 We have to finish by midnight. That's right. This week in science needs to complete our show before midnight. Is it midnight Eastern time, midnight Pacific? I'm going to say I'm going to say very likely Pacific time since Google is headquartered on the West Coast. So well, we will know in 45 minutes. That's right. We'll either finish a show or we won't. Right. Everyone, this is this week in science. Welcome to another episode. We apologize for our late start, but we've had some technical difficulties. I am now on Wi-Fi, but, you know, we'll make it work. Let's see. Yeah, I need to go back to the top of the screen here. We're here. That's good. Here we are. Yeah. Are we ready to do a show? Did you pick a title? Oh, yeah, I forgot these two stuff. There we go. Okay. I'm ready to go. Are you ready to go? Yeah. Are we ready? Are we ready? Justin's not ready anymore. I'm always ready. I was born ready. I know. Born that way. I know. Starting the show in three, two, this. Is twist this week in science episode number 732 recorded on Wednesday, July 31st, 2019. Are you ready to science? I'm Dr. Kiki. And tonight we will fill your head with salt water, wings, and old parents. But first disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer, picture for a moment. If you will, large spinning saucer-shaped spaceships. The wobbly, erratically flying 49 Ford hubcap looking things. And really big, several city blocks, a cool country mile, lights flashing different colors. Hovering, now hovering over all of the capitals of the world. And suddenly, everywhere at once, on every kind of device, a message. On the radio, the television via text messages and chat rooms, streaming via Netflix on the web tubes. And yes, if you pick up that landline that is ringing in the background, you will hear the message there too. Humans of Earth be warned. The future of your world is in danger. You are at critical levels of carbon in your atmosphere. If you fail to reduce your carbon emissions now, life on your planet will be destroyed. You have been warned. Oh, and by the way, here's cures for several cancers, hundreds of other diseases, and a technology that turns sunlight directly into electricity. And then, just like that, they were gone. Would humanity take seriously the words of these mysterious alien visitors? With their superior technology and generous sharing of cures to human misfortune, it seems plausible that humans might take such a warning seriously. But then, why is it that they don't heed the advice of Earth scientists who have made the same warnings backed by evidence, mind you, and not flashing lights, and have cured many cancers, ended 1,000 human diseases, and developed technologies that actually do turn sunlight into electricity? Why are they ignored? Because people enjoy a show. And the show people enjoy most, not most. Is this weekend science coming up next? Oh, the show people enjoy moist. Wait, is it not working? No, can you hear music? Because we can't. No music. Yeah, I can hear music. Oh, no. Oh, no, there's no music over here. It's fine. It's all right. Everyone pretend. This weekend science. This weekend science. Science, science, science, science, no. The show started, and it's going to be continuing now. Good science, you kicking Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. I would love to welcome you to this week's episode of This Week in Science. We are back again with a full list of science stories. We have our little tote bag of science filled to the brim. We went shopping in the science produce department. Science produced a lot this week. Okay, I'm going to stop that right now. All right, let's get into the show. I brought some great stories tonight. I've got stories about salty batteries. I have stories about baby bacteria and tests. What do you have for us, Justin? I've got old parents, anti-cancer probiotics. For the love of mosquitoes, I've got a story and YPE evaluations. Physical education evaluations are potentially a waste of time. And Blair, what's in the animal corner? Oh my goodness, I have beautiful, gorgeous, colorful bird wings. I have heroic sisterly ants, and I have a cuttlefish microbiome. A cuttlefish microbiome? Let's get to cuddling those fish later. Let's jump into the show. And I do want to remind you all that as we do that, I would love to remind you that if you're not subscribed to Twist yet, you can easily find us all places. Podcasts are found, Spotify, Pandora, radio.com, Spreaker, tune in, the Google, the Apple, all the places. You can also find us on Facebook, YouTube, and lookfortwist.org. That's our website if you need more information. All right, science time. Let's talk about tests, all right? There's a conference going on right now. Tests is NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. It has been put in place to look specifically for exoplanets, those planets that orbit around distant stars. We in our solar system are just planets, but every other planet gets to be an exoplanet, if it's elsewhere, beyond our solar system, yes. So the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite Test takes a look at dimming of light that comes from these distant stars. And if the light from stars is dimming, it means that, hey, maybe something passed between us and that star. So they look a little bit more closely, and sometimes they can get an eye on the wobble of that star as well. And the wobbling of the star also indicates that there are massive bodies gravitationally influencing the rotation of that star as well. So they have all these methods of looking at the light, the frequencies of light that they're able to see, the intensity of the light, that wobble of the star, and they can come up with all sorts of findings in terms of what might be around these distant stars. Well, at this conference that's going on, there is a lot of science that's being reported on from its most recent runs. New exoplanets are being reported. We have now found a new hot Neptune. It's a Neptune-sized planet that is pretty close to its star, and it's really hot. It's very, very hot. It's a hot one. What they think is that this Neptune, this Neptune, gas giant, very large planet, about the size of Neptune, right, that it may have actually gotten its start further out away from its star and migrated inward, and that this might be the last throes of its atmosphere, that as it gets closer to its star, that this Neptune, this large Neptune, is actually losing its atmosphere and becoming a little bit less with every passing day. But anyway, new hot Neptune, and it's a fairly distant way. But we have also found some exciting news closer to home. We have discovered the first nearby super-earth. What? One more people who can fly but they're allergic to kryptonite? Well, you know, maybe if it's possible for life to have gotten a start there in the first place. This super-earth, it's super because it's bigger than our planet. So it's rocky, they think. It fits the bill to be a rocky planet. But it's fairly close to its star. I mean, we're seeing these planets because they are transiting in a fairly quick periodicity. So this planet is probably making rotations or orbits around its star fairly often, about every 50 or so days. And so this super-earth is only about 31 light-years away, which is fairly close. It may be pretty hot because it is probably fairly close into its star. So it's earth-like in its rocky composition. Doesn't sound like it's in the Goldilocks zone? Or is it just on the very end? No, it could be because it's a dimmer star than our own star that they're dealing with. So maybe this planet has a thick atmosphere, or may have a thick atmosphere. This super-earth that they're positing has been, they think it's a rocky, rocky earth. And it was discovered by these wobbles in its stars, in its star's rotation. And so this planet, GJ357D, might be able to maintain liquid water on its surface. May not, but we now know we have a target. Something to look at when the James Webb Space Telescope comes online. Someday. Yes. Someday. Yes. Yeah, so maybe in the habitable zone, but yeah. It sounds like a wonderful kind of a situation, though. If you have a 50-day year, first of all, you get to multiply your age by seven, and that's how old you are. And then on top of it, if you don't like the weather, yeah, I'm a fall person. You only have to wait like a few months. Yeah, today was really hot. Tomorrow will be really, really cold. It could be. They also think they've discovered another, there's a report also, of Tess having discovered a trio of planets around a system about 75 light years from Earth. It's a system called TOI 270. And the star at the center of this system is a red dwarf about half the size of our sun. It's brighter than most of the stars, nearby stars that we know host planets. So it's also stable, which is very important. Means that the light from this star doesn't vary much. And so that lack of significant variation could allow life to get started. We don't exactly know what these planets look like because we've noticed them transiting around their star. The closest TOI 270B is on a 3.4-day orbit. Too fast. Too fast. The other is on a 2O. Get nasty on that planet. 270C is on a 5.7-day orbit. And it's about only about, so Earth is about one astronomical unit, what we term an astronomical unit from the sun. TOI 270C is a half an astro, or a point, not even a half, 0.05 astronomical units from its sun. So these things are close to the star and they're zipping around this thing. And the third planet in this triumvirate of planets that they've discovered, TOI 270D, is on a 11.4-day orbit still. So something just occurred to me that I have to ask. So all of these potentially in the habitable zone or similar to Earth, sorts of conversations that we have, it seems like a lot of them have very different periods, different kind of rotations. So my question is, even if, hypothetically, atmosphere was good, even if liquid water could happen, even if it's the right temperature, there's a really big barrier to terraforming if seasons are in the thing, like we expect them. Because then plants can't do their thing. It's sort of like saying though that, no, that's, here's where I disagree. We have the plants are the way they are because of the planet they're on. Right, but I'm saying if you're bringing something over there. But if you had a cycle that was day and night and day and night and day and night, for instance, take out all the other stuff for the seasons. But just day and night happened every four hours or every three hours. The plants on planet Earth would be fine even. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about seasonality because that's how plants reproduce. Here on Earth because we have those seasons. Yeah, so my question is, if you're bringing stuff over there, I'm not saying like, oh, nothing could evolve. I'm talking about terraforming. Yes. So we're not thinking about terraforming any of these planets. I mean, the idea would be, right. Maybe we could find a planet that would be habitable for humanity at some point in the future. But more, it's the, is there another planet on which life has evolved? Right. We're not talking, we're not talking this terraforming at, I mean, Mars maybe because we think it's a dead planet. And maybe it could be a little thing that we could, you know, our vacation home in the solar system. But the thing that we got to look for is that list of things that you pointed out kind of got me thinking. The one thing that you didn't mention was it needs to have plate tectonics. It would likely have to have thermal vents. I mean, the chemistry of turning minerals into something that could then lead to life is one of the major theories. Very heavily focused though, probably the best evidence is thermal vents. So you also need plate tectonics. You need to have an active volcanic undersea situation to reproduce the chemistry, but at least how life got started on this planet. For this planet. And so the way life got started here informs a lot of our ideas about how it would start anywhere. An example of one. Right? An of one. But in terms of what we're doing right now, we're just looking for things that could possibly, first, exoplanets, things in habitable zones around their stars, right? Are there planets? So some of these planets, these one, these TOI system planets, they're so close to their star and they are very likely tidally locked because of their own orbital dynamics with each other because they're so closely split placed. And so they're probably not even rotating on their axes. They are probably, one side of the planet is hot and one side of the planet is cold. And there's been a hypothesis that planets like these could be habitable around that transition zone between the night and day side. That that thin band of transition could possibly be suitable for life. So instead of life forming all around, all around the world, it would form in a ring this light equator. I'm going to hand this off to any of our listeners that write fiction because I know there's quite a few of them. That would be a great science fiction novel if it doesn't already exist. It's about a planet where life only exists in this very thin band and then something happens where you have to venture into the cold side or the hot side or both. Absolutely. It would be so cool. But anyway, there's a lot of news. I mean, what I wanted to just get out with this first batch of these exoplanet reports coming from the TESS craft, this satellite that's looking, it is looking at nearby systems. So we are really looking at things that are closer to us as opposed to further away. Kepler has been looking at stuff that's fairly far away. And more recently closer in, but this TESS satellite is really honing in on things that are not that far from our own system. And so it's very exciting because these are things that are in our neighborhood. These are exoplanets that we will be able to confirm visually when we have light-based telescopes that come after TESS, the next batch of telescopes that we put into orbit, things that we can look at in the sky. And who knows? Maybe we will find planets with thick atmospheres or with rocky planets with water on their surfaces in some of these habitable zones. And will these super-Earths are the ones that we are really going to be keeping tabs on and coming back to later. Moving forward. What? Like a little bit small. It's just slightly smaller planet. One with a little less gravity. Right, so this... It's an age. I feel like... Yeah, so the super-Earth... It's a little less gravity, that'd be nice. Yeah, it's interesting because it's like... Oh, a super-Earth. It can't be too much more super because if we were to go there or even think if there were advanced life on that planet, it would be difficult for any advanced life to create vehicles that would get them off of their planet because of the gravity holding them down. The more massive the planet, the heavier the gravity. And so if we were to go to these planets, we wouldn't necessarily be able to land the planets would smush us or we would get there and we wouldn't be able to get back off. So there are some interesting things to think about moving forward. I don't want to be smushed. So if there's a very tiny planet where every once in a while toddlers on a teeter-totter, they lose one. They have to think about muckled down well enough and they just keep going. There they go. There they go. Oh, dear. Well, one thing that is important as we think about any of these movements into outer space, finding life elsewhere, we think about sustainability, right? How are we going to sustain ourselves on this planet? Well, one of the ways is coming up with more sustainable energy and a new paper out of Stanford University researchers have published in American Chemical Society's ACS Omega, describing a new battery they have designed that makes use of something that's called blue energy. Got any idea what blue energy might be? Any guesses? Time and space. I don't know. Not so complex. Not so complex. Think simpler. All right. Blue number five. Closer. Okay. Blue like the ocean. This is energy that comes from seawater. Energy that comes from the diffusion gradient of salts from seawater, saltwater, to freshwater. So a battery that could be built to produce energy in places where salty ocean water mingles with fresh water. This could produce lots of renewable energy. I love this. I love this. Now, why are you loving this? We're talking about putting a gradient power plant where salmon would need to go into the river. Not necessarily. What they have already done in their proof of concept with this paper is co-oriented a test energy, a test battery at a coastal wastewater treatment plant. And so this is something that I find very interesting. Wastewater treatment is a huge energy sink. We need lots of energy to treat our water so that we can either get rid of it and not put just waste dumps into the ocean but or just have fresh water again that we can drink. Let's have more water for our farms and for our own personal uses. This battery makes use of known technologies. This isn't like an advanced idea. It's just tapping into ideas bringing different people together. And one of the co-authors, Craig Crittle, he's a professor of civil and environmental engineering and he has a lot of experience developing technologies for wastewater treatment. And so he came together with these other researchers who are material science and engineering scientists with this idea. They tested a prototype of this battery and they found that over 180 cycles at the Palo Alto Regional Water Quality Control Plant seawater collected nearby that uses that exchanges wastewater effluent and seawater that is collected from Half Moon Bay. Over 180 cycles, battery materials maintained 97% effectiveness in capturing the salinity gradient energy. And they argue that while you could, yes, put this technology, this battery technology all over the place, but that would, like you said, just in getting the way of things like salmon runs and we'd have to be thoughtful but wastewater treatment is energy intensive and also San Francisco, Los Angeles there have been California has experienced power outages because of fires. Climate change is leading to power outages. When the power goes down wastewater treatment plants don't have the energy to keep making clean water. And so could this be a new way to maintain a power resource for these wastewater plants? They say every cubic meter of fresh water that mixes with seawater produces about 0.65 kilowatt hours of energy that powers the average American home for about 30 minutes. Theoretically, at these coastal wastewater treatment plants they could recover 18 gigawatts of energy that could power more than 1700 homes for a year. Or it could just run the treatment plant. Or it could just run the treatment plant. Yeah, which would be great. Just self-sustaining treatment plants be great. Yeah. And the advance here, like I said, this is not a new idea. Other groups have tried to use this blue energy, the salt water gradient, the salt salinity gradient energy. But this is the first that uses electrochemistry as opposed to membranes or pressure. And so it's simple. It could be robust and cost effective and it's pretty basic. So it's potentially something that could be scaled up and that's what they need to do. The researchers are working now on a scaled version to see how the system functions with multiple batteries working simultaneously. So this is something to keep our eyes on, people. Yes. I love it. I love the idea that obviously everyone who listens to the show knows I'm a really big proponent of solar energy. But the really important thing here is that it's not one. We're not going to pick one horse and just bet on that all the way. It's all of the stuff. And this is a perfect example of a space where you have energy ripe for the taking right there. Right there. You can just take it. And if you have that technology, then yes, we're going to have solar panels on every new building, Fingers Cross. But we can also have water treatment plants make their own energy. It's all of the answers. I love it. Yeah. So I think it's exciting. That's why I wanted to talk about it. So I'm looking forward to hearing about what they find, Fingers Cross, because this is the kind of stuff that we need moving forward. Positive technological advancement that, like you said, checks all the boxes and can move us forward to a more sustainable future. Fast. Let's do it. All right, Justin, what do you have? Starting off tonight, I've got UT Southwestern researchers showing that editing the bacterial populations in the guts of mice can reduce inflammation associated I can never say, colorectal cancer. So they published this week Journal of Experimental Medicine. As a novel cancer prevention strategy for individuals with chronic intestinal inflammation. So this is IBD inflammatory bowel disease. It affects 1.6 million-ish Americans equally divided pretty much between those with ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease, according to Dr. Ezra Burstein, professor of internal medicine molecular biology at Southwestern. So people with IBD have higher risks of developing colon cancer. It's a big number. It's like three to seven fold with the rest of society experiences. Quoty voice here from Ezra. Most significant finding in this study is that manipulating the intestinal microbiome is sufficient to affect the development of tumors. One can envision a time in which medications that change the behavior and composition of the bacteria that live in the gut will be part of the treatment for IBD. So what's sort of interesting is that they kind of discovered that there was a metabolic activity within the lining of the gut within certain bacteria that trigger or are related to IBD. And that with a water soluble tungsten salt, they were able to affect the change, basically disable this effect. And so reduced inflammation and then over time, of course, less tumors. So this is that you don't want to take this water soluble tungsten salt. It's very toxic. But what it did is it worked. And so now they have an initial look at a pathway that they can pursue to come up with the medicine. They know what they need to target now. They found one thing that targets it. They'll find something or the next step is to find something a lot less toxic that they can use to affect tumor formation by directly attacking something within the microbiome, which I, of course, think that's just fascinating. I wonder though, do we really know enough about what's going on there? I mean, this editing of the microbiome, attacking the microbiome, I feel like we still don't know enough about it yet. I mean, this is like, okay, in mice, but what's going to happen in people? So it's building off a study that was done in people in nature last year where they found an association with the thing that they're targeting, with the microbes in the microbiome. That are associated with IBD that aren't in people that don't have it, basically. We're calling it the bad microbes that seem persistent in these patients. So there is, it is not a complete shotgun method where they're just creating an effect and getting a result and saying, aha, this makes that happen. They were targeting a sort of microbes with priors, if you will, that were chief suspects. So this is getting, it's becoming more and more targeted. If we were having this conversation five years ago, yeah, we would get an effect, we wouldn't know why. We know it's microbiome associated, related. We don't know why, but now they're starting to do, this is in, we're getting into the drill down phases of starting to figure out cause and effect of certain microbial populations. It's not to, it's still anything that you're buying over the counter is very generalistic and you can probably get it from eating yogurt because that's what it's known. Yogurt seems to have a good effect. So we'll use those microbes and that's not the whole story and there's gonna be a lot more layers to it. We're gonna get into, at some point, we'll be talking about viruses, microphages and how they play within this ecosystem of the gut. But yeah, this is a huge thing. It's 1.6 million just here in the United States. Crohn's disease, obviously a very debilitating disease that's everywhere in the world. But finding something that can target, that targets at the point of inflammation that can then reduce the effectiveness of the, or the causation of the inflammation and come to better outcomes. We're getting there, we're getting there. Yeah, there was another study this week that I think is interesting along these lines that, oh, what was it? It's something related to cutting down acid production in the gut. So when you take antacids, that they've found a connection to increased allergy medication. Yeah, so doctors are prescribing antacids to people and then within a certain amount of time, those individuals are getting more prescriptions for allergy medications than people in the United States. So important, yeah, fantastic. Which is interesting because we talk, inflammation and what's happening, and this seems to be, like I'm going to guess that it's a microbiome. They haven't said this is a microbiome thing, but this is what I'm guessing. So yeah, and you have to wonder, is the, are the antacids harming the microbiome that are then leading to allergy problems? Or is the acid reflux a symptom of a larger microbiome problem? Or is the acid reflux a symptom of an allergy problem? Wow, could mean a lot of things. It could mean a lot of things. Yeah, there's a lot to dig into, but yeah, this inflammation is such an inflammation. It's this huge issue. Gonna work with it. So are we ready for that next time in the show? The part of the show where we love to call it. There's Animal Corner. I don't know if this music's gonna play. There's Animal Corner with Blair. Thanks for that introduction. I'm really excited about this story related to how the color of bird feathers could help them fly. Yes, you heard that correct. This is a study out of University of Ghent, which Kiki, we decided was where? It's in Belgium. Belgium, there we go. There we go. So University of Ghent in Belgium, they found evidence that suggests that the color of birds feathers somehow help with their ability to fly. So they looked at taxidermied wings of birds. They were looking at black, back blacked gulls. Gannets and offspring. So animals, bears that fly for long periods of time. And they took these taxidermied wings, put them in a winged tunnel, heated them with infrared lights, and then tested them to see what happened. So this is a lot of things. So let's unpack it. They wanted to see if wing color had an impact on flying efficiency. They noticed, to no surprise of any of us listening, that the dark feathers got hotter than the lighter colored feathers. They gained heat faster than the lighter colored feathers as well. Okay, just like if you go outside in a white t-shirt or a black t-shirt. All the same stuff that we've learned about wavelengths and all that good stuff. But specifically wings that had white or light colored feathers near their bodies and dark or black feathers on the rest of their wings saw a benefit in the wind tunnel. The temperature differences were as large as nine degrees between the black and white feathers on the same wings. Enough to create a convection current over the wing, which moved the bird's body outward, moved along the bird's body outward and along the wing. So this created a boost in airflow, which in theory makes flying more efficient. Now these birds in particular they were looking at, I mentioned fly for very long periods of time. They also will ride air currents where they don't have to flap their wings. They'll be able to stay airborne for hours with almost never flapping their wings so they can ride the air currents. But this is a theory that adds to that, which indicates that this potential boosted airflow from the convection currents allows them to stay up even better, increasing lift, and it creates a difference in drag. So this is on the surface astounding. How does color have anything to do with flight? But when you look closer, it makes perfect sense. It does, but it's fascinating because so often you think we think of it visually as in terms of a visual signal, which doesn't mean that it's not, but we have a tendency to think of it in terms of the things that we perceive as opposed to the things that we just have to measure, right? Yeah, in the animal kingdom we're very focused on the colors of things having to do with camouflage, pretty much across the board. Camouflage or sexual selection, those are the main reasons for colors. But in the show, particularly we've talked time and time again about zebra stripes and all the different potential benefits there, which also recently a new study came out that claimed it had to do with convection currents if listeners recall, but so this is an important reminder that there are other things going on besides just visual cues. And I think the next step of this study, if I were in charge, would be to look at the flying patterns of birds compared across feather color patterns. Because if you find that birds that have this particular pattern are birds that stay aloft for a very long time, don't do a lot of flapping, then it would directly follow this. So it would just be a good kind of check of this expectation, but it would also potentially give a good idea of kind of the which came first out of it all. Was this a selection that a selective pressure as a result of being able to stay up for longer without having to put as much effort out? Or was it coloration that they already had because of sexual selection or camouflage that had this secondary benefit? Probably both. Perhaps both. The selection work, right? But they were lofters and the lofters that were the better lofters had this distinct coloration and they're interesting. I wonder now if this does play out, if they do more tests and they do find more benefits to it and actual physical effects. I wonder if it will influence our airplanes. I was wondering the same thing if they're like, I know you want those particular colors for your logo, but it will actually be better for fuel efficiency if we did this. Yeah, absolutely. Could it play a role? And speaking of things that act other ways than we'd anticipate, I have a story about seed harvesting ants and their kind of dedication to one another out in the trenches as it were. So these are ants, desert seed foraging ants, varro, meser, pergon die, pergon de, pergon die. And these guys are very, they're very, very large colonies. They have 20,000 ants that'll emerge all at once when they leave their colony. And it looks, they say like black toothpaste coming out of a tube. They're so tightly packed. And they only have about a couple hours to get the seeds that they need to keep their colony alive because they live in the desert. So it gets really, really hot. So they just have this sweet spot in the middle of the day when they know that they can go get food. And so they have to kind of pack a lot of punch in that very short amount of time. But there's something else afoot out in the desert where they go and that is spiders. So this is a researcher from Arizona State University who was simply trying to count the number of ants in a colony. And she found that at 4am when the ants came out to forage, so did spiders. They would wander around through the desert until they discovered a trail of ants and then would quickly build webs. If an ant got trapped, this is what kind of surprised the researcher, other ants would gather around the web and tear down that web to rescue the victim. Oh, wow. That's a pretty interesting idea. Yeah. Once the web got pulled apart, the ant was still in this giant tangle of thread. So they just kind of demolished the web. The ant was still totally wrapped up. And then they would carry this entangled ant back to the nest where they would then clean them off. Listen, no ant gets left behind on my watch. Exactly. On under my command. We're going in. We're going back. We're getting that ant out of there. There are more than 16,000 ant species on this planet. And rescue behavior has only been recorded in five. So maybe we're just not seeing it, but generally speaking, these have only been found in colonies that are usually very small. So one example is the Metabelle ant, which we've talked about on the show before. They only have 13 new nest mates per day. Their queen only makes 13 new ants a day, which means if you lose an ant, that is almost a 10% loss in that day's growth of your colony. So you definitely want to go back and grab that. But this colony, this seed harvesting ant creates 650 ants a day. So one ant caught in a web does not sound worth the time to grab them. So that's why this is kind of unusual. So what also is unusual is that if they got a seed stuck in the spider web, the ant would continue to walk. They would try to grab the seed and walk with it, but eventually they would give up. They wouldn't tear down the web for a seed. So they'll tear down the web for an ant, but not the seed. What is happening here? So it almost sounds like the argument then is that there's enough ants that like, we're not leaving any ant behind on my watch. Now not all of us are going to make it home. But it's a principle of the thing, not the numbers that count. So there's a couple of things happening here that might indicate kind of different motivations for why they rescue these ants. So one is that there's just so many of them that actually there's power in numbers. They're really close to one another. They're like that black toothpaste I mentioned. So they're so close to each other that it's pretty easy to pick up on a distress signal. And they send out this distress signal if they get caught. So if there's lots of ants nearby, it's pretty quick work to tear down that web and get on their way. They're not really in any danger. So that's one idea. But the other thing that's really interesting is that when they took these ants into the lab and did some tests with them, they found that the ants can't actually see the webs at all. They only know they're there by receiving a chemical signal from a trapped ant. So they only know there's webs because somebody shouts out, I'm stuck. It must be a web. This reminds me a little bit of a previous story where not all the ants are working. Like most of the ants are just kind of chilling out a lot of the time. These must be ants that are already out dedicated on a forage to have found this. So it's not like there's ant reserves that get called in like, okay, hey, none of you are doing anything. Here's something for you to do. This is actually a changing or a repurposing of their duties, of ones that are already actively engaged and attached. So you're right, but there's something extra here. The foragers are different sizes and almost always the rescuers are the largest ants in the group, which makes it sound like they are kind of like bodyguards. What I find interesting though is I mean, you mentioned this is this spider that is hunting them specifically looks for their trails and then it builds its webs in the path of the trails to catch the ants. So the spider knows the ants, the ants know the spider. And so this seems as though this is like a predator-prey relationship that probably goes back quite a ways. Oh yeah, we're in the midst of an evolutionary arms race for sure. So there's a couple of things happening here. One, the seed that gets caught in the web cannot send a distress signal. So they only know the web is there if an actual ant gets caught. Second, we have these larger ants that are acting like bodyguards, it looks like. Third, they have this teeny tiny foraging window. So actually, even though they produce 650 ants a day, every single ant counts because of that teeny tiny window to get food. Which means it's worth saving individuals, carrying them back to the nest and cleaning them off if that's one more body that can get seeds tomorrow. So all of these things together create this very complex society and work structure where it is no ant left behind. I like it. You all matter. In fact, if I was to be any kind of an ant, I picked that one. Yeah, I don't know. The ones where a lot of them get to just chill out most days also sounds good. I think it could be in this colony too, you never know. Maybe it's the big ants. They're back at the nest like bodybuilding when they beef up in case they later on in life. I'm going to be strong for you. There's such big, strong jaws. Anyway, I think it's time for us to take a break. It's time for us to take a break this week in science. We'll be back with more science in the second half of the show. We've got old parents and a little bit of bacteria for you. Stay tuned for more this week in science. What to do right now about the music? Oh, I could play it. No way. It's not working. Do you want this here? Here. Thank you for listening to this week in science. We love that you spend part of your week with us learning about science, letting your curiosity get the better of you. Do you have questions? Why don't you ask us? That's right. You can send us emails. You can find us on Twitter. Blair Baz. She's Blair's menagerie on Twitter. I'm Dr. Kiki and Justin is what's Justin's Twitter again? It's at Jackson Fly. At Jackson Fly. That's right. Thanks, Blair. So we've got some social media where you can find us if you want to talk with us. Ask us questions about science. We love that. You can also get a monthly newsletter from us. So if you go to twist.org, there's a pop up that will pop up if you'd like to subscribe to our newsletter. Or if the pop up is blocked because of pop up blockers you may have installed in your browser, you can send me an email. Kirsten at thisweekinscience.com tell me that you want to receive the newsletter and I will put you on the list. Also, what's going on? What is going on? You can find ways to support twists at our website twist.org. If you go to twist.org, you will find links to our Zazzle Store. That's right. We have a Zazzle Store and there we go. There's our website and that wonderful newsletter subscription thing. You can find the link to our Zazzle Store. Click on that link. It'll take you two hour. Oh, and I've got pop ups blocked. Let's just keep that going. I don't know why it's doing that today. Our Zazzle Store contains all sorts of products, tote bags, shirts, key chains, luggage tags, mugs, hats. Many items have the twist logo on them. Others are covered in beautiful, wonderful art that has come from past year's Blair's Animal Corner calendars. Peruse what we have there by yourself a gift. Do you need a tote bag? A Kiwi tote bag? You can find it there and a portion of the proceeds does go to supporting twist. Also, to support twist, you can click on our Patreon link. Go to Patreon where you will be able to click on the red button to become a patron and be able to donate once monthly at an amount of your choosing. We start at $3.14 a month. You get a patch. We say thank you at $10 a month or more. We will say thank you. We'll thank you by name at the end of our show. $25 a month and you'll get a twist t-shirt in the mail. So have you been wanting that twist t-shirt? You can go to Patreon and buy one yourself or we'll send you our special twist shirt that comes from only being a patron. Back, back, back, back, back, back at twist.org. You can subscribe and if you do subscribe we thank you. And please leave reviews for This Week in Science wherever you do subscribe. We couldn't do this without you. Thank you for your support. And we're back with more This Week in Science. We are indeed. And now it is time for This Week in What Has Science Done For Me? Lately. Our letter this week comes from longtime listener and patron Larry Cox. He says you did say haiku. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, we got a haiku. Oh, I've been waiting for this day. You didn't say good haiku. As long as it came to you in the night. That's the that's the that's the caveat that had to come to you in the night. Daytime haiku's are not welcome there. Vibrating base strings, transistors and vacuum tubes electrify all. He says when I plug in my base magnets convert string vibrations to electricity the electric signal is wirelessly transmitted to my pedal board and on to tubes and transistors that electronically amplify the signal. That signal is mixed with similar signals from my sugarbuzz bandmates and amplified further on to some really big magnets that convert the electricity back into sound waves that push a whole lot of air past people's eardrums. Rock on. That's awesome. Rock on Larry. Thank you so much. This was fun. I mean, it was a great haiku. What do you mean? Not a good haiku. It was fantastic. And I have to go now. I got to go Google some sugarbuzz. Sugarbuzz. That's right. So Larry Cox's band Sugarbuzz. Inspiration for this week. This week in what has science done for you lately. If you are inspired by this, write us a haiku. You can send it to me as an email like Larry did. You just send it to kirsten at thisweekinscience.com. You can also leave a message on our Facebook page. This week in Science Facebook page click on message us and you can send us a message and I will see it there. Justin, what do you want to talk about now? Oh, I want to talk about becoming a parent at an older age. Oh, it's the same process sometimes. So, okay. So for decades now, I guess this trend really they're saying has been trending, trending since the mid 90s. Western world parents have been having their first babies at later and later ages. Probably has to do with people needing to work a lot more. Or the necessities like. Amid this trend and delayed childbearing, a Dutch study has considered the behavior problems of children born to older parents. Specifically, researchers looked at externalizing behaviors. Things like cooperating with others or being aggressive, that sort of thing. And internalized behaviors like anxiety and depression amongst these children. They looked at the problem behavior of about 33,000 Dutch children between the ages of 10 and 12. Problem behavior was rated by their fathers, their mothers, their teachers. And the children themselves also got to have a ways in this. They got to rate themselves through a series of standardized instruments. What's interesting about this today too, it's four pieces to this. It's actually four different studies that all incorporated this test. Who are all sort of looking at parenting and children upbringing through a number of different studies. It was done by researchers at Utrecht University. And it appears in Child Development, the journal of the Society of Research in Child Development. Quoty voice of somebody whose name is going to be really hard. This is going to be fun. We wanted to know if there was an association in the general population between parents age and common behavior problems and children beyond the clinical diagnosis. Says Mariela Zandervan Zwiegenberg, postdoctoral researcher in the methodology and statistics department at Utrecht University. Who led the study with respect to common behavior problems. We found no reason for future parents to worry about a harmful effect of having children at an older age. Yes, children are sorry, not the children were 10 to 12. The parents ranged in age in these studies, multiple studies again, some of them were even twin studies, ranged in age from 16 to 68. So there was 68. Oh, the kids are 12. Okay. Yeah, not the kids. No, this is the age at which the parents first had children. Oh, it was. So 68 year olds having children. So this is a combination of the mothers and fathers. Right. Oh, right, right, right. Yes. Fathers were probably at the further age, higher ages we could assume. A study found that children of older parents actually had fewer externalizing behavior problems. As reported the findings of fewer externalizing behavior problems persisted as reported by parents and teachers, even after considering the family's socionomic status. So that was sort of leveling. And yep, it's still, it was still there. So the researchers concluded that there are favorable effects of parents age being older on children's behavior. But you know what? I'm wondering if parents being older means grandparents are not as available. Yeah. If that has potential negative impacts, because you have, I know that didn't come out in the study, but I would have kind of anticipated that, is that you have, if you're having children older, then there's less chance of having grandparents around to help with. But you've, but you, I think, I think there's a lot of confounding things that will be involved there because older parents potentially have better paying jobs by that point in time. Or they are, you know, or they have money saved there. They have, they can afford child care. So that's, you're also dealing with, you're also dealing with a Dutch population, which has, you know, better healthcare generally and also child support and that kind of stuff. Their system is set up a little bit better than what we imagine here. And so I would, I think there would be, also people today tend to, there's been a tendency for people to move away from their parents. People disperse more, you know, maybe you grow up in the country and you're dispersed to the city. There are many, many people having children who are nowhere close to their grandparents. And grandparents, you know, maybe call every once in a while or you have the odd holiday together, but they really don't influence the rearing of the child. So I would say that also that I think both of you have a very good point, but it would also point out some of the parents in this age group would are as old as you would consider as old as you would have as grandparents. But that's not the age, it's the care. Yeah, I mean, potentially, you know, this goes up to 68, but, you know, if, if you were just taking a 55 and up as being retired, these could be retired parents. Right. Right. Some of them, maybe they had, the father has put lots of time to hang out at home with the kids. Yeah, Dutch retirement programs are probably better than some others. So there's probably a better chance they were retired. But this was across Christian economic, even there. Now, what's also interesting is that the internalizing behaviors, anxieties, depressions, that sort of thing were unchanged across ages. So what it's like to be a kid, internally, didn't seem to be reporting a lot of changes, but the external behavior. And then, so then you can also start to think like, maybe this is less aggressive as we get older. There's less mimicking of, you know, teenage or 20 year old parents, sort of more aggressive attitudes or takes. Yeah, maybe older parents are just more, just better at being parents. And kids mimic what they see at home. So, so, okay. So they also say this can't be too generalized other behaviors. They're going to extend the research to cognition, attention, things. They're also going to look at different time points going forward to get a bigger, better story out of this. But thus far, yeah, your kids might be at least more civil than if you're older. Then your neighbor's kids, the 20 year old, 30 year old neighbor kids. Yeah, if you're older and Dutch. Older than, yeah. And if, well, but, you know. That's really, yeah. That's a little unfair though, because we do so many studies, they are all somewhat unique to the local population. Absolutely. Yeah. But it's a, it's a, yeah. Moving on from older parents, let's talk about the placenta. Yeah. Yeah, so you're making those babies when you're older, but you know, something that is produced by the baby and the mother, the placenta, right? This amazing interface between the blood supply of the child and the blood supply of the mother. We have had studies come out previously suggesting that this blood supply may also ferry bacteria between the mother and the child and that it's not necessarily a complete filter that there is, that there are bacteria endemic to the placenta, but no, a new study has come out that says, we don't think so. They have collected thousands of placenta samples studying maternal and fetal health and they got interested, this team got interested in this question. Can we test the bacteria in placentas? Can we figure this out? It is objectively. So this group from the University of Cambridge, they went off to test it. They looked at more than 500 placental samples that were, these placentas were collected after delivery. They were from healthy pregnancies and also pregnancies that involved complications and from vaginal delivery and cesarean C-section delivery. So they looked at all sorts of placentas to get an idea. They washed the samples in salt solutions and then the samples were frozen and they looked for bacterial DNA. First, they looked for the DNA signals and they were able to determine that there are very, very few real signs of bacteria in placentas. DNA signals that they determined that they had, they came from lab tools, the birth canal and even sometimes the salt solution that washed the samples. Even the saline solutions were. Even the saline solutions are compromised. Immediately see as a follow-up to this is if or because it didn't sound like it was included would be a viral search because this. You've talked about that before but that's not what they were looking at. Yeah, they were just looking at bacteria. Right, they were but if because we know that the infants have the greater diversity of viral loads than the parents, it'd be really fascinating to find out if the placenta was so contained, so many bacteria phages that that's why no bacteria can enter and be part of the placenta. They would be destroyed upon entry by a viral defense. That would be the next step to that. That would love to, oh gosh. Yeah, they need to do more studies but they so they were looking at when they were looking at all this, one of the things that they because they did multiple tests to look for the bacterial DNA, what they did to really make sure it was a real signal is they tossed out any bacteria that only showed up in one of the tests. So if you had a sample and it was tested on a couple of different ways and it only showed up in one of the tests, they threw it out because they wanted to rule out signals that could have been that contaminated saline solution or a contaminated lab tool or reagents or a technician's hands. And the researcher says none of that should matter if it's a real signal. They also added in a small number of Salmonella bongari bacteria. These bacteria are not found in people and the experiments found all these bacteria just fine but didn't find any other bacteria. Except in 5% of the samples they found streptococcus bacteria but the samples that they found it in, the streptococcus can be bad for babies but they didn't actually find that being tied to poor outcomes in the children, in the babies. So they don't know exactly what's going on there. And if we've learned anything, those all sound like outliers because you would expect a diversity. If we know anything about microbiome, if one thing is getting in there, there's so is other things and you get this population ecosystem thing up and running. So I think that's a good, that sounds like a good premise, which is if it shows up somewhere here or there, it's likely because it's either permeable or it isn't. It's either defended or it's not. And yeah, I think that was the wise way of doing about it. Yeah, so they're basically just trying to figure that and right, is it permeable? Is it defensive? Is it defended? Is it this barrier that protects the newborn from infection? Or does it allow some bacteria across or even in or as to your question, which we don't know, viruses of any kind that may inoculate the baby to future exposures? But what it looks like at this point, unless other data come out, I mean, there have been these studies found bacteria before. And so of course, there are going to be researchers that stand by that. But unless they can, unless they find more bacteria, it looks as though it's the vaginal canal. It is the birth process that exposes babies to bacteria and maybe even viruses. And I would, but I would take it so we don't know where those viruses come from. And that's why it's such a big mystery is we don't, we don't have a correlation between the vaginal canal or the blood system or anything else to the diversity of bacteriophages that appear in infants. And that's why that's why I would, you know, we're going to have to do those tests. That's why this study is exciting and also like, I want more. No, another deeper. Come on. Come on. Okay. Give me more stories. What else do you have, Justin? I might turn again. It's your turn again. Sorry to, let's see. Oh, yeah. Okay. So in many relationships, bringing your work home with you is a non-starter. You don't come home from a long day of work and spend all dinner talking about your day at work. Right? That's like, that's like not a thing that people should be doing. But thankfully that's not the rule for husband and wife research duo, Megan and Michael Povalones. Quoty voice of Michael Povalones. We talk shop at home sometimes. He is an assistant professor of pathology at Penn's School of Veterinary Medicine. His research has focused on ways to harness the power of the mosquito zone immune system to stop them from transmitting diseases. His wife, Megan Povalones, is an assistant professor of biology at Penn State, Brandywine, where she studies parasitic organisms. So they got to talking one evening about chrythidia fasciolata, which is a parasite. And it's part of a family of parasites that cause diseases. Although this one actually doesn't seem to cause a disease in animals or humans, but it does, it is a parasite that can be found in mosquitoes. It's very easy to grow in a lab, compared to others. So much research has sort of been done on trying to model it. And it's something that Megan was familiar with because she had worked on before. So they got to talking about the fact that it is not a human or animal pathogen, but they have discovered that it creates this very specific type of structure within the mosquito that allows it to adhere to the mosquito's gut. So they decided, okay, let's figure out more about this structure of adherence that it's doing. So they began looking into how the parasite holds on to the inside of a mosquito. And in the lab, they were able to replicate what other scientists have previously found. The chrythidia parasites exist in actually both the swimming form. We've got a little tail, a little flagellum that can move around. And they have an adhering form that basically turns them into these little balls that stick to the surface of the interior mosquito. It also stuck to the surface of plastic dishes when they were growing the lab, the little petri dish. And the swimming form was the one that they would see when they were culturing them in dishes that were placed on shakers that had some motion to them. And the adhering form, which had these little structures, was more likely to develop when the dishes were kept stationary. So they had a mix of the two and they washed them and separated them. And they compared the genomes of the little tail swimming form versus the little sticky ball version. They actually found that the genomes, the expression was quite different. Even though this is this same organism, what they saw genetically was basically like two types of organism almost. There were some definite gene expression variants between the two. So they started looking at that. One of the things they found was a correlation between genes that were also expressed in another parasite that had been implicated in the adhesion to immune cells, another parasite that's in the same family. And so now they have sort of drilled down on genetic variation between a swimming form and a sticky form. So now the next step is, and these are parasites that would be a family that would be related to African sleeping sickness. What is it? Chagas? I can never say the thing right. Is it chagas disease? Is that how you say that? I think so. And Leishmanesiasis, which I don't also know how to say it. So these are all parasites that operate via adhesion. So they've now discovered genetic mechanism. Now they're going to, the next step is going to be see if they can prevent the parasite from adhering. Premise being if there isn't an adhering step allows it to lock into the gut where it can multiply, multiply, multiply and then get transmitted. This particular parasite is non-disease forming, but others in its family that do cause diseases if they have these same mechanisms and that there is a way to basically inoculate mosquitoes in some way. From getting, from allowing adhesion to take place, you could have a future of disease-free, parasite-free mosquitoes. At some point we have to delve into are these parasites actually doing a beneficial function for mosquitoes that we just never realized? And by curing mosquitoes of parasites, doom them along with one of our wonderful pollinators. But if we can, if the parasite can pass right through the mosquito without sticking and replicating, you can do away with the parasite and perhaps prevent the spread of diseases. That would be amazing. Let's do it. These emerging, these emerging infectious diseases are- And that doesn't mean you should not work with your spouse unless you have somewhat similar scientific interests or whatever. You never can tell. Yeah, you never know. Maybe. Still thinking about things that are common, that things have in common. We have a couple of studies that have something called single cell RNA sequencing in common. And they're out this week. Very exciting, interesting studies. One study out of UC Davis mapped immortal cells, these stem cells of the hydra. The hydra is a freshwater invertebrate that has the little tube-like creatures and they have a ringed mouth and with tentacle and a sticky foot and tentacles and a tube. And anyway, the important thing about them is that they're regenerative. They have these superpowers of regeneration where they can just from a little teeny, teeny, tiny bit of tissue regrow their entire bodies. Players talked about them before in the animal corner and they're just, they sound fascinating and amazing. Well, this UC Davis scientist, Selena Giuliano, developmental biologist, has used single cell RNA sequencing to look at the life trajectories of three groups of stem cells that develop into the nerves, the glands, and other tissues within the hydra. It's published this week in Science. They looked at 25,000 individual cells from these adult hydras to find out what genes were active inside each cell of these, so these 25,000 cells, all the genes that are active. And the researcher says that every 20 days, these hydra is, the hydra is basically a new animal because it's just turning over cells constantly, constantly, constantly. Yeah, they're immortal. And so they, in continuing to track the genes that we're getting turned on, they caught the steps that the stem cells were going through to develop into these variety of tissues. And they were able to watch how genes, how the genes activated other genes to create tissue growth across the entire body. They used fluorescent probes that could latch on to RNA in the cells so that they could watch where the RNA was going in the cells. So they, for example, they had nerve cells that clustered near the foot of the hydra and also those lit up in magenta near the tentacles. And the researchers mapped the development of 12 different types of nerve cells. So this is really interesting, the single cell RNA mapping is really exciting in this case because it could tell us a lot about the regenerative properties of stem cells and their developmental trajectories. Even beyond that, researchers at King's College, London, used single cell RNA sequencing in human tissue, not these little tiny freshwater invertebrates where you're like, hey, really distantly related thing. They are looking at the possibility of figuring out how to regenerate liver tissue without having to have a liver transplant because yes, our livers contain a bit of regenerative capacity. It's when you get severe disease that the like cirrhosis affects the entire liver that you start getting into problems, but our livers have stem cells in them that are able to regenerate. And so they have just published in Nature Communications about a new type of cell they found using the same technique of tagging RNA, single cell RNA mapping. They call it a hepatobiliary hybrid progenitor, or H-H-Y-P, H-hype. And these cells form when you're still developing in the womb, but it persists throughout adulthood and can create two main cell types of the adult liver. So they examined these and found they resemble mouse stem cells, which can repair mouse livers following injury like cirrhosis. And the researcher, lead author, Tamir Rashid from the Center for Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine says, for the first time, we have found that cells with true stem cell-like properties may well exist in the human liver. This could provide a wide range of regenerative medicine applications for treating liver disease, including the possibility of bypassing the need for liver transplants. Wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't that be amazing? I know. Drink up, everyone. Not yet, not yet, not yet. No, not really yet. Where was the, where was the hydra study out of? The hydra study is out of UC Davis. Selena Giuliano, developmental biologist at UC Davis. Uh, yeah, she's got, I've got a nickname for her. Uh, I met her once before. It's Ponce Giuliana, because she's working on, uh, immortality. Aha. Yes. The immortality in the hydras. Yes. Uh, final, a couple quick studies. There is a CRISPR test underway. We've talked about CRISPR before, editing cells and whatnot. Well, researchers at Editas, which is a private company, they have become a, begun a clinical trial to study the use of CRISPR, not in cells outside the body, but in vivo. That means in the eyes of humans. To see if they can, um, treat an inherited form of blindness that's called by a, caused by a single point mutation in the CEP290 gene. We will see where it goes. This is CRISPR editing in living humans. That's going to be happening. And also, hey, Blair, this one is just for you. For me? Yes. Just for you. Uh, researchers, researchers out of UC Berkeley have created the world's very first robotic cockroach. They have taken the wonderful speed and ability of cockroaches to evade predators, their flexibility. And you know, if you've ever tried smashing a cockroach, it's kind of hard. They have taken this to heart in their design of a new, very tiny robot that can take the weight of a human body that you can step on this robot and it'll keep on moving. It will take up to about 60 kilograms, which is about a million times its own body weight. So it's able to withstand quite a high pressure. It's fast. It can run at 20 body lengths per second, which is almost as fast as a real cockroach. And it can carry a peanut. I love it. Oh, finally I have a peanut delivery system. For when, you know, it's like it's late. You don't want to get out of the bed. You don't want to get off the couch. But you really need a peanut. Just one. Just one peanut. Or half a one even. That's right. Just one little peanut for you. But it's a really interesting and very simple design. It's a thin strip of piezoelectric material, which you run an electric charge through, which causes a contraction and expansion of that material that makes the robot jump forward, leapfrogging, as they say. So this robot just basically vibrates jumping on its little feet moving forward. They think if they are able to put sensors on it and maybe even add a battery so it's self-powered, right now they're not self-powered, that it could maneuver in very small spaces where other robots cannot go. Wow. So they're these little toys that I've used to talk to kids about solar power that they look like little crickets and they have a little solar cell on their back and they basically hop around like that. So yeah, they could just put a little solar panel on there, I feel like. Right, if it's a solar panel, if they are in an area where there's light, if they're going to be in dark spaces. I guess cockroaches aren't actually out in sunlight. So if you're trying to find an analogous thing. Right, little cockroach bot. Yes. Anyway, this is the first robotic cockroach. There we go. Blair, tell me a story. Yeah, so from cockroach to cuttlefish, I have a story about cuttlefish microbiomes. This is the first study looking at the microbial populations on cuttlefish. They're digestive tract gills and skin. They try to figure out exactly how many families of bacteria live in a cuttlefish by comparison. Humans have hundreds in the gut alone. But the cuttlefish has two. What? Wait, what? No. Two families of bacteria on their whole body. That sounds... How? That doesn't sound right. Yeah, it sounds like a mistake. So they looked at the microbial makeup under a microscope. Most of the microbes were in the esophagus, which is also unusual. But yeah, they were all just two families. So bacteria in the vibrio family, which was one vibrio naceae, some of those caused disease, but others have symbiotic relationships with their hosts. Which is probably what that is. Right, and so one of the examples of that is in the bobtail squid that has a fluorescence from bacteria that live in their body. So that is one. And then the other family was pisci-ric-it-sissae. So go ahead and check out the show notes for more on that. But basically, long story short, cuttlefish microbiome, teeny, teeny, teeny, tiny, which is bizarre. And we don't know why, but it also could help us identify how to keep these animals healthy in aquarium environments. Because cuttlefish cephalopods in general are pretty hard to keep in aquaculture and aquariums in all sorts of farms, also if you're trying to make squid for calamari. So they're really hard to keep. So this might be one of the reasons is that their microbiome is very narrow. So yeah, just two kinds of bacteria in a cuttlefish. Wow, I'm amazed that they live. It's just, this is just mind-blowing to me. I mean, this doesn't mean it's only two bacteria. It's not species, it's families. But at the same time, it is, this is, I would never expect for it to be, to lack so much diversity. So on one side of course, like in the fantastic realm of my brain where I always want to take everything to the science fiction. So it's like a great piece of evidence for the idea that octopuses are aliens, right? There we go. It didn't evolve here. It couldn't have because... But also they're extremely long lived on this planet in terms of, you know, they've been around for a very, very, very long time. So they may have just found their perfect little bacterial soulmates millions of years ago and they're sticking with it. It could be just that simple. And I'm going to say the same thing I said to the earlier story and which I'm also now thinking about. There's a worm, I think it is, that has no bacteria at all. Now I want to see the viral loads of cuttlefish and one worm without any microbiome. Now I'm really curious to see if it's bacterial phages are in abundance with the exception of ones that would target these two families. Because you almost can't avoid the interaction or colonization on any part of the body. There is a bacterial presence and there's a viral presence. But for it to be so specific to be narrowed down to two, there has to be, I think, a gatekeeper at some point. Yeah, absolutely. And they're swimming. I mean, these things are swimming. They're swimming in bacteria. Yeah, so much stuff. The microbes, there's billions in a drop of water, right? Microbes are... So what's keeping them from sticking to the cuttlefish? There's more viruses than our bacteria on the planet. So it is the most prolific DNA life form, at the very least, you could say. So, yeah, now I'm really curious. Now I want to see... We need to know more. Yes, we do. Are we there? Did we finish the show? I have another story still in the rundown. Oh, I have not seen it. Where is it? I don't know. But a new study reveals that school fitness tests are largely a waste of time. The research was led by scientists from Louisiana State University. You can go LSU Tigers and DeFi University. They published in Physical Education and Sport Pedology. Pedagogy? It's not aware that comes up much. Suggests that rather than increasing students' enjoyment of PE, Physical Education, or putting them off the subject, there is very little association between fitness tests and students' attitudes towards PE. This is according to Kelly Simonton from Louisiana State University. School fitness tests are rarely used to educate students about fitness. And they're often... Just shame. Yeah. Poorly, yeah. So we cannot help but think that class time would be better spent equipping students with knowledge and skills more closely related to the PE curriculum. So this is one of those childhood memories that is burnt in. We got separated into groups. There's the red group, the blue group, the yellow group, I don't know. And then we got separated out, and then we were sent out to compete. Like this is hunger games for kids. You got to climb a rope, you got to run real fast, you got to do sit-ups. And I can remember distinctly, the only takeaway I got from it was that I was being complained that I kept bending my legs when I was doing sit-ups. And to this day, if my spine is straight, if my spine is straight when I'm sitting up, my legs cannot be straight also. It's just that tight hamstring thing, whatever. And I remember it was like, we're not going to count your sit-ups. I just did more sit-ups than anybody else where they don't count because your knees are bent. Like this is my takeaway. But basically, they surveyed the kids. Basically, you're bitter. No, I would agree that I'm bitter about PE2. PE was terrible for me. So this is what's interesting. They found that the flexibility test was rated as important by the girls who probably did better at it. The test that attitudes about the abdominal strength really angered almost all of the students. They none, nobody liked that one, which is, I think, I guess that's the one that I was complaining about. And it actually increased anger towards PE in both boys and girls. So I feel like if you're improving your cardiovascular health in general, you should get an A in PE. This has always been my thing. It's like, are you moving? Are you helping your heart? That's great. Because also, this is a time at which people's bodies are growing at weird rates. There's all sorts of weird stuff out. Your center of gravity changes all of a sudden. It's kind of a terribly awkward time to demand physical fitness. But it's still good for you. So yeah, no, I think it's good to get moving. It's good to do all that kind of stuff. But grading based on performance is really difficult. It wasn't grading based on performance, but it's a test that everybody can remember having everybody got separate into these groups and got put through these different things. So a lot of data apparently is being taken on some sort of clipboards. But what's interesting is none of that data is then later shared with the students, the parents, or utilized in any way to educate or inform anybody. Oh no, my data was shared with me and I was given a grade based on how well I did. What? Okay, so in most of these places they were saying, at least where they did the study in Louisiana, the data never got shared with me. Well, maybe currently, maybe they don't do that anymore. Maybe that was like a thing that now they're like, oh yeah, we graded people on this? Why are we putting this kids through the Hunger Games trial and then doing nothing with the data? Or like, yeah, fitness shaming, Tina. Yeah, it's okay. We're going to get to the end, Kiki. It doesn't speed it up. It actually slows it down when you do the hand wheel gesture. It actually slows it down. And we have come to the end of the show. We have come to the end. No more stories, everyone. I'm already there. We are here. We're at the end of the show. We did it. Try it midway through the show. It might get through here quicker. I would love to say thank you to everyone involved in making this show happen. Thank you to my wonderful co-hosts. Thank you to Fada for helping with show notes, social media, and with the chat room over on YouTube. Thank you to Gord McLeod for managing the chat room over at twist.org slash live. Thank you to Identity 4 for recording the show. And as always, thank you to our Patreon sponsors. 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This weekend science is coming your way You better just listen to what we say And if you learn anything from the words that we've said Then please just remember it's all in your head Cause it's this weekend science, this weekend science This weekend science, science, science This weekend science, this weekend science This weekend science, science, science This weekend science, this weekend science This weekend science, this weekend science This weekend science, this weekend science This weekend science, this weekend science And we have come to the end of our show We're at the end, we're at the end, we're at the end, we're at the end We're at the end, we're at the end And I don't know why my computer won't play audio tonight it's so weird buzz buzz buzz what's the buzz i didn't do it yeah check it out i just have to secure it but it's that's cool and yeah get it copied that's awesome so it's actually um gel sheets like that you put on lights that's cool yeah so i have to see how well it scans that's the thing i'm really worried about because it's the next level it's so shiny yeah yeah and then this one is um not quite done uh but here's my manta ray yeah i have to like i'm gonna put some extra like shades on some of these so there's a little more depth but yeah oh that's gorgeous i like it i think kai's excited i'm really excited hey kai how you doing good what do you think of tonight's show you didn't hear it at all i hear i heard a bit of it okay yeah you heard your mom's side the interesting thing about like the hydra i could hear blur a tiny bit yeah i got to i got to see these hydras they're really you can see them with the naked eye wait can i see these tiny little tentacle i really want to see a picture of them i can find you a picture of the hydras i might regret this uh i met the the reason i'm gonna regret no they're cute uh professor juliana she's uh they're like sea flowers but they're tiny and so i'm glad they got published because this is i got i got to hear that they had submitted the paper wow and it's kind of fun to see that they've gotten published but she's uh volunteered by the way to be a guest on the show oh yeah we need to get her in there's also um there's like yeah um she had to wait until it was published before she could really talk about it and now we can talk about it the giant hydra from um it's like greek mythology i think the hydra is of greek mythology so listen right it's the same thing this is where they got the i think this is how the the name of the hydra came it came from the mythological greek it's a very good guy in connection yeah um justin before fada leaves he's been asking you for that link for the last story in there it's been in there it's not in there it's not in there none of us can see oh it's in there now well yeah it's been there like no it wasn't uh by the way we also need the hydra story because that's not in there the hydra story is in there it's not in my copy i just put it in it was late yeah i put it in there it's in there now in the notes next to liver cells yes i'm looking at liver cells i don't oh there's pee yee tests are a waste of time now i see it it was not there before i don't see did you put that wait did you didn't put the hydra story in the same place did because i still don't see hydra it's over here i just put put my cursor around it yeah it's to the right of the liver cells way over there okay he and it says notes above it i says hips slash w w w yeah so uh you don't read everything okay okay yeah very cool yeah we should have her on she's uh a very good community i had a beer with her and one of her postdoc pledges i don't know what it's but uh here she is a very good communicator for research cool be a fun guest yeah let's make that happen that'd be awesome yeah so uh the big question of the night is what are we gonna be doing next week so um a uh an alternative to hangouts has been recommended to me it is known as stream yard and so i'm gonna be testing stream yard this week um that's one which will allow us to continue streaming to youtube and it might be awesome we'll see um but that's something i need to test this week and uh and there is some other there are some other alternatives but uh i'm gonna just see what works i'm looking my my big my big goal though is to have a solution that will work for anybody any of us who needs to host the show so that's that would be great even as a second choice it'd be great to have that i'm asking oh you oh you're actually i have a question i have a question and raise okay i'm just not ready for it but in the future can we try to do a twist kids like um i think it's a great idea i'm going to twist show for like kids i mean you can definitely do a daytime twist show but depending on the day justin and i have day jobs so we may or may not be available right no they didn't have Blair we weren't invited well then why is he asking us that that's not a crossover you guys can help me use the brand uh in order to uh as a platform for his own show which i'm a hundred percent before we've always talked about branching out and having other shows be part of a twist community like i was something like you guys could join in yeah and like you guys could join in and then like i can have like some of my friends who are interested in science like i have i have uh i have children who are also interested in sciencey things so uh we should set up a meeting where you can Skype and talk about how you would structure a right i have access to children that are interested in sciencey things yeah it's not quite the same it's not the same but i could get them to sign a permission slip and then it would be almost the same okay very good yeah so here's my idea maybe like i was thinking like you guys could be like um extra like people who could come in like when you can and like help us with video sometimes and like then like all right kid all right let me tell you there let me tell you the real hard the work you got it you've got ahead of you if you're taking this off all right i'm already starting 90 of what you need to do it's not the video you can do without the video we don't need the video watch this you can i'm still talking you can still hear me now uh my video is gone you don't need the video that's just an add-on thing all right what you really made is a story you got to get the story first you got to find the story it should be something that interests you because if you it's not about something that's not interesting to you people will hear your lack of interest in the thing you're talking about forget it find find stories that are interesting to you and talk about them uh live and then you'll gravitate an audience that's how that works start with the stories all the other stuff comes later if you can if you can entertain one or two people in a room with the story you're telling chances are it'll translate to a decent amount of the population out there start with your stories okay and and then let your mom let your mom actually you know what don't let your mom do your hair before the show keep it messy keep it messy there there you go yeah that's star power right there that's where my hat good just yeah story and good audio you have to have the good audio yes you know i we've had good stories like you watch like um you'll watch a channel with like um a video screen like with a screen face but then like you can't even hear them over the video because it's just like sounds like buzzing that's not good that's no that's no good you had you have to be able to hear the people like i watched a video once and it just was buzzing um so you can video justin what's up with your camera it was like especially bad today it was like fuzzy focus fuzzy focus fuzzy focus i have no idea what's up with focus and i apologize too i thought i did not realize that i was uh muted and off camera uh when you had to jump it because i was doing i was thank you for enjoying and then you started saying i'm like why is she saying my lines while i'm saying oh my gosh i'm muted this is yeah there you go so also don't be muted also by the way if you ever see somebody do this uh uh and if you see somebody doing this guy that means keep talking no that's what that means no it means keep talking maybe it means talk faster but it means keep talking and i wasn't going like that i was going i think your audience grab it out this means this means keep talking keep the show going we need to we need to draw it out we need to draw it out keep talking everybody that's what that means like you just started getting a bit i could i on my end i could it sounds a bit strange what oh i think i think hey are the hangouts gone no hangouts are still there you know uh i'm kind of curious like i know we've got we're gonna come up with the you're you're gonna research plan can we try one thing next week before we move to the new platform can we try to launch the hangouts wait what like you know we're gonna tell everybody the google hangouts are done but it'll still be there what's the name of the exoplanes you're talking about well try and figure that out justin we'll see i need to have a backup plan man we have to have the backup plan but you know it's weird uh there's something easy you're just gonna have to click a link it's gonna be great you're gonna love it there's something weird where that's like we got to get rid of this this platform we got to get rid of this thing uh there's too many people using it and it's not turning any profit we just need to kill it versus like charge five dollars a month yeah like why not like like okay from here on google has lots of their own like they set priorities and it just sounds like this was not a priority no i know but but there's too many people using it to support it for free so we'll just kill it versus come up with a pay version or hey i'm not gonna pretend to understand how this works they're like one of the wealthiest countries or companies in the world like they best version of this product that we have touched and they're killing it and well get away basically it's i agree it's like it works very well but it also randomly updates for no reason yeah but this is like mild in the history of the show has been a mild issue yeah except that we lost our lower thirds that you're gonna bum me out but like this has got to be a cream yard we can have lower thirds again that'd be great i would love that um so i have a i have a logistical question before we fade off into ether here um so so i'm gonna be in florida i will have zero cell service next week i will have some wi-fi so i am going to try to do the show i will have a chromebook and i will have my like apple your your pods not air pods the wired ones that have the microphone on them so i'm hoping that that together will get me where i need to go that should work okay right i mean usually the sound is good from those because they're wired right it should be fine okay um so that is my plan the sound can be good but you just can't move around a lot yeah will create so no i mean this is the thing with those yeah the sound quality is actually really good it's what you're right up next to hearing the person talking yeah it's all right if it brushes up against uh sugar jacket there's a horrible uh effect that can come from it as well so yeah i'll i'll do my best i mean i'm gonna be in a hotel room sir so well like not even a hotel room what would i call it like a room and a giant palatial resort resort like a florida palatial though so who knows yeah well it's i was there last year and there were definitely certain areas that had really good wi-fi and certain areas that had really bad wi-fi so it depends on where i get put and then what is available to me at what is 11 o'clock at night when we get started in florida so of uh being blareless yes so we're gonna plan for it but i'm really gonna try um but for the heads up in the morning i will bring oh yeah and edd is uh is saying an important point in the chat room which is if the wi-fi is touchy i'll just turn my camera off oh yeah because as we discussed it's yeah second yeah yeah so but again then i'd be like oh well i could just use my phone or something but yeah so um the fact that there's no cell service also it's like a whole extra thing but um yeah hopefully it'll be great it's gonna be great yeah it's gonna be great also it's gonna be i'm gonna think positively it's gonna be great one thing that would be sad though if if you weren't there for the animal corner hopefully there will still be an animal corner yeah that would be good although i picked a story i'm probably just gonna i might honestly only bring the one story that i wanted to talk about tonight that i saved we have to i have to figure out we'll have to figure out um listen wait your turn okay um it's okay just you interrupt interrupt don't interrupt um one of the things that we need to do is figure out exactly how we're gonna do the show because the idea is that it they do the speculation and jumping off into stuff um and so is will we i know right so will we report each of us report on one story pick one story and go with it and then we'll play like you know like a roulette kind of thing where it's randomly chosen what the speculation is should we do something like that where each of us report something and then then we speculate for a while based on whatever you know the random choice from those three and then maybe do that once for the first half and once for the second half or do we each bring a separate story and then all three of them have to be used in the speculation for the rest of the show yeah and you think one story each if we speculate it on each of them would probably fill the full show huh i think so yeah i mean i like that idea i did a full podcast with them just on the idea of um of people being like um like swifts like birds all the stuff that came from that there you the stuff that comes out is pretty pretty fun um yeah yeah i like that idea each of us just brings one story and we we chat about them mm-hmm be like a fun mix up on the show yeah yeah it could be could be super fun yeah meaningless words without without blare i'll try to be there if you aren't though and justin's not here then probably there would be none unless i could do the animal corner yeah i wasn't here and then my mom also wasn't able to connect there would be no twist that is true oh for four means no twist only me and my mom were left yes at time you two can just have a live twist between the two of you yeah all of it yeah there you playing with remote controls look squirrel hey squirrel good night blare good night blare say good night justin good night justin good night kiki yeah good night everyone i hope i hope you all have a wonderful week uh blare let's make a newsletter i'll write something and great everyone happy science to you good science to you all we'll talk to you next week stay tuned for the adventures in technology that are sure to come with twists in the next week