 Welcome to another episode. And what are we doing? We're gonna have like, you know, the days of our lives in science. The sands through the hourglass. The sands through the hourglass, yes. With science, yes. We are here to do this week in science. This is a podcast that we broadcast here live every Wednesday at 8 p.m. Pacific time. We broadcast live, not everything ends up in the podcast, in the final edit. Our goal is a tight 90, but that is this thing in the distance that we aim for. Like minutes through the 90 minute timer. This is, like molecules through a pipette. This is- Through Avagadro's number. Yes, we are here to do this show. We're so glad that you are here with us. Thank you for joining us. All three of us are back. Yes, Gord. Nice noticing. We are all here tonight. So this makes it all the more fun. We've mixed it up. Now it's ready to get back to the normal. Ready to go? Let's do this. Let's begin in three, two, this is twist. This week in science episode number 871. Recorded on Wednesday, April 13th, 2022. Can the internet handle this science? I don't know if it can, but I'm Dr. Kiki, and today we will fill your brains, your heads. No, today we'll fill your head with brains, leeches, and heart, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. In the past, we have looked to the future, waiting around in presence past, planning and procrastinating, predicting and anticipating, all an expectation that one day, the future would arrive. And wouldn't you know it, the future is here. In fact, the future might even be here ahead of schedule, because from the looks of it, we aren't ready for it. Case in point, an autonomous vehicle was pulled over this week. The vehicle had apparently failed to put on its lights while driving at night. Police approached the car and it sped off, only to come to a stop a little further ahead, you know what the vehicle might have considered a safer location. When police approached the vehicle for a second time, they immediately lacked any protocol on how to proceed with the traffic stop. They couldn't demand a license or registration. They couldn't ask the car if it had been drinking, or even ask it to roll down its window so that they could turn on its lights. They tried to open the door, but it was locked. In short, the future happened and nobody was prepared for it. Making us look very much not like the people of the future, but people of the past who somehow stuck around too long. While there are plenty of examples of how stuck in the past we are as a planet, the oil economy, authoritarian autocracies, racial inequality, income inequality, gender inequality, matching socks, all relics of bygone eras. The future always happens this way. Nobody is ever ready for it, not really. It just happens week by week, day by day, slowly and methodically until before we know it, we find ourselves listening to yet another episode of This Week in Science coming up next. Good science to you Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. Muah! I feel like going down like a Friday the 13th rabbit hole, but it's only Wednesday the 13th, so I guess... You'll get a Friday the 13th next month. Awesome! Okay. Look who's tracking Friday the 13th. I just know... Blair just knows. Calendar's a lot. I just learned these things. Oh, well, I'm glad that you keep track of these things, Blair, so that we all know when we can look forward to Friday the 13th. And for the record, I think you're a very good witch. You're not like one of the bad ones. Yeah, good, good. Are you a good witch or a bad witch? A witch. Or a sandwich. Or a... No, you're an Earl of Sandwich. I am so confused. Let's talk about that. I'm still trying to get the sand through the minute hour glass thing that you did earlier. That was pretty good for your disclaimer. It was very apropos of our sand through an hour glass conversation. All right, the show tonight. We have science stories, lots of science news, as always bringing you the good stuff. We have stories for me about plant protection in the rain, lightning life, and scientific skepticism. Might also talk about some baby brains. What do you have, Justin? I've got an abstract brain. Oh, good. Yes, I guess I would agree with that. Hang on, hang on a little bit. See, I don't ever see my stories until right before show time. So I actually don't ever have any idea what I'm going to be talking about. OK, let's see. Oh, gosh. Hang on, hang on, OK. I've got an abstract brain, energetic bacteria, ancient Chinese secrets, and getting high with space balloons. Sounds like a lot of fun. Blair, can you top that in the animal corner? Oh, man, I have bloodsucking leeches. Oh, that'll do it. I have a pot of porpoises and I have intelligent primates that aren't just us. Oh, that's what I was going to say. I mean, us, right? Obviously, humans don't belong in the animal corner. Get them out of there. So the rest of the story. I think my abstract thinking story is going to have the opposite conclusion of your animal corner story. It's no, it's kind of fun. It's all linked together. It's all connected, all connected. All right, as we jump into the show, I want you to connect with our podcast. If you haven't yet subscribed to us online, you can find us all places that podcasts are found. Look for this week in science in your favorite podcast platform. You can also find us on YouTube, Facebook and Twitch. We do broadcast live 8 p.m. Pacific time on Wednesday evenings. Look for this week in science or twist science on Twitch. We're also twist science on Twitter and Instagram. If all this is too confusing, you can find the links, show notes and so much more at twist.org. Let's get into the science that will break the internet. OK, this week, this last week, two stories, two, not one, but two stories made me just go. Oh, no. Oh, geez. Oh, gosh. Is it bunk science or bunk reporting? It's bunk reporting. OK, let's hear it. If people are reporting in the if people are reading in the right places, which are very science audience focused, so really focused at people who are probably scientists, then they're probably getting all the information. But if you're grabbing stuff out of the headlines from the Buzzfeed type list, sickles and that kind of stuff, it's not necessarily going to be giving you the accurate interpretation of what's going on. So two big stories out this week. We need to look at with a little bit of skepticism and wait for more interpretation to come out. But yes, we can be excited about the stories as they're happening. Just be realistic, people. That's all I just always. Can we just be realistic? What? Wait, let me say, what is the story? Don't don't tell me that coffee actually doesn't cure cancer because this is I don't want to know that one. No, no, that's not what I'm going to tell you about. Chocolate chocolate isn't good for diabetes. Come on, Kiki. Don't tell me the hard news. First, I want to talk about some heavy W bosons. These bosons have been investigated by Fermilab for quite some time, and they've got a massive, massive amount of data that they have been number crunching to try and figure out what's going on with the W boson. So we've got all these subatomic particles. And this out of Fermi is actually reported in the journal Science. So, you know, science, a very reputable journal. They've got data. It's not the final word yet. But so the W boson, it's got extra weight that was unexpected and could, based on all these analyses, could possibly mean that there's something wrong with the standard model of physics. So far, though, everything seems to be lining up in all the other experimental realms with the standard model of physics. So it would be a massive adjustment for us to go, Hey, oh, the W boson. It doesn't it isn't the mass that we thought it was going to be. And that's what the data suggests from this particular study with a very high amount of statistical significance, mind you, seven sigma, which is really significant in terms of the way that physicists look at their data. But there's another experiment at the Large Hadron Collider that has been measuring the W boson's mass. And it did not find data like this. It was only very, very slightly heavier than what was expected. So they just kind of the error that was involved would have it would have been fine. So now this Fermilab experiment is like way away from what the Atlas experiment found back in 2017. And so there's a discrepancy between the experiments. There's a discrepancy between the data. Researchers, of course, are going to be going back now to the Atlas experiment, Large Hadron Collider data and looking for more data, looking at looking to find other subatomic particle deteriorations that might show these W bosons and give us more information as to whether or not they are deviating from what we expected. Well, so this is why replicability is so important, right? Because you could have consistent results over and over from the same source with the same methodology, with the same researchers doing the experiment. And that sounds really good, but you have to then do that somewhere else with different instruments, with different people. And that's where you start to go, OK, is there is there something wrong with my instrument? Is there some sort of confounding background noise I'm dealing with? That's very interesting. And so the sensational headline was the standard models ruined, basically. Yeah, yeah, this new article has its breaking physics. Physics is broken. Hey, headlines, physics, not it's not broken. Our physics, it still works very well. But there is an interesting finding, very significant. Fermilab and the people who work in this collaboration, they also collaborate with Atlas people and there's a whole lot of work going on. But, you know, there are people within the community who would really like to see this Fermi data stand up to scrutiny because it could potentially. Fill in some holes related to some other experiments that have been ongoing. So there's a a G2 experiment, the Muon G2 anomaly that also doesn't kind of fit with the standard model. And this could potentially fix that. And so there are some explanations. What this means, though, is that right now there are physicists doing lots of theoretical calculating and writing papers coming up with a lot of ideas. And there's going to be more number crunching, more experimenting. It's not a final answer. And that is, you know, always where we want to be in science, right? It's not we're in the process. We're in the process. The standard model is never done. No. And it would be kind of cool if something like supersymmetry finally had a bit of support. No, no, no, please. No, no, no oxygen to that room. None. Just everybody needs to, like, steer away when you're getting to choose which path you choose early on in your in your life as a physics Jedi. Stay away from that. You choose. Well, it's not like the physics Jedi. And I mean, this we're going to mix like the matrix and the Jedi. It's like, which one you choose. The what it sounds like, too, is it's like an accuracy versus precision kind of a situation. Like, yeah, if you've got one lab that's like, hey, we can verify our results because we get the same result every time. That could just be that their instruments very precise. And it's looking at the same thing in the same way with every, you know, setting in the viewing machinery or whatever. And somebody else is getting a different result. It could just be that that's how their equipment is set up. So that could be the methodology of looking at. It's always the thing with you're talking about reproducibility and science. It's also tough because different labs may be working with a different conditions completely, even in an animal study, the temperature of the room in one lab is kept high and it's kept low somewhere else. So they're getting different results from the light or whatever the thing is. So then you just have to figure out which one's actually accurate. OK, we both have precise equipment that can monitor the can measure the same thing that the same way we've measured it before, but they don't match. So somebody's accuracy, actual accuracy is off. And so that's when you've got it. The delve into it, I figure. Yeah. So I mean, there's. There's fun stuff happening. There's subatomic level. I don't even know how you begin to address. I mean, this is all I mean, we talk about subatomic particles, but really what is being measured across the board is is energy, right? Is like the amount of energy at a certain certain frequency. And so it's like, OK, we have this energetic signal here, this energetic signal here, this happening. And so there's it's a bunch of inferring that's going on. And so this W Bosen, there may be another particle involved that we don't know about there could. I mean, it opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities. But I don't know, the case is not closed. Regardless, physics isn't broken. You know, you can tell things still drop. Yeah, I mean, for the for the average, you know, gravity is working. I mean, my table is still for now. Can't put my hand through unless I really know my kung fu. But that's the thing. We got to keep an eye on it. That's how we keep gravity working. That's right. And as soon as you stop believing in it, it's like fairies. Right now, I believe it goes away. That's right. Oh, my gosh. One day, one day in the future, people will stop believing in gravity. And then things are just going to start floating off the planet randomly. The planets aren't going to stay in orbit around the sun anymore. And everybody's like, what's going on? It's like, we're having a problem with the lack of gravity. And then you'll have to do a movie and somebody you'll have to find Santa. And you'll have to clap for the fairies. Yeah. And there's that'll be the power meter. Yeah. OK. What about the dinosaurs? Yeah. OK. So the second study that was a really, really big thing isn't even a published study. So the first story that we just talked about, published in science, peer reviewed, real data, like it's good. OK. This that has been making the rounds of all of the headlines and everyone's very excited about it. It's it has to do with the Tannis fossil beds. And Justin, do you remember the whole story about the the the upwelling that occurred after the dinosaur killing asteroid event that pushed a whole bunch of water and mud and all sorts of stuff up to the Dakotas and ended up in this Tannis fossil site that is all this mishmash of like fish all over the place. And these beads of the heated glass that are molten glass raining from the sky. Yeah. And so this story is like this wonderful, incredible, just this this story that has so many details. These researchers have been really taking this site apart and finding all sorts of stuff. Well, they have a documentary coming out with David Attenborough. And so there's marketing happening right now. And it's not there's no paper out. They've done a few papers that were peer reviewed. But what they are talking about right now is a dinosaur leg that was found like a bird like dinosaur, an early ancestor of birds. It's leg. No body, just a leg that was found in the correct orientation. And no, it didn't look like anybody had eaten it. So it just looked like it had been ripped off of some poor ancient dinosaur and embedded in the sediment in the process of this incredible impact event that killed the dinosaurs. And so what they're saying is that this preserved leg is proof of all of this happening on this day. And this is a piece of evidence. It's a dinosaur who died on that day of impact. That's the thing I have an issue with and lots and I'm not a paleontologist. I'm not an archaeologist, but the pros have also said they had they take issue with a lot of this because. There are a lot of details that are still not fully understood. And this is a media tour and it's a lot. This whole thing has been science through media first and then the papers after. And it's yeah, this is tough for me because so much of paleontology when you look at it, it's like one little bone. The Catecholus keeps coming to mind that like they found like one little piece of a wing and they're like, it's a giant pterodactyl. Like what? So as I know, there's more science behind it. I know that is way more complicated to that. But from the outside looking in often, I feel like it just looks like they get one little bone and they're like, all right, from this bone, we know it's an herbivore. We know how big it is. We know what the rest of his body look like, right? So it's I could see how as a untrained reader being told they found a leg and finding all this information from it tracks, actually. And so I could see how this could this could totally get out of control and people would believe it without understanding how specific all of that stuff has to be and how much other research goes on in the background to turn one bone into a fossil and into a story. So it's yeah, it's tough. I think it's a fun narrative and they are doing storytelling. They're not doing science. They're doing they're but I mean, they're doing they're doing this. And that's a thing. The storytelling is awesome, but it they're putting it forward. They are doing science, but they're putting story before science as opposed to the other way around where a lot of scientists, the majority of scientists really make sure they have their details figured out before they go out and tell that story. They have peer review. They make sure that everything is going you know, and could this dinosaur have been there witnessing that day? Like it'll be a slight caveat and then you just go past. Yeah, the very slight caveat, but the rest of it is going to be the storytelling, right, and that investigation. And I mean, I think it is this particular surge deposit in North Dakota in Montana. Like, it's amazing, so full of stuff in the store. I mean, it's amazing that the forensics are able to go through and get all this stuff. But now they're saying that they have a piece of the they have a piece of the or pieces evidence of the asteroid itself. They've got bits and pieces of it, which still hasn't been published. They're talking about this dinosaur leg and how it is evidence of a, you know, this dinosaur as evidence still hasn't been published. There's a whole bunch of stuff that is still lacking that hasn't been peer reviewed, but that they have been traveling around. And unfortunately, I mean, I don't know if this is unfortunate or fortunate because they're taking the they're giving talks, which scientists do all the time. However, one of the researchers went to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center this last week and a researcher who I know there, who's a cosmologist, you know, she's like, oh, my gosh, this is like the thing. This is it. And she's talking about how the emotional response of the scientists who were there hearing the story and seeing these bits of evidence that were brought to Goddard. And I I want to cry foul because they are touring the evidence around before the evidence has really been picked apart. And so that's that's all I'm going to say. So please, everyone, enjoy dinosaurs. The final day with Sir David Attenborough on BBC One. It'll also be on Nova and on PBS in the United States. But enjoy the story. But if you're watching this show, if you're listening to this podcast, please hear me and be skeptical. Don't just dive into the narrative and accept it all as fact, because it hasn't all been published. I mean, this is ultimately the problem with trying to communicate science in the age of the Internet. Yeah, the Internet and social media and all of the whole media environment. You have the opportunity to reach people immediately. But science takes time to be done properly. And so there is a disconnect, right? So how do you get in front of misinformation? How do you wait long enough to give the whole story without losing your moment? It's a lot of push-pulls and especially, you know, in these cases, there was nobody trying to fight the science. But when when you are specifically dealing with this and intentional misinformation, how do you wait long enough to be correct, the most correct, while also battling misinformation? It's it's a huge problem that we're currently dealing with. And I I don't have an answer other than to do it right. So we try to do so. That's why I thought it was important to put on the skeptic hat at the beginning. I'm not I don't consider I'm a scientist, right? I don't consider myself just a skeptic. I'm a scientist, but you got to you got to put on that scientific skepticism every once in a while. Enjoy the story. Enjoy the narrative, but grain of salt. Hey, Kiki, what kind of science did you study? I studied brain science. Good, because that's going to come in handy because I have no idea what this next story is about. So yeah, according to this, the human brain is organized into functional networks, which is not something I was terribly aware of. It says connected brain regions that communicate with each other through dedicated pathways are considered functional networks. This is we have one for senses, I guess, the motor system, how we move around. There's memory is involved in its own functional network. It says here the default mode network is the part of our connected brain that is responsible for abstract and self-directed thought. When we process external sensory information, the default network turns off. And when there is less going on outside of our bodies, when our senses aren't super engaged, it turns on. So I'm sort of thinking like this is the part of your brain that's working when you're reading or meditating or contemplating. Maybe I don't know what to do with the rest of your existence. So the human default mode network engaged in rest and cognitive states, such as the self-directed thoughts. So it sounds like a focused, thinking part of the brain. Mm-mm. Is that would you would you support that analogy? Yeah, very focused, thinking part of the brain. Thank you. OK. Sure. OK. So we got this focus. It's putting a whole bunch of different kinds of parts of the brain together. Yeah. So and it's the part I think that in humans is giving us that sentient glint in our eye when we're doing nothing, when we're like staring at a book. But we still seem like we might be, you know, concentrating on it. Question is, do animals have this ability based on cross species comparison of the default mode network, thinking part of the brain, between humans and non-hominated primates, macaques, marmosets and something called a mouse lemur. Researchers report finding major dissimilarities in connectivity files. Most importantly, the medial prefrontal cortex, which I'm assuming is a part of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex on the non-hominated, hominoid primates is poorly engaged with posterior cingulate cortex, which is a cloud of diversion from human brains where activity between medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex is on fire. It is working when we're doing the thinking part of the brain and not engaging so much with the outside world. And this is from an international collaboration across seven laboratories, five institutions, three countries published in one journal, Cell Reports, led by Christos Konstantidis, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Neuroscience and Ophthalmology, who says, surprisingly, our results show that in all species other than humans, the brain areas that comprise the default mode network involve two systems not strongly connected with each other. These reasons, once responsible for suppression of external events and one for more cognitive tasks, appear to be linked only recently in evolution. It is this linkage that may have facilitated the capacity for abstract thought that led to the rapid evolution of human cognitive abilities. So this was unexpected finding. They actually thought they would they would find more of archaic sort of blueprint for this than they did. Unexpected findings change the way we think about brain networks. Atypical patterns of connectivity between brain areas are we have diagnoses for these neurodevelopmental disorders, mental illnesses can be attributed to lack of connectivity with different parts of brain networks. And, you know, so they've got this now they understand that it's actually kind of unusual to have the connectivity in the first place for for the humans might lead to future therapies or understanding how to treat diseases going forward. So is this all based on the morphological presence or absence of a region of the brain? Or were they looking at how the brain as well? They're looking at how the brain worked and how it was how it was interactive. We're looking at you, you. I'm not probably not actually computing firing on, but just what is it? Is it the FMI? Is that when it's just general blood flow to a region? Yeah. And it's just like a picture. Yeah, I'm just asking because you don't like the result. No, no, no, I totally buy it. I mean, there's definitely stuff that we do that other animals don't. I get it. There's something special about our brain and I'm happy to have it. I'm just curious when when you lack what you think is a very clear evolutionary progression of the brain, is it because as we know when we damage our own brain, brains can kind of reorganize and serve different functions in different ways when their different shapes or parts are missing or whatever. And so I could see how just by looking at what we currently have and what other animals currently have, you could miss how it changed when the brain enlarged, when new areas of the brain grew larger and then it kind of reorganized and reformatted how it worked. So I think that's that's the part that I always kind of struggle with with studies like this, is that just because it doesn't it doesn't it's not visually organized in the same way. Doesn't mean it's not doing the same thing. Yeah. And so this is about the connectivity between those those regions and less about, I think they don't at least I didn't read anything that was talking about shape or function beyond that. But looking for for that, the thing that occurred to me, though, is this requires this this network requires you to have downtime. Evolutionarily speaking, you need to be able to have this is internal thinking where you were you actually sort of shutting out. This is almost like the flow mode of it, right? Where you can like you're reading something so somebody's talking and you didn't hear what they said because you were busy reading it. It's shutting off the senses. If you're a macaque or a mouse lemur, maybe there's never a good time to do that. Maybe there is never a good time to really stop paying attention to the to the nature around you. Blair is not agreeing with you. No, you're not. There's so many reasons why it's they live in large groups. So there's they take turns looking out. There's lots of time to chill when they're sitting there and they're grooming each other, they're spacing out. It's like a repetitive task. They're not really paying attention. Also, any animal that's not foraging all day spends time. Just chilling, just just hanging out. It's that is a very common thing for animals to do. Or so they appear, maybe they're always paying attention to their surroundings. Well, if you if you heard a scary sound while you were in the flow, as it were, you would you would kind of right. And that's all they need to do is be alerted to specific stimuli. But yeah, apparently these they're not I mean, we may project that that a monkey is deep in thought. Well, while it's while it's grooming, maybe they're just not. Maybe they're really not really not. They're not thinking about anything. But, you know, perhaps things like planning. Whoa, what just happened there? We're going to rave. You know, perhaps there are things like planning to steal somebody else's food or, you know, tasks that you're planning to do, these don't necessarily take the default mode network to achieve and that the abstract thought that would be involved for for other. Contextual thinking, the abstract thinking you're talking about. I think therefore I am kind of stuff. Maybe that's what it's or just cave wall art. Where you're we're using symbols to communicate language. Yeah. Well, language is a tough one. But but you're right about the for sure, certain art and stuff like that. We don't really see that. Hey, Blair, you want to tell the story? Oh, yeah, let me tell you about some bloodsucking leeches. Yeah, I've been waiting for this one. The world. This is a study out of Harvard University looking at DNA samples extracted from the blood meals of leeches. They found that those DNA samples from leech blood, not actually the blood of leeches, but the blood and the tummies of the leeches that they could be used to find out which wild animals are present in a large protected area like national parks and that they can help establish leeches as surveillance instruments for animal conservation. Yes, I love this. And so they extracted from more than 30,000 leeches. They extracted DNA to survey over 80 species of vertebrates, including amphibians, mammals, birds and squamates. That's a fancy word for reptile. And the leeches were collected over a three month period by forest rangers throughout the 260 square mile nature reserve in southern China. It's about 80 miles along the mountain ridge there. And leeches, they're abundant in tropical environments. So this works for tropical environments. We have to find something else for us temperate buddies. But they they feed on a large range of animals all the way from bears to mice. They are sitting weight parasites, I guess, predators. I don't know what you want to call them. But their sitting weight strategy means that pretty much wherever you collect the leech, if they carry the DNA of something, that thing was very close to where you picked up that leech. Those leeches are not moving very far. So you know, they pretty much walked through or nearby that exact space where you picked up your leech. So that means your mapping can be very accurate. And they they digest the blood very, very slow. So they can also get the blood from leeches four months after they fed on that animal and test the DNA. So that's a fantastic filter, then. Yeah. And they they were able to find near threatened and threatened animals via their DNA in the leech samples. So they were able to figure out where they were hanging out, like asianic black bears, tufted deers, stum-tailed macaques, types of frogs. But they also found livestock DNA, DNA from cows, sheep, goats. That means that the farmland, right along the edge of the nature reserve, there was probably some bleed over where where that means that the livestock was either crossing into the reserve where they were not supposed to be or that there was actually an overlap in resource use between the livestock and these these threatened animals. So that could be a really good monitoring tool to figure out if farmland is encroaching on degrading habitat, protected habitat, or if it's impacting those populations. So long story short, this is just kind of a proof of concept that leeches could be used to map species distribution and that unexpectedly they found some really interesting insights just from this initial proof of concept. So you because they're they're they're living their ecological blood bags, yes, doing the blood sampling, the DNA sampling that researchers can't do. And then they're sticking around wherever wherever they were. They're like, oh, I'm full. Let me drop off. Wild hypodermic needles just roaming free. They're there. They're ready for you, these blood bags. So so yeah, this is something that that researchers could go out. This way better than a camera trap or anything that you could find out from just general observation, sound traps. Any of those things are not going to be as effective as actual DNA from a leech. So yeah, that's brilliant. Yeah, I'm trying to think if there are any other animals that could be potentially used in this way. Of course, anything that sucks blood, like mosquitoes, potentially, but the fly. So it's a rain. Fly. So there's maneuverable. And it's really it's a way harder to pinpoint where they came from. So you'd have to find something that doesn't go very far like ticks. Ticks could work, except that they they do also move pretty far. So they can travel. Yeah, like the leeches got to be in the water, they got to be the animal has to introduce leeches to no, no, no, no, no, no. Never mind. I don't even joke about it. We're not introducing leeches to any environments where they're not already endemic. But let's talk about life and where it where it belongs, where it got its start, how it got its start. How is the big question? So we've talked about anybody who has studied evolution or even chemistry has probably heard of the Miller and Yuri experiment from 1952 in which chemists took a gas filled flask and applied. A spark of electricity meant to simulate lightning. And they came up came up with a whole bunch of molecules that are prebiotic in nature. They could have led to the evolution of life. There's a new study that has just been published that suggests that while that might still be part of the whole generation, the the electricity may have been involved in all of this. Our understanding of the early atmosphere now is much different than what we used to think. And where once upon a time, we thought that the atmosphere was made up of methane and ammonia, and then it shifted. Things changed and more than 300 million years into the start of this earth. You had chemical just the chemical interactions led to a change in the atmosphere that led to a predominance of nitrogen and carbon as far as researchers are aware. And so thinking of it from that perspective, those molecules don't make lightning easy. It's not the same kind of environment, the same kind of atmosphere that you would have where it'd be like, yeah, methane and ammonia and lightning all the time. And there's just all these molecules getting started everywhere and where you would just think there's this preponderance of life starting moments. Potentially, they were much rarer that the nitrogen, the researchers say Christopher Cohn, a scientist at National Space Institute at the Technical University of Denmark said, the nitrogen and carbon rich atmosphere, you need stronger electric fields for a discharge to initiate. And so the atmosphere needed about, according to their models, 28% stronger electric field for streamers, which are the precursors for lightning to discharge. Because these gas molecules are less likely to bump into each other and build up electrical charges that would lead to lightning strikes. So fewer strikes, fewer odds of prebiotic molecules getting their starts. So they were looking specifically at these starting streamers and the probability of those and looking at that. And so now they're going to be starting to model whole lightning strikes, trying to couple that with early Earth atmospheric chemistry to give us a better idea of how prebiotic molecules that might have led to life came to be, which is pretty cool. And then on another note, even beyond the lightning, there has been evidence in rocks in Canada of life potentially starting sometime around 3.75 to 4.28 billion years ago. So long ago. But it was seriously this nature paper that was published a couple of years ago suggested that it was really like the Earth turned into a rock and then life started. It's like immediately, immediately, right? And so the people said, well, these rocks, the structures, they may not have been really the it might not have been life. It just could have been rocks. It could have been natural, natural formations that created what looked like a growth pattern thingy on there, something having been there. But could maybe not be a bacterial colony. Maybe it was and scientists debated this. I don't remember who won. I know I was rooting for life, but I don't know who won. I mean, life one, we're on the planet right now, which means life did win. Life finds a way. But there is now a new paper out in Science Advances investigating these bits of rock. More closely. And so they have taken really tiny, fine slices of these bits of rock, assessed them to actually determine that they were as old as the old Earth and not just some new inclusion in older rocks. Yes, indeed, they're super old rocks. These are over three, they're three to four billion years old. So the rocks are the right age. And then additionally, they started looking into the structures within the rocks and they found in their CT scans and they're really high, high resolution searching. They discovered that there were branches and like a like stem and branch patterns that were not the kind of thing that you would find from just chemical processes. And so they're finding more and more observational evidence of what looks like the kinds of structures that would be formed by microbial life, early microbial life. Additionally, the rock specimens and the molecules contained in them have molecules that seem that in their study, they say are pretty they're pretty obviously metabolic leftovers, that they are the leftovers of life activity in these rocks. So fossils, old fossils in the rocks could be and they are there is more evidence it's been published. So again, hey, everyone, this is a cool story. Was life with those limited number of lightning strikes? Did it really get started that early? The evidence is tantalizing. But we don't know yet, but it's very exciting. Yeah, and it really this this sort of finding to to see the life this early or when it shows up later, which is still very early. If you think about the how old the planet is, the four billion years of the planet. This is that this is pushing it beyond three billion years back. But then even if it's only three billion, only if it's two and a half billion, it's still, you know, for for something that we think of is such a freak accident of nature to come to exist. But if it isn't happening so quickly, then you can sort of see like with all the other planets that have the same chemical soup and same physics that our planet has and the same interactions taking place should happen there, too. There's no reason it wouldn't be happening all over the universe. That life might be much, much more common than we have assumed. Now, by common, of course, you have to still have somewhat Goldilocks ish conditions, of course, perhaps. Well, but that's assuming you have the same criteria for life to happen is the only way. That's the other problem. But we only have one example. And that's why I was sure. But it's it's really hard for me to believe there's not others. But that's that's not the point of this. I do want to say this picture. I'm excited about the James Webb, though, because let's look at exoplanets and find this out. I have somebody waving back. No, this picture is amazing. There's just these little circles and squiggles. And that means maybe life. And I want to see a lecture from one of these scientists talking animatedly about these squiggles. I want to tell me about what you see in these rocks. Tell me why these squiggles are exciting to you, because I know they're exciting. But to me, they just look like squiggles. I want to look like rocks. But yeah, these are maybe very special rocks. And maybe they're the earliest life on the planet earlier than we even thought. The jury's still out, but let's keep figuring it out. All right, Justin, you have another story? Oh, I've got lots more stories. Yeah, maybe this one is published in the Frontiers in Microbiology. Microbiologists from Rabud University have demonstrated that it is possible to make methane-consuming bacteria generate electricity. Oh, we have a very electric show today. The bacteria, Candidatus methanopterrandens, use methane to grow and naturally occur in waters anywhere from ditches to lakes. They might be there with the leeches. It's just all over the place. According to microbiologists and author Cornelia Welp, in the current biogas installations, methane is produced by microorganisms and is subsequently burnt, which drives a turbine, thus generating power. Less than half of the biogas is converted into that power. And this is the maximum achievable capacity. We want to evaluate whether we can do this better using the microorganisms. So sort of skipping the whole burning and turbineing part and just going straight from organism to electricity. Of course, it sounds like impossible, right? You can't just hook up. First of all, they're so small, the bacteria. Where are you even going to connect the cables? And then this is a microbiologist, Helen Aubotter, who says we create a kind of battery with two terminals where one of these is a biological terminal and the other is a chemical terminal. We grow the bacteria on one of the electrodes to which the bacteria donate electrons, resulting from the conversion of methane. Through this approach, researchers managed to convert 31 percent of the methane into electricity, which is less than is achieved by the standard of burning operations. But this is, of course, just the first time they've done this. So for a first run, it's an extremely good result. And they say they're going to focus on improving the system. Also, in their system, there's no burning of the methane. It's just look, I love the look at that. Oh, that look, that's a real custom job over there with those with those. Oh, yeah. I mean, you said, where are they going to put the electrodes? Where are you going to where are you going to hook it up? But I mean, it's a it's a soup, right? It's a it's a solution. The bacteria are just in solution. So it's like a jar of soup and you put the electrodes into the soup. And then you let the thing let it go and let it do its thing. You have your cathode, your anode, you have your catalyst and you have your methanogenic archae bacteria that are like, I'm going to eat this up and suck up the methane and make electricity. I love it. And if you can make them on if they can make them more efficient and make them on a larger scale, then suddenly you have real power generation. And it doesn't. And like you said, this proof of concept, this, you know, homemade, jobby, you know, it's like what they've put together in the lab out of a couple of. Plastic jugs and bacteria and bits and pieces. I mean, you scale that up, you make it more efficient and you put that into a plant that's producing methane. You have there's. Well, bacteria powered car. Yes. You just stop at a red light and go, slosh, slosh, slosh, slosh, slosh, slosh. Yeah, we'll be talking about ginormous bioreactors. All right, but this is this is the thing that is is sustainable. You can turn half of your bacteria into a magnitude, more bacteria overnight. There are many magnitudes, perhaps like you. I mean, they just grow them off of basically, you know, sugar water and a couple of trace elements. This is not instead of the gas station. You're stopping at the sugar water station. Am I right? Yeah, exactly how it would work. And and the, you know, it's sort of funny, too, because it sounds like such a we have like all these steps in between, like, oh, yeah, we need this ancient forest and then it needs to get covered up. And and then bacteria have to digest it and turn it into or and then you get oil or something there or turns into methane gas that can get pumped out. And then so we're like waiting for like a millions of years for these bacteria to do the job. We can just do it in real time. You just do it just right there. Yeah, there's another not bacterial, but I think it's out of MIT published in Nature this week, what they're calling a thermo photovoltaic cell that's been created. It's like they're saying it's more efficient than the traditional steam turbine. There's no moving parts and it's it's little. It generates electricity from heat sources. So black body radiation heat sources like the sun. And it can generate electricity from a heat source of between nineteen hundred to twenty four hundred degrees Celsius, which is the equivalent of up to about forty three hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Super hot, really, really hot. So they can potentially incorporate this into solar setups. You know, but any place that has white hot light that's producing light, basically, white hot heat production, it can it can potentially get in there. And it's about thirty five to forty percent efficient. So sustainability, I think this is a huge point that we need, that we need to keep pushing forward. These are the solutions we are capable. We have technology. We just need to put them into action. Faster. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we could a hundred percent if if we pretended that gas was a was a resource that was somehow finite or subject to global events and and was an unstable thing on which to plan economies. We could perhaps invest in technologies that were manageable, sustainable, not destroying the planet so much. Oh, that doesn't sound less than enough for people. That's like a lot of tetrad traits, right? And then part of the problem, of course, is there's and it's something I didn't even mention where they said, oh, the energy sector will find this very interesting. I had to like think about what they meant by the energy sector, yeah, because there is. You know, there's there's bureaucrats in the world who are in charge of running a city and they might have a municipal power plant and they're like, I just need the energy sector to provide energy for the people. And then there's like mining and logistics companies who are like, I don't care what you do with the oil. You can turn it into plastic. You can you can run your car on it. You can just you can just pour it into your rivers for all I care. As long as I got to mine it and deliver it and you bought it, I don't care. Like they're not really in the energy business and other energies are actually competition for their energy. They're their mining operations. So there's a there's a lot that we have to rethink in how energy is handled as a as a utility and not as a private business. Oh, so many things, so many things. I agree with you there. But yeah, there's so many things we need to consider in this way. But, oh, Blair, can you can you tell us what our purpose is? Oh, yes. The purpose of the story is to tell you about a dolphin. And and why did why did the dolphin make a bunch of clicking sounds? It was to find her purpose. Oh, this is yeah. So this is this is a very specific anecdote anecdotal. It's not even really a study. It's an anecdotal account that I want to tell you about in the fifth, the first of Clyde, which is a saltwater inlet in the West Coast of Scotland. And it's home to many harbor purposes. And the locals found out one dolphin. They named the dolphin Kylie. And they noticed that she often spent time interacting with the porpoises. So some researchers from the University of Strathclyde. They took some hydrophones in Scottish. They dragged some hydrophones behind a yacht multiple times over the years. 2016, 2017 and 2018. They normally dolphins make sounds by pushing air from their lungs through a structure that is called their monkey lips. It's a muscular structure that's similar to vocal cords in humans. And it creates the sound that we associate with dolphins, which is like putting air out of a balloon, a whistly sound. They can also make clicking sounds. They can do other things. Dolphins have a lot of sounds that they do, but their primary means of communication is the whistling. That's how they talk to one another. In listening to Kylie, she didn't whistle. She produced clicks similar to porpoise sounds. As they continued to listen, they revealed a back and forth communication of sorts between Kylie and some of the porpoises. They would hear pausing in between clicks from the porpoises and Kylie. It sounds as though they were listening to one another and then responding. The problem is we don't know if she was making any sense. We don't know if she was really speaking porpoise. We don't know if she was just kind of like mooing at a cow like we do. Or if they were actually fully communicating. They were confident that she was attempting to communicate in some way with the porpoises, but they don't know if she's been successful. Unfortunately, she has not been seen since 2018, so I don't know what the deal with Kylie is. Either she's made it to the great blue yonder or the great blue yonder. We don't know. If she shows back up, I'm sure these researchers will be jumping out on a boat with a hydrophone once again. But in the meantime, this is our first indication of porpoises and dolphins attempting to speak to one another. She's pretty wild. How different are they? Really. They're very closely related. Yeah, very closely related. But have chimps and bonobos talk to each other? Right. Can we talk to chimps? No. Yeah, to some trainable degree, we can be trained to understand when they're hungry or when they're... I think there's some level of... But you could take your sounds back to them. That they can understand. And vice versa. Right, you could make sounds. They can't make human sounds to us. You could try to mimic, but it wouldn't necessarily mean anything. And the closest thing I can think about is parents, right? They can make human sounds. There have been arguments that they understand what they're saying, but they don't really formulate full language connections. They can't have a full back and forth conversation. So it's something that is kind of, to this point, unparalleled. That being said, it could be happening all over the animal kingdom, and we just don't know because we don't speak the animal languages. So it's possible that rabbits are talking to mice, and we don't even know. Everybody's talking... It's just the humans that never... They're just so hard to understand. Is this a harbour dolphin thing? Is this the one that I've seen in a documentary or something before where it's hanging out and it's got a golden retriever that it hangs out with and they go for swim? Is this the little town? Wasn't that a show from the 70s? Is it that old? Flipper. No, I'm not talking about flipper. It's not flipper. No, this is in Florida in an aquarium. That's what I'm finding when I google dolphin golden retriever. No, no, this was definitely... This was somewhere where everyone had British accents, and it was just like the same dolphin hung out in this one bay and just was there all the time, and then researchers would go out and swim with it, and then had this dog that would come there all the time and they'd go swim around and hang out and play. Anyway, if it's not the same... I'm not finding anything. If it was the same, then I'm like, well, this dolphin's always... is used to interacting cross species, because then it would have interacted with humans, dogs, and porpoises. But if it's not the same one... No, this appears to have nothing to do with that. Sorry. These are just friendly dolphins in the world without a porpoise. I would say friendly is a tough one, but I would say curious. Curious about their porpoise. Yes, exactly. For sure. Yes. Well, we are not curious about our porpoise because we know why we're here. We're here to talk about science, and we're so glad that you're curious about science as well, and that you're here to join in the conversation, to be a part of this program. Thank you for spending your time with us. If you are enjoying the show, please tell a friend, share twists with someone you love today. All right. We're going to come back right now to a part of the show. Oh, wait. It's not really much of a switch, actually. Yeah, we should. It's more of a continuation. I'm going on. Continuing on. It was like an appetizer. It was an amuse-bouche. An am- Yes, that's yes. A porpoise amuse-bouche. For Blair's Animal Corner. With Blair. What you got, Blair? I have chimps that know what you did. What? Uh-oh. If it involves. Chimps know what you did last summer. If it involves a chimps skull, then they might. This is a study from Kyoto University, looking at whether chimps can recognize chimps skulls. Chimps are known to interact with dead members of their species. They revisit corpses. They show morning-like behavior. We see this in other animals too, like elephants. But in this study, they tested chimpanzees' visual attention to a series of images of conspecific and non-conspecific skulls, meaning chimps skulls and not chimps skulls. They used images of faces, skulls, and skull-shaped stones, representing four different species. And they found that the chimpanzees seem to know when a skull is chimpanzee-like. They relate this to the phenomenon of pareidolia. They even looked up how to pronounce that before the show, and I forgot. Pareidolia is. Yeah, pareidolia is when you see faces and things. I was just talking to someone about this the other day. But so they think that that's what this is about, is that the chimps can analogize the shape and features of the skull to kind of picture a chimp face in their mind's eye. That's what they think is going on. Might be a little stretch, but whatever. That's what this study decided to specifically look at. They conducted a series of three experiments using an eye tracker to map where the chimpanzees were looking and how long they looked at certain parts of the images. Not only do chimpanzees show preference for chimpanzee faces, but they also show a bias towards chimpanzee's skulls over other skulls. They spent the majority of their time looking at the teeth, which is interesting. This does not conclusively determine whether chimpanzees know that it is a chimpanzee's skull, but they venture to speculate that when they find a skull, they will likely be attentive to it like no other inanimate objects in their surroundings, and that might have something to do with the fact that it resembles their own and that it could be a symbol of danger, could be a warning, could be just interesting because it looks like there's a million reasons that they might specifically focus on chimpanzee skulls. But based on this research, it looks like they do in fact differentiate chimpanzee skulls from other skulls. So, they looked at the chimpanzee skulls longer? Interesting. Yeah, so normally that's like a sign of novelty or something that, yeah, but of course it's also interest, it's attention. Interest is attention, and they're drawing a parallel to the fact that chimpanzees mourn, so that's also kind of like lingering. I do wonder because you said they spend a lot of time looking at the teeth, and so looking at the bones of a skull, you're not really seeing features of your friend, Bill, who's not around anymore, but his teeth, he he bared his teeth at you a bunch of times, and so you're like, oh, wait, those canines, those incisors. Those canines have threatened to be before. What? Yeah, maybe those look familiar. But it wouldn't need to be familiar, of course. It would just be like, that's a threat. If you're seeing another chip's teeth, somebody's not happy around you, especially if you see all of them like that, then they must really be like, whoa. Well, so this is why whenever you go to zoos, or nature preserves where there are monkeys, but definitely apes, you're not supposed to, you're supposed to cover your mouth if you're smiling, you're supposed to not smile big and wide at them, because that is a sign of aggression saying, look at my weapons. And you know everybody who goes to a zoo and they see the chimps, they see the apes, they're like, how cute are their smiling and laughing and saying, hey, take a picture, smile next to the chimpanzees. Which I'm sure an argument can be made that the chimpanzees get habituated to that. So like the apes and zoos are probably used to seeing human smiling and they're, it's not as big of a problem. But if you see a chimp smiling at you in the zoo, that means they feel threatened and they are showing aggression towards you. So anyway, so from skulls to hearts. This is like, like, I don't know, it's either, I don't know, this is a horror movie. This is the primate horror films or Shakespeare or I don't know. Edgar Allen Poe on one hand. And then in the other hand is just primate introspection, know thyself. So we just talked about knowing their own, the skull of their own species. I want to talk about knowing your own heartbeat. So this is a study out of UC Davis and this is looking at Reese's macaques and if they are able to perceive their own heartbeats. Do you think without taking your pulse, you could recognize your own heartbeat? No. Oh, recognize it? Yeah, sometimes. Like if I've been exercising, yes. You're not saying you notice. I'm saying recognize. Recognize. So both of you could because you will recognize if your heart starts racing. Yeah. If it's beating very hard, but also humans in general. This is not even in the study, but I wanted to talk about it. Humans in general have a preference for a 60 beats per minute pace in music. And that is roughly the average human heart rate. The human heart rate. If you have music that is slightly faster or slightly lower, like if you have an 80 beats per minute rate in a song, like I learned this from playing music, if you're trying to keep time at 80 beats per minute, it is extremely difficult because your body either wants to speed it up or slow it down to get it close to in sync with or double time with the human heart. So you are aware of your own heart rate, whether you realize it or not. It dictates things that you do and how you move and what you respond to. My heart can't tell me what to do. It can. The heart wants what it wants, Iggy. Okay, bye. But so for this reason, I'm kind of throwing this whole study into question, but we'll talk about this episode. It's about skepticism. Come on. So they wanted to see if Reese's macaques could perceive their own heart beats. There's reasoning for this beyond just, hey, you're monkey smart. It's because this is related to something called interoceptive awareness. Interoception is the self-monitoring of your physical systems. And interoception is something that humans do all the time unknowingly. That's why I was asking you about your heart rate. You're actually paying attention to it, whether you realize it or not. Impaired intero, interoceptive awareness is associated with anxiety, depression, mental health issues, and even potentially Alzheimer's. And so looking at what makes interoception happen, what animals have it and what animals don't, and how those systems are developed also then allows you to alter those systems and test subjects to be able to do research to help humans. So that's the background on this. Now Reese's macaques, what they did is they monitored four of them. They sat them in front of an infrared eye tractor displaying stimuli. The stimuli bounced and generated a sound either synchronously with or asynchronously without the monkey's heartbeat. So it was either faster or slower. So they did both of those so it wasn't favoring one or the other. And monkeys and human babies in other tests have looked longer at things they find surprising or unexpected, exactly what you mentioned Kiki before. So they will look longer at something unusual. All four monkeys spent more time looking at the out of rhythm stimuli compared to the in rhythm. So they did sense an out of rhythm from their own heartbeats. This is consistent with similar studies with human infants. And so this is what they believe is the first behavioral evidence that Reese's monkeys have a human like capacity to perceive their heartbeat and have an interoceptive sense. So they hope to use a similar model to study neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's anxiety and depression and all sorts of emotional hindrances as well. So if they can measure interoception, they can track it as a behavioral biomarker to follow disease progression. So their next step is to study the mechanism that causes interoception. What in the body tells us what's going on with our heart and what might be involved in psychiatric and neuro psychiatric conditions. Which one is causing the other? Is anxiety causing hindered interoception or is hindered interoception causing anxiety? And so you have to kind of answer all these other questions first. It's very interesting. The thing I push back on is that it's hard for me to believe that this is not a basic animal thing that you know your heartbeat. That I don't think this is so unusual to find it in monkeys. And I think if you look in other species, you will find them as well. And I think the issue is that rodents are just different enough that it would be hard to do these experiments on rodents. And as wonderful as rodents are for a model species, it just kind of wouldn't work the same way. But other species, I'm going to guess that we just haven't looked at them yet. We haven't checked to see because it's relatively unstudied because we have this, you know, the human hubris of our own. We have our own internal environment and our internal lives. And of course other animals can't be so complex. Well, think about any mammal, any placental mammal started out in a womb. And there was a maternal heart rate heartbeat happening all the time. When you are taking milk as a baby, there is a maternal heart rate right next to your ear. And feeling the vibrations through your small chest cavity, right? So your heart could, you know, sink up in some way with that maternal heartbeat. Yeah. So I think in terms of heart rates, I think we are very hardwired to recognize our heart rate to have a preference for a steady heart rate. And evolutionarily, it's helpful to know when your heart is racing. Yeah, physiologically, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Oh, I'm going to pass out or my heart is racing too much. This is too, you know, or maybe I need to get more excited. You know, there's, I'm going to say that a lot of this interception for the, you know, for humans as well as for chimps, where if we sit and we think about it, we can go, yeah, okay, I'm aware of when my heart changes its speed. I know when it's speeding out, when it's slowing down, when there are weird fibrillations, you know, people start to recognize those kinds of things once you become cued into it. But the rest of the time, we're probably very much like other primates in that and other animals in that it's unconscious and that it's just a part of our body has this internal sense. But we're not thinking about it, right? Yeah, and I think about, I think about my own anxious childhood and anxious adulthood and how I for a long time was convinced I had asthma because I sometimes just couldn't breathe. And as an adult, I was like, oh no, that's anxiety. So as an adult, you recognize, oh, my heart's going really, really, really fast. And so I can't breathe and I need to sit down and I need to take deep breaths. But as a child, I was very bad at that, very bad at that. And so then you start to, then you can think, then you can start to extract this into a larger evolutionary question of, is that a human thing that we've developed back to Justin's original story about what makes humans special, right? Are we like, are we extra good at that? Are we extra bad at that? Well, that's like a couple of weeks ago I was talking about, I don't know, a gazelle getting chased by a cheetah or something, right? And it gets away from the cheetah and then goes back to eating grass. It's not saying an animal can't be traumatized, but the gazelle's kind of like, like if I got chased by a cheetah, I'd need some time to come back from my survival from being chased by a cheetah-ness, gazelle goes right back to eating grass and doing whatever gazelle's doing when they're hopping around it. So like there is part of our brain that communication from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex that's like jamming information in that direction. We can think about it, but we can't really talk back to the amygdala to say, it's cool, there's no cheetahs chasing us anymore. We can relax because our brain is still in one of these other networks of activities that are going on, still thinking about it. Amygdala is still hearing about it, still thinking about cheetahs. So we have some architecture that allows us to do abstract thinking and be sentient and do all these wonderful things with our brains. And there's some stuff that was there just being an animal and running from the cheetahs or chasing down prey that's still there but isn't functioning. Yeah, and we don't necessarily, and I think that's kind of, yeah, part of it. We have this abstract modern society and yet we have these very primal instincts, networks, things like interoception that aren't necessarily something that we need to be consciously aware of all the time, but that do help our survival and that do help the management of our internal homeostasis. But I think it is, is somebody in the audience would know, is it jungle that's 180 beats per minute? Probably something like that, yeah. It's like 108, because the techno, the superfast techno. Very soothing to me. Very soothing. And if it's actually a triple time. If it's 180, then that's like a multiple. But it totally makes sense. Then it totally fits in the flares. So I googled song 180 BPM and they're almost all on running playlists, which is very funny to me, because try to get your heart rate up. Exactly. Yeah. And then get into flow, right? Keep going everybody. But I don't think I have this weird feeling, like the reason I find that super fast music relaxing now is that it's actually matching my heartbeat, which is not something that I would have. I think you should go see a doctor. It might be a hummingbird, actually. No, if it's a multiple of the 60 is what I mean. Yeah. Well, a triplet of the 60 is going to still be weird to your body. You want an even division of it. Because yeah, it's we don't need to get into this completely. It's fine. After show, after show. Yeah, I wonder. Oh, sorry. This is This Week in Science. And we thank you so much for joining us for another episode. Justin, where'd you go? It's your turn after this section. And I do want to say if you really love this show and you want to help keep us going month after month, week after week, head over to twist.org and click on that Patreon link to choose your level of giving within our Patreon community, $10 and more per month. And we will thank you by name at the end of the show. Oh, and while you're over there at twist.org, click on the Zazzle link because we have some new goodies in the Zazzle store. You know you want a new pillow or mug or t-shirt. That's right. Support twist. We thank you for all of your support. We really do. We can't do this without you. Where'd he go? I don't know. Do you just want to do your stories? No. I mean, does he not watch? Does he not look? The rundown is like, you know, he doesn't look at the rundown. And then he asked him this recently and he said, no, it's, but always it's you and then him and then me. Sorry, Rachel. Okay. Yes, sure. I will do my stories. That sounds great. That sounds fantastic. All right. So let me tell you about plants. I really do want to bring you some really interesting news about plants protecting themselves. So there are a couple of very interesting aspects of this story that I hadn't really considered previously that I get very excited about now that I have really thought about them. So plants, they have an immune system. Have you ever really considered the fact that plants have an immune system, Blair? Yes. Yeah. Okay. Right. All right. You've thought about plants having an immune system. Yeah, but that's because I think about them talking to each other too. I think about plants way more, I think, than the average person and their goings on. Yeah. So you're thinking about the plants. You're thinking about, you know, what they're doing in their immune system, but how do plants know when to get their immune system going? How do they know when they need to fight off a pathogen? Is it after something has invaded them, you know, has gone past their cuticle, has gotten into their cells, they've been bitten, right? They've started to be eaten. Their defenses have been breached. Well, sometimes nearby plants will release chemical signals, right? Signals, yeah. But what about the rain? And this is where this story gets a little bit weird, is that we don't really think about all the microbes that the rain contains. Every raindrop, every raindrop isn't just a clean drop of water. It has come from somewhere and is containing things, microbes that have been carried in the atmosphere and condensed into this droplet of water and have now dropped to earth, plummeted thanks to gravity. And then they land on a plant. And so then you have a microbe that could be bacteria, could be a fungus, and those little raindrops might get into a little nook or cranny and just kind of get in there. And like suddenly you have a fungus growing on a plant because it got moist and the plant is just going to die, right? No, no. Of course not. It's healthy stuff. Plant probiotics. Yeah. Well, the plants have proactive systems in place. Researchers at Nagoya University Publishing in Nature Communications about their work showed that structures on plants become activated by the droplets of rain themselves. And the plants then recognize rain as a risk factor for disease and protect themselves. They're trichome cells. They're these little hairs on the outside of the plants get bounced and wiggled by raindrops as they hit the plants and the trichomes play a role in sensing rain as a risk factor and they activate immune responses. So the rain, then it activates these trichomes. The trichomes lead to increases in calcium concentrations in the cells and the calcium concentrations change these G proteins and the signal cascades and all this thing. And then these, you know, because of the calcium increases, the leafs are able to inactivate an immune suppressor molecule and get their immune system going. So they have this whole thing. It's like, it's like the hairs on your arms standing up when you, you know, hear scratches on a chalkboard. Oh no, something bad's about to happen. And then it's not your immune system necessarily, but your fight or flight response is starting to get ready to go. Scary, something stimulated, but they are getting all built up to protect themselves from the rain. Plants protect themselves from rain. And this is wonderful to me. This is interesting because I was I was like thinking, oh, but the the bacteria is, they're probiotic bacteria. I mean, the plants need them. They thrive with these. No, always. Because, well, yeah, because, and this is the extrapolation from a previous study where they had done sterile water and put it on plants and collected rainwater and put it on plants and the plants that got the rainwater did much better. They grew better, they were healthier plants. And their extrapolation is, you know, this is likely because there's a probiotic effect for the plant to my microflora that's on it. And that's that it's getting something that it doesn't get anywhere, which could be. But this is a mechanistic study, which is then sort of saying that it's a like by activating, maybe it could be then also extrapolating also speculating because it could be the probiotic thing could be a thing. But it could also be that the plants immune system just getting woken up makes it thrive better. It's reminding me of the, in a way of the dishwasher study, right? So if you if you have your kid in a very hermetically sealed home, then when they finally get exposed to things, they have problems with it. But if you if you let things get a little dirty, then you're exposing your child, then they're less likely to develop allergies. That's an allergy thing is a little different. But it's kind of like that, right? It's like sending your kid to school and letting them get exposed to other sicknesses as opposed to the last two years. And then you send your kid to school and they get sick immediately, right? This is what I was very afraid of is the second I took my mask off, I was going to get sick because I used to be sick all the time. And then I kind of like developed an immunity. And then so I'm wondering if that's what this is to is it's like it's it's working the muscle of the immune system. It's it's making them fight little bits of things off so that when the big stuff comes, they're they're pumped, right? And they're ready for it, right? Ready? I don't know. But I just I love how all these pieces come together. It's like, whoa, plant immune systems and they're protecting themselves from the rain and the rain is triggering it. And I will never think of the rain the same again. And then Justin, I did have to bring another story to kind of kind of drop it back around to the brain networks. And a study that suggests that that babies, it was not baby monkeys, but baby humans, looking at newborn brains. Yeah, these functional MRIs of baby brains, researchers at Ohio State University have just published in neuro image, their fMRI scans of 267 newborn babies, most of which were less than a week old. So these babies have had very little exposure to stuff outside the womb. And they were scanned for 15 minutes while they were asleep. So the default mode was not active. They weren't they weren't engaging in abstract thought of any kind. But what's very interesting is that we don't really know a lot about which networks like you mentioned, there's motor networks and sensory networks. And there's the default mode network. And, you know, from this particular study that you talked about earlier, humans have this default mode network, which allows us to have abstract thought, not something that primates have primates have, right? So what aspect of our brain development is genetic? And what's there from the very beginning? And what develops as a result of experience and exposure during our lives? Because we know that there's, you know, you're born and you have this massive explosion of growth of cells and dendrites and connections within the brain while you're growing. And then it gets pruned back and it gets all chopped, chopped, chopped, gets chopped, chopped and pruned. And then you have your adult brain and all the networks are there, but they're not all there from the very beginning. And this particular study showed that newborn brains have five of the seven brain areas that are found in adults. Newborn brains have active visual default mode networks, sensory motor, ventral attention and high level vision networks. They're there from within the first week of after being born, probably there from prior to that. But what this suggests is that there is, these are genetic, these are there from the get go. This is human, right? This is, you know, this is all wired in to start. What are the other two? You need it to start. The other network, the two that are missing are control networks and limbic networks, and these are associated with higher level functions and emotions. And so little babies have very little emotional control and very little cognitive control. They're not controlling their thoughts. They're not controlling their emotions. And so those networks aren't there, but while we know that babies don't really see well immediately upon birth, and it takes several months to get the eyes to actually to start working, really, the network is there. The distance of their vision is very limited in the beginning. They have it, they have the vision, but it's, you've got to be right up there. Yeah, but the network is there. The brain network is there and ready to go. Whereas humans, we really need to develop our emotional control and our cognitive control, how we use our brain, how we think, how we, how we control ourselves in social situations. These don't come naturally. So it's, I think it's really interesting also what they're suggesting is that this, these networks, there's a lot of variation, you know, in the brains of the babies to start with, but all these networks are there. So there's individual variation, but then, especially when it comes to things like emotion and cognition, cognitive control, those things, because they're independently experience-based, there's going to be much more variation between individuals, and those can be affected by experience, by the environment during the life, the lifetime of the individual much more. Yeah, so anyway, really interesting looking at, you know, genes versus environment, you know, what's there to begin with versus what has to develop in humans. But the default mode network, it's there from the get-go. Yeah, I love it. Abstract, abstract thinking, Bambinini's. Right there, yeah. Well, they have the potential, not necessarily having the potential to control their emotions, but their potential. It's tough, I get it. Yeah. All right, Justin, tell me a couple of stories. Let's wind this show up. All right, DNA, which some of you may have heard of before, this is from ancient human remains unearthed at the Bako Kiro Cave in Bulgaria. They did some analysis to see who some very ancient people were. I think these are, they're like many, many, many thousands of years old. I don't, it doesn't say it right here. I think this is around, this is very ancient DNA, but I'll have to look it up later. Study published and genome biology and evolution found that they were more closely related to contemporary East Asians than contemporary Europeans. And I think these are like 40,000 year old remains. That's, that's crazy. So this is in Bulgaria, population, ancient remains found in the cave, much more closely related to East Asians today than they were to Europeans. So they tried to solve this mystery. They were looking at the wider context of Eurasian paleolithic human genomes. Study was led by Leonardo Bellini and Professor Luca Paganini, Pagani, sorry, we got Paganini net from University of Padova collaboration with some other folks. So the scenario that the authors are putting forward is the populating of East and West Eurasia. So Europe versus China and Southeast Asia that area was done over several waves of expansion from a, from a single population hub. Now what's interesting is they have no idea where this hub is. There's, there's a population, this hub of people that seem to keep reaching out into Europe, they find them reaching out into East Asia, usually unsuccessfully. So they, they, this is okay. So while there were earlier Homo sapiens expansions more than 45,000 years ago, they all seemingly failed. There's only one representative of that migration that they really found that is related to neither the modern Europeans nor the modern Asians. It's somewhere in the Czech Republic. They found some remains that, that weren't part of that. And they don't know how, how widespread that was. Then around 45,000 years ago, this is quoting Leonardo Bellini, around 45,000 years ago, a new expansion emanated from the hub and colonized a wide area spanning from Europe to East Asia and Oceania. So it went everywhere and is associated with a mode of producing stone tools known as the initial upper paleolithic. So we've got the same kind of tool use all the way in Europe, all the way in Oceania and South, in East Asia. And this, and it's genomically linked to these are the same people who are from the same pop, the hub of population. So the fate of those sellers was then different in East Asia and Europe. So the, in Europe, they endured for a while and they all, the other way around the East Asia, they endured, they survived. They led to modern day populations in East Asia. The European shoot, they declined and then they pretty much disappeared and ended up, there's this one, this one that they found in Bako Kiro. And there's another one in Romania, I think, that they have that looks like it's also of this early peatling of Europe. But then they just failed. They just didn't make it. This is Julia Marciani from the University of Bologna, co-author of the study. It is curious to note that this is around the same time the last Neanderthals went extinct. And it says finally one last expansion occurred sometime earlier than 38,000 years ago and recolonized Europe from that, again, same population hub whose location though has yet to be clarified, say the authors. So, although even in Europe, there were occasional interactions with survivors of previous waves and extensive and generalized admixture between the two waves only took place in Siberia where it gave rise to a peculiar ancestry known as ancestral North Eurasian. Which is interesting. So now they're determining there are these different waves coming from this one population and two of those waves meet and they become ancestral North Eurasians, which if you've been tracking some of the segments I've done on this show over the years, this is the population that is most closely linked to Native Americans and is thought to be the direct ancestors of the Terram Basin mummies in the Silk Road. So this is a mystery and it's still kind of interesting too because this population, I think the oldest representative that they have dated thus far is about 20,000 years ago, which is still earlier than we have signs that there were folks in the Americas that are even older than that. So it looks like this population met somewhere in Siberia, these two waves of peoples leaving a mysterious hub that we don't know where they're originating, they leave, they go off, they evolve over some thousands years, they meet up again and then that, so anyway, it's a very fun find because it's sort of tying in together this one offshoot dead-ender that they found in a cave in Bulgaria is sort of helping fill in the pieces of this mystery population of humans that's been going around the world. The last story today at the end of our show is Space Balloons. But before I jump right into Space Balloons, telling you the whole story, we're going to cover the entire history of ballooning. So starting in 1783, a French science teacher, Jean-François Petret de Rosiaire made the world's first hot air balloon and then launched it with a sheep, a duck, and a rooster on board. I did a report on him in my French class in college. Nice. So then you know it was successful. The balloon lofted high up into the air. It was up there for about 15 minutes and then it gently crashed back to the ground. Two months later, that same de Rosiaire himself went up in a balloon and this was a huge event. The King of France even showed up to watch this balloon launch. It was such a big deal. De Rosiaire managed a solid 25-minute ride this time, may have reached an altitude of 3,000 feet, which is really insanely high. There's the highest anyone had ever been on the planet. And then landed five miles away from where he started, which might have been a little bit, you're like, oh, hey, the King is there. He's going to shake my hand, but now you're five miles away and he's got home. Two years later, de Rosiaire died, crossing the English Channel when his experimental hydrogen balloon exploded 30 minutes into the crossing. Hydrogen has a habit of doing that. Yeah, but he was a chemistry and physics teacher. So it's kind of surprising that he made that big of a mistake. That's pretty bad design. So because of that, pretty much the world forgot about ballooning for 154 years. There's a little bit here and there. For 150 years, though, it's not nobody's talking about balloons, traveling and balloons to go anywhere until it was used as passage back to Kansas in 1939 by the Wizard of Oz. So that may have inspired some people because people who were kids around that time, back then in the 50s and 60s, the hot air ballooning sort of had another wave and people started doing this recreationally. And there have been many firsts, there have been many accomplishments, there's been crossing of the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans and ballooning. But in terms of travel, it's really never caught on because the airplane came along. And that's way more efficient, way more practical, so people just use airplanes for travel. And it's the best way of traveling unless the only direction you're interested in is up. In which case, balloons have some advantages. Balloons have been considered, and we were talking in the pre-show, I had a friend who was, they were looking at balloons, high altitude balloons that could be used as platforms to launch satellites. The further away you are from the surface of the earth, gravity is dropping off like by half, by distance. And so you get up there and the amount of fuel you need to launch a rocket the rest of the way to put a satellite in orbit is significantly reduced just by taking a balloon up. Now part of the problem with that though is the temperatures and the atmosphere when you get up there, you know, unmanned, unmanned altitudes of 53 kilometers have been achieved. You know, you can really get up there. So, but now we got space tourism going on, so there's a company that's eyeing ballooning for space tourism, is what they're calling it, with an offer of- To get kind of toward the edge of space, like as high as balloons will get us. So yeah, so depending on who you ask, there's an international standard, there's an American standard, it's anywhere from like 80 to 100 kilometers up. Yeah. You know, around 50, 60 miles depending on what you're looking at is where they consider spaces. And so a lot of these space tourism things are just kind of going up over that and then coming back down again in these rocket launches that are being done privately. Okay. This is not that high. This balloon is going to reach an altitude of 30 kilometers. So not quite space, but it's three times higher than a commercial airline flight is going to be, which is pretty significant. This is getting up. This is curvature of the earth in the distance. This is an amazing view. And they've got such a cool little pod here. So there's a little luxury cabin they're calling it. The company is Space Perspective. They've put out some pictures of this fancy cabin. It has one and a half meter tall windows, super comfy looking seats complete with drink holders, a space lounge with bar, and an ability to wander around the cabin looking out windows in any direction. The flights offer longer time and altitude than most. So it only climbs at 19 kilometers per hour. So it's about two hours up. Then you do two hours of just sort of hanging out, gliding, looking out the windows, hanging out at the bar. And then there's a two hour voyage back down. And it ends with the adventure of an ocean splashdown. That does sound like an adventure. Yeah, that's why I put it. You're muted. What were you going to say? I was going to say, I was pretty interested until right now. Yeah, that's very into it. I was like, oh yeah, it's just like a giant elevator that goes really high. I would do that. It's like, oh no, you're going to feel like you're falling at the end. Well, it's 19 kilometers an hour. That's not too fast. I mean, I feel like one elevator for sure. You won't ever get like zero gravity stuff going on with this. It's not going to be a drop. You're not going to get dropped down to there. Because it's going to be controlled because it's a balloon. Yeah. And so unless something were to happen, yeah. Yeah. But we've got the picture of the cabin up here on there for those watching there. It looks, that looks really cool. Looks fun. Like that, I would be much easier to convince me to try that than going up on one of those firecrackers that they were putting people up on. Yeah, I don't know about, yeah. Rockets, they're explosive. There's a lot of... Yeah, it's at 30 kilometers and that's a great infographic there. That is above 99 percent of the atmosphere. Yeah, I mean, it would be high enough that you'd really be getting out of a lot of the atmosphere. You'd be at the edge of the stratosphere and the musesphere. You'd be... Or you're getting up there, but I mean, you'd see a lot. And people do go to the top of tall buildings all the time. And if you've got the money to do something like this, what a day, right? That would be weekend trip. Yeah. Yeah. So I want to make one addendum to your history of the balloon because I was like, DeRosier, that doesn't sound right. The word for hotter balloon in French is Montgolfier and that's because he was the original person who invented the balloon. So he invented it six months prior. So he and his brother, the Montgolfier brothers, did their tests on in June and DeRosier did their tests in November. So yeah. So at least that's my understanding of the beginning of the balloon. Because I was like, that's not what I remember from my report. So I looked at it and I found it. Montgolfier, okay, Montgolfier. The things you learned in a French minor. Yeah, yeah. Montgolfier did design, I think, the balloon that might have blown up. They were, they designed the, they built the balloons for DeRosier. But they were actually the first to cross the English channel in a balloon. So they do have some, some historical notes too. But they were, they were builders. I don't know that they invented or designed. I think that is still DeRosier but they definitely worked together and were on at least a couple of flights, balloon flights together. So they weren't in a competition. Different history books say different. Okay. Hey everybody. Homework assignment. Yeah. Yeah, let's see. Justin, I expect dueling reports next week. Okay, mine will be in French. So. Oh, yeah, so we can. Oh, maybe we can. J'aime beaucoup le français. C'est bien, c'est bien. Oh, the science. Oh, did we do it? C'est fini. C'est fini. C'est le fin de le show. We have come to the end of another show. Thanks for some great stories and great conversation there. That was a fun one. And everyone, thank you for joining us for another episode of This Week in Science. I do want to give the shout outs, shout outs too. 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Thank you all for your support of TWIS. And if you are interested in supporting TWIS on Patreon, please head over to TWIS.org and click on the Patreon link on next week's show. We will be back Wednesday at 8 p.m. Pacific Time, broadcasting live from our YouTube and Facebook channels as well as from TWISTWIS.org slash live. Hey, do you want to listen to us as a podcast? Perhaps as you fly your latest weather balloon? Just search for this week in science or our podcasts are found. If you enjoyed the show, get your friends to subscribe as well. For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes as well as links to stories are available on our website, www.twis.org, and you can sign up for a newsletter. You can also contact us directly at email kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com, Justin at twistmaning.gmail.com, or me, Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org. 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That's what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science, you may just get you may just not understand. Are you paradoxing us? Yes. I have one more to show you. Okay. This is way too much fun. Paradox. Oh yeah. This is my favorite one. Look at him. So one of my favorite Facebook groups is googly eyes in strange places. Because people take googly eyes and they stick them on all sorts of things. And so it's very similar concept is just you put eyes on something. Some people we know personally like to do that. Yes. I'm sure they're not watching right now. No, not at all. Not at all. They're probably enjoying a nice glass of wine from a bottle with googly eyes on it. Probably. You know who you are. Yeah. So the man in the moon. What is it? The face on Mars. Yeah. I think the bad astronomer Phil plate. He has a whole like funny presentation about like it's not faces, but male anatomy being seen. Oh. Very good. Very good. In space. So it's like a it's a really funny. Look at this one. These guys are mad. You know, so I just have to wonder something like that. The top left speaker kind of thing. They did that on purpose, right? They engineers have to do that on purpose, right? This one also seems intentional. This is like, I'm going to make a cute face. I'm going to put a face on it. It reminds me of here, I'm going to stop sharing. I'm always afraid to share my screen while I Google. Yeah. Don't share your stream while you Google. I'm out as a bird. Yes. Twitter feed faces in things. It's funny. Reddit has great stuff like this. There's some really good sources for this kind of entertainment. I was thinking about. Yes. Intention. But actually, Cody, so especially seeing faces. The human brain has a a predisposition to see faces in things. Yes. Oh, what's his name? Beemo. Yeah. Cute Beemo. He says so nice. But Beemo has a face in his face. He does. Beemo's adorable. He just has a very simple face. I think that's what I was thinking about is that like, his face is so simple, but it's still undeniably a face and it's because we do that, right? Right. And so we have this, our brain is like, I would like to see faces. We like faces. Faces are important to us because that's potentially friend or foe or predator. Faces are part of recognizing. The specific type of coat hanger? Brain cells. Yeah. Is it specific kind of coat hanger that always looks like an octopus that wants to fight me? Now I have to find a picture of this thing. Drunk octopus wants to fight you. Right. This is what you're talking about. Here. Has he been drinking? Yeah, because his eyes are lopsided. We're octopus. There we go. There we go. To me, this is like, there we go. One of the best examples of, oh, there we go. Yeah. That's like, yeah. That's like one of the best examples of that sort of, what do you know? And then you see it. What is it? What's the word for the? It's called Paridolia. Paridolia. Paridolia. We were talking about. Wait, hold on. Here's, there's one that somebody, when I got a share here, logo. Fada is signing off. See you next week, Fada. Night Fada. Okay. Come on. I just want to see this image all by itself. There we are. Okay. It's not necessarily Paridolia, but it's a very similar concept to it of just seeing things in a particular way. Colonel Sanders tie. It's like his little stick figure. His head is on a little stick figure body. You're never going to not see this again. Oh boy. How is that even a tie? That's not a tie. It's like a little body and he's got this big head. Yeah. But it's a little, there's little Colonel Sanders tie, you know? Yeah. The Southern Gentleman tie. Yes, the Southern Gentleman. Oh, Schnaggo just shared a good one in the chat in the Discord. Oh, and everybody, if you're supporting us on Patreon, you can be in our Discord. So that's something you can do if you wanted to be in the Discord. Yes, identity four circles. Emojis are a great example of it, the simpleness. Thank you. Oh, oh, not, not a Bolo. And as an example, okay. So in an example, the, it's, it's kind of, it's like a Southern, Southern Gentleman. But the two, the two O's, zeros, O's in this username, they look like eyeballs. Great. We're not seeing it. I'm seeing, I'm just seeing KFC still. No, on the bottom part of the screen, you can't see it. Lower third, bottom corner, right underneath Justin. Oh, there. Okay. I see it. I see it. I see it. Stick figure. I know. Oh, yes. Oh, Colonel. Colonel, stick figure. I can never not see it now. His cute little tie. Oh, Colonel. He's not really a full grown man. He's just a stick figure with a giant head. So, let's see, Blair, you had a fancy getaway. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Great times. Yeah, I went to the Big Easy. Indeed. I went for a wedding that was supposed to happen April 5th, 2020. So it finally occurred. So that was nice. And then I stayed because I love New Orleans some extra days because it combines my favorite things, delicious seafood and jazz. And beignets. And also, and beignets and also alligators. And alligators. I may have bought several things with alligators on them. I can't help. Is that your new thing now? Is that what we're buying you now? Things with alligators? No, I mean, alligators are always good. They've always been good. They were actually my favorite outreach animal for a long time there. My favorite animal to use in zoo education programs. Because they ate the children? No, because they're a success story of conservation, actually. That's why. That's the real answer. They're also just really fun to handle. They're so cute and kids get such baby alligators, right? Yeah, they get such a kick out of them. You get to keep them until they're like three or four. So the American alligators almost went extinct. Yeah. And we brought them back. And part of it is an ultimate success story. Part of it is that they're like a predator. So they took back the neighborhood really easily when we reintroduced them. But the buy is really interesting because not only that, but we almost ended up with American hippos. Right. So we went to the Audubon Zoo one day, which is an excellent zoo. It's an excellent zoo because like a third of the zoo is a swamp exhibit. So you really get to kind of like immerse yourself in the ecological history of the space you're in, which I just I love when a zoo does that. And so they had a whole little bit talking about the water hyacinth, which is an invasive species that exploded in the bayou. And so they were one vote shy, one vote in Congress shy of introducing hippopotamuses into the American South to get rid of the hyacinth, to eat the hyacinth. Talk about like dodging a bullet. Well, aren't they in Central and South America? Yes, because of the drug cartel bosses that had them. And then it was a, then there was like a storm or something and they escaped. I don't know. They're down there. It's a whole thing. So you are currently showing the difference between alligators and crocodiles. So side view. That's interesting. Side views are pretty easy to tell if you can get close enough to see teeth because alligators, you only see the top teeth and crocodiles. It's like a zipper. You see top and bottom. And the easy way to remember that is that this makes the shape of an A. So just the top teeth, like the shape of an A for alligators. But the easiest way to tell is actually if you look from above, which is what you're about to click on, alligators have a big fat snout. They're much more rounded and crocodiles have this like more skinny, lumpy, crinkly looking snout. Cracodiles, generally speaking, can also get way bigger. And alligators are freshwater animals and crocodiles can do fresh or salt, but they are usually salt. So there's a bunch of differences. If crocodiles have been around longer, evolutionarily, that would make sense. There's only two species of alligator on the planet and there's a lot more crocodiles. So there's only the American and the Chinese alligator. Those are the only kind that we still have. But yeah, so if you're in the South, you usually see alligators. That's usually the deal. Yeah, I love them. They're so cool. This guy looks like a puppy. This little image, his little eyes. It's like, oh, you're just a leathery, scaly puppy. Look at that. You can train you not to eat me. You play fetch with an alligator. No. No, no. I had a children's book growing up about someone raising an alligator in their tub. Yeah, no, that's a poor idea also. People do it though, right? Because probably in the South, right? It's the... Zach's alligator. There it is. Man, I definitely read that book. Did it make you want to get a bath alligator? Yes. See, that's not good. What's the albino alligator? California Couch Sciences? Yeah, Claude. They had two albino alligators at the Audubon Zoo, although none of them, to my knowledge, are actually albinos. They're all leucistic. So it's a misnomer. Who? Yeah. So they're actually... The difference is that they have some pigment. So like one of the white alligators at the Audubon Zoo had like splotches of color on his face. It's pretty cool. Splotches. He had splotches. He was very cute. Splotches, little splotches. Oh, Zach's alligator was named Bridget. Oh yeah, there she is. You're looking at things. Share. We took a trip to Cal Academy specifically to go visit Claude because I guess Claude has a children's book and it got read in my daughter's class and then she... And then I was like, that's... You know, we can just go drive there. Like right now, we could go see Claude for real. And so it was on. We jumped in the car and drove down to go say hi. I probably read that book too, Blair. Let's go familiar. The alligator starts... This is the thing that's crazy, is the alligator starts really small. She starts out so small. The alligator's grow. She's a little key chain. And she jingles around. Her crocodile's turning up in Florida. What? Everything shows up in Florida. She shows around in, or she shows up in the change pocket. He is just snapping in his pocket. Aw. Is that's where baby alligators go? Yeah, not a great lesson to be learned. No. That's okay. It's a kid's book. I'll cut some slack. Yes. How's the Bambinino, Justin? Oh, he's great. Good. That's fantastic. I think go to bed. We're very quiet this evening. Yeah. We're not arguing about things. We're not debating things. I'm still adjusting to being diurnal again. We're very quiet. New Orleans, you got to be up so late if you want to really enjoy the music, and I almost completely switched to being nocturnal. And Brian's like, this is no problem. Yeah. Brian's like, I do this every week. This is easy. It's nocturnal to diurnal to diurnal to nocturnal is easy as pie. I'm like, I can't do it. Yeah, I'm bad at it too. It's no good. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Identity 4 says, when they were in college, the folks in the dorm next to me had a pet alligator in their room. What? No, thank you. I just have to know. I did somebody come and say, you got to get rid of the alligator. Like, I think that depends where you went to school. Alligators in dorms? What? Oh, what? Oh, what? Oh, what? Everybody leave the wild animals in the wild places. Okay. Okay. Bozeman, Montana. That was unexpected. Thank you for that punchline. And is ancestral the territory for the American alligator? Yeah, right. Ancestral for the crocodile. There were alligators in Montana once upon a time. That was their native habitat. The RA was okay with it for some reason as an aquatic pet. Oh, that's great. Okay, let's teach those RA's. No alligators in the bathtub. They're just also kids. Although while we're on this, you can Google this on the, what do you call it, the YouTubes. Pet lobster. There's an amazing video of somebody who went to a store and purchased a live lobster and then brought it home and put it in an aquarium and kept it as a pet. And it is, it's a heartwarming story. And lobsters are amazing intelligent creatures. I mean, this thing is coming up to feed when he's playing with them a little bit and cleaning, constantly cleaning its aquarium and like shuffling the debris to one side. It's got like the trash area that it puts all the, the refuse in and then priming and just, just an amazing. So go find, I don't know what it's called exactly, but there's a pet lobster. It's a rescued, rescued from a store. Just bought, just went to the grocery store and bought a live lobster to go and put in this aquarium to see what all happened and had to nurse it back to health because the poor claw was from having the rubber band on. Yeah. Work at first and atrophied muscles. Yeah. And he put it through rehab and kept this and it's just, it's a great story. So I wouldn't say don't keep any creatures about this. Go everybody after, go watch the video, just get trained and then go get, go rescue a lobster from your local grocery store. It has to be a live one. That's a caveat. But yeah, not a dead lobster. Yeah. Oh yeah. That story ended. Somebody else tried that. Let me see your lobster roll, lobster roll. All right. Next week. So many. Yeah. I was just going to say so many animals are smart, are intelligent in various ways. I would not have thought that a lobster would have had better housekeeping skills and instincts than myself. But it definitely does. Yeah. So smart and such a fascinating creature. I've never really looked at a lobster. Like when they got the live lobsters in there, I'm always just sort of like, I don't want to see like a live thing waiting for, you know, boiled alive and like, I don't, it's just something terrible to me about the live lobster pen. It's like a death row in the grocery store. It is such a weird, such a weird thing. But that's such an amazing creature. Sadie. Oh, that's the cutest puppy. Hi, Sadie. She came in to get me. She was like, excuse me. Hi, Sadie. What are you doing? I want to be in your lap. Hi, Sadie. Hi, Sadie. You're cute. Hi. She's like, I don't know. She likes to be held like this, like a human. That's funny. She's like, I want to be in your face. I'm going to be right here. Oh, she says it's bedtime, Blair. Say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Say good morning, Justin. Good morning, Justin. Good. Good night, everyone. Thank you for joining us for yet another episode of This Week in Science. And we do hope that you will join us again next week. But in the meantime, stay well, stay happy if you can. I don't know. Stay calm. Don't get overexcited. Listen to your heartbeat. Listen to your heartbeat. Stay connected to humanity with kindness and compassion. And stay curious. We will see you again next Wednesday. Ciao.