that it can be plugged in, augmented, modified, reprogrammed, retooled, reused and do more things than we ever do with our devices. And in that infrastructure is where our glitching is coming from. This is where failures are happening. This is where this thing is trying to communicate so many different ways. When you take a piece of technology or programming and you put it into like a vehicle specifically, it's only able to do that one thing over and over again. So it's a lot, the reliability is much, much, much higher than we are used to experiencing with technology because it isn't interacting with anything else but that task. Now, it's hardware failures. And this is very, this chip that they're creating is very specifically, it's a collision detector and that's all it's supposed to do and that it will interface with other programming. Yeah, the computer. It doesn't want to play video or route to audio or have it, no, so when you build those things into vehicles, because vehicles, as much as you may not even realize the last vehicle you drove, probably had way more technology in it, way more programming in it than we use currently to launch to the space station. I mean, it's very intense, but it's also, I don't know, is it called steady? I don't even know what the phrase theology is, but it doesn't need to interact with anything than other than its task. If I'm, just last thing, is that what I know about Teslas currently, just as an example, is that there is technology that will always be for autopilot. However, when there is an update on software, sometimes they have to push a new update, like a day later, because something needs to get patched or fixed or modified and it's that sort of thing that just makes me real nervous. And you're like, oh, that's a human element. A day of driving, a day of driving where it's not completely right. You know what makes me nervous? Human drivers. No, but this is why I think the two together is an amazing idea because you have the automatic braking, you have the adaptive cruise control, you have all this lane guidance and stuff, but I just am not ready. Take the human out of the driver's seat. You don't have to be ready yet. Well, how about taking the human out of bomb detection? This is another Locust story. That sounds good. That's great. Yeah, sounds great. Researchers at Washington University, not Washington State, Washington University in St. Louis have found out that there are neurons in the Locust brain that respond to different dosages, concentrations, air concentrations of vapors of TNT, DNT, RDX, PTN, anemonium nitrate and so these are chemicals that are commonly in explosives and the neurons respond differently to different compounds. So what they're doing is they're sticking electrodes in Locust heads and they're trying to create a shoebox sized enclosure that would hold a Locust that you could then maybe stick it on a little robot that you remote control drive someplace and use the Locust and its neural responses to tell you whether or not there are any explosive devices nearby. So someday soon, Locusts driving your car and checking for explosives. Locusts, the plague we love to hate. I mean, yeah, okay, Locusts. And then my last story for the night is about life itself and how we really need to thank Chlamydia for life. Thank you, thank you, Chlamydia. Before I do the round of applause for the great job Chlamydia has done for life, I need more information. That's right, a new paper in Science Advances. We talked about this related finding a few months back, which is that at the bottom of the ocean in the Arctic, researchers found a bunch of bacteria that had unique chemical functions. Well, they've done some further analyses and they have discovered that there's a group of Chlamydia related bacteria. These are like old ancient Chlamydia. So in the family Chlamydia, they have been around for a long time apparently, hanging out, not using oxygen to get their energy to do their respiration. And instead using hydrogen and they have a group of genes that are hydrogen producing genes. Well, researchers trying to figure out a lot about, ah, this switch from prokaryotes, bacteria and such to eukaryotes, multicellular, nucleated organisms like us, how did that happen? And there must have been a switch in how energy was produced and there was something in the steps from single cellular to multicellular and they've hypothesized for a long time that there would be genes related to hydrogen respiration and anaerobic respiration involved somehow. Well, ta-da, genetic analysis of these two billion year old genomes of Chlamydia bacteria at the bottom of the ocean have these hydrogen producing genes. Oh no. Yes. So it's mytochlamydia chondria? Is that where we're heading? So it's either that there was some kind of a merger or there was horizontal gene transfer and that genes got transferred and an organism ended up picking them up and then that led to the ability to metabolize using and have proton gradients and proton pumps and hydrogen energy basis. Yeah. So this is it. This is our evidence. International researchers digging up genes from anoxychlamydialis, a group of Chlamydia bacteria that live without oxygen, have genes for producing hydrogen at the bottom of the ocean. So it's fascinating because Chlamydia are parasites in most mammals and infect cells and live inside of cells. So maybe there is something, maybe it is like a mitochondrial Chlamydia kind of thing. Yeah. But yeah, a relative of Chlamydia, we should say thank you. Thank you for making us who we are, allowing us to metabolize hydrogen. Thank you, Chlamydia. Yeah. Never thought you'd say those words. Oh, that would be. Unless you went to the doctor thinking you had something much worse. Many would, oh thank goodness it's Chlamydia. Oh, I just got to take some antibiotics. It could have been so much worse. It could have been, could have been, would have been. Tell me about what is really worse, Justin. The temperatures in the Arctic Ocean are worse. This is temperatures between Canada, Russia and Northern Europe are warming faster than current climate models had predicted. This is a nutshell. Over the past 40 years, temperatures have been rising by one degree every decade. However, between the Barents Sea, which is in the Barents Sea, which is between Finland and Russia, around Norway, which is Slavard Archipelago, which is this island that's way north of Norway that Norway has, which didn't know existed, but apparently it's this amazing research center where you have to carry a gun if you leave the facility. You have to have a rifle on you because polar bears are omnipresent. As well as, so the temperatures in this sort of Arctic Sea areas have been increasing at 1.5 degrees per decade throughout this same 40-year period. This is a conclusion that's published in Nature Climate Change. Quoty voice of Jens Halsberg Christensen, our analysis of Arctic Ocean conditions that we have been clearly underestimating. Rate of temperature increases in the atmosphere nearest to the sea level, which has ultimately caused the sea ice to disappear faster than we had anticipated. He's a professor at the University of Copenhagen Neil Bort Institute, one of the researchers on this study. So, basically, smoke them while you got them, people. If the COVID don't get you, the global warming will. No, no, no. Yes, yes, it's over. It's over, life has been up. Yeah, last week was at the Greenland Ice Sheet. There's a report that it's pretty much, even if we stopped climate change right now, the melting of Greenland's ice sheet is just, it's on its way. It's not accumulating enough snow anymore. So the amount it loses, it's no longer making backup. In snow. So, if you think about this, it's pretty easy math. I'm not a mathematician by any stretch of anybody's imagination. My 13-year-old daughter is way better at math than I am. But a one degree per decade versus a 1.5 degree per decade seems like a 50% higher number, which means the estimates that we had that we're based on, and these aren't the IPPC old estimate that has been picked apart. This is the highest end of warming trends based on carbon is already taking place. Now, not into the future, when we were talking about where it could get to, it's already seeing warming that's associated to that because the warming isn't happening evenly and it's not happening how we thought it was, which explains why every week we could do a story about how ice is disappearing faster than predicted, the ice caps in Greenland are just getting Antarctic. To hurricanes going into the Gulf. Yeah, so. Hey, so if you're in the United States, vote. Yeah. So that there will be people who can make decisions to make sure that despite all of this stuff going on, you and your family will be protected and that we can prevent it from getting worse. Yeah, although, while this was looking at areas in and around Finland, Russia, Norway, what's very interesting though is that even though the temperature rise has been quicker there, has been faster, because they're more accelerated and that sea ice is melting, the actual sea rise will affect that area much less than the rest of the world. Interesting. Yeah, it's just something to do with, you know. Well, there's heat expansion in different places. How, where water goes, don't completely pretend to understand. But yeah, the effects will be much more equatorial in terms of sea rise than it will be near the Arctic. Yeah, there's different things you can look at pick your poison depending on where you're on the planet, what impact it's gonna be. Well, yeah, vote. That's one thing that we can do. And also know that we already have a lot of solutions out there and we have the intellectual capacity to solve a lot of these problems. We just need the will. We need to take, we need to, we need the will to change it. We need the same. And we need community solutions. We need people to do it in bigger groups. Biger, big groups. If it's your family, that's better than just you. If it's your neighborhood, that's better than just you. If it's your city or your state, great. Just try to expand that sphere of influence one step further than where you're at. And if you ever wonder, you know, oh man, is somebody, somebody's gotta be already talking about this. Somebody's already, well, maybe there is, but if you aren't talking to somebody about it, then why aren't you? You can be an influence on people. Yeah. In my last part, don't give up. Absolutely, you're both right. Solutions are on the way. The will change is coming. I'm just saying, predicting. You said smoke them while you got them. Well, that's all, but I say that anyway. But I say that about life in general. But I do think we are going to be having this conversation, maybe with a little bit more earnest call to action when there are no ice caps. I think we will definitely get beyond where ice caps will sort of go as a thing that people of our generation or the next generation tell their kids once existed. I think we will- Glaciers and ice caps, they were this thing. It was amazing. Go look at them at the top of mountains. Change is coming. It is reversible. The solutions are there, but I think we're at the point where those changes are going to happen first at this point. Yeah, which is why you need adaptation and mitigation. You need both. That's why you need not one or the other. You can't stop reducing CO2. You have to be reducing CO2, but you also have to address the changes that are coming. You have to do that. A lot of it is very much like the pandemic response in the United States in that, okay, we already messed up to the point where now, contact tracing doesn't matter. Maybe even testing doesn't matter. Now we just need global ventilators to keep the planet from floating. We need more ventilators for the planet. This is this week in Sa... What? Oh, just, I got it. Carol Ann Benoit is in Norway. Yes, her fjord will be fine, but it says on the plus side here in Norway, we're uncovering all sorts of archaeology. So that is a fascinating aspect of it that I do appreciate, is that there also should be incredible dinosaur finds. And ancient frozen scat. And yeah, I mean, because this is Ben, there is a bit of a time capsule involved in this as well. There might be some interesting things to discover. This is this week in science. Thank you for listening. If you would like to help Twist grow, get a friend to subscribe today. It's time for that wonderful part of the show that we love to call Blair's Animal Corner. With Blair. Well, since we were just talking about climate change, I thought I might actually flip-flop my plans here and talk about coral bleaching because that's the thing we've talked about quite a bit on the show in relation to climate change and ocean warming. So when you think of a coral reef, what do you picture? Do you have some animals? What does the water look like? It's blue. It's clear blue, see through and it's the only place that corals grow. Beautiful. I'm just imagining the little mermaid. If you're living in the ocean, that actually means that that habitat is really nutrient poor. Then if you think about like a lake or the San Francisco Bay, for example, or a river where the water's kind of like greenish, brownish, you can't even really see through it, it's nutrient rich. So that's actually what you would consider a space that would be really good for animals to be able to feed off the water column. Coral reefs, there's very little nutrients there. And so that actually is what the corals have adapted to live in. That being said, this new piece of research looking at what aggravates corals and what might create coral bleaching looked at one thing that we've talked about a bunch and we're very aware of, which is the overall temperature of the reef that when it gets too hot, it can bleach. But this study also looks at the nutrient levels of the water. So corals are animals. That's why they're in the animal corner. I'm just gonna throw that out and remind everybody for those of you who forgot, because I know it's- Plantamals. Yeah, they seem more like plants than anything else, but really they're a little almost like anemones that live in these little, the skeleton, these exoskeletons that they make out of calcium carbonate and they reach out and they filter feed. And they do that with the help of their photosynthetic algae. There's Zosanthole, or Zosantheli, or however you want to pronounce it. But anyway, they do it with this, this photosynthetic symbiotic relationship. And so they get nutrients from that because the filter feeding doesn't give very much food. So if you think about the water so clear, they could be sticking the little teeny, tiny anemone arms out there all day and get very little food. This is not gonna do it for them. So the photosynthetic algae is what gives them the supplement to give to, so that they're able to survive in this otherwise pretty clear barren seascape. So you would think more nutrients, ah, that's a happier coral, right? Doesn't need as much from their algae. There's Zosantheli. So interesting story turns out from this study King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, that higher nutrient levels also encourages bleaching. We don't know why. It could be because they're like, I don't need you anymore or it could just be stress. More nutrients could also potentially reduce how much light they're getting. There's any number of things that could be related to that. But ultimately what this study showed was that heat-stressed corals that are exposed to excess nutrients were more susceptible to bleaching. So there's a couple of reasons you could have increased nutrients in these otherwise pretty nutrient poor habitats. One could be these, some shifts in ocean currents. One of the things that is a side effect of climate change because when you heat up the ocean, it disrupts ocean currents. Just like your human heart pumps blood and oxygenated blood through your body, the ocean pumps hot and cold water, which carries nutrients. Colder water is more turbid, carries more nutrients. So that's part of this whole thing. So if you kind of disrupt the system by heating it up, then the nutrients will go somewhere different. It's just gonna disrupt the flow of the stuff around the planet. So that could be one of the reasons. The other thing that could impact nutrients is fertilizers or other sort of pollution that could go into the water column and impact in that way. So the other reason this hasn't really been looked at up to this point is that temperature is something really easy to study via satellite in the ocean. Nutrient loads are way harder to measure. So how can we measure nutrient loads and sea surface temperatures to see when these two are gonna intersect in a way that will stress out coral? So that you can protect that coral so you can potentially transplant new coral. So you can try to stave that off before it gets too high. There's any number of things you could do in terms of conservation once you start to have that type of information. So ultimately, it's about a perfect storm. You have to have both. Through this study they found out that what you have is heat stress corals plus excess nutrient levels equals more bleaching. All the bleaching. Yeah, we don't like that. Yeah, I think it's an important thing to remember because, A, I always gotta be telling people corals are animals, but B, because the coral reef is seen as this place that is teeming with life. But as we know, life on this planet has spent millennia adapting to a very particular set of conditions. Millennia of millennia. Yeah, the reason why should anybody care about this? The one that I learned about doing this show is half the world's oxygen. Half the oxygen that we breathe comes from corals, not from rainforests, well, maybe the other half, but from corals. No, actually, I think depending how you measure it between 60 and 80% of the oxygen on our planet comes from the ocean. Oh my goodness. So the ocean's kind of important. Very important. There's also, you can think about the ocean. Remember also, I forget what percentage, but more than half of the world's population lives on coastlines and coastal communities, about 80% of the protein that they consume comes from the ocean. So we are tied to the ocean. We are connected to it and we depend on it. And so the more we can know about what the ocean needs so that we can protect it, the more we can protect ourselves for generations to come. And while coral bleaching can be something that in the short term, many corals can recover from if it's a one-off kind of thing, the more it happens and for the longer periods of heating, the harder and harder it gets for these coral to recover. So there's only so much they can take. They can take a little. Like we can all take a sunburn every once in a while, but it's over long, lots of sunburns over a long time. You're gonna end up with skin cancer. You're gonna have some issues. Yeah, so there are analogies to be made there, but yeah, if we can figure out how to protect them, that'd be great. Protect those corals. Yeah, and we'll remain in the ocean for the last section of my segment here today to talk about one of my favorite animals on the whole entire planet, the flamboyant cuttlefish. Yay. They are so amazing. They are these cuttlefish. So they're cephalopods related to octopus and squids. And they stomp along the ocean floor. So they've adapted their mantle. They're kind of the hood part of the cuttlefish. So like the body, the main body, I guess is what you would consider. It's also kind of their head, hence cephalopod. Anyway, they've adapted that to kind of turn into almost feet so they can stomp along the floor of the ocean with that and then a couple of their front tentacles. And then they also will pull out the top tentacles to kind of make a display, go, I'm being scary. And then they have the strobing effect, this beautiful strobing effect on their body in all sorts of amazing colors of fuchsia and purple and white and yellow and red and brown. And this is how we picture the flamboyant cuttlefish. Also, I'm describing this cuttlefish. The first time I saw it was on, I think maybe it was an episode of Nova or something. It was on something on PBS and they're describing it and the camera work makes it look like they're about six feet long. And then they zoom out and these little buddies are a couple inches long. Those are the girls, those are the big ones. The boys are actually a lot smaller, under an inch, some of them. And so these little buddies with a big punch and so because we usually see them via scuba or via an aquarium, we usually see them displaying these flamboyant displays. And so the assumption has long been that that's their usual kind of resting face. They're just always, they're always on. They've always got a display going. But a recent study from Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole sent a bunch of, many of them volunteer scuba divers down to collect thousands of hours of video watching flamboyant cuttlefish and trying to catch them kind of in their natural element. They wanted to see what their sex life was like, what their courtship was like, what their competition was like between each other and how they hide from predators. And they found that actually flamboyant cuttlefish spend nearly their entire life camouflaged. They blend in with the bottom of the ocean. They look just like another little sandy little outcrop. And so they're almost impossible to find until they start displaying. But in the blink of an eye, they can switch from some of the best camouflage you've ever seen to this flamboyant display. But this is what's really interesting. They only use it on certain occasions. They use it for courtship rituals or when they're fighting over a male or to defend themselves, flash at a threatening object that gets too close. That's usually the scuba diver. The males, while they are usually much smaller than females, you can see right now on the screen, if you're listening to this at home via podcast, look for the link to this story and click on the video because I watched it probably 10 times on loop. So the males are teeny tiny compared to the females. Yeah, they look like they could just be eaten. Yeah, totally. Oh yeah, and probably would be. So they approach and they court the female. They show these flamboyant displays. They have rituals, they have waves where they put their tentacles high up in the air and then they do quote-unquote kisses, which is when they kind of dart forward and press their arms into hers over and over and over. And the females tend to just ignore. The females will stay camouflaged. They just keep on doing what they're doing. Maybe they're foraging or hunting. And the males can do this for six to 52 minutes is what they discovered in the study. Now just for comparison, mating lasts about 2.89 seconds. So that's a pretty big temporal investment. It is, but once you're there, it's a good investment. Here's my spur, here's my spur, goodbye. Take it. Everybody needs to watch this video. Go to the link on our website and see it because it's pretty amazing. There was one part of that clip that was really crazy. The male has got a female on one side and it gets competition on the other. And on the female side, it's got these side flashings going on that are courtship. And on the side where the competitor is, it's doing flashing that is back off, man. Yeah, totally. So they can, they can. That is wild. Bilaterally, they can just spur themselves and do one display on one side and one on the other. And I love this little anecdote. In one case in the observations, the males were showing competition signals to one another and it ended abruptly because one of the males, while facing a female, waving and kissing, backed into a camouflage scorpion fish and was eaten. Oh no. No. You're not the only one. You're not the only one that's had a camouflage kind of fish. Remember that. Yeah, so then that's the males. The females, they actually lay their eggs while camouflaged. She pushes her eggs under a coconut shell and it fixes them. And when the hatchlings exit, they're big enough and self-sufficient enough that they're fully capable of camouflage and signaling by the time they leave the little coconut husk. So they are ready to go. The switching from camouflage to flamboyant takes about 700 milliseconds. That's not very much. It's less than a second. Yeah, it's very quick. So they are very effective at staying camouflaged for exactly as long as they need to or switching back to camouflage as soon as they need to. And so just mainly this is bringing the life of the flamboyant cuttlefish to light a little bit better, it's lovely. But also looking at the brain of a cephalopod and what this takes, the neuronal control of the thousands of chromatophores, which are the little skin cells that expand or contract to make all of the displays, including the camouflage in their skin, enable this signaling. And they're all turned off or on in less than a second. Like I said, about 700 milliseconds. And they can change it just that quickly. They can have the decision-making to figure out what they need to do in that amount of time. So this is an extremely complex mental capability that they have. It doesn't appear to be chemically signaled or anything like that, because if they're able to cut down the middle, say, I want this over here and this over here, that is based on observation, that is based on some logic going on. And we know that cuttlefish are really good at logic puzzles and memorization and all this other kind of stuff. So these guys are so stinkin' smart. I love it. Yeah. Smart cephalopods. We knew they were smart, but they're really smart. That's great. I wonder the rapidity with which it happens is impressive. But I wonder what kind of resources it takes. How much energy does it cost? That's a really good question. To be able to switch back and forth. What, is this something that is costly? Is it not? I mean, in fact that they're able to? And I wonder if you stay, if you stay camouflaged, once you do it, are you kind of like, okay, I'm resting. I'm resting in camouflage space. Or does it take constant energy to kind of keep it up? All of it, yeah. What is the resting state of a cuttlefish? We don't, I don't think we, I don't know if we know. Well, I don't know. I think, I feel like if the cuttlefish were doing a study on humans, they might, they might wonder like, looking at a piano player, like how do they, do they, must they concentrate on each finger as they play? I think there might be, I think there might be something that just is intuitive and effortless once you've got it to this point. Yeah. Could be. Thank you. And I'll just throw out there too, in case there are any other supple enthusiasts in the, who are listening or watching, that I did use the words tentacles and arms interchangeably. I know they're different. So cuttlefish have eight arms and two tentacles. And I don't know which is which in any of these processes. So you don't need to tweet at me about it. I know they have both. They use both words. Tenet, what is the difference between a tentacle and an arm for those who do not know? So if you watch a cuttlefish eating, for example, the arm is usually kind of on the outside. And then when they feed, the tentacle is what shoots out. It almost looks like a frog's tongue or something like that for feeding. So usually the tentacles have to do with feeding and reproduction, except for in the case of an octopus, they have a specified arm called a hectic codilus, which is for reproduction. So that it's, it's all complicated. Nobody said cephalopods were simple. Nobody said that. No. Okay, Blair, this is a, I got a question for you because you know what? We've come to the end of the show and we have a question. This week in science questions. I'm gonna play a video while I read this question. Those of you who are listening in the podcast audience, know that there's a video. It's dark, but it's a video of hedgehogs eating dinner. Question comes from Art Dogtjev. Hi Kirsten, Justin and Blair. I've got a question for you and it's something light and not even closely associated with COVID-19. Let's take a bit of a break from this dark topic for a moment. This video is the subject of my question. As you can see, he, she, kind of hard to tell is happy chomping liver sausages. I do follow Blair's advice not to touch wild animals. Yes, I imagine how terrifying it should be when somebody is several times bigger than you is touching you, but just can't resist to feed these folks. My question is for Blair. Is it okay to feed them with liver sausages? It seems like they enjoy it a lot but I'd love to hear a suggestion from an ex zookeeper. It's gonna make me be the bad guy. Yeah. So I have no idea what to hedgehogs eat. So I think in terms of that, so first of all, sausages are usually high in sodium and have preservatives in them and stuff like that, which are not good for wild animals. They're not good for us either really, but they're especially not good for wild animals. That being said, hedgehogs eat meat. They're omnivores. Generally they eat insects is their main thing, but their system can probably handle it fine, but we really should never feed wild animals. And there's a couple reasons for that. The main one being, if you give them a free lunch, in this case a free sausage, they will do less of the job they're supposed to do in the wild, which hurts them and it hurts the general ecosystem. So if they start looking for your sausages every night, instead of going and foraging for their own food, if you move, if they go up to another human who is freaked out and kicks them, or if they stop eating the food they're supposed to eat and they get an imbalance as a result in their dietary kind of plan, that can all have a negative impact on them. So it's really better to let them do their wild thing. Then there's the side of their actual job. So in the case of hedgehogs, they eat insects. That means that they are an important ecological check on insect populations. And so if you teach this hedgehog to eat sausages and they eat less insects, you're actually potentially inviting more insects onto your porch at night. Aha, well, these are all good points. This is why we should never feed squirrels. There's actually some of them at one of my complex that keep catching, feeding peanuts to squirrels. And it reduces their flight distance, which is not safe for them. They're more likely to get hit by a car or eaten by a cat or a dog or any number of bad things. So it reduces their flight distance. It reduces their desire to eat what they're supposed to eat in the wild. And then it reduces their impact on the wild that they're supposed to have. So don't feed wild animals. I know it's, they appreciate it, those individuals, but I know if I was told that I could eat junk food every day and I didn't know what it was doing to me, I would be pretty tempted. I wouldn't want to reach for that salad. So that's part of it. But yeah, it was better to leave wild animals wild. Leave the animals. Could you, can you put out a bowl of water? Yeah, definitely. And especially, so for example, in California, during the wildfires, it's really helpful to put water out in your backyard because those animals flee fires. You're giving them a respite, a safe space to stop and take a drink while they're running away from wildfires. So that's really good. In terms of, it also depends where you live. So if you're in a space where if you have a cat or a dog and there are raccoons nearby, don't put water out because that's gonna encourage them to hang out in your backyard. And you could have a nasty interaction one night when you take the dog out. So it all depends on the local animals in your area and how much you want them to hang around and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, water would be okay, but- You might leave the liver out for the hedgehogs because they're cute. And then a wild pack of coyotes might catch the scent. You're messing with a big indoors box of what shows up to have that meal. We're mountain lion. Don't want that in your neighborhood. You know, and if you just happened to order a box of beetles and other insects and spill it on your back porch, those hedgehogs, maybe then they'll come eat your beetles. Don't do that. That was the invasive beetles. Or worse, worse, you could end up with cats in your yard. That's true. All right, as cute as those hedgehogs are, maybe just leave them water, leave the feeding to the hedgehogs themselves. And if you see wildlife that you think are injured or need help, call a local wildlife rehab center. They can take care of it. You can also describe it and they'll be like, oh, I know that raccoon, it's fine. So call them, let them do it. They're the professionals. All right. Thank you, Blair. Yeah. Try your very professional response. I was just waiting for, well, they shouldn't eat liver paté or whatever. No, no, no. Yeah, that's right. Do you have a question out there? Do you have something that you need to know? What did find out if we can answer this question? Ask us, yes, ask us. Send me an email, Kirsten, at thisweekinscience.com or leave a message on Facebook. That's right, you can send us a message on Facebook. Make sure to put twists, questions, twists definitely in the subject line so it doesn't get what, Justin? Spam filtered into oblivion. Yeah, we're gonna say that again in a minute because you know what? We reached the end of the show. Thank you for listening. I do hope that you enjoyed the show and that you would recommend that others enjoy the show as well. I just realized that I don't have documents, documents open that I need to have open. Oh, Kiki, what have you done? And for those of you who have stuff, you can get stuff with twists on it. Why not? You've already got stuff, you're gonna get more stuff. You're gonna get rid of some of your old stuff and get new stuff. Get some stuff that says twists. That's not a bad thing and you can find that. Where can we find that? Some place where you're selling merchandise on our website. Our website, yeah, it has a zazzle and then that's great. We can do that. Okay, I have my thing now. Oh, good gracious. And what is this list you're about to read, Kiki? It's a list of names. It is a list of names. Of people who have contributed to the show. I would like to start with some shout outs because we have many people to thank because this show does not happen just on its own. Thank you, Fada, for helping with social media, for recommending tonight's guest and also for doing show notes on YouTube. Thank you, Identity Four, for recording the show and Gord, thank you so much for manning the chat room. Thank you, we really appreciate it. 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The end of another show. We did it. We've done it. Sadie, that was so cute, little dance party over there. Everybody dancing, getting down. You know, we talked about you today, Brian, so why don't you get in the video? Get in it, get in here. Emergency worker, front line person. My cat, my cat is like, she knows it's dog day or something, she's like, I'm gonna sit here and meow at you and claw and play and be ridiculous. Yeah, I saw her tail a lot tonight. She was back and forth and she was attacking the wall, she's clawing at my carpet, she's in a mood. Why aren't you in a mood? Sadie, okay, speaking of a mood. Oh no, you roll around on the floor, she was just trying to knock over my microphone. Animals, animals. So Gaurav Sharma asked a question in the chat room, which I could talk for several hours about, but instead I will give the short version. So the question was about the ethics of zoos and how you determine if a zoo is helping animal conservation or exploiting them for profit. So the bottom line is you have to know the difference between a zoo and an attraction. So in the United States and parts of Canada and South America and Mexico, we have the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, which is supposed to be, it started just America, but then they kind of branched out a tiny bit. But so there's an accrediting body. And in order to become accredited by this organization, when they have the European Association of Zoos and Aquariums in Europe, and then there's some like Middle Eastern countries that are part of that, then there's Waza, there's the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums. So like there's this, it covers the whole world. And in order to be accredited, not only do you have to prove, there's Waza, there's the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums. So you have to prove good animal care, like exceptional animal care. But on top of that, you also have to prove you're actively doing research, you're providing to conservation and that you have education and outreach programming. So you have to prove that you have all of these things going on. And the accreditation, it depends on the organization, but AZA for example, is every five years. And you can lose your accreditation, you can get your accreditation suspended, they are checking in on that constantly. And if they see one nail out of place, you are given a couple of weeks to fix that or you will lose your accreditation. It is very, very, very strict. So if a place is accredited, then you know the animals are being treated well and that it is a mission-based organization that is trying to do the right thing for animals. So ultimately, you have zoos as like research-based institutions, so we can learn about animals and so we can protect the wild ones better. We have them as kind of a modern day seed vault where we're trying to keep animals around so that we can breed them and then release them when the wild is a safer place for them. I know that sea level rise is happening and there's less habitat in some places, but there are other places where they're civil unrest and so it's not safe for animals there right now. And so like for example, huge swaths of giraffe habitat are places that giraffes can't live right now because they're actually, they're like succumbing to friendly fire in local civil unrest. So they can't go back there, but it's possible that in 2030, 50, hopefully last years, you could put giraffes back in that space, right? So you're keeping them for that. So you have the research arm, you have the kind of the last bastion for animals that are dwindling in number. You have animals that are currently being released into the wild, tigers, snow leopards, there are lots of antelope species are being released into the wild currently. My zoo does damselflies, which people don't think about a lot, but basically dragonflies that are a key part of our ecosystem here in California and they raise and release damselflies. My zoo also releases Western pond turtles and yellow-legged frogs and Yosemite toads and stuff like that. But then there's also the fact that not everyone can go on a safari in Africa. And we have done reporting on the show about how zoo visits and seeing animals in person has a measurably different impact on the conservation attitudes of people for the rest of their lives. And for those of you that are looking and want to hear more about this, I would point you to a couple of things. So there are those. So you could probably search the word zoo on twist.org and find a lot of these things. But there's also a really cool resource called why zoos and aquariums matter. Wazaam. Wazaam, I love it. I love our acronyms. This is something that started in 2007 and is still ongoing. It is a constant research effort that's going on across zoos and aquariums where they're actually measuring public action, attitudes, outcome, fundraising, like all of this kind of stuff across all these things. They've even recently started studying like STEAM concepts, like science concepts, things that kids are learning from zoos that they aren't getting from other places. And so you can actually see, they do this really good robust testing because there's thousands of zoos on the planet. So they do this robust testing so they can actually see the impact that zoos and aquariums are having on a population. Which is pretty cool. So it's science-based. It's not just like, oh, people like this. Like that is why zoos started. I'm not gonna say that that's not why they started. People did start by saying, I'm gonna capture a tiger because people are gonna wanna pay me to see that. That is why they started. But there has been a shift in the last, maybe 50, definitely 30 years to completely change the industry. And so the accrediting body is a really good way to kind of check, like before you're gonna go to a zoo, go to their website, see if they have a, that it's always at the bottom of their homepage. They have all of their kind of certifications and accreditations are always on their homepage. So you can check that. If there's not a seal that says that they are an accredited zoo or aquarium, then maybe don't give them your money because they might not be following some of those rules that helps to kind of make sure that you're supporting the right kind of situation. Yeah. In different countries, you see a lot of that. Like, yeah. I've got one more story. Oh, yeah? Yeah. So I didn't bring it in the show because it's an after show story because it was published back in June, June 3rd. Title, it's out of University of Liverpool, University of Reading. It is leading, the title of the study is leading the fight against the pandemic. Does gender really matter? So this picks up where we were sort of alluding to at the end of the last show or maybe it was in the after show that female led countries seem to be doing better. Well, this was actually studied back in June which you would kind of think is, well, that was too long ago. We would need to see what, but the study was thankfully about who shut down soonest and the effect up to that point in June. Turns out, yeah, they studied 194. Oh, the female leaders. Yeah. So they looked at 194 countries, 10% of which, a little less than 10%, 19 of which exactly, were female led and it turns out having a female leader in your country significantly reduces deaths. What was interesting about it is they were sort of playing with what might have been the reasoning, why that might be. They found that the female led countries didn't necessarily close sooner based on cases but absolutely closed sooner based on deaths. And what was sort of, and they compared to their neighbors, they compared, okay, but maybe it's a region that's closing sooner. Well, compared to their neighbors, they all close much sooner than any of their neighbors did, almost by a magnitude of deaths within the country. So they've kind of played around with the reasoning that might be behind this. Some of it was saying, well, maybe women are less risk averse, which sounds like it could be a thing except that the reason that the men didn't close their countries might be because they were being risk averse towards the economy versus to human life. And so it kind of does come down to this balance of prioritization of what is risk and what are you risking? And they sort of alluded to the idea that it could be just women or leaders or more empathetic to their population than male leaders. Well, maybe women are more willing to make difficult decisions that might be unpopular at the time. Or they don't necessarily feel like they have to look tough or strong, you know. Oh, maybe. I was thinking more like, you know, the classic. That is a tough, strong decision to make. I'm going to close the borders and it's going to hurt the economy. I know that. And I'm going to be bold enough and brave enough to say, yeah, yeah, but that's a different kind of tough. That's a different kind of tough. I'm thinking more of like Bolsonaro and Trump, where they're just like, you know, they strut around and, you know. Yeah, but you can handle it. Yeah, you can handle it. It'll be fine. It's not a problem. Also, she's more of the opposite of tough. That's dealing from a place of weakness in my opinion. What I'm hearing is the stereotypical, I'm not saying everyone falls in this, but the stereotypical, like, I don't know. It's been my experience that the stereotype with like moms and dads is that like mom is kind of like more hard on the kids because she's around more or whatever reason. I don't know. But like, you know, it's usually like, go ask your father or like, you know, I don't know. This like weird thing that's like the mom is the, is the kind of the harder one on the rules and the dad will give you chocolate cake for breakfast sort of thing. That might be just your household, but. No, no, I don't think, that was like, that was, this is a common trope in like sitcoms and stuff too, is that the mom is kind of more the rules men, right? I just feel like that might be part of the like, I'm gonna make the tough decision, the unpopular decision to feed everyone broccoli, even though that they don't want it. Yeah, okay, okay. You see what I'm saying? Okay, now I'm trying to explain it a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, it's delicious. But it is, I think a fascinating thing that we sort of just talked about it anecdotally last week, like, yeah, it seems like a lot of these female led countries handle, I mean, Denmark is one of them, it's open completely because they had a very fast reaction as soon as people were going, we were starting to die. And it was a few deaths. And it was enough to say, hey, of course we had the example of other countries that hadn't closed. So it could be some of us are, but they looked at stuff like GDP, they compared to neighbors, they did a pretty, I think a pretty good job of including a lot of peripherals to make this, to see if this was actually taking place. And absolutely it is, if you put women in charge, we have less death in a crisis. Ah, it can only be a good thing. I'm covered in cat hair right now. Shetty cats. Yes, put the moms in charge. That's what I think. I need to go to bed. I have an early morning tomorrow. Concur. I have a video shoot tomorrow. Oh, fancy. Fancy. Yes, for a program called Ancient Mysteries Decoded. So is it through Zoom then? It's got to be Zoom, I'm assuming, or a video thing. Yeah, so it's gonna be, it's interesting because it's definitely a little bit different. There's gonna be one camera person who will have to stay at least two meters away from, we have to stay apart from each other the whole time. The producer who's going to be prompting me to say things is in England and will be over Zoom. Oh, that's funny. Yeah, whereas in the past, the producer would have been right there. But so there will be one camera person. They will have to wear a mask the entire time. I'm gonna be the only person not wearing a mask because I'll be on camera, but yeah. Wow. But yeah. Wow. I went to a doctor yesterday, didn't get a COVID test, but I got no temperature, clean villa health, nothing looked funny. So I'm fine, no reason to test anywhere. I think he's asking how the fires are around us if we haven't already talked about it. So the fires are in my backyard of where I was a week ago, but they're now 6,000 miles away. Yeah, today was better, at least air-wise for me than it has been. In the Bay Area. Yeah, in the Bay Area. The air quality in the Bay Area has been like what they call moderate, which basically means it hurts to run, it hurts you. Like it feels like you're lung surgery. Which is rough because if I'm not mistaken, San Francisco is by an ocean and often has the wind coming in from the ocean, pushing. So that's part of the problem is I guess for the past couple of days, the predominant wind has been coming from land towards the ocean, which is unusual. Yeah. Add it to the list of unusual things like 12,000 dry lightning strikes in three days. That's also unusual. But yeah, so at least for me personally, the air was much better today because it was wet. It was like there was lots of fog hanging around the Bay Area today. So that was another thing is they were saying that was a nice, wasn't a full respite, but it kind of slowed down the progress quite a bit for firefighters today, because it was just kind of moist all over the area. I'm getting pictures back from the hometown of cars covered in ash. The Central Valley is just that. It's a valley, it's a big bowl. If the wind is not blowing very much, even if it is actually, the valley fills with the smoke of the fires that didn't happen in the valley. Even if the fires are really far away, it collects and drops into the valley so the air quality becomes, I mean, the last fire season, I was on a drive in the middle of the day and the visibility was like a thick, tully fog of smoke. So it gets really bad there, yeah. Yeah, when I was camping last week and then we came home early, because the fire started, it started getting dark at like 4 p.m. Yeah. I think it's time to go. Yeah, it's, yeah, there are fires all over the place. There are still lots and lots of fires burning all over California, all over Southern Oregon. Like there's fires, fires, fires, fires, fires, fires, everywhere. The lightning was wild because, I mean, I know it's not unheard of in the Bay Area, but not like that. That was wild. That was like, I've been in Florida and in Georgia for lightning storms like that. It looked like that. It did not look like something I've seen because it was hot, it was like warm. It was like 80-something degrees, a light rain that was intermittent, but constant thunder and lightning. I have not seen that in the Bay Area in my whole life. Yeah, yeah. It was wild. Okay, for geeky sake, I think you should say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Say good night, Justin. I can't. Good morning. Say good night to me because it's not for me. Good night to Blair. Good morning to everybody else. And good night. Good night, Keene. Good night, everyone. Thank you for another wonderful show and everyone stay safe, stay well and know that we appreciate you. Thank you for being here and we will see you next week with more. Happy National Dog Day. Happy Jealous Cat's Day. It's every day. Good night.