 I get over here and I start dancing and I'm so excited once that music starts. Oh my goodness. It is the time later, much, much later than usual, apologies, everyone. We've got, we've had some internet technical difficulties. Coordinating from across the pond can sometimes be very difficult as much as we try. Thank you for joining us here, everyone. We're so happy to see you tonight and or this morning, wherever you may be. This is the This Week in Science podcast broadcast and we're excited to be gearing up for episode 900 tonight. You ready, team? So ready. Yeah. Yeah, we ready. We're gonna make it go. We're gonna start this thing in just a moment and do some science-ing because that's what we do. We're glad for you to be here. Let's see if it all works. We'll see if Justin's internet and everything work well and we'll keep going as we're going. But now it's time to start the show, yo. Yeah? Justin's not saying anything. Okay, we can't test it. Yes, we're ready. All right, let us begin. That's so great. In three, two, this is twist. This Week in Science episode number 900 recorded on Wednesday, November 9th, 2022, 900 weeks of science. 9999, number nine. Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on the show we are going to fill your heads with base fertilizer and the alphabet and the number nine, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Global warming is coming. Despite what you have read, despite everything you have heard, despite everything you know to be true, regardless of your better judgment and your amygdala's common sense application of fight or flight, do not panic seem to be increasing. The responses to those threats underwhelming, the proposals by world governments, undeliverable, the urgency and public conversation absent in the predicted outcomes, prophetically grunt me by the day, but whatever you do, do not panic. Sure, the moment to stop it completely has passed. Sure, there's a level of sea level rise now unavoidable and sure the sort sidedness of past inactions has decidedly put us up a creek and downwind of a big farm all without a paddle, but do not panic. It's where there are problems, there are solutions and we will absolutely can and will slice our way out of this. As long as you maybe just panic a little bit and slap yourself in the face a few times or cold water over your head because for some reason then say, I got this roll up your sleeves and listen to the 900th episode of Music and Science coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I wanna discover is it happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to keep you in Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. It's not just another episode, not just another episode. It is our 900th episode. This is 900. Wait a second, wait a second. 900 episodes of a weekly show. That means we've been doing this for a while. 900 weeks give or take. Little bit more, which is, you know, over 17 years of science in podcast form. Our podcast is old enough to drive. Almost old enough to vote. Almost old enough to vote and go to war for the country. That's right. I mean, if we look at it really going back then we can go back. We can go back and it's probably old enough to drink which I'm doing right now raising a glass to you all who are here joining us tonight to my wonderful co-hosts, Blair and Justin for being a part of the show. Thank you. Thank you because honestly, you are audience, my co-hosts but really the audience here, our community without you there would be no reason to record. There would be no reason to be live. And so this is for you. We can't do this without you. There are reasons for being live. Yeah, I mean, we still might have a phone call and talk about science and, you know, debate and have some fun, but... Not this early. No. Four in the morning, I don't know. I certainly wouldn't do as much research, so... Well, everyone, thank you so much for joining us and we're glad that you are here whether this is your first episode with us or your 900th. We are just happy that you're here with us and we hope that you enjoy the show. All right, so what do we have on the show for us tonight? We have so many wonderful stories. As usual, it's gonna be a great show. I have stories that are hopefully optimistic and, yeah, we're gonna talk about fertilizer because fertilizer is important. We're gonna talk a little bit about the cosmic spin cycle and how we're taking a look at that. I've got some vaccine news because, yeah, you know, it's not really over. It's not over. What? Yeah, and then at the end of the show, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna tell you all to get some sleep. So I'm just telling you now what I'm gonna tell you later, which is at the end of the show, I'm gonna say go to bed and then we're all gonna go to bed. Even you, Justin, even though you just got up. But anyway, Justin, what did you bring for the show? So I'm gonna counter some of that optimism with a Greenland ice cap update. Spoiler alert, it's not good news. I got some other stuff though too. I've got a really good, I haven't heard much about Utsi in a while. It was new. And some ancient words of them, maybe. Justin, could you please tell us those things again? Oh, good grief. Is it really gonna be like this? Is it that pad? Because it's so strange. On this end, I can't see it. You two come through crystal clear and no hickey ups, but apparently I got all sorts. So I got the Greenland ice update. Spoiler alert, not good news. Good news in plant research. Utsi, the Iceman update. And some, maybe. And something maybe, got it. Okay. Just edit me out of the show now. And I'll just, well, just my part of the show. I'll send it to you. Maybe turn off your video. Turn off your video. Turn off your video. It doesn't help. We fight this. It doesn't do anything to the audio quality. It's the same, it's bouncing signals around the plant on low grade internet. Low grade internet. Okay, I'm, when you start, okay, I'm gonna click a button in your mic settings now and see if this helps. I don't know if it will or if it won't. Uh-huh. Don't touch anything. Now, please. Go ahead and talk. Okay, I will continue to say that unfortunately, for some reason, there seems to be a high demand for internet at 5.30 in the morning, Central European time in Copenhagen that disappears later on in the day, but. You sound perfect right now. Your audio's perfect. Okay, please tell us again what you have brought for the show, Justin. No, why'd you turn your video off? Okay. Well, just because now it's fixed, everything's working out. Okay, okay, go ahead. So I've got a Greenland ice. Oh, I've got bad news about Greenland people. I got good news about plants. Oh, it's Otsu the Iceman, who used to listen to the show 5,300 years ago. Update, he's got an update. And then some ancient words of wisdom, maybe, inscribed upon a comb, an ancient Canaanite. Okay, now do that. No, I'm kidding. No. That was perfect. Okay. Klammer, disclaimer, disclaimer. We'll use the comb. I'm gonna give Rachel the comb to comb through this episode, yes, for all of them blurbles. I forgot, I forgot I was doing science, I guess I wrapped up in this right here. Yes, so I have pigs, I have looky loo fishes and a late breaking story about octopuses. And I also wanted to drop that bass, as Kiki previously discussed. All about that bass, about that bass. No question. It is, but it's not. It's not, it's all about us right now, because we're doing this show here and we are so excited that you're here with us, like I said already. But if at any point you realize, oh my gosh, I'm not subscribed to Twists, you can find us all places podcasts are found. Look for this week in science, you can also find us places like YouTube, Facebook and Twitch, because that's where we livestream every week, Wednesday at 8 p.m. Pacific time, unless of course Justin's internet is being a problem like it was tonight. And we are also Twistscience on Twitter and Instagram. And you can just find us at twist.org, if all of this is too much information for your brain. Just remember that one thing, that one thing, that's what's important. But right now it's time to jump into the science. I'm gonna start the show off with something that's coming up that is, that's wherever you are, Justin's already at November 10th. We are just about at the cusp of November 10th here. November 10th, celebrated every year is the World Science Day for Peace and Development. And it's meant from UNESCO's International Days to highlight the important role of science in society. And I thought what better opportunity for us at Twists to just kind of wax poetic about our 900th episode for just a moment about the importance and relevance of science in our daily lives. So this year's Science Day for Peace and Development is aimed at sustainable basic science, 2022 actually is the International Year of Basic Sciences for Sustainable Development. And you can use hashtag Science Day all over social media to be a part of World Science Day conversations around the globe. And so this year is focused more so on basic science, which means that research, which has been done for years and years and years, not necessarily knowing that it's gonna have a payoff, right? It's the stuff that is the basis for things that we take for granted today. Polymerize Chain Reaction. Yes, while we might all kind of look a scance at the Nobel Prize winner who came up with PCR these days for some of his more interesting ideas on science and health, he did come up. Kerry Mullis, Dr. Kerry Mullis came up with an amazing reaction, which is used today in laboratories around the world. We used it during the COVID-19 pandemic to help and it is still used to test and find viral fragments that are identified from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. So basic science led to PCR, led to our ability to be able to use this in some of our health, public health initiatives today. We also have developments in nuclear science. We have developments in material sciences, chemistry, biology, all of the things. Claire, is science ever not a part of your life? No, I'm always thinking about it. It's probably annoying to people around me, but it's, I mean, that's the beauty, right? Is science fundamentally is about figuring out how the world works and how things respond when you manipulate them, right? It's all about the manipulation of variables and cause and effect. And it impacts everything, everything that we do. And it has the more informed you are about the way the world works, then the better the world can be. I think even with basic things, just like when we report on stories about how societies respond to one another and the intricacies that exist there, that can help inform us and help us be better. Yeah. It's, you know, there's really never been a downside to scientific knowledge that I can think of. You know, maybe the atom bomb, but I feel like there were things related to that that were also important to the betterment of society. So it's, you know, it's really, you got to tease away at that ball of Christmas lights, you know, that is our existence. Justin, how has science been a part of your life? Well, you know, I think that the highest and best achievement of science thus far is still the dishwasher. I mean, you think of the number of marriages, relationships in general that the dishwasher has saved. You know, talk about bettering human existence on the planet. That's got to be at the top of it. And then there's certainly like, you know, the long list of diseases that science has overcome. Yeah, I don't get leeches when I go to the doctor to do these things. I mean, you could because they do still do use them. Antibiotics alone is huge. The things, everything to do with agriculture. You know, if we were basing the current human population today on agriculture from just a hundred years ago, there would be mass starvation and famine, the advances. You know, you take a simple thing. A simple thing, freezing food. The ability to freeze or to have refrigerators in your home, but also to refrigerate food when it is in transport. The whole entire system of transporting food around the world. Like all of these things that didn't exist, that now do exist, absolutely have positive impact. You know, germ theory, like learning how to get sick from things and how sickness spread. Pretty important. Pretty gosh darn important. And one of the, in terms of recent outcomes of scientific efforts. So respiratory diseases had been thought to be spread by fomites, which are the spittle basically that lands on stuff. And then you get on your hands and you wipe your nose. And so that does happen in part, but people had completely underestimated the influence of viral aerosols, of these viral particles that remain suspended in the air for hours, days after people are in a room. And it was the COVID-19 pandemic that really pushed advancement forward in this area. Prior to the pandemic, the World Health Organization did not accept viral aerosols as a method of transmission. It now does for respiratory diseases. So this is progress. This is progress. And so as much as we had to hurt, science helps bring us along. It advances so many aspects of our lives. And one aspect of UNESCO's World Science Day is a reiteration of the importance of science to everybody's lives and to the future of humanity and the universal human right. It is listed as a universal human right. Access to science. That means access to scientific information, access to scientific innovations, access to scientific careers. Science is for everyone and it is accepted as a universal human right. And so I don't know, I'm just thinking about this day as it comes forward. And our 900th episode, I'm just very, very proud to be part of and have been part of sharing science with people. Even science, they don't sometimes like to hear. So anyway, let's move on from this fomentation. What am I thinking? I'm not fomenting anything. No, Justin, what's happening? Something bad, right? This is not just good news, is it? I know, this is just bad news. That's it. Science news segment that's not afraid to tell you what's really happening in the world today. Where? Researchers from Dartmouth, UC Irvine and DTU in Denmark have made a horrifying discovery. And I published this in the journal Nature. The loss of ice from Greenland's largest frozen basin is occurring much faster than expected and could contribute up to six times more to the global sea level rise by year 2100 than climate models are currently projecting. That would be somewhere in the neighborhood of half an inch or more of water to sea levels by the end of this century. So I've been to the northern, north, northernmost, north-western town in Greenland. Lovely place. Northeastern Greenland where this research took place, not so lovely. It's a really difficult environment to monitor ice melt or anything else. Researchers used satellite data in numerical modeling with GPS data collected from the harsh interior of Greenland over the past decade. They found four extensive speed up and thinning triggered, or excuse me, they found extensive speed up and thinning triggered by a dramatic warm ocean current event that took place in 2012, which has since propagated some 200 to 300 kilometers inland along the northeast Greenland ice stream. So for those not familiar with kilometers, 200 to 300 kilometers is about approximately equivalent to 200 to 300,000 meters. That's a lot of meters inland. Despite being an exceptionally cold place and having exceptionally cold 2020, 2021 years, northeast in Greenland is an Arctic desert where precipitation is as low as 25 millimeters or about an inch per year in places. So the ice sheet as it is bloating, as it's melting, as this cascade effect of collapse is taking place is not regenerating. It does not have any sort of an offset of additional ice and snow falling. Perceptation. So this is according to Chef Karabas Khan, professor at DTU. We can see that the entire basin is thinning and the surface speed is accelerating. Every year the glaciers we've studied have retreated farther inland and we predict that this will continue over the coming decades and centuries. Under present-day climate, it is difficult to conceive how this retreat could stop. Our data shows us that what we see happening at the front reaches far back into the heart of the ice sheet. Co-author Eric Renaud, professor of Earth Systems science at UC Irvine said that the more precise observations of the change in ice velocity are included in models. Estimates of global sea level rise projected by the UN, the IPCC's estimations need to be corrected upwards, which regardless of what glacier or Antarctic where you're looking, that seems to be what everyone has told us. What all the models have told us is that the intergovernmental panel on climate change really needs to get corrected upwards. And Renaud, we'll finish this by saying, he says, we foresee profound changes in global sea levels more than currently projected by existing models. Yeah, so all of those models that we go to online that are like, imagine where you live 50 years from now with global climate change and sea level rise, they're wrong, you would be much more underwater. But this is part, again, this is part of the process. And this is, while it's unfortunate, this is part of the scientific process of putting greater resolution into the data so that we understand what we're up against better. So it sounds- Yeah, you're trying to prevent more carbon dioxide or you're trying to prevent more climate change, you're trying to curb what's happening. But we are at the point now where things are gonna happen. There's no stopping the happening, no matter how good a job we do. And so the second part of it is preparing for that. And so, yes, it's unfortunately a really difficult balance of trying to not create just the worst panic where people are just paralyzed, you don't want that. But you definitely want your realistic model so that you can save lives. That's the other piece that I feel like keeps getting missed here is, this feels to many people on the planet very far away, this particular area that is losing ice, but it impacts the whole world. Yeah, I don't know, there's a tropical storm. It's about to hit Florida. No, and take out the SLS. It's November. It's still hurricane season. No, no it isn't. Yes. I don't think so. I think it's past. I don't think this has happened in the last 50 years. Season? What is that, just in season? Quote unquote. What were you saying? Gary in the chat room says, unfortunately too many people are just counting on science to save us from global warming. I would say that unfortunately too many people aren't counting on science to save us and aren't investing in it. There's a lot of talk about potential solutions. Yeah. There's not the funding that the one source for those solutions is ultimately going to come from, which is science. It's the only thing that will save us from ourselves again, again, again. Well, and the problem is you can't just throw money at carbon capture and call it a day, which is kind of why I brought up what I did before is like you can't just focus on, oh, well, if we pay enough money to plant more trees, it'll all just go away. No, no, that's right, that's over. We're past that point. Justin reported on the, we can't plant enough trees to actually make up more. I did report on that, but I'm going to take it back. We could, look, we could, I did the math, it's in the neighborhood of two trillion trees, you know, let's put $2 a tree at it, you know, money-wise. So somebody says, you tell me if you give me $4 trillion tomorrow, or the day after, it's fine, I can wait. See you on Mars, got it. I can, I can, then you have engineers, engineers who will figure out how to design a massive growing and planting apparatus. We'll have greenhouses popping up all over the planet. We'll have every plant botanist, plant biologist, plant breeder, plant geneticists deciding the right trees. We'll have every microbiologist making sure the soil is the proper soil to encourage that. And in 50 years. That's the problem though. Who's going to die in those 50 years, Justin? And who's going to die in the next 50 years? But if only trees weren't made of weed, right? I mean, that would be, then everybody would be into it. They'd be all wanting to make money weed. Actually, that grows faster. Yeah, smoke it if you got it. Anyway, I mean, everyone's. Stubbled upon even better idea than trees. But in the big picture of where we are, we can't just focus on science alone. We can't just focus on corporations alone. We can't just focus on individuals. It's your fault. You need to change your personal habits. Unplug your computer. No, we need to be active and we need to be pressuring our politicians. We need to be pushing for regulations. We need to be pushing for subsidies because without the money, I mean, yes, investors, if you've got the money to invest, you divest from the bad things, reinvest in the good things, and then we'll see things happen. So if you want to see a good world coming, you have to put your money where your desires are. And we have to put. And our votes. That is it. And we just passed election day in the United States and I am pleased to say that it didn't go as badly as. We're sticking to might, but you know. Yeah, it would be nice if there was control of, you know, both kind of different spots of Congress that could actually work on this. But you know, what we can get right now is where science and politics and people really do overlap is our future. And yeah, you wanted to say something, Justin. Well, I just wanted to say, while I disagree with the effectiveness of the messaging of throwing soup at masterpieces of art. Yeah. I love it. I absolutely love what they were saying. Here's a hundred-issue-year-old painting that we value so highly that we conserve it, even protect it with glass. Painting wasn't hurt. When we display it and say, this belongs in a museum so the public can experience this because we have conserved and cherished this important thing throughout time. Yeah. The point of compare that to a future that we aren't conserving. We compare this, like the actual concept, I think was really powerful and really a strong statement. We will do so much to conserve the past. Why would we not do so for the future? I don't think the messaging was lost. People were like, hey, they threw soup on a painting. That's terrible. Because it was oil-based paint. That's what I read. Yeah, but it's also now it's also this glass. There's a plexiglass thing in front of the paintings. The painting wasn't hurt. The frame was, but that's a part of the story. But the other thing is I love the target because of all of the artists you could have chosen. Maybe you could have gotten away with a Warhol or Jackson Pollock a little bit, maybe I depending. But Van Gogh. Van Gogh was an artist who was not afraid of a public spectacle. Or soup. Self-harm even. Mutely, yeah, yeah. Self-harm that showed his passion for a subject. And so of all of the artists you could have chosen, that was the right one. In fact, if he had been here, I think he would have not only destroyed the painting, but maybe he lost another ear. Well, we will never know that particular thing. But in terms of messaging to the public, I don't know who gets reached by that message and who really follows it. And who really got the message as it was intended. Because the news of the sky, they threw soup on it. But now that you've explained it, people who hadn't heard of it, maybe in our audience, now they understand it better. So I hope this helps everybody's water cooler conversation a little bit more. I mean, especially now that we're all, are we all going to mastodon? I don't know. I can't even talk about social media and mastodon because that's like, it makes mastodon, mastitis. It's boobies. I don't know what's going on. Blair, tell us about our ears. What are you talking about? I'm so confused. We're going to write a, it's a stick species? Yeah. I'm confused. Anyway. Is that, wait, hang on a second. Is that a new social media thing that people are supposed to go to to leave Twitter? And then you're going to have a point. That's where all the academics went. The academics, not just the hashtag rooms, but you're also, everybody's going to be siloed completely in different social media? Just, it'll blow over. Just let it, anyway. Just let it go. Stay on Twitter. It's fine. We're still there. But Blair. Don't take your eye off the target. Pay attention to the climate change. Don't pay attention to the blue check mark. Anyway. Doof, doof, doof, doof. Are we going to the club after this or what? It's our 900th episode. I think we've got a party afterwards. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, anywhere that there's bass. Bass, bass, bass. When you go to the club, Declurb as I call it. And you. Do you now? Do you now? We call it Declurb. Declurb. Anyway. Going to Declurbing. When you're really feeling it. This is the thing. You've actually used this in a sentence. You're really feeling it. When you're really, you know, you're really, you're vibing, man, in Declurb. Anyway. When you're really feeling it, you're really dancing it out. So I just wanted to know, why? What about that music? Really, really gotcha. And it is that bass, but it's more complicated than that. Some researchers recruited participants attending a live lab concert for electronic music duo Orfsks. And the concert goers are equipped with motion sensing headbands to monitor their dance moves. They weren't just checking how good they were dancing. Actually, they were checking how hard they were dancing, how hard they were enjoying that bass. Anyway. They were also asked to fill out survey forms before and after the event. And that was made to make sure that the sound that they were changing underneath the music was undetectable to human ears. They also measured concert enjoyment and they examined how the music felt physically all through the survey. But then the headbands were really, were looking at their heart rate. And so what they were- And what did the Clurb Nerds report? Yes, so what they were doing, I didn't even get to the actual variable they were manipulating here yet, they was a 45 minute concert by Orfsks and the researchers manipulated the very low bass playing speakers. They turned them on and off every two minutes. So it wasn't the individual song, it was a regular interval. And they found that the amount of movement was 12% greater when these speakers were on that we're introducing levels of bass that were too low to hear. So this super low bass sound was causing people to dance more intensely. They were clurbing, they were clurbing hard. Clurb extreme, you know? Anyway, they circulate that these physical processes, that the low undetectable bass was creating a neurological connection between music and movement just based on this undetectable bass sound that was undetectable to our ears but obviously detectable to our brains. And the neurological connection was picking up on low frequencies and could affect the perception of groove. So, you know, the groove is now a scientific term. Yeah. It's like how much did the music make you want to move? Well, that's the groove, man. That's the groove. So, oh geez. So this, this is absolutely the technology that needs to get deployed in offices around the country. Just come in and just start putting on your subhuman hearing range bass. And just watch and see if any of your coworkers start just like. Oh, guaranteed I'd start dancing in my seat. I dance during the day all the time in my office. Anyway, can I tell a story about Marshall right now? Yes, please. Yes, so apparently when Marshall and I first started dating, he would go into work and we would go to the club over the weekend in San Francisco. And then he'd go into work on Monday and he'd go in and put his headphones on. And apparently he would sit at his desk listening to dance music, house music, trance music, all the things. And one day his office mate threw down her mouse and her pens and she said, would you stop it? And he took his headphones off. He said, what? Stop what? That, that doof, doof, doof, doof, doof. You're saying it continually. So apparently he was working at his computer listening to music with his headphones in and just going doof, doof, doof. Absolutely ruining his coworkers day. But anyway, we digress. They didn't even need these speakers. They just needed to bring Marshall into the club. Doof, doof, doof, doof. Anyway, yes, there you go. So there's different, people have different vestibular sensitivity to this base. And so they, next they want to look at the brain mechanisms involved to figure out how the low frequencies impact vestibular, tactile and auditory pathways. But I just think it's hilarious that musicians could be adding low level base to their music that is imperceptible to the human ear, but could impact our desire to dance. And is that cheating is my question. Right? Suddenly the DJs, if I'm having fun. It's not a good DJ. It's just good, very low frequencies. Yeah, and as David is saying in our YouTube chat, infrasound can have physiological effects. Yes. And so we know that there are different frequencies of sound that are outside the range of human hearing. And they actually, yes, can have physiological effects. If you have higher frequency sounds, those are the ones that are being used by the military and the police as a crowd deterrence. They can be highly tuned and create a lot of feelings of pain. However, these very low frequency sounds, apparently have different impacts. They make you want to move in a different way. This legitimately feels like magic to me, but you could imperceptibly impact people's desire to dance. This sounds like a magic spell. I will put you under my control now. The bar magic. It's very good. You and the curbing. I'm never gonna get that out of my head. Yeah, can you tell? I go to the clurb all the time. I go to the clurb, I go all the time. Oh, I love it in the face. And this band, I had taken a moment to give a listen to the band Orphix, O-R-P-H-X. And this band is a very industrial, experimental noise. I mean, if you were there for a house music concert and you ended up in the industrial concert, then maybe the very low frequency sounds did help people dance. But if you're into industrial stuff, give Orphix a listen. They were involved in science. It's pretty awesome. Yeah, I'm trying to figure out where this was, but like it was Canada, I think. Yeah, it was at McMaster University. Canada, which is in Canada. Go ahead. If you've been clurbing long enough. Oh, Orphix is Canadian. You may have lost a significant portion of your hearing. But you can still feel it. I do, but if you still feel it. But you can still feel it if it's got that, that... It's all about that bass, about that bass. Yeah, well, because, I mean, Daniel Cameron, the first author on this paper is a drummer. So I was wondering about that too, because like, first of all, definitely has hearing loss. If you're a drummer. I've never met a drummer who you didn't have to talk, talk loud to and have them staring at your lips while you talked for them to get it wrong. Like it's really bad. If you're gonna play drums, kids to the kids out there, if you're gonna play drums and you wanna do that, that's great. You've gotta wear the earplugs. You have to. You have to. I mean, that's true for breast. I have, my hearing's ruined. And if you're going to the clubs, it's Friday night, I'm going to the clubs. I'm gonna put my earplugs in my ears to protect my hearing for my future self. Cause I love my hearing and I wanna get old and still be able to hear. Yeah. Okay. That's not good rapping. And, you know, I don't want to. Oh, yeah. I didn't even know it was, I think you're just saying. No, I very much wish I could go to 15 year old me and just shove like earplugs into my hands. Shake her. Shake her. Why put them in the wrong place? That would have been also part of the problem. My tinnitus is just so crazy these days. But geez, what would happen if instead of giving everyone earplugs, they were a field of plants and we just sprayed it with fertilizer. That was, I don't know. I don't know about that. The plants of dancing. That's the plant of the fertilizer. Putting a fertilizer in the flurb as some people call this field. Can you tell me about the fertilizer? Okay. I gotta tell you about the fertilizer now. So researchers were like, hey, all these people in agriculture are taking fertilizers and pesticides and they're just spraying them all over fields and pesticides. I don't want the little insects to come around, but there are pollinators and others who are attracted to these plants potentially, especially if they flower. And so the researchers, based on earlier evidence, they know that bees can detect electric fields of flowers and are attracted to the ion field, basically this electric charge, the electric field that is found around flowers. And so these researchers publishing in the journal PNAS flowers, they specifically, PNAS Nexus, not flowers, they specifically sprayed fertilizer on flowers. They created artificial flowers with charges. They tested the impact of adjusting the electrical field of these plants to the insect behavior. And they found that bees are less attracted to flowers after they have been sprayed with fertilizer. And the reasoning that they've come to understand is that the fertilizer triggers a physiological response in the plant, then sends molecules to different places within itself, which leads to a change in the ions that are being released and the balance of ions at different places. This changes the electric field and bees don't like it. And so they don't go to the flowers for a period of time afterwards. Things like rain, they also wanted to check and see, because they know rainstorms can also impact fields. And they found that rain also does impact the ion fields, but rain doesn't impact the behavior of the bees as much as the chemical sprays that we're putting onto our agricultural products. So. That's one of those times you think you're helping the plant and you're actually hurting it. Right, yeah, especially with fertilizer. With pesticide, it's very selfish. It's like, oh, we want the plant to grow more and not be eaten by insects. And so you'd think, okay, having insects not coming to the plants is fine, but with fertilizer, right? And so it's just another, I think that the interesting aspect of it also is, this is something that we hadn't thought about before, this interaction of the bees with the electrical properties of the plants that they're interacting with. How many other things are we interacting, are we affecting the way that insects, pollinators, birds, other animals that have different sensory systems that they rely on interact with things that are important to us. And I was thinking about your bee study from last week, Blair, and the balls, the playing bees, what if those balls just had an electric charge? Oh. That was something that they are naturally stimulated by or interested in. That is fascinating. That's a really interesting idea. This is one of those things, or now you gotta go back in time. You gotta review every bee study you've ever done. This is like when we found out about how mice don't like it when it's cold in a lab. And you're like, well, you gotta redo every single mouse study you've ever done. You gotta turn up the heat and start over. This is the same. You have to look at the electromagnetic field. You're gonna do electromagnetic chess here with the bees and look at that for everything. That could be how they're doing everything. Right. Yeah. So anyway, electric fields, bees, flowers pollinating who knew and our fertilizers, and they affect the way that the insects interact for a short period of time. What you got, Justin? I've got some more plant study news. Scientists, this is good news. I've got good news. Scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore have genetically modified a plant protein that is responsible for oil accumulation in plant seeds and edible nuts. They got lab-friendly Arabidopsis plant seeds to accumulate 15 to 18% more oil when it was grown with the modified protein under laboratory conditions. Most oil producing crops, things like palm, soy, bean, sunflower, rapeseed, peanut, that sort of thing already have such a high percentage of oil in their fruit or seeds that it is hard to increase their oil content through traditional crop crossbreeding methods. Vegetable oils are so commonly used in food processing and biofuels and soaps and perfumes that the global market for vegetable oil is estimated to be worth around $241 billion a year and it's expected to only increase. So even a modest increase in yield from oil from plants, re-yield of oil from plants could be massively economically beneficial as well as potentially more sustainable. So we could produce more oil on the same amount of land or we could reduce the amount of land that we're currently using and keep plant oil production the same or the more likely scenario is we would still use more land and get more oil out of it. But either way, it's a pretty significant advance published in the scientific journal Science Advances. The team detailed the molecular structure of a key protein and how it binds to plant DNA, which then signals the plant how much oil accumulation it needs in its seeds. The team modified the plant's protein the team modified the gene to enhance the protein's affinity for DNA, the modified version's increased DNA binding 10 fold leading to that 15 to 18% more oil content in the seeds of Arabidopsis. My first reaction though was that this is Arabidopsis which is a very small plant that's very popular in labs. It's probably the best studied plant on the planet. Yeah. Arabidopsis seeds are extremely fine. They almost look like dust. So when you plant them, it's you kids just, okay, I have no idea if that was dust or if that was seeds that went to the dirt because they're so super tiny. So yay, increased oil content of an incredibly small seed that probably didn't have a whole lot of oil content to begin, but they show that the protein target, the DNA strands to which it binds are extensively conserved throughout plants, which means this could be a common, not only common binding mechanism across many plant species, but this could also trigger the same effect. Currently vegetable oil provides approximately a fourth of dietary calories in developed countries. So we were talking before about science feeding the world and how if it wasn't for science and agriculture working together, we wouldn't have as many humans on the planet. So this, if this does translate to increases, it's yet another way science will have helped feed more humans than ever have lived at one time on the earth. I think we will hopefully increasingly need and it's something that we will hopefully be able to do with increasing sustainability going forward. Yeah, and if we can use the same amount of farmland to be able to raise the plants that will be able to sustain nutritionally, increasing numbers of people. Or less, because we need to make more forests. Because we need to control the forest that we're going to use to offset the carbon, which is, what was it last week? Half of the world's current farmland. This will be turned into forest. So yeah, we really gotta really make sure we're getting the most out of those sunflower plants. Yeah. Oh my goodness. Well, my last story for this first part of the show is making the most of the ice on the planet, the Ice Cube Array Experiment in Antarctica, where they have a square kilometer of neutrino detectors. Detecting neutrinos, we've talked about them on occasion for the past several years. Well, a couple of years ago, they were like, we have detected neutrinos and we have like two and a half sigma reliability. Our significance is enough to suggest that maybe just maybe Messier 77, a spiral galaxy similar to our own Milky Way galaxy that has a black hole. It's a pretty big, supermassive black hole at the center, at its center. It's also known as, Larry, you're gonna love this one, the Squid Galaxy. Ooh, how come? Yes, because I guess it looks kind of like a squid. Show me that squid. I don't know why they call it. If somebody knows why they call it the Squid Galaxy, that would be fantastic. I don't actually know why they call it. It looks like a spiral galaxy, so I'm guessing it has something to do with the arms of the galaxy. However, it is very far away. It's part of the set of what we're thought to be star clusters in galaxies that were named many decades ago. And initially, the Ice Cube experiment was like, hey, look, our neutrinos that we're detecting, I think that we can detect them to this galaxy cluster, NGC 1068. Anyway, they thought it was this one galaxy cluster and they're like, meh, maybe it's the Messier galaxy right nearby it in there. And then they're like, I don't know, we only have two and a half sigma. And then now they're like, we have 79 neutrinos. And because of our 79, only 79, only 79 neutrino observations that they were able to pinpoint as coming from this area of space, they've been able to get almost to a five sigma. Still under five, but almost to a five sigma significance that it is coming from this area of space. That means that these neutrinos could be coming from somewhere behind the Messier system. But at this point in time, it's most likely that they are coming from around there. This is one in 100,000 observation significance. And the interesting thing about this story and why neutrinos are fascinating is that neutrinos are these very energetic particles that don't really interact with anything. We didn't used to think they had any mass. Now we know they have a little tiny bit of mass, but they're still very weakly interacting with stuff. And so they can go all through space. Hi, energy cosmic particles, bloop sh. And they, you know, there's a neutrino probably going through you right now, not interacting with you at all. And so when we do actually detect them with our detectors, which have to be in the ground and hidden away and we have to do lots of work to try and shield them because we create neutrinos from our nuclear reactions, the earth itself creates neutrinos, the sun creates neutrinos, our nuclear reactors on the planet create neutrinos. But the idea of what in the universe could create really, really, really high energy cosmic particles. What could be doing it? The neutrinos being able to actually pinpoint, detect them and then pinpoint where they're coming from is really important to us because if a neutrino doesn't really interact with anything as it's making its way through, that means it wasn't bothered by other stuff on its way to us. So it's like somebody really had a free shot into that crumpled up paper into the garbage bin. And so we can potentially, they're looking at Messier, it starts to get at the idea that maybe these supermassive black holes are the big powerful accelerators that spin things up in the universe and throw out these highly energetic particles in cosmic rays. Until we figure that out, it's just a hypothesis. And you're like, I don't know. So that's why it's important to dig tubes in Antarctica and create these neutrino detectors. We wanna learn more about the universe. And at Google, I was not able to figure out why it's called the Squid Galaxy. So, hey listeners, please tell me at Blair's Menagerie at the Science, please tell us. Why? Why is Messier 77 called the Squid Galaxy? Probably because it looks like a squid. I have no idea. Do we look like squids? We don't know. You gotta let us know how we look to you. How do we sound to you? Do we sound like squids? I don't know about that either, but this, this, this, this is This Week in Science. We're talking about science and we're bringing it to you every single week if you're enjoying the show. Please share it with your friends today because that would just be fabulous and very helpful. All right, let's come back with just a tiny, tiny, tiny bit of COVID news, but it's not really COVID news, it's more COVID vaccine news. Oh, yay. Yay, yes. We want people to get the COVID vaccines because that helps to save lives. It is, it's very important. All right, speaking of saving lives, new paper out and this isn't new, new, totally new news. It's a new analysis. Researchers have published their analysis of mathematical models incorporating data from 152 countries, suggesting that if the richer countries had been more sharing with their vaccines instead of hoarding vaccines that there would have been as many as 3.8 million lives saved around the world. We could have helped save lives, but instead we prioritized just our own countries. And there are lots of considerations and I do understand that, but there is an organization that has been working to develop equality when it comes to vaccine availability called COVAX and it's a global vaccine sharing campaign. And they were trying to get us and other rich countries to share. They said, hey, could increase or decrease COVID deaths in low income countries by about 45% if we had just tried to go for 20% vaccine coverage around the globe by the end of 2021 instead of hoarding and just saying all for us. Yes, anyway. I think what's frustrating about that is that we immediately didn't learn our lesson and did that again with Monkeypox and let a bunch of smallpox vaccines go literally to waste and threw it away instead of sending it to the areas where it was spreading. Yep. And I think that that's the other part of this is it's not just about saving lives, it's about preventing global spread too. So by sending it to areas where it could be needed, you can actually save lives in the country that you're currently in with those vaccines by doing that. Yep. Thinking ahead. Thinking ahead. Couple steps forward instead of just right now. Sharing is caring everyone. I don't know, I mean, I think I learned that in preschool. For those of you who are getting your vaccines and are worried about the possibility of myocarditis or pericarditis, researchers have been trying to figure out the risks associated with the mRNA vaccines related to myocarditis and pericarditis. And remind me what those are. What's myocarditis and pericarditis? It's heart problems. Oh, it's heart, yeah. So myocarditis is inflammation of the muscle of the heart itself and pericarditis is the inflammation of the pericardium or the sac that encloses the heart. Both of these can lead to negative outcomes, but more often than not, the inflammation goes away and people recover very, very easily. These are not common incidences, but they do happen. It is, I just wanna say the risk of myocarditis and pericarditis just from getting COVID-19 is about 450 per million. So 450, I just want you to keep that in mind as I report the numbers for Moderna and the Pfizer mRNA vaccines, which they have now discovered that the Moderna vaccine has a higher risk of leading to these inflammation states as opposed to Pfizer. Moderna's rates of myocarditis were about 35.6 per million second doses, 22.9 per million doses for the pericarditis. Pfizer, 12.6 for myocarditis and 9.4 per million for pericarditis. I just want you to remember what the risk just from COVID all by itself was. So this does also 450 per million. That's a lot. Yeah. Okay, got it. Additionally, the data trended stronger for men in younger age groups. So younger age groups being 18 to 39 years of age. So if you are in a particular health state where you might be concerned about, oh, okay, I'm gonna get vaccinated, but which one is going to be better for me? If you have a concern of myocarditis, Pfizer will probably be better. But overall, for the majority of the population, getting vaccinated is better than getting COVID. So just wanted to make sure that was clearly stated out here so that we can all share this information so that when the misinformation, social media happens, you can go, no, no, no, no, I know. I read this, I heard this. I know. Don't forget your flu shot. And don't forget your flu shot, yes. And eventually, you know, it is going to turn into, I think I saw a headline in the Atlantic. You know, eventually we are all going to not really worry about how many COVID shots we've had because they're gonna be annual and you're gonna get your COVID shot and your flu shot and that's just gonna be the way it is. And we're getting there. Mix it up. Exactly. Wash your hands, wear your masks, be as safe as you can in public indoor spaces, moving forward because, woo, the trapezoid of diseases. You're gonna, everybody with kids, they're bringing it home. We're just, we're all sick one week after another. Oh, seriously. Get some sleep, take some bitsy, eat healthy. What I wouldn't give to be single and go into the clubs again. You could not pay me to go to a club right now, full of disease, hot, sweaty. Also, I go to bed at nine. It's a daytime clubs for Blair. Well, at least you're getting your sleep. That's what's good for you. This is This Week in Science. Thank you so much for joining us for another episode. If you are enjoying the show, remember this is 900 episodes. Oh my goodness, we made it this far. Can we do more? Well, we can't do more without you. We need you. You are the part, the big part of the equation. Twist plus you equals us having good science fun all the time. So if you really enjoy twists, head over to twist.org and click on the Patreon link because Patreon is how we really support ourselves through the show. And if you click on that link, you can choose your level of support, $10 and more per month. We won't thank you by name at the end of the show. And Dave Gillespie is letting us know right now NovaVax, which is the low-cost open source vaccine that is available. It's a standard Vax and has a very low myocarditis risk. So there's more out there. But right now, it's this week in science. So let's do some more science saying it's time for that wonderful part of the show that's full of invertebrates and strange happenings. It's time for Blare's Animal Corner. Dave Clerming with Blair. On Blair's Animal Corner. That's all. Buy a pet, mail a pet, no pet at all. If you want to hear about this animal, she's your girl. Except for giant pandas and squirrels. What you got, Blair? Do you like bacon? Oh, yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. Next time you're eating bacon, take a look at that piece. Think about if that pig ever resolved a social conflict in its life. Because chances are it did. I don't eat bacon. You're eating conflict resolution bacon. Congratulations. You didn't even know I had that in me. In a very small study, asterisk, asterisk of 104 domestic pigs, bystanders would come in to a conflict between two pigs and try to just kind of smooth things over. So normally, in social animals, there's a couple of different types of conflict resolution between the two parties involved, the aggressor and the victim. One is reconciliation, where the aggressor actually will kind of re-approach the individual that they were mean to, and they'll try to kind of smooth things over. But the other kind actually is when a third party comes in and tries to kind of initiate de-escalation. De-escalation. Yes, exactly. That de-escalator, right. So that's known as triadic context. And so within these pigs, these 104 pigs, they saw all sorts of examples of reconciliation. And they measured them against their genetic relationship. And that was by the way that they looked, how big they were, how old they were. But then they also did some genetic testing on 31 of those pigs to verify their assumptions. And they were right. And so they were able to kind of see, from June to November of 2018, they could see aggressive behaviors like head knocking, pushing, biting, lifting of victim pigs. And then they'd watch the behavior for three minutes afterwards to know what kind of happened afterwards. And the aggressor would sometimes initiate reconciliation. Sometimes also the victim would initiate reconciliation. That could be nose-to-nose contact, sitting in physical contact with one another, like sitting nearby, kind of just touching, like, hey, we OK? And then another one resting their head on the other one. They found that the reconciliations were significantly higher and more distantly related pigs compared to closely related pigs. That might be because they value relationships differently based on what they can provide, whether they are related or not. But what was really interesting about this study was that distantly related pigs were more likely to engage in reconciliation after fighting to ensure they had social support. But this was really most common when this bystander would come in. So this third pig would show up, would walk up, hey, hey, break it up, break it up. No. So they're fighting. This third pig comes up and engages with either the victim or the aggressor. When they engage with the victim, the number of aggressive behaviors didn't change. But the anxiety-related behaviors of the victim were lowered. So basically, they gave the victim a pep talk. And they were like, it's chill, man. Just let him do his thing. He's crazy. Just let him be crazy. You're all good. And so their anxiety was lowered. They were reassured by this third pig. But if the bystander pig approached the aggressor, the number of aggressive behavior tax towards the victim was reduced. So in that case, they're going up, they're going, hey, buddy, chill out, man. You don't need to attack him. He wasn't trying to start anything. Just be chill. Just be chill, man. It's all good, right? So these bystanders have different. So not only do aggressors and victims have different ways of deescalating when it's just the two of them, but the bystander has different tactics, depending on if they are trying to initiate this deescalation with the victim or with the aggressor. So the study wanted to look specifically at kind of the genetic relationships and how they value different relationships and how closely related versus not closely related can could help with social support and all these sorts of things, which I think is very interesting. But I think what the social interactions here are actually way more interesting to me, just the fact that this third pig has any investment or interest in what two pigs are doing. And I think that that is really the meat of this conversation is that these bystander pigs are inserting themselves into aggressive relationship. There's gotta be an inherent risk there. So for some reason, they're sticking their snout in where it's not really long to calm down one of these two individuals. So how do they pick that individual? And that's part of what this study was trying to figure out, but I think didn't come up with anything substantial yet, just essentially more questions. But also, yeah, why? What is their skin in the game that they wanna reduce these aggressive interactions in their social structure? So I don't have answers. I only have questions at this point. They do have some pig skin in the game though, for sure. It was only one group of adult domestic pigs, so it's not necessarily representative of pigs in general or mammals in general or social animals in general or anything like that. But I do think this is a really interesting starting point to, you know, I was just thinking about like the dog park. Like sometimes dogs, two dogs will kind of start getting into it a little bit. Sometimes other dogs will come in and join in on the fight. Sometimes other dogs will come in and kind of try to distract one of the dogs. It's very strange. And what is impacting that behavior? Why would you wanna do that? Why would you wanna get yourself in where those sharp teeth are? Which I have been bitten by a pig in their teeth are sharp. So... Of course you have. That's the thing. So, yeah, I don't... I think the other interesting aspect of this is that they do have impacts that the input of these pigs coming in from the outside are helping. Like they are changing how the social situation turns out, which I think is fascinating. But, right. How are they related? What is the motivation? Is it like, hey, don't mess with my friend? Is it, hey, I'm gonna help eat up or like whatever it is. So I think I'm like the only... I'm trying to picture... There's one very clear memory I have of witnessing conflict resolution of this nature by a third party in the animal kingdom. And this was, I had a mule. I had a mule named Misty when I was seven years old. Cute. And we also had these seven half broken, nearly wild stallions that were collected from the Bureau of Land Management. Six or seven of them. And they would end up at some point at the fence of the neighboring ranch and their horses would be there. And they'd be like braing and displaying and kind of like arguing back and forth. And then he would come Misty, who didn't hang out with the horses much, would come and braing, run down the center of the fence lane, right? And the both curds of the horses would just take off in different directions. And I remember thinking that my mule was just really annoyed by that. And that's what got her to do that behavior was she's just so annoyed with those dumb horses arguing over the fence all day that she would just break it up. Break it up here, everybody. Yeah, I think that'd be something really interesting to look at to that point, Justin, is... It's not your bad stress, right? If you're a place-stander. Cortisol level, right? Cortisol levels, if you break up these fights, do cortisol levels dip? And if you prevent the pigs from breaking up fights, does cortisol go up as there are more and more fights or the fights are longer or any number of things? So that's really interesting. Yeah. We've all heard how smart pigs are. Some people have pigs as pets and pigs are, their intelligence is well-known. And they do live in groups. Domestic pigs have to live in very, very, very large social groups very often. So the idea that they may have developed at some point in evolutionary history, even before we threw them into very, very large mega farms. Yeah. Yeah, this is only 104. This is not quite mega. Oh my God. But definitely there are other ones. And then, yeah, is the same happening with cows, with bees, with dogs, with monkeys. Like what are, what's happening with conference resolution? That's the thing. It's like with cows, I go, I don't know. I don't look at the intelligence of cows as highly as the intelligence of pigs. But I've only recently started to really look at the intelligence of bees as being so incredible. So there's potentially a lot of misunderstanding on humanity's part. And cows are extremely social. Like they don't, you don't think about it when you see them hanging out in the pasture, just standing around there looking bored. But they're hanging out with cliques. Other. They have very strong social groups that they interact with. Except for Ferdinand. He had his flowers. Oh. What else you got, Blair? Ferdinand. I have fish with low self-esteem. So Northwestern University led an international collaboration looking at zebra fishes' brains and eyes. And where fish look when they swim? Where do you think fish look when they're swimming? I would have thought. Think about a fish eyeball. Right, out to the sides. Yeah, up to the sides. Up, up, out to the sides, predators that are going to be where the predator is coming from. That's what I want to know. Great question. Well, it turns out this study tells us that fish spend a lot, a lot, a lot of time looking at the ground down at the bottom of the river. You don't want to trip. Yeah. Kind of, yes. So this is, so let me tell you how they did the study first. I'm going to tell you what they think is actually happening here. So they took zebrafish and they created a model with a few different methods here. So they visited seven sites across India to gather video data of shallow rivers where the zebrafish are naturally. They encased a 360-degree camera inside water for diving case attached to a remotely controlled robotic arm. They dunked the camera, right? Then they used the robotic arm to move it around under the water. They were able to model hypothetical scenarios where a simulated fish moved arbitrarily through a realistic environment. Great. So then in the lab, they had zebrafish where they tracked the zebrafish's motions inside a ball of LEDs. They were able to change what the zebrafish saw at different spaces in this kind of sphere they were inside so that they could move it across and watch the fish's responses to stimuli in different areas. So they could see where they were focusing the most. When patterns appeared on the bottom, the fish swam along with the moving patterns as opposed to other areas on the sphere. So this is evidence that the fish were looking down at their visual cues. And then, so for example, if you played a video with moving stripes, they'd move along with the stripes. It's, and they'd kind of swim faster and faster, wagging their tails faster and faster more to try to keep up with the moving stripes. They then abstracted the data from the videos combined it with the data from the lab experiments. And they combined that with data from how motion signals get encoded in fish brains. They fed the data sets into two preexisting algorithms used for studying optic flow, which is the movement of the world across the eyes or camera lenses. And they found that in both scenarios in the wild and in the lab, zebrafish were looking down when swimming forward. They, the reason they think that they're doing this, because it doesn't make sense, you wanna look up for predators, you wanna look around, are you looking down for camouflage? So what they actually think is happening is the same thing that happens when, is this ever happened to you where you are in a parking spot and there's a car on either side of you. You're like kind of not paying attention, you're sitting there, you haven't put your car into reverse yet. But the car next to you starts backing out and you go, you think you're moving forward? They think that's exactly what this is about, is that there's all the stuff moving in the riverbed. There's pebbles, there's other fish, there's particulate in the water, there's light dancing in the water, there's movement of gravel and all the other stuff going around them. Yes, and so they think that this is essentially that they are trying to keep reference in a space so that they don't get swept away with the water and so that they know where they are in relation to the environment. They're saying the visual cue from the other stuff around them is so strong that it could override all the other senses telling them that they're not moving. That's what's happening to us when we're in our car and that other car starts to back up. We know we're not moving, we can feel through our vestibular system that we're not moving, but our brain tricks us into thinking that we might be moving in that moment. And so this misleading motion could come from cues above them to the side of them. And so the most reliable signals are at the bottom of the river. And so now we're gonna be using these zebrafish as a model for car sickness. Interesting. So actually, yeah, I actually had something to do. Interesting, what they're actually gonna do is you can guess, use them as a model for, of course robots. Robots. So they wanna make a fish-inspired robot. And if they were just looking at the anatomy, they would have eyes pointing sideways. So based on this study, they know actually to have the majority of the eye time spent looking downward so that they can balance all the other tasks with stabilizing in a liquid environment. So fascinating idea, the stabilization in a liquid environment. I mean, our atmosphere is a fluid. So we're in a fluid, but we're tacked to the ground because of our legs and gravity and the way that we move through space and time. The fish are completely different. And I have never considered this aspect of their physiology, their biology, this evolutionary force on the way that they interact. I mean, it's very similar to, I would imagine, birds. So I wonder if there is some similarity in some of their sensory systems to flying animals. So it's just a thicker fluid environment. Yeah. I don't know. I wonder, yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating. And I think this is a good reminder of what you see is not really what's happening. Like if you look at a fish eye, it looks like they're perpetually looking sideways ways like we were saying, but their eyes don't work that way. They can actually adjust focus to different directions even though their eye is immovable. So it's one of those things where we understand our eye works. We see their eyes. We kind of project that same functionality onto their eyes, but that's not how their eyes work. How can we use this? I'm serious. How can we use this to fight car sickness, motion sickness and be better space travelers? Yeah, that's what we need to know. That would be great. Especially if we got to high tail it to Mars later. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just had to experience something like this this morning. Oh, yeah, just moments ago going to Mars. Yeah, like no, a couple of hours ago. Looking out the window, saw a formation of lights in the sky racing at a very quick pace all in uniform. I was like, oh, what is that? And then I realized it was a cloud that was illuminated by the moon, which is almost as beautiful as a moon, if not a full moon, that was moving towards a bunch of stars. But because it, for some reason, had triggered as the fixed object, as the ground in my mind for that moment, I got as far as my internal dialogue going, what the, oh, I see what's happening. But it had this really weird look or feel that all these stars, all these lights that were stars were racing towards something. But they were, of course, motionless and the cloud was, the illuminated cloud was moving towards them. But yeah, when I first saw the images you were showing, it looked like, to me, it looked like they were trying to track the shadow. So it looked like an effort to stay camouflaged by having the darker ground below them because that would better match them. And then so they'd be hidden from being eaten above. Right. But I, yeah, if you really put yourself in the mind of a fish, there's a lot going on that could be distracting. Yep. Put yourself in the mind of a fish. Yeah. Do you have the word? Yeah, and then, yeah, real quick, I was gonna talk about these octopuses. Okay, talk about the octopuses. That this is late breaking news, I have not reviewed this story, so here we go. But this is all about octopuses throwing objects at each other, so including, I think, sometimes fish. So there is that. But octopuses are generally very, the majority of them are solitary. We know about some that kind of hang out in groups, but generally speaking, they are solitary. And in a 2015 study, there was more than 21 hours of video recorded off the coast of New South Wales, where they captured the behavior about 10 octopuses throwing, propelling, projecting objects that had been gathered. And so they kind of wanted to look into this octopus throwing behavior. Both males and females did it. The majority of them were females. Two individuals accounted for 66% of throwing. So also, you know, I'll recognize this is kind of a smaller sample size. So this could just be a isolated incident. I don't think it is, but it could be. Out of 102 throws, 32% are related to octopuses cleaning out their dens. They're just saying, I don't want this stuff in here. 8% occurred after eating probably. I'm done, like kind of thaw or like, another. And then the majority of what was thrown was shells. 53% of recorded throws occurred within two minutes of one octopus interacting with another that could be fighting, mating, or grappling. And so that does seem like they were throwing stuff at each other. Get out of here! 33%. Yeah. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. Or the shell. 33% of these throws involved material hitting another octopus. So 20% of the time their aim was not good is what it sounds like to me. But it's hard to throw things underwater. It seems to researchers like it is deliberate. Some of the evidence for that includes that they found octopuses using an unusual combination of legs to hold the material and throw it. So this doesn't seem like another behavior that just kind of ended up in a lob. And that they were turning darker right before they did it, which usually means that they're feeling aggressive. So, yeah, I don't know. It's very strange. They're not sure why they're doing it. And... Many reasons? No. Yeah. I mean, it could be lots of reasons. There wasn't really any cases of return fire. So most of the time one octopus would throw something and they'd, all right, I'm leaving. And so, yeah, I don't know. I think octopuses are just emotive. I think this is something that the more we learn about them and captivity too, like they spray people, they spray things, they're cranky, they can be cranky. They're so smart. I don't know. It's one of those things where I feel like sometimes emotional complexity follows intelligence. And it is a normal behavior for an animal of any type to throw something when it's mad. I feel like lots of animals do that. They'll like drop things or throw things. It's just like, it's a natural behavior. If you're holding something and you're mad, you're gonna toss it. And so if that's all this is, is something kind of got their ire up and they had a projectile nearby, why not? Why not throw it? Use what you have in your environment to your advantage, especially if you're trying to maintain a territory. If it's mating season, like you said, it was more females than males. I imagine females are more likely to maintain territories because of their, the eggs that they lay. I have all the sperm packets I need. Go away. Keep your hectic hodls away from me. They do look really spooky when they turn all dark like that. Good guy, I'm looking at him. Angry. I got playing on the. Note to self, angry octopus has changed color to be darker. It goes all. They may throw things at you. They, yeah. Yes, they may throw things at you. Or maybe they're just cleaning up and you just happen to be in the way. That's true. Yeah. I want to say that to somebody next time I'm cleaning. You're just in my way. I didn't throw anything at you on purpose, Brian. No. What are you talking about? Sadie. I'm just cleaning. I'm just cleaning. That's all. I'm not cleaning, but this is, this is this week in science. Yes, it is this week in science. Justin, what you got? I got an update on Uzi the Iceman. The. Still frozen. Beloved. No, no longer he's in the museum in Italy somewhere. Oh, right. Maybe an inoxygenated, non-oxygenated little thing. Anyways. Oh, is he a dozer? Is he leading tours? Yeah. That's right. But he's old, right? This is a 5,300 year old corpse that thought out of the ice in pretty decent condition. Good enough so that they could do an autopsy and find out how he died. So he thaws out of the ice in 1991, becomes one of the world's favorite archaeological finds. Everything about his well-preserved flesh and items are immensely informative. He's got a bunch of tattoos. Those are interesting. The snowshoes he was wearing were constructed with bearskin, soles, deer hide on top, a netting made out of tree bark to keep it from falling through the snow. Grass wrapped around his feet that functioned like socks for warmth and acts of copper before the copper age was thought to have begun. He had a fungus-based fire kit where this fungus is turned into a powder and then you'd flint it and it would ignite. It would ignite quickly. It was a good fire starter. And once it was lit, smoosh it down with a hammer and it would smolder and it would stay smoldering long enough for you to carry it from one in a pouch from like one campsite to the next. So you didn't even have to re-flint everything. You could just keep that little bit of algae, or not algae, a fungus smoldering and restart a new fire. He had an undigested meal in his belly, giving us a glimpse into diet. And of course, the unlucky fate of having been murdered as a stone arrowhead was found lodged beneath his shoulder blade. Yet, such a lucky chain of events had to happen for him to be preserved in the first place. So first the body had to be freeze-dried in the cool of fall or winter on this mountain in the Alps, then encased in ice beneath a glacier while being protected from the glacier's movements by having fallen into a gully where he remained frozen. And only was undisturbed for thousands of years, only coming to light because of global warming, climate change melting the glacial ice in which he had been frozen. Such a sequence of events means that, of course, Uzi is a sort of archeological unicorn, one that is unlikely to be repeated. Except. A small team of researchers affiliated with institutions in Norway, Sweden and Austria have found evidence that suggests there's some flaws in the unicorn story about how Uzi remained preserved for so long and they have published in the journal The Holocene. In fact, the researchers disagree with almost every part of the original story that I have just told you. The cause of death remains the same, still died of that arrow wound, but they suggest that Uzi belly demonstrates that he died in spring, not in the fall or winter. Study the landscape shows that the remains had not been covered by a glacier, which suggests that Uzi likely melted out of the ice many times. There's also evidence that Uzi had been immersed in water several times, so that fit. And the researchers also found evidence suggesting Uzi had not died where he was found in the gully, but instead had been transported down the mountain by natural environmental processes and come to rest in the gully. So researchers conclude that since the evidence showed Uzi's remains had survived for so long under very common conditions, it is likely that there are others like him in the Alps to be found as conditions in the area continue to grow warmer. So talked about a little bit ice patch archeology, where we're finding artifacts and things melting out of the ice, but there's kind of a tight window to discover them. The thinking is that the natural degradation will quickly destroy many artifacts. If they're not found quickly, as global warming allows this look into the past. But if Uzi's any indication, you can melt and maybe you re-freeze a few times before you've done too severe a damage. Yeah, also- And people don't like eating freezer-burned meat. You know, it's been frozen and melted and re-frozen, yeah, but yeah, being it, that's different entirely. And in my last story- I'm just gonna make sure there's no plant-based aliens that are in the ice that are gonna melt. Oh, no, too bad. Take over your entire Arctic outpost. Oh, that's actually probably already happening. Yeah, sorry Blair, shucks. My last story of the night, the origins of the alphabet we use today, commonly, is about 3,800 years old. It was created by a segment of an ancient Egyptian population that found hieroglyphs, two dang complicated and cumbersome to have any meaningful conversations with. So they had built this shorthand version for texting each other on clay tablets and etching the names under the walls of pyramids. The new format caught on really quickly and soon spread across the region. Thanks quite a bit to the Phoenicians who were credited with standardizing the new text symbols. They get to pick the font, I guess. And some say there were also very good grammar coaches as well, they helped auto-correct your texting. Now one of the oldest texts of that format has been discovered. An indigenous Israeli Canonite inscription dating to about 3,700 years ago, which is a mere 100 years into the creation of these ancient fonts, this ancient alphabet. A comb made of ivory from an elephant's tusk, likely owned by a wealthy person as there were no local elephants. So also likely an imported luxury object. This was discovered by a team from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Southern Adventist University of the United States is published in Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology. The comb bears an inscription. There are 17 Canonite letters, archaic in form from the very first stages of the invention of the alphabet script. They form seven words in ancient Canonite, the first sentence ever found in the Canonite language in Israel. What message of wisdom, what words from ancient past were motorized here for future generations to discover? It reads like an enchantment or perhaps an advertisement, almost an instruction. It reads, may this tusk root out the lice of the hare and the beard. May it, yes. So I don't know, that could be an enchantment empowering the comb to remove lice or maybe it's an advertisement telling people, hey, this is what this is for. And then by that sort of an instruction telling you how to use it. It's also kind of fun as one side of the comb had six thick teeth for untangling knots in hair while the other side had 14 very fine teeth that was used to remove lice and their eggs which if this event unfortunately had to deal with this this is exactly how they make the current day two-sided lice combs that you can go buy in the store. Haven't changed. Yeah. Haven't changed. Lice combs haven't changed in 3,700 years folks. Just come out the nits everyone. They found the remains the outer, what is it, chitten membrane of the nip stage headless was found on this comb. But it also shows that regardless of your prominence in society, regardless of the wealth, you could afford this language inscribed ivory imported luxury lice removal comb. You still need a lice removal comb even if you're like the richest. That's what they always tell the kids when there's the lice outbreak in school is, no, no, no, getting lice, the lice attack clean heads. They like clean hair. So it's a compliment. I've never gotten it. The lice like any head they can get themselves onto. And yes, it doesn't matter who you are, but if your hair is there, the lice are gonna attach. Now, I think it's just amazing that they've been able to figure out the writing on it and that it was so very instructive, not just no writing, but a shorthand, I don't know, yeah, it's like almost like shorthand, right? Instead of the hieroglyphs. It's like going the opposite direction from where we are now with emojis. It kind of is, right? So the way you could sort of picture this first language, because all of the symbols of the first alphabet are just derived from hieroglyphs. So much so that, yeah, it is a language of emojis. Right. Where if you put certain emojis together, it means this. If you put this other grouping of emojis together, it means that. And so our transition back into emojis, it's the sort of basis of language we've been using for such a long time. Doesn't matter, Lys have been with us the whole time. If you want, go look up the ancient Canaanite and actually really look up the ancient Phoenician alphabet. And you'll see how it leads into the Greek and the Roman. And you'll also see how it connects to the Egyptian hieroglyphs, because all of the symbols, all those letters that we take for granted is just being a symbol that stands for something that can make a sound. They all started out as images, as emojis themselves. Like, what was it, the letter J was an outstretched arm. It used to be on its side. Like they moved a lot of these things around. The W was a palm hand, which might have turned into the E, like some of them got changed in use over time. The letter A was a head of an ox. So yeah, which again, that one I think got turned upside down at some point. If you flip the A, the capital A upside down, you can see it's very, oh, okay, now I can see how this still looks exactly like an ox's head. Like if you were gonna like make a crude symbol of an ox's head, that's perfect. With the horns, a capital A, the lower case A. It still has kept its ancient form. Old combs, new technologies. Lys is still here. Now, I don't need to talk about going to the clurb. Day-clerbin, we're going day-clerbin. But you know, if you're not going clerbin, you should be getting some sleep. That, that is, I mean, there's so many studies. Just go to sleep, everybody. Published in a journal that is appropriately called Sleep. Researchers have published their study. Sleep restriction reduces positive social emotions and desire to connect with others. So in their study of 50-ish healthy emerging adults. Now, I love the idea of an emerging adult as if it's emerging from the, like there's a child who's- Primordial teen-ness. There was a chrysalis at some point. I mean, I don't think so. But anyway, there's some- Teenage cocoon. These kids, aged 18 to 28 years old, were randomly assigned to one night of sleep restriction with only four hours in bed or allowing eight hours of sleep, regular, typical sleep. And then they asked the participants to report on their desire to pursue social connections. And then they had to complete a task in which they had to reflect on their gratitude for something that someone had done for them recently. And they found that the people who, who reported their desire to pursue these reflections, like their self-reported motivation was low. They're like, uh-uh, I don't wanna go talk to anybody because I'm tired, right? They're like, I don't need to talk. I don't wanna talk to anyone. And then in the reflection, the researchers looked at the words that were used and coded the different words, looking for words and how they were focused, whether they're self-focused or whether the words were focused on other people. And they found that there were fewer socially oriented words used by the individuals who had slept less. So people were much less likely to reflect on their gratitude in a way that was actually reflective of gratitude to others. But in this whole situation, it just goes to show once again that if you are feeling like you're unusually unsociable, that you don't want to hang out with people, that something is abnormal in the way that you want to interact with others that perhaps getting some sleep will help with that. I know, H-N-E-K, I never get enough sleep. What am I supposed to do? Right, and so then this becomes the question of, there's too much sleep leading to demotivation, not enough sleep leading to demotivation. And so there's that happy middle, right? Moderation, which unfortunately is very hard to come by these days. Sleep as you can, I mean, sleep them if you've got them. I don't know if that works anymore. It's good for you. And I think we've done all of our stories. Have we made it to the end of the show? I think we have, I think it's time for a nap. I think we might be time for a nap. 900 episodes, I think we deserve a nap. We did 900 episodes tonight. That's very long. Once again, cheers to all. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your presence. Thank you for your curiosity. Thank you for your friendship. So wonderful to have you here. Thank you for listening, everyone. So I think it is time, it's time, it's time, it's time, it's time. Is it time, it's time? It's time, it's time, it's time. It's time for me to say thank you. I just said thank you, but I'm gonna say thank you again. Fada, thank you. You've been with us for so many episodes, helping and doing social media and show descriptions. Since what, 2015, somewhere around there? It's been so long. Thank you so much for all of your help. Identity four, thank you for recording the show. You've been recording the show for quite a while. If you've been saving all these episodes, your drives are definitely full. Get a dust broom in there. I also have to say thank you to Gord, Aran Lore, Gouldusator, others who are in the chat room constantly and are helping to keep the chat rooms very nice, happy places to be. Thank you for all your time in the chat rooms and moderating in there. And our patrons, and thank you to our Discord server. Everyone, noodles, who else is in there? Kevin Unique, I know Kevin, you're in other places. Schnago, who else is in there? We've got Hot Rod and there's another bunch of other people over in the, oh, Identity Four says he has a 16 terabyte NAS drive. So he's got plenty of room to record more twist episodes. Gaurav Sharma, H-N-E-K, all of you who are here tonight in our YouTube chat room, our Twitch chat room, our Facebook chat room, thank you for being here and for chatting and being a part of the conversation. So it's just wonderful to have your engagement and your presence. And of course, I do have to say thank you to Rachel for bearing with us. And yes, you're gonna have to cut out a few bits tonight from the edit. And additionally, of course, to our Patreon sponsors. For those of you who support the show financially, we really can't do this without you. 900 episodes is a huge deal and you've made such a huge difference. Teresa Smith, James Schaefer, Richard Badge, Kent Northcote, Rick Lovman, Pierre Velazarb, Ralphie Figueroa, John Ratnaswamy, Carl Kornfeld, Karen Taze, Woody M.S., Chris Wozniak, Dave Bunn, Begard Sheffstad, Hal Snyder, Jonathan Steyes, aka Don Stilo, John Lee, Allie Koffengorf, Sharma Regan, Derek Schmidt, Don Mundy, Stephen Albaran, Dale Mychak, Stu Pollock, Andrew Swanson, Fred S104, Sky Luke, Paul Ronevich, Kevin Reardon, Noodles Jack, Brian Carrington, David E. Youngblood, Matt Bass, Bado for Texas? I wonder if it's gonna change. I think it needs to change. Yeah, John McKee, Greg Riley, Mark Kessonflow, Steve Leesman, aka Azima, Ken Hayes, Christopher Rappendana, Pearson, Richard Brendon Minnish, Johnnie Gridley, Rummy Day, Flying Out, Christopher Rudier, Greg Briggs, John Atwood, Rudy Garcia, Dave Wilkinson, Roddy Lewis, Paul Rick, Ramis Phillips, Shane Kurt Larson, Sue Doster, Jason Olds, Dave Neighbor, Eric Knapp, EO, Adam Mishkan, Kevin Parachan, Erin Luthan, Steve DeBell, Bob Calder, Marjorie, Paul Disney, David Simerly, Patrick Peccararo, Tony Steele, and Jason Roberts. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you for all of your support. And keep it going. We're less than two years away from episode 1,000. Yeah, so we're gonna need some Patreon support so that we can have a crazy event. I think if we do episode, if we get to episode 1,000, there needs to be something big. There will be. Yeah, we have to do it live. There needs to be live in person. There needs to be a destination. We're gonna have multiple speakers. It'll have to be a festival-y kind of thing. I think it'll have to be, it'll have to be a whole day. Yes, it'll have to be big. So yeah, do you like the idea of that? Yeah, it's less than two years away. It gets close. We gotta start planning now. We have to start planning it now. That's right, Gaurav. Someone do a rough calculation. Let's figure out what it's gonna be. Well, two years and four weeks ish. And so October. That's wrong. That's less than two years. 10th. Two years minus four weeks. There we go. Yeah, so October 10th ish. October. Yeah, October-ish in two years. Okay. Plus or minus. Yeah. Well, we'll just, you know, it'll be your wedding anniversary getaway weekend where multitasking. That's what we do now. But if anyone is interested in the meantime in helping us out on Patreon, head over to twist.org and click on that Patreon link. Tomorrow, I am interviewing Professor Matthew Cobb about his book As Gods. And it's about genetic engineering and the ethical choices that we're making. And it is at 11 a.m. Pacific time tomorrow, Thursday, November 10th, 2022. But next Wednesday, we'll be back. Yeah, next Wednesday. Actually, we're gonna have two broadcasts next week. We have one Wednesday, 8 p.m. Pacific time. And we have a second broadcast that will also be live Thursday, 5 a.m. Central European time. He means it's the exact same time. But they're at the same time. Just one broadcast. Broadcasting live, of course, from our YouTube, Facebook channels from twist.org slash live. Hey, do you wanna listen to us as a podcast? Maybe you can put on some low bass in the background while you listen and dance to all the science. Anyway, just search for this weekend science where podcasts are found. If you enjoyed the show, get your friends to subscribe as well. Take their phones, sign up for them. 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This Week in Science, it's the end of the world. So I'm setting up shop, got my banner unfurled. It says the scientist is in, I'm gonna sell my advice. Show them how to stop the robots with a simple device. I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand. And all this is coming your way. So everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientific method and I'll broadcast my epic in science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Science, science, science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Science, science, science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. That what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science, you may just not understand. Just not understand. Your philosophy. I break it. It's the after chill, everyone, we made it. Yay. Yeah, I love the vest and the top hat. It's wonderful. I brought my tiara for the occasion. You've done it. My crooked tiara is all I ever get is a crookedness. In style, you said you would have the top hat and you did. You brought it. I did it. I appreciate it. It took a second and I found it. And I love the spider. The Lego spider is wonderful. That's fantastic. And Blair had shared. Let me get the cover. We have a cover image. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, where did all my emails go? There it is. OK, I will open that up and you can see the wonderful cover for the two thousand twenty three calendar. But Blair has. Put together her Lego calendar cover. Oh, thanks, Garov. Yes, twist two thousand twenty three. The calendar is coming. And I know Blair wanted to get things up for sale tonight for episode nine hundred. And I was working on it. But eventually it's, you know what, we're doing our best. Yes, we are doing our best. We're doing our best here. But what I am going to say is that we will either do our usual thing through mixed book, do the order and then do the order fulfillment ourselves because that's like an easy way to do that. But we'll do the order fulfillment to places where we can where the shipping makes sense. So we may only do domestic shipping this year, which I feel very bad about. But I also I mean, it's very expensive for people to order a calendar and internationally. But we will do digital downloads because we can do a PDF and we will offer digital downloads for half the price of the calendar and it will not have any shipping. So if people want to download the calendar and print it themselves on whatever kind of paper they want, then that is also a possibility. And so that we that won't have holidays on it, though, right? It won't have our science holidays. OK, no, did you get my email? And I saw I haven't I haven't been able to open it yet. So there are a couple of it. So in Canva, I think you can go through and make the calendar and add text and do all that kind of stuff so that we can do that. I was also looking at Vista print as an option and Vista print that originally. Yeah, if we could download the I don't know if we can download the PDF of the design, I would hope so from Vista print. But if we can do that, then they can do fulfillment of a certain number. So they have a system where you can do where they do the fulfillment and and the printing and everything. And they have a pretty good system for creating the calendars as well. So interesting. We have some options. I just really I want to make sure that everybody I want to make sure that international listeners and viewers are able to get a calendar somehow. I feel like it's great. But yeah, I just can't figure out how to all of play around with it. Are you on the right now? Yeah, I can't figure out how to change date. Like add text to dates. But I think we would just hit the text button and then you just add it on top. OK, that will take a very long time. But if we I mean, I'm happy to help, too. You know, so if you want to, I mean, we can we can split it up and make sure that it gets done sooner rather than later. And I'm happy to know I have a whole literally my entire day on Saturday is twist calendar. So awesome. Yeah. So if we've got the spreadsheet of the dates and have that all double checked, then we I'm happy to help do that and we can make the. And then we've got a PDF and canva also allows allows downloads and printings, but I've never ordered one from Canva before. So I don't know how that works. And I don't know how we would do that as a marketplace. So right. Yeah. So everyone who's here right now and listening, just, you know, just understand that I we do a podcast and we doing a calendar is super fun. And I'm so happy that Blair does it every year. But there are certain details that just are. I mean, I'm into science, but businesses and marketing and products and stuff are that this just that's complexity that I details I find complicated. Well, I've got I've got a ton of great ideas. They just require a research team and a big bag of money. Exactly. Somebody else just make that happen. Yes. Well, and also we've been making these since 2016. And I guess 2015 because we did the 2016 calendar and resources have changed. Like, yeah, I don't think so. Yes. So and we haven't changed the way that we've produced it since then. So I think it's I think modernizing it and making it available in different ways. It's about time that we do that. I looked into Zazzle and we can make the calendar in Zazzle. However, it will not have the holidays. Like we can have it just put like, you know, US holidays. Yeah, kind of in it, but we can't add our own holidays to it. And you can't just do an upload of a calendar. Yeah, this is much more what we would want to do. I looked at printful and print printify. And there are all these things where it's like, if you have a Shopify shop space and then you use printful is the thing. I'm just like, yeah, it's a whole new system to implement. And then like all of a sudden, yeah. Maybe maybe what makes the most sense then. Mm hmm. Is Zazzle for printed and shipped calendars. And then we make digital calendars with Canva. And we can make that available, you know, through our website pretty easily. Yeah, yeah, because you purchase it and then you get a and then you get a download link. Yeah. And then I guess there could be a third option where people pay slightly more and will order a small batch of printed calendars through Canva and then you can still mail them domestic. Yeah. Yeah, I can't through Canva or Mixbook either one. But yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's I feel like I'll look at it. But I think if I'd rather not put manually put in all the dates twice. I agree. Yeah. If we're going to do a digital calendar through Canva, I can just do that and then we can we can. OK, so they will take that. They have been good to us at this point, but we have to look at how much it's going to cost. And it's going to be similar to order through Canva. Yeah, I mean, the big one is your art and how special that is. Although the science holidays are so fun to have on a calendar. Yes, yes. Very much. Maybe we'll have a lot more orders if people are getting the. I don't know. I like physical calendars. Yeah, all calendars. I don't know. I don't know. We could also. We could create a Blair's Animal Corner twenty twenty three planner and have it printed through Amazon's print on demand. Oh, because they print books. Interesting. Rick Loveman, thank you for that input about Vista print. That's fascinating. Oh, so a planner through Amazon. That's Vista print is the one that he says that negotiators they consistently be called twice to get different prices. And the paper stock price Vista. They're in the bay. I just this is this is an unsolicited ding company signed me up for some five dollar a month auto pay thing that I never signed up for and discovered like a year in. I was like looking over banks like, what's this? Why is Vista print still charging me for something that I did like a year ago? And I looked in, I was like every month and I just hadn't seen it. And those kinds of things you got to watch out for. Well, but I do and I tell you I never clicked on subscribed on or agreed to anything. And they still sign me up. So I have ordered from Vista print before and enjoyed it, their products. So the products that you offer them was great. The five dollar a month charge they signed to me up for, which was for some weird like some very like nonsensical thing. It was like, yeah, this will allow you to have access to support for our team. I don't remember what it was, but it was like utterly dumb. Oh, noodles, have your last birthday cupcake. We I started this calendar conversation because you made your comment in the discord. Happy birthday, noodles. Oh, happy birthday. Enjoy that birthday cupcake. And you you can gift yourself. It's just not going to be tonight. We will be getting these out. I wanted to do pre-orders, but I think with if we're going to do digital downloads, it'll be easier just to have have it order. You can order a digital download and then we'll make we will do pre-orders for the physical ones that people want to get from us that'll have all the science holidays and everything on them. We'll figure it out, everyone. We'll figure it out. Maybe we will make it a special Patreon thing. No, Gaurav. Yes, Zazzle has great quality on stuff, the tote bag and doormat. You get I love my I love my towel, my twist towel. I have to say I ordered myself a big beach towel and it makes me very happy. I really enjoy it. Kind of sad we're in the we're we're digging into winter right now. And the cold weather is here. I'm going to have to pretend that I'm at the beach one day with my twist. How I live in Australia. No, I don't. It's 30 degrees outside. Happy 900 episodes. Woohoo, we did. Done it. Yeah, we did. Done it good. We're keeping it up there, everybody. And, you know, Justin, I don't know what happened with your internet earlier at the beginning of the show. I know it's fine. It happened two weeks ago, too, where it started horrible and then kicked in. I don't know if there's some sort of throttling going on. I don't know if there's some sort of like reason that people are all jumping on the internet. Five thirty five. And they just got home from the clerk. I don't. It's the Wednesday night, clurbers. I don't understand why it's a thing that is happening now. Some frequency, but hopefully hopefully doesn't happen again. Where I'm still ringing laughing. Happy to a bludge. They're just putting it together with the dump, dump, the club, dump, dump, the club. Oh, dump, the club, dump, dump. Clurb, clurb, clurb, dump, dump. Clurb, clurb, keep a deeper dump, dump. Anyway, OK. Say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Say good morning, Justin. Good morning, Justin. Good night and happy 900th episode. Thank you for wearing your top hat. My pleasure. Two years, everybody. Let's make it a thousand. All right. Thank you for joining us in less than two years. We'll be at a thousand months. We take a week off. We will. We will. I like weeks off. It's good for the good for the soul. The science never stops. We never stop. We don't. But tomorrow, 11 a.m. Pacific time, if you're around, join me for an interview with a hopefully very interesting gentleman, Professor Matthew Cobb, who has also been on what is these? What are the fancy, the fancy British podcasts? Welcome to the Monkey House or somebody and somebody and somebody. There's like some British podcasts that are. Wait, you're saying there's other podcasts? There are other podcasts. Yes. I thought we were the one podcast that was. Yeah. Well, anyway, the Infinite Monkey Cage is one that he has been on before. He's written for The Guardian. He's also been written for New Scientist. He's written like six books. This is another book of his and he's, it's going to be fun. We're going to have a great time. I hope that you can join us. Justin, if you're around and awake, feel free to jump in for it's a quick half hour. It's at 11 a.m., you say. Yes. OK, that could be that could be doable. That could be doable. Yes, it's a quick. It's a quick half hour, though. So that's it done. But that's on Friday. Well, maybe maybe I'll listen while I'm working. Maybe I'll be in the chat room. I wasn't paying attention. Is that on? What is it? If it's no, it's it's your. Today. Yeah. I won't be able to make it if it's my today. Yeah. OK, it's your today. Tonight. It's your tonight. Danish language school. Oh, how is that working? You're going to see. They can eat out of dance. You can you can dance. Can I tell it? I did. I can eat out of dance. He dances in the club. In the club. Yeah, I tell a dance. He dances on the club on television is what I can tell you. I haven't been to the club in Copenhagen. I need the clubs in Copenhagen. I 100% guarantee it. They don't call them the club. Take your baby to the club. We're going to the club. All right, beyond 11 a.m. tomorrow, we will be back next Wednesday, 8 p.m. Pacific time and Justin, make sure you reboot that router before you come join us next week. We will see y'all in the science club. Doof, doof, doof, pipette, pipette, pipette. Oh, my God, I got to go. Thank you for joining us. Have a wonderful week. Stay safe, stay healthy, stay curious. Go get your sleep.