 This is TWIS, this week in Science, episode number 596, recorded on Wednesday, December 7th, 2016. Just breathe. It's science. Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki, and tonight on This Week in Science, we are going to fill your heads with a bird laser, fake news beliefs, and deep breaths. But first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. What is really going on is a real thing. Everyone may have views or opinions. These views and opinions can be shaped and formed and influenced and manipulated and then solidified like a lump of children's play-doh. However, let us never forget, or even imagine that truth is an opinion. That facts depend on a point of view. There is a reality of the world that is beyond human perception. Not invisible to the mind, but beyond the ability of its doughy design to dismiss. Reality goes on with or without human words or action. And while we head into a future free from the foundations of logic, one where reality may be a near constant casualty, you'll begin to hear people asking more and more often, what is really going on? And when you hear this question asked, even if you yourself are unsure of the answer, reassure them that yes, reality is going on, and it is still being discussed openly and honestly. Here on This Week in Science, coming up next. Got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I wanna learn everything. I wanna fill it all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I wanna know what's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. What's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. Science, dear Kirsten. And no Blair tonight, but good science to you, Justin, and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. So sad that Blair's not here, but she's having a little bit of an early birthday celebration with her mother in that beautiful place. I don't even know. I can't say that word together with it. Yeah, I know. The land where everybody's happy and where's mousiers and stuff. I don't have the same feelings about it that other people do. I'm sorry. It is, to me, I always, I always enjoy it. And it's the big picture thing of the thing. It's like somebody had this idea, what if, and created it on a massive scale. It's great. And that's fantastic. I am, yes. I am glad that Blair is in her happy place and celebrating her birthday. And I'm also glad that we are here for yet another episode of This Week in Science. We have a great show ahead, lots of stories. Don't worry, there will be animal stories even though Blair is not here. We have added some animal stories to the docket. Additionally, if anyone out there is interested, you can go to twist.org to find out about our 2017 Twist Blair's Animal Corner calendar. And also, we'll be posting information about our January 19th show at the Cal Academy of Sciences Nightlife with SF Sketch Fest. Go to twist.org for that information. Okay, on this week's show, I've got tons of science news stories. I've got some dark matters to talk about. I've also got bird laser goggles. And I really want a pair. And I just want to remind everyone to breathe in. Breathe in, let's breathe in. What did you bring, Justin? I brought false beliefs that cannot be refuted by facts. Microbes have feelings and paving the rainforest, as well as perhaps a grab bag of other things. Oh, such a grab bag. We've got a giant grab bag of science, science stories. Can't wait to get into all of them. So let's get to it. Drumroll, please, off the top. Why don't we just dive right into the science policy? And you know what? For once, it's kind of good news. You know, we're always talking about, oh, the government, this, and they're not gonna fund that, and they're not doing this, and this problem is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, we're constantly talking about kind of the bad news when it comes to science and the government, but some really great news. Today, the Senate passed the 21st Century Cures Act This is big news. They passed it with a 94 to five vote. It was previously passed in the House last week with the 392 to 26 votes. This is an incredibly bipartisan bill that was passed. Massive document, almost 1,000 pages long. It's health legislation that people on both sides of the aisle, all sides of the aisle have been working on since about 2014. It is gonna cost about $6.3 billion, but you know, there's a little bit of good for every, there's a little bit of something for everybody in it, so people really didn't have a lot to complain about. Everybody, especially the insurance company lobbies, wow, they're getting a lot. But anyway, this act is to, one of the big things it's trying to do is to relax food, the FDA is Food and Drug Administration's drug approval process. So we know that there are a lot of drugs that get off-label use so that you can't necessarily get a prescription for that particular purpose, but maybe your doctor can give you these off-label uses with a prescription. But they're not actually sold for particular purposes, right? And so the FDA process, basically this bill is going to try and make it easier for the FDA to be able to approve these off-label uses as on-label uses so that things kind of get, if there's evidence of medical use for certain purposes with a positive effect and not really any negative effects, then a drug could potentially get slated for a different use or a better use. Additionally, it might also fast-track medical devices and other drugs, and this is one of the problems that people did have with this particular act is that the pharmaceutical company did have a massive role in creating this act and that they're trying to kind of maybe undermine some of the requirements that make sure that all the testing is done. So one of the things, for example, that pharmaceutical companies will be able to do is apply for drugs to be licensed by the FDA, but not have to give them all of the data, not have to provide all the data, but rather a summary of the results. So this is not going to enable the FDA. It will enable the FDA to kind of gloss over things and see things more rapidly. All these results look great, but it will not allow them to look more deeply into the actual data that underlie those numbers. And so this could be a problem when it comes to pharmaceutical. Absolutely horrible. Yeah, okay, I can understand, for instance, you said that in some cases, the FDA will be allowed to use a summary in order to approve. Like if they were like, you know what, I think we've got a pretty good idea how whatever this drug is done in other arenas, the summary of how it's doing in this new off-label use, for instance, that'd be perfectly acceptable to use the summary. We'll take all the other data too, but we might not approve it on the summary, but we'll have that in case something goes right. We can look into it further later, but instead what they're doing is like, all that they have to provide is the summary. A data summary, just a summary. Not the raw data files. That's insane. Yeah, so this is something that is not going to necessarily help the public. Another way in which this is going to work, it expands the FDA's voucher system and the voucher system rewards drug companies. If they work on certain conditions, say conditions that only affect a very small number of children, it's not going to be a big money maker for the pharmaceutical company. So the FDA has been trying to get pharmaceutical companies to be more likely to work on them, to come up with treatments for these very small minority groups that are affected by diseases, by giving them vouchers, tradable vouchers. And so the vouchers, the drug companies can then turn them back in to get expedited, fast-tracked priority reviews from the FDA for their drugs. So the other aspect of this is that the vouchers for those drugs are for any drug. That is unclear. And so that's like if it's a tradable voucher. It's like, okay, I'm going to work on this one little project and then this big money maker, fast-track it. There's danger in there, but I also get that there is, you have to find some sort of an incentive to get them to do other than the abroad consumer market of drugs. The other problem with this voucher incentive though is that they can be sold to other pharmaceutical companies. So you can take your voucher and there's a market. So you can take your voucher and it's not specific to your company. You can sell it to any other company if they, if other companies, if it's worth it. And it almost, I mean, the fear would be when do you use this voucher? Well, when we maybe don't have very good data. That's when you would, that's when you maybe really need, otherwise you could just say, hey, look, we have stacks of data. We'll just give you that. There you go. That should be enough for decision on this other drug. Here's a voucher instead. Okay. That's what it sounds like at least. Now there may be more details that we're not into at this point, but this is definitely something that needs to, we gotta do- There's definitely some more digging that needs to be done and people are definitely going to have to pay attention to what will be happening with the FDA and pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies over the next several years. The next hundred years. Right? It's a whole 21st century, that's right. 21st century Cures Act. It's, they're really, they're really not, not this decade, you know, not next decade. This is gonna be the thing we do for a hundred years they want it. Okay. So, well at least we- Oh, go ahead. At least what? Well, at least that gives us enough time to monitor this. Yeah. So those are some of the negatives or the questionables. We don't know exactly how those are going to end up affecting drugs coming to market and what is actually going to happen there. But this legislation is going to hand out $4.8 billion over 10 years for Biden's Cancer Moonshot. So $1.8 billion goes to Biden's Cancer Initiative. $1.6 billion to the Brain Initiative. So studying the brain and disorders of the brain and $1.4 billion for the Precision Medicine Initiative. And then there are $1 billion in grants to states over two years to help states fight opioid abuse and addiction, which is potentially going to be great. So this bill is, it's, they're trying to simplify research grants and also policy make it simpler for things to get through the pipeline and the FDA. Make mental health a priority nationally. And then also bolster monitoring of drug-resistant bacteria, providing states with funding to fight the opioid crisis and to support these research initiatives. So this is, there's a wonderful article with more information at ours, Technica. If you're interested, there's also an article that's available through Science Magazine at news.science.com. It's interesting that they would dedicate a billion dollars to increased law enforcement incarceration of people who encountered opiates through a Cures Act. No, I don't think it's, no, I don't, it's not, it's not, it's not putting more people in jail. It's not a billion dollars. Well, I thought that's how we dealt with it. That's how we deal with drug crisis is typically, I wonder what's different this time. It's a bunch of white people. Oh, I didn't even think of that. That was possibly, by the way. I don't know, no, yeah. Opioid. That couldn't be why. Yeah, I saw somebody tweeting earlier or somebody, it was you on, no, it was you on Facebook. You posted, you, or maybe it was my cousin. Probably wasn't me. I haven't talked about this. Maybe it was my cousin. I saw somebody posting on social media how it's really interesting that, opioid addiction and this epidemic, which is, it's bad, it's really bad, but how it's getting attention as a mental health issue and is getting a bunch of funding for actual scientific and health measure initiative. Which is awesome. Which is great, but the crack cocaine epidemic was, consider it was a different class of people and that was put into, oh, this is incarceration. It's not a mental health issue. People are gonna go to jail. Yeah, and mandatory minimums and long-term jail sentences. Maybe it's a sign of the times and that's what I hope it is that we're applying science and good mental health policy and that this will be the way it works moving forward. Yeah, it is. We can only look at the past and hope that it's a lesson and that we have learned it and are moving forward. Even if we include that past and this present, it would still be a sign of the times. That's the sign. That's what the sign says. Yeah. Anyway, but I'm glad it's being approached this way. Yeah, I'm glad. And addiction is a mental health issue and it should be treated as such. Definitely moving forward. And also moving forward, moving outward. Let's move away from the policy and the politics for a moment into the deep reaches of outer space. The dark matter of outer space. Yeah. The European Space Organization, the ESO's very large telescope, VLT survey in Chile has been looking at the bending of light through weak gravitational lensing through making really precise measurements through an effect that's known as cosmic shear. And the press release says it's a subtle variant of weak gravitational lensing. So the light is emitted in gravitational lensing. You have the light emitted from very distant galaxies getting slightly bent off its original course, warped in the way that we see it by the gravitational effects of large amounts of matter. And that large amount of matter could be gravity clusters. It could be, not gravity, galaxy clusters, excuse me. Galaxy clusters, it could just be dark matter in space that we don't see, but there could be just pockets of space that are dense with mass and have a lot of gravity, gravitational effect, warps the light, hence it, we see it differently. So researchers processing the images from this survey, which I love, it's called the kids survey, the kilo degree survey, which means 1,000 degrees. They looked over 1,000 degrees. Well, they're working on it. They looked at five patches of the sky over about 15 million galaxies. And what they were able to determine from looking is, do you remember hearing about the plonk analysis and how dark, it looked at the sky and said dark matter is clumpy and this clumpiness is what has caused galaxies to cluster together and to clump together, right? Yeah, and I just, it's as much as I actually understand about this, but yeah, I do remember that space is clumpy. Like, it was sort of my takeaway, space is clumpy. Space is clumpy, well now? This is the biggest, and this also is, this is the biggest, from what I understand, the biggest scan of its type, right? This is, like they've done these before, but this is the biggest scale version of this look. Yeah, which is great because they're really making a lot of measurements, which is going to make this a much more statistically significant result, right? They've, they're actually measuring this really weak effect on the light in space to be able to figure out, okay, is it actually, you know, are we getting this accurate result? And so- Is space clumpy? This- Man wants to know. Is space clumpy? Well, not as clumpy as the plonk survey suggested. God. Survey says not so clumpy. Maybe a little clumpy, but not as clumpy as maybe you thought it would be. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, the take home result of this is it's like, okay, still clumpy, yet not as clumpy. So it's like, just, I don't know, a little, just a little less clumpy. So the interesting question here is how this is actually going to affect our understanding of galaxy formation and the formation of these galactic clusters. So do we, is it all because of dark matter? Does it all match up perfectly? Or the previous results back in the early 2000s, like around 2006, they did computer models, which kind of lined up really well with this idea. So really bright galaxies tend to kind of cluster together and they're probably more aligned with these clumps of dark matter, but they also found that there were like these odd kind of, there were diffuse halos around these areas and that there were also a visible light and that there were also less bright galactic clusters that tended to end up in different areas. And so what I'm thinking is potentially this is going to just fall in line more with our understanding of how visible matter baryonic matter has come to be in the places where it is. But I don't know, this is, how are they going to adjust it? Yeah, we're running the universe versus from 14 billion years ago forward and trying to figure out that evolution. The interesting things here are like, this is sort of refuting what was expected a bit. The actual observation that we've got from this look is different than what would have been, what had been previously theorized. Not off the scales like, oh my gosh, physics is totally different and nothing like that. But big enough of a difference that we gotta look at it some more, there's more here that needs to be delved into, more research. And I think the key, you look at the title for the article, kids 450 and 450 is because it corresponds to the 450 square degrees or the 1% of the sky that they looked at. Cosmological parameter constraints from tomographic weak gravitational lensing. And so I think constraints, parameter constraints is the key phrase here. It's not something completely different, it's just taking what we know and narrowing it, making it more known, which is pretty cool. But yeah. It's like one of those fake, this doesn't actually work. But every once in a while there's like, it's usually some sort of spy thriller where they've got this fuzzy, fuzzy image and they're gonna run it through the computer and make it more and more clear until eventually the face of the perpetrator who's nervously in the room going, you gotta get out of here, comes into view, right? It's not quite outward because that doesn't actually work. But yeah, it's clarifying things. It's every one of these observations that we do takes that theory that we had and says, okay, yeah, cut off these edges, put a little bit more definition here. Okay, now we still have a theoretical model that's fuzzy, but we've got these direct data points that are now filled in and now we gotta look again and retool the theory to see if we can back engineer and do more observation as well. That's right. It's just fun. Super fun, super fun. And I know that the physicists who are working on this, the astrophysicists who are working on these questions they probably go to work every day going, this is fun. This is fun. I'm so glad I'm doing this. Yeah. All right, Justin, what you got? And I figure a lot of them too have a real gut feeling about what they're gonna see when they get their data back. In that research project, in fact, we were just talking about there, or the scan, the scientists had three sets of data. Two of them were fake and one was the real set and they gave themselves a kind of data double blind where they had to go through and figure out which one was correct, which was also sort of interesting there. And there is a perceived link between our gut and our mood. We hear this all the time like somebody has a gut feeling, you go with your gut, somebody's got butterflies in their stomach because they're on stage and they feel like they're freaking out. This link has received some pretty interesting scientific support recently from the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. There's a Dr. Vicki Ellingrod, she states, current state-of-the-art research in both animal models as well as humans, point to the link between gut microbiota and mood and anxiety models as well as the potential for psychiatric medications to directly affect the gut microbiome. So research rats, they were subjected to chronic stress over seven weeks. Number of, the number of microorganisms in their guts decreased as stress became more chronic. The research rats also began experiencing loss of pleasure and despair-like behaviors. Stress, less microbes, okay. Maybe they had a tummy ache too. Yeah, right? It feels so good. Amazingly, when the microorganisms were transferred from the stressed rats to a group of animals, research rats as well, that had not been stressed out, the stress-free research rats also began to demonstrate the same behavioral changes after a period of five days, suggesting a possible potential non-correlative but direct mechanism between the mood change and the change of the microbes, possibly. But amazing, right? You have these weird behaviors after this stress and you know the microbiome has changed. You take that microbiome out, you put it in another research rat that's been just enjoying life, relaxing on the exercise wheel, just making it easy, and all of a sudden, they start acting sort of depressed or anxious or stop being interested in pleasures, whatever the observations they made to determine that. So treatment implications were examined in a series of human studies that demonstrated similar reductions in microbiome and participants suffering from both major depression and bipolar disorder. Changes were associated with increased anxiety, sleep problems, increased complaints of general health problems, referring to these associations and bipolar subjects. Dr. Simon Evans concluded that the data support the hypothesis that targeting the microbiome may be an effective paradigm for bipolar disorder. So of course what they're talking about here is figuring out a way to address the gut first and the mind perhaps second or at the same time. Role of medication. My gut mind connection, gut brain. Were they, you know, maybe start treating possibly, you know, this all stops saying possible because of course this is an indication that we could be having. You're treating the gut to take care of depression or bipolar or at least fight some of those symptoms, maybe some of those behaviors are symptoms of these diseases and it's not necessarily rooted in the gut, not necessarily the source completely, but a way to address in conjunction or separately from anti-depressants and anti-psychotics. Well, we goes on here because they're actually gonna talk about this here. Role of medications were examined by studying individuals over time. Dr. Shadi Khallariye was able to examine microbiome changes when individuals were depressed or in remission and when they were and were not receiving anti-depressants. Well, no changes in the gut bacteria or diversity were seen in patients with depression. Species level differences were observed. So the sort of ratio of which species are predominant was changed. In addition, starting anti-depressants was associated with changes in triptophanase producing bacteria. In addition, preliminary evidence suggests the president's, the presence of increased intestinal permeability in depression potentially increased bacterial translocation. So gut permeability and the ability for microbes to take root or move from one place to the other in the gut seemed to increase during depression. Finally, changes in how our body metabolizes energy and resulting weight gain can be, they say a side effect of a typical anti-psychotic medication. Dr. Stephanie Flowers showed that female bipolar patients who gained weight with anti-psychotic treatment had a greater reduction in microbiome diversity than did female bipolar patients who were also being treated with anti-psychotic medications but did not gain weight, suggesting that health of our gut may also put us at increased risk for side effects from medications. So the sort of summary of all this, I suppose, is that barrier that we've been talking about a lot of, not just about human health and digestion and things like obesity or energy levels of any rest of this, but direct mental health is going to be routed. Almost all of human health as this is going forward seems to have some connection to the health diversity of our microbiome. So again, everything we know about nutrition and now we have to throw in mental illness needs to have this whole field of our microbiome included within it to the point where we have to challenge and question some of our previous understandings of these systems and add this whole new complicated system into the mix and learn and understand how it's affecting what the mechanisms or connections are and how we can better treat diseases going forward. Yeah, I mean, there are going to be so many interesting questions answered as we move forward. While this was showing correlations in changes over the course of the depression or bipolar bouts and then remission and then also the treatments that were taken, it's kind of, okay, I'm going to measure these things in you as this stuff is happening to you. We're going to kind of make a correlation. We don't have any absolutes, anything that we show is causing the causative. We're not completely there with mechanisms. Yeah, we're not there with the mechanisms. And so it'll be really interesting to see like with the SSRIs, is it that the SSRIs are stimulating something to happen at the gut level to produce some sort of government stealth plane? SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. And so they're supposed to, they act wherever there are the specific serotonin receptors in the nervous system. So they could be acting at the level of the brain, they could be acting at the level of the gut as well. But what they affect is the reuptake of the serotonin. So normally you dump serotonin, the nerve dumps serotonin out into the synapse space. And then it has these receptors that grab onto it and then suck it back up again so it can be recycled for more use. And so there's like this neuronal recycling process that takes place with our transmitters. And so what happens with the reuptake inhibitors is that it stops the reuptake from taking place so that there's more serotonin available in the synapse space to move forward to other neurons to latch onto them to give you that little whatever it is in the brain that gives you that boost of happy, the serotonin boost, right? But serotonin is also related to things like digestion. It plays a major role in our digestive process. So there's something, what's the mechanism that's leading to these particular indoles being produced at higher levels? What is it changing in the gut? What's going on there? And so that's gonna be, and why is that good for this particular species of bacteria? And what's indoles? I don't know what indoles is. It is a nitrogen-based molecule. It's like a ring-shaped nitrogen-based molecule. It's a family of molecules. So yeah, and they did notice that, I guess there was an increase of that and it was part of the tryptophanes producing bacteria. So yeah, there's a little bit of mechanism, a little bit of reaction stuff going on. Yeah, so the question is, okay, these bacteria get to stick around and then what kind of a feedback loop does it create? And what kind of process is occurring between the serotonin and the bacteria and the entire process? And the tryptophan that the bacteria produced, how does that then go back to produce more serotonin to go create more, what is the system that's being supported there? It's the fascinating stuff. As we get closer, ask more questions, we will get toward to those mechanistic answers. It's so fascinating. And if we just take the advice of our chat room, the answer would be, sounds like high colonics and eating lots of pine ice cream. Same to me, but the two conclusions they're getting from the study. Microbial alamode, thanks, Esvom. I'd like my microbe ice cream, please. That would be microbe cream. I don't know, it's gonna be fascinating. I tell you, if you just tuned in, this is this week in science, I'm Dr. Kiki and I'm here with Justin. No Blair tonight, but you know what? It's time for some animal stories. Yeah, we could pretend. Pretend we're doing the science. We don't have to talk about squirrels and all that kind of stuff right now. No squirrels, no pandas. So this is the story you're about to bring. When I saw it, I thought it was like, oh my gosh, this is perfect, this is perfect. This story just makes me seriously very, very happy. And the reason it makes me very happy is that really they have researchers at Stanford University have combined birds and lasers and goggles. They made bird laser goggles. Laser goggles. They made bird laser goggles. And why on earth would researchers need to make bird laser goggles? Because of course they're making the birds fly through a little space full of lasers and they don't want to burn their eyes. You have to be practical as a scientist, as an engineer. And if you're not going to hurt your animal, you must figure out a way to help them. And in this case, protective laser goggles for birds. Fantastic. So these are birds that they had trained to fly from one spot to another, I guess on command or just as a habit. So if they need to keep doing this test, they need to make sure the birds are healthy. Yeah, and so they have to make sure, they have to of course have to make sure the birds are healthy. And in this particular study, they had to train, they trained two parrots to hop between two perches. And so they hopped off of a perch, had to beat their wings a couple of times to get to the other perch at the other side of this chamber. And so they had a clear plexiglass window that could, or a glass window that they could use to observe the birds and film them. And also the chamber was also a very sensitive chamber. And so the perch and also the floor were our force transducers. And so such sensitive force transducers that every time the birds beat their wings, they're able to measure the amount of force from the air that is coming from the wings with these transducers. Nice. So they can register that, is it a downdraft or whatever it is? Right, the downdraft and the updraft, they measure a couple of aspects of it. And the fun part here is that not only did they have the birds hop back and forth, yes, there were lasers involved. So what they ended up doing after they trained the birds to hop back and forth, and they knew that their force transducers were working, they also created some experiments where they put a bunch of particles in the air and also like little smoke particles, little particles and used lasers to be able to see, to visualize the movement of those particles within the chamber as a result of the beating of the bird's wings. And historically it's the way that they have been trying to figure out how birds fly, how they move their wings, I was gonna say arms, how they move their wings, and how much force at which part of the wing beats. They haven't, they've missed out on certain details because inevitably air flow ends up becoming turbulent and they haven't, and you gotta have strong lasers to be able to measure the air flow. And so researchers just have never put laser goggles on birds before. And so this is how they solve this problem, little tiny special goggles for the birds. And so it's a very animal friendly, animal friendly design and I really love it, they found that the wing beats for these birds, they last about 50 milliseconds and the sensors take a new measurement every millisecond. And then they can get a very precise value every 10 milliseconds to be able to get detail for the lift that is produced by the bird's wings. And they ended up discovering that the bird's wings actually create a lot of lift in the down stroke. But where they don't really create lift is on the up stroke and they, so there's a lot of force on the down and basically zero force on the up stroke, no lift on the up, lots of lift on the down stroke. And so this clarifies questions that the field that have been existing in the field based on previous techniques that researchers have used. And so now they are going to be moving forward and they want to do, now that they have a proof concept of this methodology for studying how these trained parrots could fly, now they're going to be moving forward to try and find out how hummingbirds fly and how many different species of birds fly and they're gonna be having to manufacture lots of little goggles. And so hummingbirds are gonna be particularly interesting because we've spoken before about how they have a figure eight type wing beat in which the, which is very much like an insect which allows the hummingbirds to hover as opposed to parrots and other birds which their beats are much more, I guess elongated like an elliptical beat pattern. And so anyway, this is elucidating the lift generated by bird's wings. And you know, it'll probably end up helping us make better airplanes. And also protect the eyesight of welding pigeons. Welding little welding pigeons, yes. And I just love this, you know, boldly going where no bird has gone before these pigeons with their goggles on, it's just fabulous. Just fabulous. So thank you very much to the Stanford engineers who are working on this. They are absolutely fantastic. This is mechanical engineer, David Lentik and Diana Chin who are involved in this project. Super fun, super fun, bird laser goggles. Ha ha. Ha ha ha ha. Oh dear. All right. I think I should probably head to the break. I got, I got another story, but we're already past the typical halfway point. I can throw that one to the second half. Okay. Sounds great. So, ha ha. Sounds like you need to take a break. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. All right, we will be back in just a few moments with more science stories. Justin's got a habitat corner coming in and I still have to talk about breathing. So, take a few breaths. We'll be back in just a few moments with more This Week in Science. The herd with more than a line of reason shows the way to give birth into hypothesis and patience, honey. Only thing's honey, we're on a pair of goggles and we're looking for things I can't get to see. Hey everybody. I hope you're having a wonderful, wonderful December. You know what we're doing right now? We are selling our annual, second annual, twist calendar. That's right. This Week in Science, Blair's Animal Corner, Blair's wonderfully made art and created a calendar for all of us to enjoy and they are available if you go to twist.org. That's right. Head on over to twist.org. You'll be able to find the link to be able to get yourself one of these wonderful calendars with scientific dates to follow along throughout the year. So, you feel like you've always got sciency holidays to enjoy. Also, letting you know, remind you every Wednesday about twists shows and also with wonderful art from Blair. So much goodness in these calendars. Get your hands on one now. 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Try and spread us far and wide because that really will help us out the most. We thank you for your support. We really could not do this without you. The lives that they lead need adjusting. They drive to the bookstore and blindly start trusting. The miracles and cures all lay down in black ink. Never even bothering to stop and think. The only real power that I do believe is the dollars and cents all these offers receive. And we're back with more this weekend science. All right, Justin, tell me a story. Fake news has been making a lot of real news lately, hasn't it? Oh my goodness. So we're in this strange time whereas the ability to self publish is democratizing the media more and more. It is also allowing the spread of fake news, false advertising, outright propaganda to reach more and more people. So as we begin to adjust to this tabloid age of information, everyone needs to keep this next story in mind. This is as it is illustrating how big the problem we're up against might actually be. And a study on false memories. Dr. Kimberly Wade in the Department of Psychology demonstrated, and I should know where this is, but I don't see it. It'll come up. The Department of Psychology demonstrates that if we are told about a completely fictitious event in our lives and repeatedly imagine that event occurring, almost half of us would accept that it actually did. 50% of us are susceptible to believing we've experienced fictitious events as though we lived them, that they are from our own life's memory. Over 400 participants in a memory implantation study had fictitious audiobiographical events suggested to them. Around 50% of the participants believed to some degree they had experienced those events. Participants came to remember a range of false events such as taking a childhood hot-air balloon ride, playing a prank on it. I know for a fact I've never been for a hot-ballon ride. Not yet, but after the study it might be like, oh yeah, I do remember this. Also, one of the other events was creating havoc at a family wedding. I think most of these were designed to have childhood memories. 30% of participants appeared to remember the event. They accepted the suggested event, elaborated on how the event occurred and even described images of what the event was like. Another 23% showed signs they accepted and suggested they suggested event to some degree and believed it really happened. These findings have significance in many, many areas. Obviously raising questions about the authenticity of memories used in forensic investigations, courtrooms and therapy treatments. They're trying to jog somebody's memory of an event that they don't quite remember. Moreover, the collective memories of a large group of people or society could be incorrect. The information in the news, for example, having a striking effect on people's perception and behavior afterwards as we have seen actual real-world evidence of when a man walked into a pizza parlor to, you know, based on some sort of horrendous fake news stories that he was... Reading, yeah. Dr. Wade further states, we know that many factors affect the creation of false beliefs and memories such as asking a person to repeatedly imagine a fake event or to view photos to jog their memory, but we don't fully understand how all these factors interact. The finding that a large portion of people are prone to developing false beliefs is important. We know that from our research, from other research that distorted beliefs can influence intentions, attitudes, behaviors of people. I've got to go and figure out where this came from. Hang on a second. Oh, wait, there it was. This was University of Warwick. That's where this originated from. Yeah, I mean, this isn't just one study either. I mean, there have been studies over the years that we've reported on and other people have reported on so much that we've become known that you can't really trust an eyewitness on the witness stand, you know, in trials, that leading the witness actually really can start planting ideas in their heads about the things that happened. But this is being a self-titled mega-analysis of these reports from eight peer-reviewed false memory implantation studies. It's really starting to dig into, yeah. But this isn't just an odd thing that's popped up here or there in a study that doesn't have a lot of support, but this is actually something that's becoming much more accepted in the body of literature. Yeah, and we're, like I started talking about in the disclaimer, we're really heading into a, you know, there was some news. Where are we? That I left the TV on the news because I wanted to hear about something and I should not, I mean, I don't know where you get news now from anyway. And there was somebody explaining how we're in a post-fact society. We're like, the fact part of thing, reality, isn't what matters as much as how many people you can convince of your perspective or agenda or whatever it is. That's terrifying. It is, I mean, finally somebody put this terrible name to it, you know, calling it post-fact. But, you know, it's been this way for years. I mean, this is what politics has been. It's been convincing the largest group of people that you're, you know, you're going to be doing things for their benefit. And, you know, it's how different groups have been trying to twist information. I mean, we've got, you know, the smoking lobby who have been working to hide information to make you think that you understand something completely different from reality. You know, they've been, and now those tactics are being used by many, many other, many other groups. Here's the analogy that part of it, I think, might be the problem, though, or as I'm seeing it. Like, I don't know what it was with, like, somebody in the chat said that 89% of people, Kevin Unique, 89% of people believe anything you put in the form of a percentage. Okay, I'm about to do that. Some percentage of people, was a big percentage of people believe that aliens visit the planet on a regular basis. A much smaller percentage of the population thought that police would use violence against unarmed people in a non-dating situation. Now we have these cell phones and we have cameras. We don't have any UFOs abducting people caught on iPhones, but we have a lot of police violence against unarmed people. Okay. And then, so there is a democratization there of what sort of information can get revealed to the public. But from the news organization side, I guess is what I'm really terrified of, is that news media, and I was looking at the North Dakota pipeline standoff a lot. But the video that was coming directly from there was saying one thing to me. And the reporting on it was, police say this is taking place. Protesters say this is why they don't want. But there wasn't, okay, there's an actual real thing somewhere in between what two sides say. And if you just report on what two sides say about anything and don't go any further than what they told you, that's fake news. The way the news is being reported is to be fair, we'll let both sides say what the information is. Without a reporter delving into digging through and discovering facts and bringing those to bear. That's, I think, the disconcerting trend that I've been seeing. We'll let both sides say whatever they want and not have a drill-down on it beyond that. That's what's right. And I guess that what takes it back to the study is that people are so suggestible to these false beliefs about things that have happened. So, you know, it's all about, like you said, affecting people's perception. And even with video and these things, you know, you can take a picture or a video and then put some music on the video and give it a completely different feeling than what it had or put a picture with a caption under it or have it associated with an article that really that picture never was associated with, but it just, you fit them together and suddenly it tells a new story because you're taking different modalities of sense and putting them together in a novel way. And it's, yeah, I think it's all fascinating. But yes, we don't have to have lived something to remember it as our own. That's why. And, you know, I don't want to get into feed truth or trolls in any way. But there was a clip that I always remembered seeing the very nose of an airplane right before it hit the Pentagon. And because that's how it was being reported. And if you go back, there actually isn't a shot like that. I'm not doubting that an airplane hit it, but I did believe that I'd seen that in coverage, you know? And so there's a lot of scepticality I then have to have about things I've seen, right? Or any of us have seen or thought we witnessed. When it's possible, you didn't actually see what you think you saw. Right, because you didn't actually see it, but maybe because of all the things you're exposed to on the internet, all the pictures you've seen, the things you've looked at, the websites you've been to, the conversations you've had with people, suddenly you have a memory of having seen something that you never did before. Yeah, we should all be aware of our own proclivity to this and the fact that it can bias our thinking. We all can be biased, every single one of us. We just need to be aware of it. It's hard to keep track of it, but... That's a human thing. But you know what? We should take a breath right now. Yeah, maybe take a breath in through your nose, out through the mouth. Right, that's good. Inhaling through your nose was recently found by researchers to heighten your memory and also heighten your response, your reactivity to fearful stimuli. So there is some truth to calling some people mouth breathers? Yes, absolutely. So published in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers at Northwestern Medicine, Northwestern University, have, wow, the Feinberg School of Medicine, they have done a study where they had, they looked at people's brain activity while they breathed, and this came from a study previous where they put implants, electrodes into epileptic patient's brains to monitor their seizures. But what they found is that the brain activity fluctuated with breathing. And so they're like, okay, all right, we're in here in the brain in the hippocampal area, kind of near this area where emotions and memory get processed. And so they're like, okay, let's ask some deeper questions and actually do a little bit more looking. And so they got 60 subjects to make really rapid decisions based on faces that they saw in the lab and their breathing was being recorded. And so they were presented pictures of fearful faces or surprised faces. And then the subjects, as fast as they could, had to indicate which emotion the face was expressing. If people were inhaling, they were recognized as fearful more quickly than when they saw faces when they were exhaling. So all people, if you were inhaling, you recognized fearful faces faster than when you were exhaling. However, this didn't work for surprised faces. And then additionally, this effect went further down when people did the same task breathing through their mouths. And so it was very specific to fear and breathing through your nose. And so they did another experiment where they were looking at memory and not emotional response. They wanted to see stuff related to the hippocampus. And so they were shown pictures of objects on a computer screen and asked to remember these subjects, these objects for later. And they found that if the images were seen when somebody was inhaling, people recalled the images better. So breathing through your nose, you're inhaling through your nose. It's taking air past a bunch of sensors, smell sensors, right? So you've got smell stimuli. You've got also this neural stimulation is going to be heading up to your brain to your olfactory bulb. It's going to be related to your environment. You're going to be maybe your olfactory. Our olfactory sense is much more tied to how our general perception of an environment is taken in any moment. And so if you're breathing through your nose, there's a whole bunch of sensory information. Breathing through your mouth, less sensory information. And you know what this reminds me of course is our previous guest, we were talking about the conditioning that takes place with smelling a smell. Right. Yeah. And so smell and memory are very, very highly correlated. Right. And so as we're inhaling, we may be taking a snapshot. It's part of the snapshot. Yeah. Wow. Isn't that interesting? So they're thinking that also when you're meditating and doing deep breathing exercises, that there might be something there because what you're doing is actually synchronizing your breathing with your brain's rhythm. So with the slowed down brain rhythm, you're synchronizing that slowed breath with the slow overall brain rhythm. So there might be something going on there or maybe the breathing is helping your brain to slow itself into that rhythm and that because you're by doing the breathing in through the mouth, out through, in through the nose, out through the mouth, very deeply and slowly, you might actually be calming down those neurons in your amygdala and thus allowing the brain to calm down a little bit. Additionally, if you're panicking or you're running or you're like, you know, like, something that you're panicking, your breathing is faster, right? And so you're going to be inhaling more often than you do when you're calm and so you may be affecting a faster response time with that faster inhalation for reacting in a dangerous environment. Future twist school, at least we will try, we'll put everybody on, for every lecture everyone will be on exercise bikes and informed to only breathe through their noses. That's right. And the room will be scented as well. Yeah, we'll have a nicely scented room breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth. Keep pedaling, keep pedaling. We'll go down. You're also creating the energy for that, yeah. Fascinating, fascinating. Of course, you know, there's definitely more to be seen here and this is, oh, it's speculation, but it's an interesting bit of speculation about breath and the brain. Oh, show. Want to tell me another story? Sure, this is a study involving researchers from three continents. They found that habitat destruction still outstrips habitat protection across the planet. And by planet, I do believe they're talking about the one you are living on. I don't think they just picked a random planet, right? Associate Professor James Watson of University Queensland said the published study revealed more than half of the planet could now be classified as completely converted to human dominated land use. That would be half the land mass of the planet, I would suppose at least, or the land coverage. In an area of 4.5 million square kilometers, about two-thirds the size of Australia, has been converted to human dominated land use in the past 20 years alone. As a consequence of past and recent habitat loss, almost half the world's, ecoregions now must be classified at very high risk as 25 times more land has been converted than protected. Highly converted and poorly protected ecoregions occur across all continents, but they dominate Europe, South and East Asia, Western, South and North America. Western Africa also and Madagascar on this list. Watson said the researchers assessed rates of habitation or habitat conversion versus protection at a one kilometer resolution across the world's 825 terrestrial ecoregions, areas that contain unique plant in the animal communities since 1992. This is a long ongoing study. It showed there has been considerable gains in global efforts to increase the size of the protected areas, but alarming levels of habitat loss persisting. This is Dr. Oscar Venter, University of North British Columbia says it was time political leaders recognized it simply chasing protected area targets while ignoring impacts of rampant habitat loss elsewhere was not a good solution for much of the world's imperiled species. We need to specifically target protected areas to places where habitats are disappearing before it's too late. They identified 41 ecoregions across 45 nations that are in crisis state where humans have converted more than 10 percent of the little remaining habitat in the past 20 years. These crisis and at-risk ecoregions are clearly the places where targeted conservation interventions need to be prioritized. They also point out nations tend to be protecting areas in very remote locations where nobody is trying to develop them. Right? I mean, could you imagine 20 years ago somebody came through and was like this part of the San Francisco Peninsula we're just not going to let you develop it. We're going to protect it. We're just the area, all these new houses that have been going in and all the people living there. We're just not going to let all these houses happen. We're just going to protect it. Yeah. No. Remote areas are easier to protect because people don't go there. You don't have resources that you need there most of the time and it just makes it easy. Oh, look, we don't use this space. Let's protect it. And then somebody finds oil on it and it's like, oh, wow. By protect, we mean ah, never mind. Exactly. So the idea though is to focus on areas that already have high human conversion use and protect try to protect even some of those little micro areas that are absolutely on the verge of getting disappeared. I mean, it's definitely going to take like they're doing in this story, you know, planning they're looking around and going, these are areas that are in a crisis state. These other areas around the world are probably the next on the list after that. Let's come up with a list and prioritize so we can help countries start figuring out where they can actually do the most work. I mean, what we're looking at is exponential increase in population size of humans around the world. And so as population goes up, you have to house people somewhere. You have to grow food. You have to find people. You have to get rid of the waste. There is land use related to population growth as well. And so that's what we're seeing. And I'm going to bet the amount of time that it, you know, the amount of land that we took in the last two decades, it's going to be you know, a hundred times if it was 10% in the last two decades, it'll be a hundred percent in the next two decades. Yeah, and so it's going to go. We need a Logan's Run type lottery system. No, I don't know. Like, what do you, we so, so one of the, one of the things from this, and this isn't, I don't have this story here, but this is something we've talked about before. There's another version of it. You actually help the ecology better by moving to a very dense urban area as odd as that sounds. The more you love nature, the further away from it you should stay. The better way, the best way to protect the natural open spaces that are left on this planet are to just to get yourself into one of those high-rise apartment buildings via condo on the 50th floor, whatever to, like, get yourself as far from nature as possible, because you, being all of us humans, are the thing that destroys nature most. Well, it's us spreading out. We don't need, we don't need to spread out. We don't need 10 acres per person. We don't need that. Well, that would be nice. It would be nice. It would be very nice. But, you know, you can have a house or an apartment in a city block and the needs are taken care of, so you don't have to drive your car as much so you don't, that your resource footprint is smaller in a city than it is elsewhere. I don't want to do it, but I mean for everybody else it's a good solution. There you go, Justin. Okay. A bunch of fast news stories to, we can finish up the hour. I've got some fun stories tying it back around to the FDA fast track. So we talked earlier about the 21st Century Cures Act. This isn't, these two stories are not kind of within this purview, but FDA does have a fast track that researchers and drug developers can apply for to find out if they can get their drugs to market faster, if they really think they have the evidence to support the benefit of their product. And the first one that is just wonderful is a compound, what's called New Sinnerson. New Sinnerson. What about New Sinnerson? Well, New Sinnerson it is a drug that a paper appeared in the Lancet this week providing evidence that New Sinnerson has a very beneficial effect on the cells of the brain and the spinal cord in children who have a genetic disease called spinal muscular atrophy. This disease basically in a number of years, sometimes a number of months destroys the motor neurons in the spinal cord and the brain stem so that children can no longer swallow or breathe and they die from this disease in a very short period of time. The development of the disease depends on the genetic variant that different children have, so that different people different kids have. There is a gene that's called SMN and that's for survival of motor neuron and so SMN1 is motor neuron, survival of motor neuron 1 and there's a protein that's produced by this gene that normally goes on to help motor neurons survive but when there is a problem in SMN1 the protein is either defective or completely missing and then the motor neurons deteriorate and then the children die. So usually when SMN1 with a genetic, if both parents are carriers, the chance of the children being affected is 25% and if they're affected by the mutation in SMN1 it's basically a death sentence for the child but there are milder forms that carry a slightly different gene, SMN2 that still produces a small amount of the protein and so this drug targets SMN2 and up regulates the amount of protein that it makes so that it makes sure that SMN2 produces a bunch of the protein, this spinal motor neuron protein and what they found is that basically it works that when children are given this drug their disease process slows down that everything seems to work and it's a late stage trial that they pretty much had to stop because they couldn't continue having a control group and justifying it anymore and they were like, we got to give control kids the actual drug because it's working so well so there were, there have been a few deaths during the trials but it doesn't seem that they were related to the drug in specifically so it's a very existing, exciting trial and they are trying to fast track this trying to fast track the approval of this drug that it's going to be marketed as SPINRASA and so absolutely for something like that being fast track and you know it's any, I think there should be also like some sort of opt-in ability for folks, if there's a drug that's being researched currently to be able to opt in to try it because we're talking about last arrow in the quiver or however you want to describe it, last chance sort of thing you can do and when you're facing end-of-life type diseases and I can't even imagine when you're talking about children you want to do everything that is possible you want the drug that hasn't been invented yet let alone the one that's being studied to be utilized or to be there as an attempt so things like this make absolute sense now the warning in the back of my head though because I'm becoming more and more skeptical about everything is to not allow a study like this to determine how you fast track everything no, yes absolutely and that might be where we're at of course there's a lot of drugs out there that people would like to sell to the public that may not really be necessary just, you know, you can look at the treatment for osteopenia as an example so those drugs were already on the market there but there's a push to create markets sometimes where they are not in this field and so something like this absolutely should have the quickest run to production and approval but don't let studies like this influence you on the industry as a whole right, each study should have its own should be assessed on its own merits absolutely such as this next study another fast track application has been made by an organization called MAPS the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies they are I had a precognitive moment maybe it was a flash I don't know but they are trying to fast track the approval of MDMA methyl diethyl methamphetamine which is also known as ecstasy popular club drug it is a schedule one drug illegal and not currently accepted as having any medical uses it has been schedule one since 1985 but lots of evidence suggests that it might be really great for helping treat PTSD and this is the fast track use that MAPS is going for they have had several trials and they have a new trial coming out that's going to involve at least 230 patients planning to start in 2017 to study the effects of MDMA on helping to alleviate PTSD symptoms it's kind of a last effort kind of therapy kind of the interview we did about ketamine very similarly it's like when really no other treatments are helping people it's like okay let's try this let's see what happens with MDMA and there have been lots of positive results so there was a recent one we didn't bring it this week so it was psilocybin the magic mushrooms were being used to reduce anxiety or were shown to reduce anxiety in cancer patients there's reasons to utilize these molecules people we sort of have this draconian I don't even know what draconian means we have this way of shutting the door on things as though there is no scenario in which can be or could be beneficial so yeah the psychedelics have a place in medicine absolutely and I feel like we just need to find out what that place is and find out how they really can help people and we need to be able researchers need to be allowed to do that work and then I should be able to apply for a card shop doctors until I find the one that no I'm being silly for something that affects veterans who've been in combat situations you take all that we don't want the club kids to get the idea that what they're doing you take that out of the focus that's not even on the table of what you're considering when you're looking for cures so we don't worry about the fact that gosh you know the hippies did mushrooms and therefore we have to make sure there's no counter revolutionary thinking going on out there so the cancer patients are just going to have to live with anxiety right let's yeah we got to figure out that we have to look at all the different angles and hopefully that's what the science will be allowed to do and the fast tracking of these drugs it doesn't preclude clinical trials like I said the mdma trials they're going into a phase three trial at this point which you know they're looking at hundreds of patients they've they've done they're doing due diligence and the same as has been done with the spinraza mercinerine drug that I mentioned previously it's not that they get to just not do the clinical trials it's the review process and the paperwork and the and some of the bureaucratic aspects that are tied up in the FDA get smoothed out to try and just make it happen a little bit faster but that said I think a lot of organizations and companies are applying for fast tracking because the FDA process takes so long just normally yeah and there's always good in the bureaucracy that moves slow and there's also negative there's due diligence and then there's a you know awaiting a cure while it sits under review for another year or two years so we gotta figure out how to fix this without breaking it don't break it do you have any other stories I have two more quick ones yeah I got a real quick one that I gotta throw into the thing there but this is sort of a backfired conservation effort weed scientists and at least two midwestern states and that's not that that's not what it's after we talked about MDMA and psilocybin it's not different they're talking about weeds just weed like growing your garden and they don't you don't want them in there not the other kind but who knew there was something called weed scientists that had nothing to do with marijuana weed scientists and at least two midwestern states have been reporting for years that conservation program meant to provide habitat provide habitat for pollinating insects is sowing the seeds of devastation in agriculture so it's it comes down to this one super invasive troublesome thing called something Palmer where is it where to go Palmer amaranth which is which is weed that somehow once it gets into the into the crops and mixed in with the crops actually damages soil so I don't know if it has an effect on the soil microbes or just the pleats nutrition of the soil but it's pretty devastating to corn crops and the like and apparently the what they've drilled down to the way this came across is one of these providers to the department of agriculture for seeds that they've been sowing into our conserved land is supposed to be 100% weed free and just have native plants that are supposed to go in there and populate and be pollinators and do great but one of the companies that from midwest that have been delivering seeds apparently had this seed mixed in with the bunch so you know this is conservation gone bad if you're putting in an aggressive weed that's bad for not just agriculture but perhaps even for the you know maybe the pollinating plants themselves but if you hear about this you know that a conservation effort is destroying agriculture it's not the whole story it's a weed that was provided to the department of agriculture that is causing the problem interesting someday you might be playing computer games with your mind right how else does one well it's true I mean you do play with your mind but you have these appendages that you use and we also use our eyes to take visual signals into our brains and there are all these ways that our body helps collect information to get it into the brain so that we can transform it into an action and a response that our thumbs can play out on a keyboard or a joystick right our mind is really in control of all of that but you know someday we're going to just plug right in to the matrix plug right in it's going to be brain in and we won't need our eyes or our limbs or anything our brain will just be part of the cloud right and our brain might be just wanting to play video games so researchers at University of Washington are working on that we reported a while back about these researchers using transcranial magnetic stimulation in the back of the brain in the visual cortex to create these these artifacts in the visual field called phosphines which are basically just like you see light even though it's not there so it's kind of like your visual cortex thinks your eye has been stimulated by light but it hasn't it's an artifact anyway we perceive them as these like little bars or blobs of light in our visual field and so the researchers knowing they could do this generated these phosphines through transcranial magnetic stimulation in the back of the people's heads who were not watching a video or were not watching a video screen these people were not watching it at all but they were able to use the phosphines to help the people be guided through a video game so the people whose brains are being stimulated were able to choose whether to go right or left or up or down and to send back that information so in the game they basically could navigate this game without using only using their brains and so the researchers also recorded brain activity to be able to determine where the character in the video game was supposed to go so the brains were neurally stimulated and this is part of the researchers question which is basically how do we how do we get information into the brain without using our normal senses can we encode information and how can we encode information so that the brain will perceive it in a way that we can use it to either navigate our environment navigate a virtual environment or do any number of things pretty fun stuff go University of Washington there's a little element too where the brain's like someday I won't need the rest of you that's right I won't need I won't need eyes or arms or legs or all these nasty human appendages nah just need just the brain it's all I need really you know there is but there is also there's an area of research called embodiment so the idea is that we need our body our body and our brains work together and so our body our brain embodies our body right it holds on to that information and it works with it and what would the brain be without the rest of us I would be so freed up to do so many different things if I didn't have to constantly keep operating a heart what are you putting what are you drinking oh do you not know what you're eating and drinking how it's going to affect me what are you doing my final story which I thought about this last week I just thought it was so wonderful there are things that you know we think we know things and then we find out we had no idea it was published in nature communications this last week a study finding that sea grass you know it's nice kelby grass of the sea right you know when you think of how grass produces normally ok grass on the ground it produces pollen and that pollen is spread in the air also sometimes it's spread by pollinators we talk all the time about bees and other pollinators that are so important to our environment for allowing grasses and flowering plants to be able to perpetuate well you know what we need pollinators in the ocean too and we didn't know this before sea grass this is a new finding that this sea grass relies on pollinators it doesn't just release its pollen into the water and have that pollen spread about like the the polyps of a coral like it doesn't just pollen doesn't just shoot around on the ocean currents more grass they found that there are microscopic crustaceans and little tiny worms that help pollinate this turtle grass the sea grass called palacia testudinum this is new research like I said published in nature communications so the animals actually were drawn to male flowers these sea grasses produce flowers organisms are drawn to those male flowers and it's thought that they're going there like bees and other pollinators to feed off of some kind of sugary or protein rich source the pollen and then the feeding they basically take pollen from flower to flower in the sea there are sea bees I never thought that there were sea bees sea bees under the sea pollinate flowers and grasses for me and you alright that does it for me next music compilation that's right about sea bees that's right that's where I make up a song this is what I do when it's the end of the show I'm tired you guys don't forget don't forget head over to twist.org if you're interested in finding out more about our twist calendars for 2017 we'd love to see you there and also to find out information about our SF sketch fest show on January 19th Academy of Sciences Cal Academy of Sciences in San Francisco thank you everyone for enjoying the show thank you to those of you who suggested stories for this week so much fun thank you to those of you in the chat room who have joined us throughout the show thank you to those of you on Facebook who are watching right now and those of you on YouTube thank you you guys right now I'd like to say thank you to our Patreon sponsors thank you to Chris Clark from Disney John Rataswamy Richard Onumas Andy Jake Jones Derek Nicholl James Randall Bob Calder Brian Hedrick Laila Charlie Henry Gerald Onyango Steve DeBell Alex Wilson Matthew Litwin Jason Roberts Richard Porter Darrell Lambert Rudi Garcia Nick Abbasi Darwin Hannon Brian Kondren Nathan Greco Debra Smith John Crocker Sylvan Westby Dave Wilkinson Rick Ramis Justin Howard Matt Sutter Phillip Shane Russell Jensen John Maloney James Paul West Eluma Lama Dougle Campbell Adam Mishka Marjorie Paul Stanton Tyler Harrison Colombo Thank you for all of your support on Patreon and supporting us, you can find information at patreon.com. Remember, you can help us out simply by telling your friends about twists. Tell a few people, share us on social media that will help us out. But let's see, next week's show we're going to be back again broadcasting live at 8 p.m. Pacific time on twist.org. Don't worry you can always watch us at twist.org slash youtube or just twist.org Thank you for enjoying the show. Twist is also available as a podcast. Just Google this week in Science in your iTunes directory or if you have a mobile type device you can click for the twist for Droid app in the android marketplace or simply this week in Science in anything Apple Market Placy. For more information on anything you've heard here today show notes will be available on our website www.twist.org where you can also make comments and start conversations with the hosts and other listeners or you can contact us directly email kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinScience.com justin at twistminion at gmail.com or Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org just be sure to put twist twis somewhere in the subject line or your email will be spam filtered into oblivion. You can also hit us up on the twitter where we are at twistScience at Dr. Kiki at Jackson Fly and at Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback. If there's a topic you would like us to cover or address a suggestion for an interview a haiku that comes to you tonight please let us know. And we'll be back here next week like I said and we hope that you will join us again for more great science news. And if you've learned anything from the show remember it's all in your head thisweekinScience thisweekinScience thisweekinScience thisweekinScience it's the end of the world so I'm setting up a shop got my banner unfurled it says the scientist is in I'm gonna sell my advice show them how to stop the robot with a simple device I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hands and all it'll cost you is a couple of grand thisweekscience this is coming your way so everybody listen to what I say I use the scientific method for all that it's worth and I'll broadcast my opinion all over the earth thisweekinScience thisweekinScience thisweekinScience science thisweekinScience thisweekinScience thisweekinScience science thisweekinScience thisweekinScience thisweekinScience thisweekinScience thisweekinScience thisweekinScience thisweekinScience thisweekinScience thisweekinScience thisweekinScience thisweekinScience thisweekinScience thisweekinScience thisweekinScience instead of rolling a die we may rid the world of toxoplasma got the eyes this weekend science this weekend science this weekend science science this weekend science this weekend science science science I've got a laundry list of items I want to address from stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness I'm trying to promote more rational thoughts and I'll try to answer any question you've got so how can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one hour a week 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 science this weekend science this weekend science this weekend science this weekend science this weekend science science this weekend science this weekend science this weekend science we finished another show we did it we finished another show thank you guys for joining I mean, I do, yeah, this is, it might be a Swift. It's a little tiny SD's rocket. It needs a little tiny ASI rocket engine in there. There's the launch tube, it's standing up there, pew! But it does, and then you, I like the big rockets with the D engines, there we go. Bigger rocket engines. Mmm. Oh yeah, if you guys want other podcasts, I also do this stem cell podcast that Ed from Connecticut shared there. Thanks for doing that. Yeah, and I am tired. There are CVs and I make up songs about the little mermaid. I'm tired, why did I get so tired? Maybe it was all that pie I ate, I think. I didn't think it was a lot of pie at the time, but it made me really tired. Not it was, thank you. Sorry guys. No, I'm yawning. All right, well, fair enough, I think we did a good show. We did about an hour and a half, hour 40 minute show or something like that. I think it's a great show, it was good. Could you imagine if Blair had been here? Man, we would have gone three hours. Nah, I would have brought less stories. So, that's all. I would have talked faster. That's the only difference. Same number of stories, just we talked slower. Yeah, talk a little bit. I did, I gave myself time to talk today. I didn't push myself to be super fast the whole time. Yeah, I know, there's fantastic stories this week too. As there often are, and I was wondering. That's always good, right? Yeah, well, the thing is, I always wonder too, like, you know, if you weren't listening to this show, and therefore maybe I wasn't doing the show. The number of stories I'd miss, you know. So many. I can see myself, even before the show, I'd do some science reading, but it was always light, you know, you look up, and a lot of times it's the big headline stories. But there's so much fascinating, incredible stuff going on. I mean, I don't know if anybody who doesn't listen to this show is nearly, as aware, as to the impact that the microbiome is now having on health and nutrition, you know. I don't know that that information is out there in a meaningful way. It seems to be a subject that we're covering with some pretty, you know, pretty consistently now, new stories, new studies are coming to light. I don't know that, I don't know that there would be. There are other people covering it, but yeah. There's nobody else covering these things. And there's gonna be the, you know, a Nova special, and there's gonna be, but just in terms of, I mean, we're doing a couple hours of science news coverage every week. And it's, I don't know that there's that, there isn't really another, there aren't many resources out there to get this. It's not in an audio form, which is easy. You have to do a lot of reading. Yeah. Ed, thanks so much. Ed from Connecticut says, I read many of the same stories, but Dr. Kiki explains it so even I can understand it. It's because I have to kind, I have to understand it to explain it. So I have to like get it to my point of under, I have to understand it to myself. What does this mean in real language? What am I saying? I just got a text message. You know what it says? Snow day tomorrow. Oh, wow. There you go. You will be able to sleep this pie off. I know, I get to sleep in tomorrow morning. As late as my son will let me sleep in. Yeah. I don't have to rush off to school in the morning. Portland public school is closing all schools and district offices tomorrow. Wow, they're expecting a good snow. They are, or at least a good ice. It's supposed to be, even if it doesn't snow, we're basically going to be hit with freezing rain, sleeting rain, which is going to leave black ice everywhere. And it's just gonna be dangerous driving conditions. Years ago in Portland, I put my windshield result had ice and stuff on it. It was defrosting. I thought I'd speed it up by doing the windshield spray on it. Only being a Californian, I had always a sunny Californian. I'd always just put water in there because there's a solution you can put in there that won't freeze. But in California, most California, you don't really need that. It's just water is fine. Just works perfectly well. So of course I do this and immediately I have frozen up my entire windshield. Look at that, one where I could not see out of it at all. Great, it's work. Fantastic. You know, when you come up here, when you and Blair come up here, for, it's because at some point you're going to come to Portland and we're going to be away. I was like, I'm like, all of a sudden I'm like, oh wait, I totally forgot. When am I doing this? I have not scheduled this. Oh no. Okay. Yeah, at some point, it's not scheduled yet, but at some point you guys are going to come up here and we're going to do a live show up here in Portland. But I just got a link. So remember our old opening show theme song? The scientist of everybody. It was by the Dandy Warhalls. Yeah. I don't remember all the words. It was several years that we used it for our theme music. The Dandy Warhalls frontman Courtney Taylor lives in Portland and just opened a wine bar. Oh, nice. What? Yeah, that would be a fantastic place to do a show from. Oh my God! But that would be. I just got a tweet from John Carabayak who lives here in Portland. That would be so awesome. I'd be like, do you understand? We used your song for so long. Thank you. Yeah, and you know what, salty hash, it's not just any wine bar, it's called, this wine bar's name is called The Old Portland. It's not the new Portland, this is the old Portland. I love it. So excited. So excited. But you know, actually in Portland, it's not a wine bar. You don't open, that's not being Portland. If you're here in Portland, you open a, I don't know, a weed distributor shop or you open a bar for beer. You're brewing your own beer, artisanal beer. Got artisanal hops that you're making beer. Right, so this bar takes you to Maine. Exactly, Ben, yeah. Yeah, oh it does boom, that's what it is. Farm to table wine, there you go. Day boom. Farm to table wine, that's exactly what you get. Oh my God, I would love to meet them and talk and be like, you know, did you ever listen to our podcast? Cause it wasn't a podcast then, it was a radio show. That's the only reason we got to use your song because you were licensed to a major label. Oh yes, hot rod, that's right. If I get to sleep in tomorrow, it means I can stay up late. I don't think I get to sleep in though. Not with a five year old, he's gonna wake up in the morning. Oh come on, this is what Netflix is for. You take your blankets and your pillow, go out to the couch, you set the laptop up, put on a kid show, you crash out. Of course every five minutes, you'll have to get up and get milk or more snacks or. Okay, I'll get you more stuff, okay. You'll get those little five minute cat naps that you'll be having for the rest of your life. Look, tomorrow's my day to edit twists. Got work to do, man. Got things to do, but I can do, I can do these things while Kai is home. It'll be all good as long as the ice melts and he can go to school on Friday. Cause you know what, we only have one more week of school before the holiday, the winter holiday. I do not have enough time in the next week to get all the work I need to get done for the next three weeks. This is just not going to work for me. It's not going to work for me. I'll get it done. I know what it's gonna get done. I always get it done. I'll get it done. I might complain a little bit, but yeah. I'll get it done. That's right. That's what we do. We'll get it done. Yay. Yeah. Yeah, you don't ever want to put hot water on your windshield. That's right, salty hash. If you do put water, you want to put like room temperature water, maybe slightly warm water, which is yeah, room temperature, cold water even, that's what I used this morning. Okay, I'm gonna attempt to show you something. I'm gonna have to move my mic. Oh yeah, I want to see that skull. What's up with that skull? You posted pictures of it on Facebook. What's going on here? Where did you get a skull? Why? That's not a question you asked me. One, two. It is, why? Do you have a purpose for this skull or did you just go, I got, is it a real skull? Here, here. They no longer make these. Who is it? Let's look at the brow. I know, who is it? Who is it? Quite pronounced. Is it Artie? No. Oh, got it. Neanderthal, is that Neanderthal's skull? It's a Neanderthal. That's right, the brow. Pronounced brow, it's gotta be. It's a Neanderthal. Where'd you get a Neanderthal? Well, apparently they make life-size replicas. Really? Of these things. That's cool. Yeah. So I got one. Cause I kinda had to. Not because it wasn't really like a want thing or a required functional thing it was missing. I just needed to. I was like, I need to have that. Cover a lot of Neanderthal's stories here. So, you know, I'd have this guy staring at me, reminding me to find something Neanderthal related each week's episode. I love it. And then at any episode, you'll just bring up the skull and hold it up. And then you can, my Neanderthal friend has some news. We have a story for you. I still not mounted on that missing part of it. But yeah, there he is. He's got a big head. That's a big head. That's a big jaw, too. Ah, I'm gonna try and, yeah, compare your teeth. He's got big teeth. Wow. That's a big teeth. I would not want to be bitten by a Neanderthal. No. I don't actually, you know, I'm gonna have to check on these teeth. I don't know that they're quite right. I'm not sure that I have to check into that because I expected the front teeth to be a little flatter. Although, we don't really have a canine pronounced. So the eye, I suppose, bit flatter. But it's, you know, for gripping things and such. I don't know. I'm gonna have to put this thing back together later. There you go. Ugh. Edvin Connecticut, yes. Standing Rock is getting real snow. It's true. You're right. Yes. Reality of the people who are still camping. I'm complaining about cold weather here in Portland. Cold. It's windy. And you're indoors. I'm wearing two sweaters in my house. Whoa. Yeah. Yeah, other people are, there are a lot of other people, not just, you know, not just Standing Rock. People at Standing Rock have been standing up for themselves and their beliefs, but there are a lot of people around the world who live out in the elements all the time. I got a little bit of city girl wimpiness here. Does boom. Quote to Neanderthal. Nevermore. Nevermore. Oh my gosh, though. The wind is picking up here and it's making my whole house shake. Makes my whole house shake so that the floor shakes and my monitor shakes a little bit on my desk. I don't wanna be outside right now. I'm very, very thankful that I have a roof over my head and that I'm here. I'm very thankful for that. Yeah. Last poor Neanderthal. I knew him well. Quote to Neanderthal. That's good. Minus 17 in Fairbanks. That's just not, I'm not okay with that. Holy smokes. I have a, but I have, raininess is not an excuse, but I have rain nodes where if when my nose gets cold, I go out in the cold and my nose gets cold and it doesn't even have to be really cold outside. When it's really cold, it's really pronounced, but I lose all the circulation in my fingers and my toes. Yeah, so that I can't feel, I can't use my fingers and toes anymore. They go completely numb. It's not fun. But that's your body trying to survive. It's like, let's cut circulation to the extremities and keep the core warm to survive this. Yeah. Oh, Ben Rothig, when you're hot, the high is supposed to be three next week. Oh my goodness. Yep, yep, I, yep. This is about as far north as I go. This is it. I don't need to be any higher in elevation. I don't need to be any further, any further north, just fine. Everybody should just, you know, know where their body works well. They should stay. Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, and then there's Yanni, exactly, Finland. They go ice swimming after their sauna is exactly Ed. My goodness. 27, I don't know how cold it is outside. It's like 30 outside right now, I bet. Here, 2030. Greg Griffin. I just got a tweet from Brian Eng. Who's Brian Eng? Greg Griffin. Dinosaurs, monsters, rap music. Vengeance from the old forest and all forms of beasts who eat humans and bring ruin. What is, what is this? Oh yeah, I have electric heating gloves actually. I should get those there. USB, you can plug them in. USB plug, pluggable gloves. They're awesome. Checking the temperature. Or, you know, you could just try to climatize. Climate, climb a what? Climate ties, just stop running the heater in the house. Pretty soon, you'll be just fine. It's pretty funny though, because that's where I grew up. Is like, I, that was the house I grew up in. I grew up in a house with no central heating. We had one, we had a kitchen wood burning stove and there was a floor heater, a furnace in the floor of the living room. And so we'd heat the downstairs, like we'd heat like three rooms of the downstairs usually. And then the upstairs would be completely shut off. And there's no insulation in the entire house. It's the house that was built in the mid 1800s. So you'd go, you'd live in the winter time, we lived downstairs and then we'd have to go upstairs to sleep. And it was like, you put on the parka to go upstairs, to go to bed, brush your teeth, wearing your jacket over your pajamas. And then, you know, we had, we had electric blankets and stuff, but getting up in the morning. Oh, brutal. You wake up and you blow, you breathe and your breath, you can see your breath in front of you, in the house. Yeah, I was thinking the other night, I'm like, man, yeah, my child's never gonna grow up having to deal with that at all. He's a lucky kid, because his mom doesn't want to acclimatize. Done that. Fireplaces are nice, Ben. Who's Brian Ng? Is this, is Greg Griffin somewhere in the chat room right now? Somebody tweeted to us and said, this is me. Salty Ash, yeah, towards the norm throughout human history, crazy have quickly get used to it. And, you know, I think again, I think people can acclimatize within their own lifetime quickly and easily. Oh sure, yeah. Yeah, when there's a heat wave in the 80s in New York, many, many people die from it, you know. When there's, when it's mid-summer in the central valley in it's 80, everybody puts on a sweater, because all of a sudden the temperature dropped 20 degrees. Brr, it's freezing. When it drops really fast, it's hard to get used to it. My experience when I went to Greenland, it was probably low 40s the whole time I was there. So I didn't go down at night, so there wasn't a night. It was just always like in the low 40s. And at first I had layers and I was dressed for the Arctic when I got there. And of course, after being there a bit, I could go out in shorts and a t-shirt and have the morning or middle of the night or whatever time it actually was, cup of coffee on the front porch. You do kind of, you kind of do get used to these things. In fact, I remember flying back, we landed in Wern, Denmark and it was sweating. I had just a shirt on. I was sweating through the shirt and the backpack and everything. And it was only like 70 something degrees, but that 30 degree rise in temperature was like a heat wave to my body. Like I was sweating in 70s. So I think we have ability to change our bodies, our bodies temperature regulation pretty quickly. I think so. I think so, I agree. And then there are those individuals who, not just go jumping in ice water, but where they actually do feats of existing in the cold. I think there's some specials about this one person. I know there are probably more, there's one guy at least who thermal regulates to such a degree that he like wears a speedo in sub zero temperatures. He's like, I'm fine. No worries. I think that maybe that guy and then there's another guy who can handle super hot sauna that were profiled in Stanley's Superhumans. Yeah, super. Yeah, I think it was in Superhumans, yeah. It's healthier to be cold, huh? The thermostat is down and I'm wearing two sweaters. Tell me about being cold. Then I'm cold. But if I get cold, sometimes I'm like, well maybe that brown fat shivering thermogenesis will get started. There you go. You know, not just like the warming brown fat cells that are in there somewhere. We'll just start energizing me and just generating more heat. And there's nothing wrong with wearing a sweater indoors if you have the thermostat turned down. What's troubling is if the heat's not on. What's troubling is if you've cranked to the air conditioner and they're now wearing a sweater, then you're doing it wrong. That's when you're doing it wrong. It's not okay, no. That's the not okay version. You don't have the heat cranked up so high and so you've got a sweater on, perfectly acceptable. Thanks. Yeah, Arctic reindeer herders. Ed, grandfather's home had a cold furnace in the furnace. His job as the youngest was to get up and shovel coal to get it going in the morning. Tough job, but I can't imagine having a cold furnace. I've had a lot of the wood-burning stove memories from cabins and small places out in the sticks. I definitely remember that. A lot of wood chopping was involved. Tremendous amount of time it seemed, but maybe it was just because it was one of the chores I had to do, that it seemed all time consuming. Might not have actually taken that long. It was like me, my dad making me mow the lawn. It seemed like it took all summer to mow the lawn. Yeah, but yeah, we chopped wood. I mean, the wood chopping happened all summer. It really did. And then you'd have this magnificent stack, piled stack of firewood, black widows, and rattlesnakes. And then you throw a big tarp over it and then come the winter. There it was, all your fuel. Yeah, I like Desbelman saying, save the wood splitting for the winter and then it heats you twice that way. That's good. That's all good. Wow, Portland Public Schools has sent me many messages. They really want me to know that tomorrow is canceled. Okay, I get it. Do not drop your kid off and then drive back home. Your kid will be standing in an abandoned school in the snow freezing to death. Yeah. They're gonna have to have somebody there just to let those people who didn't get the message into a warm classroom until they can be picked up again. I hope, I don't know. Yeah. That better be the plan. You'd have to be somebody there. Wow, this dude really wants to get in touch. Hello, Brian. Look at this. Portland's freaking out about snow. These people are tweeting about Portland freaking out about snow. It's ridiculous. Okay, I'm tired. I got nothing, but there's nothing in here anymore. Just tired. Well, there's lots in here. It's tired. I hope people buy more calendars if you have not gotten one yet. And I will be sending more out. You know, I forgot to say on the show that Blair really wants to sell the calendars out by her birthday, which is next week. So I've got to get to work on that, people. It's before next week. It's by next week. By next week? Yeah. It's coming up. I can't remember what hers is. I know it's close to mine. That's coming up really soon. I need to sell, I don't know, somewhere. Good night, Hot Rod. Good night, Minions. Good night. We're leaving. Already calendars still. Come on, people. Yeah, good night, you guys. Have a wonderful night. And I hope everyone stays warm wherever they are, or at least as warm as they need to be for themselves. I think we should all be able to see our breaths when we wake up. When you wake. May you awake to clouded breath. And we'll be back next week for show. We'll be back. And we're looking forward to more science, more and more and more science, and tales of Disneyland from Blair. Yeah, so everyone have a wonderful week. Enjoy your weekend, and we will see you again next week. Thank you so much. Good night, everybody. Good night.