 We are here. What? Who's got a hat? Who's got who needs a hat? There's no time for a hat right now. Welcome to This Week in Science, everyone. This is This Week in Science. We're broadcasting live, the live recording of the TWIS podcast to be edited for the actual podcast. But you're watching it live right now or maybe you're watching it later, asynchronously, whatever. But you're here now and we're so glad you are. If you're not subscribed yet, please do subscribe. Click down there wherever it is on the like button, the subscribe button. Be a part of this every single week. You're supposed to be like, like and subscribe. Right? Isn't that how it goes? I don't know how to do these things. It would just be really great. You're supposed to tell everybody, while you're here, if you're on the YouTube's, below me, there's a link or a thing you can hit that says like. Mash that like button. Yeah. Or if you're on the Twitch or on the Facebook, same thing. Like us, please. We like you, liking us. And there's a bell. What does the bell do? I'm always afraid to hit it because I don't want to learn to go off. Right. So there's the like or the follow channel, right? The follow the channel. The like just likes the video or likes a thing. The bell is a notification so that if we have a new episode that goes out, you get notified when that happens. But does that work if they're not subscribed? Should they also subscribe as well as like and bell? Subscribe. Like and bell and subscribe. It seems like a lot to ask. Bell, like. It should be, one button. Do it all button. Like the three things all together would just be one button. The choices. It's time for us to do a show full of the science choices that we made this week. We have chat rooms, everyone. Yeah. Are you in our chat rooms? Are you there? Yes, Gaurav. It is Women's History Month, all month long. Monday will be International Women's Women's Day. So I expect flowers. No. Was it like 51% of the planet should get flowers tomorrow or Saturday? Monday. Monday. I don't see. I don't even know because my expectations are so low. Beth Bennett. Women will get flowers from other women, right? Isn't that really how it's going to end up going? I feel like, you know, actually instead of flowers, I would like equal pay, pay what rates. Oh, what an interesting idea. Let's not go too far. What? Let's not go too far. We're going to touch 500s or in politics or in politicians. No. We're talking about science. We're going to talk about science. We're talking about science in our politics. This month of March, this wonderful month of March, I am lining up, trying to line up wonderful interviews with female scientists, science writers, people to talk about the sciences. So there's a lot coming this month. It's very exciting. Very thrilling. Beth Bennett, yes. You can love us on Facebook. You can just, no, just love us here and Facebook, wherever you are, all the places. Double triple up. It's like, yeah. It's like a triple decker ice cream cone. It's time for the science show. You ready to start? I am going to open up my computer here and get this show on the road. Let's get music ready. I've got the voices in my head ready. Do roll with this. What three things are we going to talk about? We've got trappings, fat and lice. Okay, good. I've got this. Which one of those is mine? I don't think any of those. Should I go to bed? Hold on to the show. Okay. Blair. I'm kidding. It's a joke. Oh, she's mad. Oh, no. Do I get mad? I don't get mad. I just get even. Oh, no. I'm having too much fun. I think I'm in too much of a good mood tonight. Time to start this show in a three, two, this is twist. This week in science, episode number 814 recorded on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2021. How wild is life? Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki. And tonight on the show, we will fill your heads with trappings, fat and lice. But first, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Trust the science. But more importantly, learn about science. Recently, a recent addition to the United States Congress put up a sign outside her capital office that read, there are two genders, male and female. Trust the science. That is the same individual as also professed belief in a solar powered, Jewish space laser that caused the California wildfires. That 9-11 global warming wearing masks and voting results are all hoaxes. That victims of mass shootings, many of them children, were paid actors. Just goes to show how fringe of fantasy, two genders is. So let's take a look at the science on gender for a moment. Genetics, we have learned, are not gender. Science has confirmed that gender occurs across a spectrum. That having a specific gender along that spectrum, itself does not always imply or correlate to a set physical, emotional attraction or to sexual behavior. University of League Belgium found that transgender brains resemble their late identified gender even at an early age, suggesting that gender is structurally different in the brain, not just the genitals. And in fact, it does not originate in the genitals at all. The check mark next to sex on a birth certificate is just a guess of what took place in natal development, where all sorts of factors contribute to gender. And when a child is born with both, choosing a gender for the child with surgery has led to tragic consequences. The DSM-5, published by the American Psychiatric Association, contains the condition gender dysphoria, which has been used to distinguish people who are experiencing socially driven emotional stress over gender identity from people who are experiencing bipolar disorder, which previous DSMs might have wrongly categorized them as. This congressional person claimed that science backs up their position on a bill affirming equal rights or their opposition to a bill affirming equal rights for non-binary gendered Americans, without having even the foggiest idea of what science actually has to say. And went on to say that gay rights in general has everything to do with attacking God and believers. Whomever believes that human equalities and attack against their God needs a better God. Or better yet, you can just leave God completely out of it and put your trust in this week in science, coming up next. Good science to you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of this week in science. Wow, what a rockin' intro. What a disclaimer today, Justin. You brought it. Fo sho. Do not take the name of science in vain or you shall be smitten. Smitten. Smit on you. We will smit on you. We will smite. Smite. Smite thou with thine tongue lashing? Smite with thine blade of data. Data, yes. Welcome, everyone. We've got a great show full of science for you today. It is World Wildlife Day, so just remember it's a wild, wild world out there. And what a wild world it is. Everything relates back to wildlife, so hopefully we will be touching on that throughout the show. But I have stories about, well, not necessarily wildlife, but space hurricanes. Because, yep, apparently that's a thing. Yep, now it is. We will talk about those. I've got some lying lyrebirds and some... Lyrebirds gonna lie, I suppose. Lyrebirds gonna lie. That's right. And we'll, at the end of the show, get into some Neanderthal news. We will. Yeah, Justin, what'd you bring? I've got how to match the fat to the wine instead of the wine to the food. A update on a dinosaur that's not a dinosaur. The absolute worst idea I have ever heard in how to handle climate change. The absolute worst idea yet. And good news for people who can't see color or very much else. Did you bring that story specifically for Blair? Yeah, I won't tell anybody. Actually, I think it does apply. You're right to Blair. That's, I didn't even think of it. Blair, what is in the animal corner? Well, if you try hard enough, anything applies to me, but... In the animal corner, I have... Wildlife? I have lots of wildlife. So I have a story about wildlife that played dead. I have a story about wildlife that are very smart. And I have a story about wildlife that are dying from climate change. I don't like the last one, but... It's meta. It's very meta. So it's not, you don't have to picture anything. Picture a world without any wild life. It's more of like, it's like a computer simulation I'm reporting on. It's all right. There were no actual animals harmed yet. All right then. Let us start to dive into the show. But oh, first I need to tell you that you need to mark your calendars for 4 p.m. April 17th, a 4 p.m. Pacific time, April 17th. That's a Saturday. It's going to be the crossoveriest crossover show in history, the Daily Tech News Show, and the Twist Crew are going to be joining forces, bringing the powers of science and technology into alignment for one great super sci-tech show. Let us know what you want us to talk about on that show because we have lots of ideas, but we really want it to be very viewer-forward. We want to respond to you and give you the kind of conversation that you are hoping to get out of such a crossover show. Well, they can email me, kirsten at thisweekinscience.com. Yeah, makes it very easy. But remember, mark your calendar April 17th, 2021. It's just a few, it's just like six weeks away or so. It's very soon. It's going to be so much fun! 4 p.m. Pacific time. And if you are not yet subscribed to This Week in Science, you can find us. All places, podcasts are found. Look for This Week in Science. You can also search for This Week in Science on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch, where you will be able to find us, subscribe to us, and get the show every single week. Our website also is twist.org for more information. Now for the science. Okay, World Wildlife Day needs trappings. Lots of wildlife trappings. And I don't mean wildlife in traps. I mean camera traps. Camera traps. It's really great. Researchers have just completed and reported on one of the largest camera trap efforts in history ever. It's massive, a massive effort is just published in, I believe, is the Royal Society letters and the proceedings of the Royal Society Bee. Excuse me, I was a little bit off on that. It's the Royal Society's flagship biological research journal. These researchers were around the world part of a team, Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring Network. The team network uses motion activated cameras to monitor species and their trends in tropical forests in Asia, Africa, and South America. So this is tropical ecology. They're trying to see who lives in different places. Now their paper is based on the idea that we have species ranges. It's kind of like, oh, we've been studying this species and we've seen it in a few of these places. But based on its ecology, we expect it to be able to live in all these places, not actually knowing for sure whether or not it actually does live in those places. So these researchers set out camera traps. And this is data from 15 wildlife preserves around the world and has really set out a relationship between biological diversity, the productivity of the tropical rainforest that the wildlife preserves are in, and also human activity. And the relationship is, if you have a very productive ecosystem, a primary productive ecosystem means that plants are producing a lot of planty goodness. And that gives insects and herbivores things to eat. And then the herbivores become meat that carnivores can eat. And so you suddenly begin to develop a big food web because you have more support, the more primary productivity you have, the more support you have generally for greater biodiversity. And what they seem they have found in their analysis is really what they say is more unique animal traits. So the more productivity there is, the greater likelihood that you're going to find an animal that you don't find anywhere else because it was able to really specialize in some niche because it has the whole ecosystem can support it. So less productive ecosystems, generally less biodiverse via this relationship. They also discovered, and surprise, surprise, that when humans get involved with forest degradation, deforestation, encroachment, and hunting, and agriculture, and all the things that we do, biodiversity tends to go down. You lose those unique species regardless of the actual primary productivity of the ecosystem. So the ecosystem might still be able, or the ecosystem that's left, might still be able to support biodiversity, but because of human activity, those unique species, and they're very often more top of the food web, the top predators or other animals or larger animals, they disappear in the ecosystems. So moving forward, there's going to be more of this camera trap analysis of wildlife and ecosystems, and it's so wonderful that they were able to document really where species are, who the species are that are in different places, and really start to get an idea of ecosystem health and potentially how we can start to develop programs in line with human activities to reduce our impacts on those ecosystems. I love camera traps because they create just massive sets of data that everyday people could actually analyze. Yeah, which I think is the other piece of this is we just need camera traps like everywhere, and then people can spend time, it can be gamified, there's all sorts of cool stuff that can be done where you can really quickly, an AI can kind of teach you how to identify things, and then you can be doing a lot of the hard work of sifting through these camera traps, five minutes here, 10 minutes there, and you can actually be teaching an AI to be better at it itself while you're doing that. So that's one of those things that you don't have to be PhD in conservation bio to be able to analyze camera trap footage. So that's yeah, I think it's definitely it's a it's a resource that that could and should be tapped more for that totally. I love it. Shoebrew in the chat room says camera traps, shoot pictures, not bullets. Yes, I like absolutely great motto. I love it. But yeah, let's let's track the wildlife, let's see who actually lives where and see how many animals and how much wildlife we can preserve. Speaking of preserving wine in my household usually is not preserved very long but Justin, tell me about your wine story. What's going on there? Yeah, so wine drinkers are often portrayed as or actually participate in trying to find the perfectly paired wine that can make a delicious meal taste even better than it would without the wine. Right. That's the right wine. But it actually might be the other way around that's making the it might be the food that's being chosen actually is making the wine taste better. This might be the bigger effect. So this is researchers reporting the general of agriculture and food chemistry have explored how lipids fatty molecules that you might find in a cheese or meat dish in your olive oil, other types of foods, vegetable oils, how they interact with the tannins of grape. And they found it's actually can mask and maybe even change some of the undesirable flavors that might be in the wine compound. So the tannins are responsible for the bitterness, the studency of red wines. And they had noticed over the years of people who do test wines at certain food combinations reduced the sensations. So what the researchers did they made this pretty simple sounding oil and water emulsion using olive oil and an emulsifier. They added some grape tannin. They studied the lipids and the emotion with various bio physical techniques. What it really came down to those the taste tests volunteers indicated olive oil had the effect of causing tannins that were in it without the olive oil perceived as stringent. They had a fruity taste instead. So yeah combining that the bio physical and the sensory results researchers concluded that the tannins can interact with oil droplets in the mouth along with the food making them less available to bind to saliva proteins and cause the astringency. So yeah if you want to really experience a wine to its fullest but don't necessarily want to have a big meal just a little spoonful of olive oil how to do it. As opposed to a spoonful of sugar a spoonful of olive oil. Oh sugar a spoonful of sugar in your wine sounds real gross. That's called juice. No I was thinking specifically when you were talking about the olive oil I was thinking about when the really fancy Italian restaurants will have like the focaccia or some sort of herb bread that you dip in the olive oil just tastes so good. Yeah let's have a little bit of olive oil and maybe balsamic vinegar mix sort of sitting on the table you just dip it in while you're waiting for your food to get ready. I want to go to the restaurant oh no. So is this oil is this part of the reason why cheese and wine go so well together because of the foil masking the astringency. It would be the lipids in there that can mask some of the astringency so it's maybe you think or you know maybe it hasn't effect the other way around too I guess that could still be possible but they definitely have sourced a way in which the food alters the flavor of the wine itself. Cool these things they work together not on their own. Two great tastes food and wine it's good Blair. Yes moving on to wine. Yes yeah when they when they don't want to be food they a lot of them will play dead think about opossums but there's lots of actually invertebrates that do it as well. So this is a study published in the science journal biology letters that evaluated the benefits of death feigning in terms of predators visiting small populations of conspicuous prey. So how beneficial is it to play dead? Yes and and how long and when is it beneficial and when is it not beneficial these computer simulations that utilized marginal value theorem which the lead author the paper professor Nigel R. Franks from University of Bristol School of Biological Sciences explains it quote imagine you are in a garden full of identical soft fruit bushes you go to the first bush initially collecting and consuming fruit is fast and easy but as you strip the bush finding more fruit gets harder and harder and more time consuming so at some stage you decide to leave to go to another bush you are greedy and you want to eat as many fruit as quickly as possible the marginal value theorem tells you how long to spend at each bush given that time is lost moving from one bush to another so what they found was that with beetles that can remain stationary for 23 minutes antlions some of them 61 minutes they have these like very long amount of time that they'll pretend to be dead but it's not consistent there's no predictability in how long they will pretend to be dead so the idea is that if they become a waste of time by playing dead and there being no predictability on how long you're going to play dead yeah it behooves the predator to give up and leave because they have no long how no idea how long it's going to take if you think about a line at disney land which i'm going to just kind of put salt in the wound again and talk about disney land now after restaurants we think about the line at disney land if it says the line for space mountain is 30 minutes you're like oh that's fine no problem if the line says it's 120 minutes you might be like no way or you might be like i'm going to go get some food and eat it in line for two hours i don't know but if it says question mark question mark question mark you can't see where it starts and you can't see where it ends is it better to get in that line or is it better to go somewhere where you know how long it's going to take to get off so that's really abilities better yeah exactly so essentially they posit that the arms race between predators and prey in relation to death feigning has been prolonged so long through evolutionary time that it can't be bettered it's gotten as good as it's gonna get because it's found this kind of critical mass of being long enough because this is the other problem is if you're if you're out of it in foraging or um daylight hours or whatever it is that as a prey item you need right if you're out of that for too long then avoiding being eaten isn't good enough if you're going to starve or you're going to be stuck out at night or any of these things right so there's there's a there's a perfect medium between playing dead and losing time as prey and playing dead and making predators give up on you and so that's the idea here it's it's pretty much it's gotten as good as it's going to get and it's also playing in possum yeah it's highly convergent this has happened all over the animal kingdom just in your muted yeah so as first I was thinking well like I hope there's no scavengers around but a lot of scavengers are gonna look for uh a either if something that's been dead for a while like your rodents and squirrels will usually wait 16 days before scavenging a carcass uh whereas some animals might want it fresher but they're probably still looking for that making sure it's dead smell before they go in uh well and also keep in mind if a scavenger goes up to an animal that's still alive and tries to take a bite out of it that's what I'm thinking my danger danger and then the scavenger goes oh no you're too much trouble goodbye yeah and I think that's why this because you know you don't have to wait that long for there to be the scent of the insides on the outsides kind of a thing taking place um yeah it's I uh yeah it sounds like a pretty good strategy yeah yeah just waste your opponent's time I actually really like that idea and I love the uh the the fact that it there's randomness involved that that lack of predictability that between species between individuals there's no knowing how long they are going to play dead and even individuals between different playing dead sessions we're gonna spend different amounts of time and so that whole aspect of randomness lends itself to this uh to the evolution arms race between the predator and the prey and and this whole strategy yeah very cool randomness it's a strategy and it's successful all right thinking of other things that um I don't know well they might get better I don't know space hurricanes you've never heard of space hurricane have you I heard of space lasers but that wasn't a real start what is the space hurricane the hurricanes and space hurricane so we didn't really know that there were space hurricanes I mean we've seen hurricanes in our atmosphere so atmospheric hurricanes that are the results of differences in air pressure and temperature and there's that heat engine that gets involved to to drive the energetic momentum of the hurricane uh within our atmosphere we also see hurricanes in the plasma sphere the atmospheres of Jupiter of the sun even so there are these hurricane-like spiraling masses of energy energetic materials right that these these atoms are bouncing against each other energetically ending up in something of a spiral pattern space hurricanes we didn't ever know about them happening here on earth though until august 20th 2014 so uh these this was revealed in our upper atmosphere during a retrospective analysis led by shangdan university in china and the data suggests the hurricane appeared over the north pole extending to a diameter of 1000 kilometers 110 kilometers to 860 kilometers in altitude and it was made up of plasma with multiple spiral arms swirling in an anti-clockwise direction at speeds of up to 2100 meters per second the center was still though just like atmospheric hurricanes and so the question was okay has this happened before what were the conditions that possibly made this happen and the researchers had to get to work so the what they are reporting on really is their query into figuring out what exactly happened and what what they think is that the hurricane gets started as the result of a disconnected magnetic field line reconnecting and that reconnection transfers solar wind energy into the magnetosphere and the ionosphere and that is what they found leads to this hurricaneing system there are other factors that are also potentially very important um low so low solar wind potentially so that there's not a lot of solar wind obstructing or affecting the hurricane that allows these field lines and the the plasma to actually get into this energetic conformation the researchers the researchers who is one of the main researchers mike lockwood he's a space environment physicist at the university of redding in the uk and he went on to say that plasma and magnetic fields in the atmosphere of planets exist throughout the universe so the findings suggest that space hurricanes may be a very widespread phenomena also because these are there's plasma involved and magnetic field lines an aurora occurred at the same time under the position of this space hurricane in our upper ionosphere in the atmosphere and so the researchers think that we might be able to look out for aurorae in odd places to be able to indicate that some of these space hurricanes are happening in the future yeah yeah so they and they also think this is really important to understand because they think that it's going it's going to these space hurricanes will also influence because this is space weather it will influence satellite drag radio communications at very high frequencies there might be errors in radar location satellite navigation and other communication systems so this kind of a space weather phenomenon on our planet is very important to understand but we don't but it's sort of a polar phenomenon too right because they found this at the north pole assuming it's going to find it at the south pole maybe as well yeah so potentially at the south pole but what one thing that I was thinking is that as our pole is shifting and we do know that the north pole is rapidly shifting right now there are there are disconnections and reconnections of the magnetic field lines there are also temporary poles that occur at places that are not the north and south pole and these those temporary poles could also induce this kind of space weather with their connection and reconnection okay but there's also like a there's some sort of a polar cloud phenomena where you get those those high like almost into space clouds that are like way way way way higher than they are anywhere else on the planet that happens occasionally yeah so there's like some weird weird stuff taking place I know the balls it's just I love these discoveries of things that we're like oh we know so much stuff and then it's like something that you're like what we'd have space hurricanes I mean it's not a hurricane plasma hurricanes in our in around our planet yeah I would have gone with space nato space nato I would have done that that's my nato all right tell me about this dinosaur that's not a dinosaur around 260 million years ago antiosaurus roamed the earth quadruped carnivore the size of an adult hippo had big canines a powerful bite large dense bones a thick tail and it must have been a scavenger or an ambush predator of some sort because it was too heavy and sluggish to catch anything that was still moving it was so big and bulky but looks can be saving because as we said antiosaurus was no ordinary dinosaur because it actually wasn't a dinosaur it was a dinocephalian which is a mammal like reptile that predated dinosaurs this one predated dinosaurs by about 30 million years before it stopped existing uh so the fossilized bones of this dinocephalian uh well they're found all over the world this one I think was found in South Africa they they always stand out because of their large size heavy weight thick thick thick dense bones some scientists uh this is quoting dr julian benoy of evolutionary studies institute university of whit waterson some scientists even suggested that antiosaurus was so heavy it could only have lived in water by carefully reconstructing the skull of antiosaurus digitally using x-ray imaging and 3d reconstructions a team of researchers investigated the internal structures of the skull what they were looking for is the definitions on the inside of the skull that would give them some concept of brain regions and they found specific characteristics of its brain and balance organs were developed in such a way that it was probably everything or anything but slow moving this is quotey voice again of benoy agile predators such as cheetahs and the infamous velociraptor have always had a very specialized nervous system and fine-tuned sensory organs that enable them to track and hunt down prey effectively we wanted to find out whether this antiosaurus possessed similar adaptations team found that the organ of balance in its inner ear was relatively larger than that of its closest relatives and most importantly of other contemporaries predators that this indicates that the antiosaurus was capable of moving much faster than its prey and its competitors they also found that part of the brain responsible for coordinating movements of the eyes with the head was exceptionally large which would have been something very important if you're moving really fast and tracking something that's running away from you at the same time in creating the most complete reconstruction of an antiosaurus skull to date we found that overall the nervous system the antiosaurus was optimized and specialized for hunting swiftly and striking fast unlike what was previously believed says Dr. Ashley Kruger Natural History Museum in Stockholm Sweden so yeah prehistoric killing machine yeah potentially way more dangerous and feisty than previously considered yep killing machine not a real dinosaur you called it a dinosaur it wasn't a dinosaur you thought it was slow moving it's fast moving you know you gotta keep looking at these things you might be wrong looks can be deceiving scientists what do they know anyway no well that's the thing it's it's okay to be wrong exactly it's you think you know something but then you collect more data and you understand something much more but you can't skip those steps of the collecting data before you can say that you know anything oh i don't know i see people do that all the time on social media all right my last opening story for this segment of the show is a bunch of lying birds i mean have you ever really trusted a bird never never the cunning birds well lyre birds part of their name comes from their wonderful vocal mimicry lyre spelled lyre they are musical and magnificent in the way that they sing their songs and the males of the lyre bird species are incredibly i would i like to i think of them as decadent they've got these wonderful tail feathers that they shake for their perspective mates they create these bowers that uh or these mounds that they dance for their mates on aren't they the birds that were famous in uh the david attenborough videos where they end up looking like just kind of like a black blob with two white eyes and stuff and they have those crazy shapes they make out of their body yeah there's are there's are more like they have this tail that they bring over their heads from the back and over their heads with these these feathers that come forward and bounce like it looks like a like uh i don't know like musical notes or the the um on a violin that that little design that is carved into a violin for the for resonance but i am getting away from myself here in what this story actually is about oh and female lyre birds on the other hand female lyre birds are drab and they're just they're brown they're drab birds but they get to choose they go inspect and they look at the lyre bird the male while he's singing and dancing and strutting on his mound and they go inspect the mound and during courtship these female birds will enter the display area of the male and it's and this is one of the important times for where things may go forward or the female may leave and the male sings a bunch of songs and does a lot of vocalizations in this process and then the second time that they have discovered that the the lyre bird vocalizes and sings is during copulation and very often during copulation so they're just like us the more the more about the animal came in the more you find there's no different than humans lyre birds sing just like us yes well these male lyre birds they kind of get into this practice where it's called uh the the vocal mimicry of a mobbing flock of birds and sometimes birds will imitate a mobbing flock and this happens a mobbing flock is what occurs when there's a predator and one bird puts out an alarm signal and then everybody starts to make a bunch of noise to and mob the predator to scare them away or get rid of them and during courtship and during displays very often this these kinds of mobbing calls occur because there is a it's a highly protective period of time researchers set out to record the mating songs of lyre birds in southeastern australia and while they were out there they heard the sounds of a mobbing flock and this is the sound of a mobbing oh i'm not in the right computer hold on one second let me i have to play the sounds for you so that you can hear uh but in in meanwhile we'll have an actor's rendition oh that's what you think okay let me get this link open on the computer that actually is connected to the uh to the audio of this system okay so this this is the sound of an experimentally induced mixed species mobbing flock so this is researchers got they they got a predator they had a predator bird in a cage that or or they had a dead bird that they brought near a flock of birds and got birds to make mobbing sounds so this is the sound they have a mixed species lots of different species mobbing it's a mob yeah i was pretty close these birds are going crazy right okay and so they're recording and they're out in the field and they hear one of these lyre birds start making the sounds of a mobbing flock during copulation and this is the sound of a male lyre bird imitating a mobbing flock well we are listening to the sound of birds having sex i mean you didn't realize that's what we are it's also just like yeah that that first one sounded like birds and this one also sounds like birds it sounds yeah birds you have to have birds you have to slow it way down you've got the refined palette i understand we just don't hear fast enough but is it okay but what are they doing are they telling the other birds there's a predator here stay away from this area while they're having sex yeah so so that is the question and that is the question and it's it's hard to know so these lyre birds they they investigated the the call structure of the lyre birds and the call structures of the mobbing flock and they found that there was a lot of traits in common between the calls and so this is how like it wasn't just listening to the recording and go oh this sounds like a mobbing flock they actually looked at the structure of the call during the process of copulation the male will also take his wings and cover up the females head so that she can't hear nothing to see here meanwhile mobbing flock look at me protecting you it's it's very curious and the researchers don't know really what is up with it at all but this is something that they came across that they did not expect and the the sound is only made during copulation or when females decided to break off early from the interaction as they say okay wait a second so maybe the sound is for the female who has if the females don't respond to the to the the call the display yeah yeah i'm trying to scare off that they're well they're not scaring off the predators with that uh with that sound with the mob call they might assume because they can't see that there's a predator nearby and so they better not move until wow that's it that's one that's one hell of a tactic right the tactic maybe i'll just make this noise and convince the female there's a predator nearby and i can keep her safe or immobile anyway lying liar birds lying liar birds i love birds this is just i really should go baby there's a hawk out there i don't see one anywhere close your eyes and listen to this sound like it's really it's it's kind of a raking bird sound it's not cool not cool oh lying liar birds unexpectedly i really do feel dirty yeah jg in the chat room i also now feel dirty for having listened to that thank you i have better welcome for most uh copulation in the animal kingdom if that's the case right this is this weekend science thank you so much for being here with us we are so glad that you are joining us right now if you are able subscribe to the show and maybe get a friend so to subscribe as well all right we're coming on back with this part of the show that we know so well as blair's animal corner with blair oh i have cuttlefish what do we know about cuttlefish they're not as cuddly as you think they are true what else um cuttlefish are very intelligent yes that's the one okay i got it we have talked so many times on this show about the marshmallow test we should all be very familiar with it at this point it's used on usually human toddlers where they could have an immediate reward okay you can eat this one marshmallow right now or if you don't eat this marshmallow right now in a little bit i'll give you two marshmallows so of course there's a lot of children don't pass this test until they get to be a lot of grown-ups don't either a lot of grown-ups don't we also had a story on the show where depending on your socioeconomic background that can have an impact there's all sorts of cultural and um and socioeconomic and uh all sorts of interesting markers that could have an impact on this test but this is a pretty consistent delayed gratification test used on humans but a modified version of that with shrimp has been used on cuttlefish and they appear to do very well some of them were able to wait 50 to 130 seconds which may not sound like a lot but that is something that they have tested in chimpanzees crows parrots and that's pretty consistent with them right so they can they can even wait longer for a meal um they found that that the the cuttlefish that waited longest for meals actually did better on cognitive performance tests so not only did they have this ability for delayed gratification but it was often linked to other cognitive performance so the way they did that is after they did this modified marshmallow test they were they were trained to associate a visual cue with a food ward and then they reversed it so the reward became associated with something else and you had to see kind of how long it took them to adjust their behavior and the ones that did best were also the ones that did best delayed gratification now the the big question here is why are cuttlefish good at this because the understanding is and you know so often with conventional understanding especially when it comes to animal intelligence so you know a lot of assumptions but basically the assumption was that delayed gratification in humans has to do with social bonds they're waiting to eat so a partner can eat or they're waiting for something so that it benefits the species as a whole so basically it's based in what guilt you're telling the child don't eat that marshmallow now and they have to conform to this expectation that you've put upon them for some reason that's you know my my Blair explaining of the sciencey words to this which is basically just that they think that it is somehow a social cue right the other thought is that it could be somehow related to tool building because waiting to hunt while constructing a tool is related to delayed gratification i could eat right you have to take the time now or i can get something bigger like make this tool and go hunt for it exactly doing doing the work before you get the reward right the problem here is cuttlefish are not social and as far as we know they do not build tools so so why why can they do this thing so now their their guess is that it has to do with camouflage and that's because these cuttlefish have this amazing camouflage where they blend in almost imperceptibly to their surroundings but they can't eat while that's happening and they actually break camouflage when they forage so that exposes them to predation which means they have to romulan ship can't fire while in cloak yeah exactly so they that means there's a delayed gratification there they can't eat because if they if they take that impulse to eat they'll get eaten so that's the expectation here is that it somehow has to do with that they also say that this means that this is an extreme example of convergent evolution and this is where the study loses me because just because we've only seen this in parrots crows chimps and humans that does not mean it isn't elsewhere and i think depending this is just like our tool use conversation depending how you categorize delayed gratification i think you start to see it more places do do ants in a line bypass that teeny tiny speck of sugar because they're being told there's food there's better food further out things like this and that's why i question whether maybe this is convergent evolution or if this is something that could be really essential to anything that feeds yeah yeah i don't know so this that's just that's part of the thing is that like i wanted to bring this a because it's all over the internet never it's talking about cuttlefish passing the marshmallow test i would explain what that meant but also because this is another opportunity for us to challenge how animal intelligence is examined i think that's the biggest point that's great yeah and actually they can go a step further and and study the further implications of the marshmallow test which is disadvantage the cuttlefish starve it a little bit make its meals uh stochotic and further apart and see if it can still do it because they found in the children's study when they did this that tended to be the affluent kids who could count on snacks in the first place and who had very regular meals in the first place were better able to do the delayed gratification strategy versus those who were uh come came from poorer neighborhoods regardless of race or ethnicity and uh they saw this as an opportunity that might not happen again and so they took the first opportunity yeah yeah so that's a that's an interesting point when you start bringing in the experience of an animal and what they what an animal is it expectation or is it opportunity and what yeah what's actually going on there well and then the other thing i was thinking about delayed gratification that's a lot of basic animal training especially dogs think about training dogs to like not eat stuff that they want to eat all the time how badly do you think that my dog wants to steal my food straight out of my hand while i'm eating it but she doesn't because when she does what she's supposed to she gets treats it's like that's delayed gratification totally but now walk up to a feral animal that doesn't have somebody steadily feeding them and you might get a very different result yeah she also around dinner time gets more and more kind of toes over the line with what she's supposed to be doing anyway moving on um i have another story about climate change specifically global warming rising global temperatures and what that could mean for food webs so we we like to talk a lot about this particular ecosystem or this particular species or this particular ocean or this particular forest or you know we we like to talk about even when we're trying to use systems thinking when we talk about climate change we often talk about specific zoomed in pieces even when we're trying to zoom out we're still talking about forests or oceans but this is a really really interesting study by University of Exeter and Queen Mary University of London looking at food webs period how do animals that eat each other how is that energy transfer impacted by climate change and this blew me away simultaneously made a lot of sense but it's something that i hadn't really thought about so they measured the transfer of energy from single celled algae phytoplankton to small animals that eat them zooplankton normally between uh prey to predator as you move up this food chain they're called trophic levels there is a 10 percent carryover of energy which is one of the reasons that there's a part of the the movement to eat less meat is to make food availability better because on the same land the same area of land you can get 10 times as many calories out of corn as you can out of cows that eat grass on that land so there's there's this there's this factor of 10 between trophic levels what they found in this in this study was that you know about a four degree celsius warming event so that what when that occurs the energy transfer up the food web was reduced by up to 56 percent so now you're turning 10 percent into five percent yes yeah so the reason that this 10 percent factor is involved is because organisms spend energy to exist so when i eat food a lot of that goes to maintain homeostasis to maintain my body temperature to beat my heart to contract muscles all this kind of stuff that is not building muscle and fat so there only a very small fraction of the energy i consume is retained in my actual biomass that's what that factor of 10 is but when you increase the temperature metabolic rates accelerate and that reduces energy available to predators as you move up the food web this was tested in a seven year long outdoor warming experiment in the uk and this shows again this is just photo plankton to zooplankton but this shows evidence that there is a fundamental cost across trophic levels related to climate change which of course has an impact on the food that made your impact obviously yeah but this is impact on everything everything eats something so so the the only thing that wouldn't really be impacted here potentially is plants but we don't know if this is also being impacted from the nutrients that they use to grow that could also be part of this process that could be messing up their metabolic processes so there's lots of there's lots of follow-up that could be done here but ultimately the fundamental metabolic processes of life could be impacted just by warming great so i guess if i could like if i could try to make this not sound so terrible yeah this whole time we've been talking about systems thinking now we need to be talking about systems thinking in terms of the whole planet which we should have been done this doing this whole time of course but this isn't it's hurting the rainforest and it's hurting the oceans it is hurting the fundamental processes of life all over the planet so if you think this doesn't affect you it affects everyone everyone from phytoplankton to jeff bezos it affects everyone affects everybody so figure out what you can do to be part of your community in making climate action and changing the fundamental way that we function as society to reduce that warming in the future it's the best i can say hopefully we can find a way to work together to do that i mean that's that is the big issue of our time and if i think anybody can figure out the science of getting everyone to cooperate on these big global issues that's a game changer yeah if they do it the right way that was my final story to later tonight is going to be the worst idea i have ever heard about how to handle just just that okay worst idea ever coming up in just a few Blair i think you need to head out right now yes everything's fine nothing's wrong but something's come up and i have to go um but i'll i'll see you guys soon i'll listen okay good luck thank you you're welcome bye justin's like wait what where'd she go what's going on okay there's a note here private messages in the meantime this is this weekend science yes we've just ended Blair's animal corner on this world wildlife day episode of this weekend science thank you for being a part of the show and if you want to see more twist science like this weekend week out maybe even interweek i don't know more more science support us on patreon you can head over to twist.org click on our patreon link and support us at any level of your choosing we also have paypal if you would like to support us on paypal instead of patreon but we've got a great community going easy it's easy it's an easy way to fit to your fit to your budget and be able to support the ongoing discussion of science in as sane and also you know as as fun away as we at twist try to do so thank you for your support and we really cannot do this without you all right coming on back justin made a good point there about the being able to listen to this show throughout the week because you could listen for anywhere from like 20 to maybe even 40 minutes a day depending on the like that week's episode and and have the this weekend science there for a little chunks at a time uh throughout the week little bits and pieces of twists all week long justin what stories did you bring well i got one that's just for blair uh this is from the american chemical society nano researchers report infusing contact lenses with gold nano particles to create a safer way to see colors because you know some of the things that can happen if you're colorblind i assume is not being able to tell whether or not a banana is ripe till you've opened it maybe uh your socks are probably always different colors the workflow diagram at work or the test at school if it's color coded with green and red you're doomed uh and and so the blair i was gonna ask her some questions about this but she has we got her the chroma something chromatic glasses that allowed her to see color those distinctions between them it worked the problem is uh they don't make them prescription i don't even know if you can get them prescription uh those sorts of glasses so this is uh amad amed uh salah and hater but of the department of mechanical engineering califa university abadabi them and some colleagues took up the challenge to create some prescription uh contact lenses that could also operate as fixing color blindness they mixed gold nano particles into a hydrogel polymer they produced some rose tinted gels that filtered light say already i want to know if that gives you rose colored eyes that would be kind of freaky cool but it would be but it filtered light between five hundred and twenty and five hundred and eighty uh nanometers these are the wavelengths where red and green kind of overlap and apparently this is a big part of the confusion for people of color blindness is they get their vision gets tuned there and can't really distinguish what color it is because they're the colors are overlapping in that in that region so the lenses block that section leaving the rest of it uh more obvious lenses had good water retention properties similar to those of commercial ones they used commercial ones i think as the material base in the first place and they were not toxic to growing cells because the only thing it really looks like they've added is these golden nanoparticles which may be super bacteria friendly anyway anyway the next step is to conduct some clinical trials with human patients to assess comfort and effectiveness further right so do the gold nanoparticles affect the way that they feel when they're being worn do they change how long you can wear them does it make it a rougher surface does it make them stiffer yeah it's not that those are all questions that was a crazy thing too i hadn't really thought about too much because i'm not Blair but yeah but oh hey your vision's fixed why don't you wear them all the time and i guess the answer probably is i still need vision i need to be able to read on top of tell what a color is so right and if you're reading you know if you're if you're reading black and white text not having to is yeah yeah but i it's interesting the idea of adding in this kind of chromatic correction potentially in addition to prescription like you could have your prescription lens with this coating to be able to allow you so you can see outdoors all the colors all the time and i don't i don't actually know i couldn't tell from this if the they were making a claim or anything about the the chromatic glasses whether they just don't make them as prescription currently or if it's somehow that material cannot be utilized uh correctionally like the lens in such a way messes up the effect i don't think so i think it's just a colored lens yeah i don't i don't think doing prescription would affect it yeah but maybe it but you think i can sort of imagine if it's bulking up or thinning out in certain portions of it that it might maybe it does affect it i don't know it'd be really interesting to find out uh and in my last story no is the dumbest idea around climate change that i have ever heard but it makes perfect sense tell it who it's coming from researchers from princeton university university college cork and h.e.c montreal have developed what they think is a systematic ethical framework for addressing climate winners as well as those harmed using financial transfers their approach they're calling polluter pays then receives requires polluters to first compensate those most harmed by climate change subsequently polluters would then be eligible to receive compensation from those who are passively benefiting from the positives of climate change they published in economics and philosophy the article emphasizes that yeah yeah wait what those are the words those are the words i'm benefiting so uh i'll pay you because you're not benefiting so this is a new trickle down there they the idea how yeah it's retaining wealth in that sector and it ignores a tremendous amount of reality also in that the polluters once we get to the point where laws are passed are going to even exist because we would have this change in the energy sources and those companies are mining companies essentially yeah at the core so they're not even this is published in economics and philosophy two things that can be meaningful and can also be completely vacuous of actual evidence to support them the article emphasizes that through climate change greenhouse gas emitters affect a variety of individuals and groups both both positively and negatively at different regional or sectoral scales sometimes at the expense of other groups what economists call externalities that's us by the way you the planet all humans all live on earth compared to our our economy we're in the eyes of an economist we are externalities to the damage of climate change anyway this is a quotey voice of somebody at princeton uh kian mince will who's a co-author of the study with a global issue like climate change it's difficult for people to make decisions that account for the harm or benefit their actions cause because those effects aren't directly or proportionally felt by that actor our research argues that payments are one way to help correct incentives harms should be redressed and then beneficial actions should be rewarded mince will recently joined the department of philosophy environment research institute university court college of court well uh globally the negative consequences of climate change are expected to far outweigh the benefits some groups or places may experience net benefits for example countries at the far northern latitudes or specific industries may see improved agricultural conditions which they don't understand agriculture then because that's not necessarily how it works additional tourism if if people aren't starving and having civil wars everywhere at that point or lower energy costs so the idea is the energy companies us presumably fossil fuel companies could charge those who have lower energy costs for that benefit that they created for them the authors say and of course they that because they would be they would be not paying for anything outside of a national basis though it seems like kind of weird because you wouldn't be paying for all the land loss and the flooded cities in other certain countries who would only be with certain trading partner it's just ridiculous not systematically considering accounting for beneficial climate effects makes it easier for climate impact skeptics to think that climate change discussions are oversimplified or alarmist so so this is the I mean there is that there is that place in there where things are not going to be equally distributed bad all over the planet right it's that that's a given there are some places that are going to do great other places that are not canada is probably going to do pretty well florida texas no not so well at all there's going to be differences well so yeah you're right there's positives there's going to be positives i'm not saying there's not positives but so the yeah i mean i i'm getting okay this is an economic way that they're trying to balance it all out basically being like hey you didn't or canada didn't didn't earn this good environment it's just a fact of climate change you know texas and florida didn't earn the bad environment necessarily and and how do you how do you balance all that out how do we how do we benefit how can we pass some of the benefits of places in northern latitudes to the detriments in places like bangladesh where there are people are being currently flooded out of their homes they almost say that yeah uh almost just just in no relation literal professor of applied economics at agc montreal another motivation of our study was to address the unfairness that arises when some benefit from climate change while others are suffering harm which sounds like what you're saying yeah flooding in bangladesh maybe america and china should kick in for that right right uh it's a question of solidarity still sounds like it's on that right path both sharing benefits that weren't truly earned and compensating losses yeah you're earning a fine by the way you're talking about also entirely revamping the instruct infrastructure for northern latitudes that don't have any air conditioning in any homes whatsoever yeah your time so yeah there's a real win they explore okay so the authors say that this compensation approach could be experimented with at a regional or national level before being introduced globally so yeah no bangladesh will have been underwater for so long before we get around to just making sure the fossil fuel companies have money on the exit explore how it might be implemented and uh anyways yeah the the dumbest idea i think i've heard in a really long time you're gonna charge are you charging you're gonna charge norway for not having run the heater in the winter you're no nobody's doing that nobody's charging norway and i guess the i mean the question is how how are who i mean this isn't the science of it this is the implementation of tax policies but who will decide on who gets taxed and when they get taxed and how much they get taxed and who is going to do is this i mean if they're talking about local and regional taxes i am pretty sure that you know the local government in Svalbard Sweden is not going to be saying yeah we should tax ourselves for the nice weather and you know the um yeah the the melted snow that we have up here you know it's good yeah so this they're saying uh they could a national carbon tax can be used to collect funds from greenhouse emitters yes of course uh it's you know we end up paying those taxes anyway taxes everybody the cost goes up for the taxes anyway that's usually what happens those revenues would first and foremost be used to compensate victims somewhere somebody defining what a victim is again you're right it's very this is not a specific plan in addition a corporate tax would be levied on the sectors of the economy that gain passively from climate change which in a way you could imagine that being well your solar panels and your wind farms are doing well because we've been transitioning due to climate change to green economy so you should pay back the fossil fuel industry for having wrecked the planet because you're benefiting from it financially yeah this is just and we're all externalities all wildlife is externality all you know fish, bird, bug, plant, death you know what economists economists someday are going to admit you don't know what you're talking about someday they're going to admit it just we just watch the numbers go up and down and talk about them after the fact yeah but we don't know why we really don't know this anything this last line of their abstract we call this the polluter pays then receives principle yeah ridiculous ridiculous yeah anyway yeah yeah okay i will agree with you on that one there are there are possibly probably many better solutions out there i hope one of our listeners has better solutions i imagine that they do head over to twist.org if you are interested in one of these cool cool twist sweatshirts i've got a i've got a blue-footed booby on my back i got one of those those are really nice i like it yeah it's got twist logo on the front it's got pretty art on the back it's comfortable i love this sweatshirt you too can get a blue-footed booby sweatshirt head over to twist.org click on our zazzle link and get yourself a sweatshirt or some other bit of merchandise this is this week in science and i have a couple more stories you ready Justin yeah yeah let's talk about neanderthals neanderthals we've talked about them before Justin talks about them a lot on the show this story this story came out because and uh people are talking about it i think it's very interesting um because of the implications researchers used the implications yes the question has always been whether or not neanderthals had speech like humans could have had could have produced speech like humans we haven't seen like the hyoid bone we haven't seen the the structures in the neanderthal skeleton to date that would indicate that their tongue that their throat that any of the structures that we have as humans that allow us to create the speech sounds that we use that that was would have been possible for neanderthals now they would have made sounds of course and and i have said on this many times that they must have in fact even homo erectus maybe even homo habilis must have because they passed down tool knowledge over millions of years that went almost unchanged and it's fine enough that he could have watched it and maybe picked up some stuff but really he probably had to to communicate some some core things from time to time yeah be that stable of the society right yes and it's these are large groups that were working together you had this technology tools technology passed down right so there had to be some some way for that knowledge to transfer and so speech language of some sort communication of some sort would have been important but like i said we haven't had the evidence to support neanderthals having the kind of speech that we think that humans that the human lineage has had for a very very very very very long time time so researchers in uh binghamton university in the state of new york uh they worked with they worked on spanish neanderthal skulls they were looking at the enter the enterthals skulls using 3d models based on ct scans of the the spanish neanderthal skulls and the researchers were comparing neanderthals from the age kind of the that age when neanderthals and modern humans may have been intermixing or around the same period of time and neanderthal ancestors skulls that also had been found earlier fossils in that region of spain in this particular cave area that that they that they had been looking at anyway the ct scans and the 3d models they decided to look at not the speech production structures but the structures of the ear oh here's the atapuerca fossils that they were looking at in spain so these ct these these the structures of the ear not necessarily they have been able to use ct models 3d models of lots of species to determine the frequencies the field of auditory detection that an animal might use for hearing and not just the range of frequencies but to be able to tune in on the narrow band of frequencies that are most important to an animal those frequencies used for interspecific communication communication with others of your species so they looked in and these are these are software based models that have been developed for auditory bioengineering these this is modern very modern technology so they looked at these old neanderthal ancestor fos ancestral fossils they looked at neanderthals and they looked at modern humans and they found that the they estimate the hearing abilities up to about five kilohertz which is within the range of human speech sounds neanderthals showed better hearing than their ancestors between about four to five kilohertz and this reprie this resembles modern humans so from this the key takeaway is that there there was the ability to detect the range of sounds similar to the range of sounds that humans make for speech they also think that there is a there is evidence for speech capacities in the use of consonants and that not just vowel sounds being important and that's what a lot of the old research has been looking at but that there is the structural capacity for the production of consonants in neanderthals and so all together they say that the ear of the neanderthal was tuned to perceive frequencies produced in human speech which indicates that neanderthals were probably creating speech sounds within the same range themselves so neanderthals may have sounded like humans a little and maybe they even listened to and understood humans a little so but i like okay well i believe that anyway i've already believed that that's fine however it's a weird thing when you're talking about hearing range i mean what ancestors couldn't hear the range of human speech how varied was it and then and then yeah what's to say if it was moved slightly outside of part of the range of human speech that they communicated with different frequencies they maybe didn't do the high sounds like they couldn't hear the punchline to any Jerry Seinfeld joke we're just going to say to have the 3d models work out that the structures of the ear would be tuned specifically to the the primary range of human speech sounds not i mean it's it is able to pick up a broader range but it's primarily tuned to the range of sounds that is within that range of sounds produced by humans so anyway it implies that they had the because they're they had the auditory capacity that they probably had a vocal communication capacity what would be the point without it yeah yeah that makes sense and so instead of doing a vocal structure first they're doing okay if the ears work for it they probably did they probably could communicate why what why else would they have ears that were tuned for that kind of communication so and they and they likely interacted with humans well enough to form bonds enough to have children so probably and there's also uh there's a case of them adopting human tool use in an overlap area where the neanderthals were using the human terms tools maybe they just found them and said i could make this maybe they see maybe not secretly just watched them make them maybe they had a conversation over you know um mastered on barbecue and and that's a great idea i'll try that i've never have you ever thought of that one yeah it's like 400 000 years nobody's thought of this we'll give it a shot um hey bub have you ever seen a wrench like this no no they're hanging on each other's you think it's a cave it's they called it a garage just so you know they didn't have the rest of the house invented yet mankind started with garages and then we added the rest of the house but uh but then i the part that i don't like to rule out though is the idea that those predecessors if they did have different toned ranges may have been toned for different vocalizations themselves so it doesn't rule those out but i do like the overlap and the similarity although ultimately it's maybe not much uh separation yeah between neanderthal and man anyway so yeah ultimately modern human man current modern speaking of neanderthals and humans having having sex why are fewer young adults having casual sex that is the title that is the title of a paper published this week in socios sociological research for a dynamic world the researchers looked at data from 2007 through 2017 of the panel study of income dynamics transition into adulthood supplement to quantify some of the reasons why um young adults are having like less sex and the key takeaway is that well more young adults are especially young men are living with their parents and playing more video games that combined with young women not drinking as much is contributing to a decline in casual sex science apparently and there's this number the numbers are very interesting the percentage of adults ages 20 to 24 who did not have sex in the past year increased from 11.67 percent from 2000 to 2009 to 15.17 percent in 2010 to 2014 changing with a different study in a different time frame another group looked at the percentage of sexually inactive men 1824 and they found that it increased from the percentage of inact sexually inactive men increased from 18.9 percent in 2000 to 2002 to 30.9 percent in 2016 to 2018 and sexually and sexual inactivity in women from decreased increased from 15.1 to 19.1 percent over the same period yeah there are similar decreases not just young people who are having less sex it's happening in all sorts of age groups less sex is happening across the board you say Netflix and chill but you don't mean that and it's really just my cell phone I'm happy got my social media oh I don't know with all the dating apps that exist in the center yeah but there but uh there they there are a lot of things but if you live with your parents and if somebody's pointing out millennials are working longer hours to make a barely living wage exactly times are different now it's there's not as much fun and frivolity there's a lot things are harder the minimum wage what is it the somebody's pointing out the minimum wage was it 30 years ago uh was the equivalent of 20 an hour today which is more than twice the federal minimum wage so yeah it's tough out there it is tough out there yeah so young adults I mean the on the upside fewer unwanted pregnancies fewer sexually transmitted diseases that's the upside of this but on the on on the other side of it it potentially means that young adults are not getting the same amount of emotional physical development as might be beneficial I don't know have you looked at adult humans of the past and how they turned out it might not be bad I don't really know you gotta wait and see call that one I did forget uh I'm gonna actually break the rules uh there's a male there's a really fantastic male fertility uh male not fertility what's the opposite of fertility male contraceptive uh compound that is like the male pill has been invented uh really perfectly effective one I saw the story I forgot all about it until you did this story I'm gonna break the rule I'm gonna bring it next week you think it came out yeah it came out just today so I think it's I'm gonna bring it next week but I'm glad you brought that up because I totally forgot about this story I hope you do bring it next week yes I'm gonna bring it and my last story because it's the end of the show I thought this was very important um it's uh in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences um which is the title just makes me laugh because it's kind of funny do conversations end when people want them to no no they don't across the board they go a little at least a little further than than was comfortable sometimes much further but it's not just one or the other the researchers found uh in in their in their studies of 932 conversations they found that uh conversants had little idea when their partners wanted the conversation to end and underestimated how discrepant their partners desires were from their own they also discovered that not oh it's not just that they never ended when both conversants wanted them to and rarely when even one conversant wanted them to but it was uh that sometimes they went too long sometimes they were too short also sometimes it was the it was the other direction so not always is it conversations overstaying their welcome and people just not picking up on signs and continuing to talk and it it goes it goes the other way as well with people shutting conversations down very early but it gets at this very interesting we think that we are so good at communicating with other humans we have small talk we have networking we have deep conversations we have podcasts and what how much do we really know if we if the and the crux of this that I think is very interesting is that in a conversation people are inherently hiding information that would help the other person understand what what your what their views are on how how they want the conversation to end if you're having a conversation you are putting your you know your interest out there you're you're talking you're continuing to ask questions even though in your mind you're saying I'm so done with this please end the conversation but you don't want to be the rude person necessarily right or it's the other oh wait you don't oh that's what I'm doing wrong what I'm like I'm I'm done talking to you is that okay is that how you have conversations you just like I'm done I was like you know what I just reached the limit I can put into this conversation I can't talk about this anymore I'm not I don't mean to be rude that's just which sometimes I kind of I kind of like the way that phone conversations end as opposed to face to face conversations because a phone you have you ever talked on the phone with people who like all of a sudden the phone call is over and they're like okay bye and they just hang up and you're like my seven-year-old does that my seven-year-old does that my seven was like we're talking and she's like okay I gotta go by and hit the button before I say it back like she hasn't figured out or wait doesn't wait for you to say it back she's just okay bye boom gone yeah but I think there's like I think there is like a little signal well all right well I guess I'll let you go meaning I'm done this little you know things that people can hint at that you're supposed to pick up on yeah and you can learn these things and you can you can learn to use them yourself but I I I love the idea of conversations as you have the is this dynamic between the people who are in the conversation so you have the needs and the wants that are self the selfish needs and wants of each individual individual person but then also the the social requirements that are that that lead to behavioral cues that are not necessarily honest because you don't because of the social requirement to not be rude or the social requirement of you know talking to somebody who is this where does this other person stand in the social hierarchy what is this relationship to you how does this conversation affect your relationship what is this you know there are so many factors involved that I need to start paying closer attention I don't know we start we we talk about dishonest signals in animals all the time and I find it very interesting to think of think of conversations for the first time I haven't really ever considered them this way in the sense that humans are are are buffering our signaling are giving dishonest signals in conversations and so as a result our conversations are either going too short going too long we're just not having we're not living up living up to each other's expectations except except we're right here except for right here except for right here on this weekend science where we always wish the conversation didn't have to end but now it's the end of the show so that's where we are everybody we have it we have not really a timeline or time limit to the show but we do have a point where we've brought you everything that we prepared to talk about this evening that's where we are right now if you have any questions about covid or anything else science related anything about the show if you just want to write us a little note send me an email kirsten at thisweekandscience.com you can also um you send us a message on facebook that works as well thank you for joining us we've made it to the end of the show of of we've made it to the end of this show this time we're done it's done shout outs to fada thank you so much for all of your help on social media and show notes for youtube your help is invaluable identity for thank you for recording the show and sending me sending me those files every week gourd thank you so much for manning the chat room and making sure that everything is working on those fronts and i would like to thank our patreon sponsors for all of their support without which we really could not do what we are doing right now thank you too woody ms andrey beset chris wozniak david bun vegaard chef stad house nighter i'm sorry i put this right behind my camera and i can't read it scoot over list just scoot over there we go vegaard chef stad house nighter donathan styles aka don stylo john she only geome john lee alikoff and gauravsharma shoe brood arwin hannon donald bundes steven alberon darryl myshack stu paulik andrew swanson fredes 104 sky luke paul ronovich kevin bierden noodles jack bryan kerrington matface joshua furie shawna nina lamb john mckay gregg reilly marqueson flow jeem telly a steve leesman aka zima ken haze howard tan christopher rap and dana pierce and richard brenden minish melizon johnny gridley kevin railsback flying out christ christopher drier richard porter mark masarros ardy on greg briggs john outwood two fabulous thespians rudy garcia dav wilkinson rodney lewis paul rick ramiss matt setter philip shane curt larcen craigland and mountainsloth jim drapo sarah chavis sue duster jason olds dav neighbor eric nap e o kevin parochan erin luthan steve debel bob codler calder marjorie paul's stanton paul disney patrick peccararo gary steele toni s c lissy's adkins brian kondren jason roberts are you looking at my calendar that's fun you see all the things on my calendar i moved my screen and it didn't work thank you for all of your support on patreon and if you would like to support us on patreon please head over to twist.org and click on the patreon link on next week's show we will be speaking with jess phoenix she's just come out with a book it's called misadventure oh it's on the floor why is it on the floor misadventure my wild explorations in science lava and life we're gonna talk with her about volcano hunting which i think will be oh last yeah that does sound pretty amazing uh we will be back next week wednesday eight p.m pacific time or thursday five a.m central european time broadcasting live from our youtube and facebook channels and from twist.org slash live want to listen to us as a podcast just google this weekend science and whatever podcasts are found uh and if you enjoy the show get your friends to subscribe to for more information on anything you've heard here today show notes and links to stories will be available on our website www.twist.org and you can also sign up for our newsletter yes you can also you can contact us directly email kirsten at kirsten at thisweekandscience.com just in a twist minion at gmail.com or blare at blarebaz at twist.org just be sure to put twist t w i s somewhere in the subject line or your email will be you can also hit us up on the twitter where we are at twist science act dr kiki at jackson flying at blare's menagerie we love your feedback if there's a topic you'd like us to cover address a suggestion for an interview haiku that comes tonight please let us know we will be back here next week we hope you will join us again for more great science news and remember if you've learned anything from the show it's all in your head this weekend science this weekend science this weekend science is 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 robot with a simple device i'll reverse all the warming with a wave of my hand and all it'll cost you is a couple of grand science is coming your way so everybody listen to what i say i use the scientific method for all that it's worth and i'll broadcast my opinion all over the earth because it's this weekend science this weekend science this weekend science science science this weekend science this weekend science this weekend 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 understand but we're not trying to threaten your philosophy we're just trying to save the world from Japanese Japanese and this weekend science is coming away so everybody listen to everything we say if you use our methods that are rolling and i we may rid the world of toxoplasma i because it's this weekend science this weekend science this weekend science science science This Week in Science! This Week in Science! This Week in Science! Science! Science! Science! I've got a long list of items I want to address From stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness I'm trying to promote more rational thought And I'll try to answer any question you've got How can I ever see the changes I seek When I can only set up shop one hour a week This Week in Science is coming in a way You better just listen to what we say And if you learn anything from the words that we've said Then please just remember it's all in this Week in Science This Week in Science! This Week in Science! This Week in Science! This Week in Science! And then there was one It's the after show, everyone. I hope that you are looking forward to the show next week. Speaking of volcanoes, says Eric in Alaska. I saw a story that there has been an earthquake swarm under Mount Hood. Ha! You had a good quake last Saturday. I did not feel any of those earthquakes. Thank goodness. I would, I had the earthquake under Mount Hood. Hopefully that means it's just getting rid of a little energy and not leading toward a big ol' disaster. That would be bad. Mount Hood is big. A big volcano. Beautiful snowpack. We just want a ski there. We don't want it to explode, erupt. I was showing off. I can't bring it really close because it'll just be out of focus because my camera doesn't do that. But I have two fragrances. I don't wear perfumes very much anymore. But I have two of the most interesting perfumes. I don't know if I'll ever open them, actually. One is Powell's by Powell's. Oh, de Bookstore. I like it. Yes. That's what, that's more an ambiance spray. It's more getting in the mood for, you know, for sitting and reading. The riveting scent of books with subtle hints of wood and violet come together in Powell's by Powell's. Wherever you are, experience the comfort and nostalgia of Portland's most iconic Bookstore. That's brilliant. You won't be able to put it down. It's supposed to smell more like an old book, Gaurav. Because they have a cafe in there. It should have that hint of coffee in there, too. And this is Ode to Space. Smell your own breath in your face mask as you walk outside the capsule. Nope. Decades ago, astronauts aboard the International Space Station noticed something strange. After returning from a spacewalk, the astronauts secured the safety hat, took off their extravehicular mobility units, commonly known as spacesuits, and smelled something strange. A rather pleasant metallic sensation like sweet smelling welding fumes, burning metal, a distinct odor of ozone and acrid smell, walnuts and breakpads, gunpowder, fruit, rum and burnt almond cookie. Even the first space tourists exclaimed about a pungent aroma like burnt cookies once the hatch opened. The smell of space is so distinct that NASA reached out to a fragrance maker to recreate the odor for its training simulations. Is it the smell of space or is it a bunch of engineering materials that never off-gassed? And sealed away individually until applied? I think yours is more accurate. So I've got bookstore and space. I like that bookstore. If you don't open that one, I would love to steal it from you at some point because that sounds pretty awesome. I will open it. I will have to smell it. There's some chat in the YouTube chat about Dr. Seuss being banned. Dr. Seuss didn't get banned. No, Dr. Seuss didn't get banned. The publisher, and it's not even the, it's the estate, has taken on yourself some that Dr. Seuss himself said, yeah, those were early works. That was probably was the 50s. I'm sorry. And so it's too bad he didn't re-edit them or something while he was alive, because that probably would have been a nice solution. You know who they need to ban though? Curious George. Curious George needs to get canceled because that is an ape, not a monkey. H.E. Ray got it wrong. Wrong. It's misinformation. It's absolute misinformation for the youth of anthropology. They're going to go through life thinking monkeys don't have tails. They're, it's, it's absolutely bad science. Fake science. News. What? Curious George. Although I do like that monkey. Oh, it's even happening to me. It's conditioning. Conditioning response. It's a chimpanzee. Oh, what is that? Which one is that? Bookstore. Oh. You're in a musty basement with plenty of notes of wood and you probably have like books in the house. Can you even tell? Oh, that smells nice. Oh, it's got, yeah, it does have, it's got like a little smokiness to it. There is a bit of sweetness. I could see how it would potentially mellow out into a bookstore type smell. Oh, I like it. I like it. It's good. I like bookstores. Yes, Gaurav. Dolly Parton got the Moderna shot and she did a whole video about getting her Moderna shot and she changed the lyrics to Jolene to vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine. Oh, nice. You do a good Dolly. You go and get your shot. I don't remember all the words, but yes. You can change the lyrics. You can change the lyrics away anytime you want. Something like that, right? Yeah, that's right. I'm begging, please don't hesitate. Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine. I'm still completely, by the way, I'm completely and totally still. I've heard there is the Dolly Parton Moderna connection. I don't understand it because I haven't read enough media stuff surrounding this, but somehow she's like she involved. Did she bankroll it? I think she might have like bankrolled it. That's what it sounds like. She's like, I'm Dolly Parton. I'm going to save the world because I am a superhero. I don't usually let people know, but this time I'm writing the check saving humanity. I don't know if I want to open space. Gaurav, I like the idea that you're saying we need more celebs donating to science. Actually, I think we just need better taxes on wealthy people and then have a government that diverts those funds towards science in the first place so we're not at the will and whim of Uber rich people deciding whether or not to contribute to society. See, that's what taxes are all about, is sharing this. And by the way, by the way, people have been talking about socialism. A little bit of fear of socialism. It's the capitalism of America. Can I point one thing out? Wealthy people already live in a socialist utopia. They have They take advantage of all the things that They have insurance for everything. They have the best insurance for everything. They have the best medical insurance. They have the best dental insurance. Those are the givens. They have insurance that pays for the treatments that yours don't pay for. They have homes, all their properties are insured, all their belongings are insured. Their businesses very often, the success of their business is very often insured. Their finances are often insured. When we saw the giant banking fiasco that was taking down some big Wall Street companies, those are mostly owned by the 1% and they were insured. They didn't even take a loss when the economy collapsed that they were profiting from. So that is a utopian version of whenever harm happens to one of us all pitching together to make it right. Except I guess it doesn't work at the level of their expectation if we all have that same thing. Then the amount we help each other is less. It's a lot more than you and I will ever be helped in our lifetime. But it's less than they get every time something goes awry. So there is already socialism completely entwined with American capitalism. In fact, it's a democratic capitalist socialist society. They're not at odds with each other. They're other things that you apply all the time throughout society. So anyway, I'm off the soapbox now. Just a little bit. So let's see, she gave Dolly Parton gave a $1 million donation. Oh, nice. Yes, to coronavirus vaccine research. Wait, that's how much a vaccine takes to make? The price of a one bedroom condo in San Francisco is all it took? It's all it took. No, she was part of funding it. Yeah. And then it became a spokesperson once successful. Okay, I get it now. She's helping everybody. She said don't, she said in her, in her video, she was, she said, she's like, you cowards. She's calling people out. She's like, you won't get vaccines. Cowards. Don't be a chicken squat. I started laughing like, oh, Dolly. Hello, Dolly. Yes, don't be a chicken squat. Get your shot. There you go. Oh, she's fantastic. Yes. Oh, I think here's what I think. I think that the Dr. Seuss issue is one of those distractions that is very often dropped in the media bucket to try and distract us from what's going on more importantly in politics and in the world. Oh, by the way, if you have ever owned both a Mr. Potato Head and a Mrs. Potato Head, you figured out right away that you could switch their genders anytime you wanted just by putting on the facade of one gender or the other. Just so you know, there already wasn't a Mr. and a Mrs. Potato Head because you could intermingle the parts all that you wanted anytime anyway. That was already a thing. Anytime, anytime, anywhere. Yeah. So, okay, it looks like the Mount Hood has had a little bit of a swarm of earthquakes. Eric in Alaska had asked about it and it looks as though within the last two days, there have been a few very minor, very minor earthquakes. From what I can see, the biggest one was a 1.3. So these are like all 0.5, 0.6, 0.6, 0.7. So not very big earthquakes, which that's great. I'm happy with that. Let's keep it that way. So yeah, we have had a few earthquakes here. Nothing big enough to be felt. Thanks for bringing it up though. I need to find a good, I have, I had found a good account that actually texts in the Bay Area sends you a text when there's an earthquake. And so I still get texts about road closures and earthquakes and all sorts of things going on in the San Francisco Bay Area because of course I can't figure out how to unsubscribe myself from it. So I'm like, oh, hey, I want to text all my friends in San Francisco. Bay Bridge is closed just so you know. But I have no idea what's happening here in Portland where there are tons of volcanoes nearby and the Cascadia range and earthquakes just off shore. And oh, if you live in San Francisco or Santa Rosa Petaluma especially, never watch a documentary about the 1906 earthquake. No, never, never watch it. Just a tip, just a fun fact. If you watch that, you might have to give up your city. I got to move. I don't know why I'm in Portland. This is a terrible place to be if you're afraid of earthquakes. I think somehow you have some sort of, oh wow, DNA socks. These are from Phage Genomics. We were sent many socks from our friend who talked about the Phage Genomics process. I like. Yes. Would you like some socks? Yes, please. I will mail you some socks. I have socks for myself. I have socks for you. I have socks for Blair. And I have socks to give away to people. So I'm going to figure out, yeah, I think I have three pairs of socks. Should we do a Patreon lottery? We could do a, yeah, some kind of thing. Just take all the names, crumple them up in a hat or something and shake it up. Yeah, we could do a Patreon lottery. Send some, send some socks to an unsuspecting supporter. Stephen Rainey saying adds 1906 volcano to watch this. Did I say 1906? Did I say volcano? I might have. I've been looping words like crazy this week. It's 1906 earthquake. If I said volcano in San Francisco, please ignore because they probably won't find it. No, I'm not going to find it. I've been looping, I have been looping my words for like two weeks now. So. Are you overloaded with studies? No, no, no. I'm just deteriorating. Cognitive over time. All right. So I think it's just, I got to, there's a certain point when things just were like, from now on, it's gonna be down at this level. I'm gonna work down here now. Okay. Get more sleep. There are some amazing YouTube documentaries about the 1906 earthquake of San Francisco that are crazy. Get a sock. What? I need like the whole bag, the half of the bag. Oh my goodness. I would, I will absolutely rock those. And I know somebody else who will absolutely rock those as well. Yeah. Socks from my friend. I need, I need at least two pair. I need at least two pairs. Two pairs, like one, one pair of each. Yeah, one of each at least so that I can, because I never wear the same color sock. I like to mix maximum. All right. All right. And you get a sock and you get a sock. Yes. Yes. Socks for my friends. What else was I going? Oh, fleece socks. That sounds fabulous. My, I think it's my friend gave me a link to a pair of pants. They're like velour on the outside and velour on the inside. And they're the softest things I've ever worn. They're amazing. They're amazing. You know, they're the pants that you never leave the house in them. You can't, I mean you could, but they're, maybe they're not velour, they're velvet. I don't know if they're soft and it's thick. Okay. So there was, there was, there was a brief window, I think in the very late 80s, early 90s, maybe even when that was acceptable club gear. I don't know that it still is today because I haven't been to the, to the electronic rave scene for a while. I don't know. I just haven't gone back. I just got my fill when I was out. But that was, that was, you know, the velvet pants had, had a time and a place where that was absolutely the go to gear. I have a pair of pants that are like fun velvety pants that definitely would be great kind of great club gear. They would be very fun. They're kind of flurry at the bottom and they're a fun color. They'd be fantastic. These pants though, these are like, they're more like joggers. They're more like, you've got little joggers or checkings. Are they like stretchy? No, they're like sweat pants. Okay. They're like sweat pants, but made out of the softest, most amazing velour material ever. They're amazing. Next week. Yes. Along with more socks. More socks for everyone. That's right, Thunderbeaver. Two for each foot. Socks for all your feet. Genome socks. So much good stuff. Well, I, oh, I have to check and see if Blair was successful. Did I get a message? Did we get a message? Do we know? No. Was it, was it a unsuccessful? All right. Well, tell her good night. Good night. Text her good night, Blair. Okay. I'll text her good night. Good night, Blair. And then she would say, say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. We hope that you have a wonderful week. Looking forward to our interview next week. There is a whole bunch of stuff happening this week. What do we have? Well, yeah, International Women's Day is on Monday the 8th. Is it a day? I thought they got a month. This is the whole month. That's kind of, isn't it kind of a rip to have the women's day in the women's month? Because it's kind of like two different holidays, but they get the same pay as a single holiday. Hey, yo. Oh, maybe that's the point. It's a learning moment. Do twice as much holiday for the same time. Two, two, two holidays in one. Really appreciated getting to do this show tonight, getting to hang out with you. Yeah, have, it was fun. Have a wonderful night. Have a great week. Take care. Be healthy. If you get a chance to get vaccinated, get vaccinated. Don't ask them which one. Just get it. Unless, of course, you have severe allergy. Oh, I got which one? Like, why not? Why not? Find out. But ask. But let's get the first opportunity. First opportunity you've got. Because chances are, next year, if you like, you could pick a different one because it might not be over. But you know what? I'm not going to be like, they're not going to try and prolong things any longer. I'm going to say good night right now.