 It's late, not a big deal, it's good. We are here. One, two, three, four. Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, it's Twis. We're here for a show. I hope you're here for a show. We're gonna do our weekly Twis broadcast tonight. That's what's happening right now. If you are not yet subscribed to Twis, make sure that you do subscribe, hit that subscribe, hit the notification button so you get notified next time we go live. And make sure to talk with us as we're doing the show. Before we start, Kiki, I can hear your discord chime. My discord, I have to learn how to turn the notifications off. I'll just, I'll toggle my volume. Okay. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, lots of boop, boop, boops. Thank you, Blair, because that would be annoying during my editing process. Faux show. All right, everybody, are we ready? We're in weird places all over the place. I'm feeling lost without a web chat on my screen right now. Yeah, it is weird. It's a little weird, a little different, but here we are. What's missing? What, what? Justin, we'll talk. We'll talk about it after. This is from last week's show. Everyone who's here now, I hope you're ready for this week's show because it is time for Twis. Are we ready to rumble? Yes, we are. Starting in, three, two, this is Twis. This week in Science, episode number 827 recorded on Wednesday, June 2nd, 2021. This is a periodic science show. Hey, everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on the show we will fill your head with hearing, bad hearing, new limbs and magic tricks, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Not everything you don't understand is the first thing you think it might be. As you have news abounds, few things to remember. Nothing has been discovered. Yes, there are instruments giving results that don't make sense, but they only don't make sense if you assume you know what you are seeing. Yes, there are eyewitness accounts that seem credible. They come from humans trained to track vehicles in flight. So as far as vehicles in flight are concerned, nothing makes sense. Sure, so, but that just maybe means they're not vehicles in flight, that they're just objects. What we do know is that objects are falling from over 80,000 feet in the sky according to the Missile Cruiser USS Princeton that tracked hundreds of such objects over the course of the week the footage was taken. And they are very, very cold as shown in the infrared camera on the Super Hornet Jet Fighter's sensory display. That's all we know for sure. It could just be re-entering space junk from cluttered and decaying cloud of millions of pieces of space trash we've littered in our low orbit. But to be fair, I guess it could be falling space junk from E.T.'s mother ship that we blew up with our secret moon-based laser. But I'm skeptical of that second idea. Also, hey Pentagon, if you had to spend $22 million to look into this, maybe pay scientists instead of whoever you got that didn't give you an answer yet, because you would likely have an answer by now. And that answer would no doubt be this week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough I wanna discover is it happen every day of the week there's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek I want science to kick in Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We're back again. We're gonna talk about science. We've got lots of it. And no, Justin, we're not talking about UFOs tonight. Just not, no, we're talking about science. Okay. You could do both, it's just- Just putting it out there. Just putting it out there. It's all about science. Are the UAPs now unidentified aerial projectiles or something? Yeah, thank you very much, Blair. There's a new terminology even. But for those of you who are joining us for this episode of Sciencey Goodness, I brought all sorts of fun stories and I know Justin and Blair did as well. I've got some NASA news. I also have dark matter mutterings. I've also got bat people. And, oh, I've got neuroscience because, you know, I always love the brain stuff. So some intelligent pupils in fast memory will close out the show for me. And we have an interview tonight on women menstruation and the COVID-19 vaccine in just a little bit with doctors Kate Clancy and Dr. Catherine Lee. Justin, what did you bring? I've got the, gosh, I always forget how to say them. Are it axolotls? Axolotls? Axolotls? Axolotls? Axolotls. My son acts a lot of questions. I got some axolotl news, some medical health news. I've got some, oh, I've got a new segment for the show called, did we really need a study to tell us that? I think I might like that. All right. And then if we haven't run out of time, human brain and testes found to have something in common. I would love to know what that is. I guess we will just have to wait. Blair, what's in the animal corner? Oh, I have, why YouTube is bad for exotic animals. I have electric fish and very purposeful pauses. And also I have Eurasian jays and whether or not they enjoy a magic trick. Birds of a feather, like magic. Together. Together, yes, okay. All right, we will find all of this out in this episode of This Week in Science. As we get started, before we jump in, I wanna remind you that if you are not yet subscribed to This Week in Science, look for This Week in Science on YouTube, on Facebook. We're also on Twitch as Twist Science. We're on Instagram as Twist Science. You can also find us all the places that podcasts are found. Look for This Week in Science. Our website is also twist.org. Okay, let's dive in first with NASA news. I just made up that little jingle. Okay, NASA made headlines today. I mean, NASA on its own makes a lot of headlines for the amazing things that it does, but our space agency in the United States today made headlines because it announced that a selection for the discovery missions to Venus. They selected two missions to go to Venus. They will be slated for launch in 2028 to 2030. The Da Vinci Plus mission will investigate the planet's atmosphere, looking for signs of life. That's right. They're also gonna search for evidence of past oceans and take pictures of tesserae. And if you don't know what tesserae are, they are continent-like formations. They're trying to figure out whether or not Venus at one point or maybe currently has plate tectonics. Additionally, the other mission is the Veritas mission. It's going to study the geologic history of Venus and check to see if currently there are active volcanoes spewing water vapor into the atmosphere and continuing to add to the thick greenhouse gases that maintain the Venusian skies. Also, moving on from these two missions, the one not-so-exciting piece of news that came out this week. Guess which space telescope got delayed again? Is it the web? Because that's the one that's always getting delayed. It has been delayed since 2007. It was supposed to launch in 2007. That was the original launch date. It's now bigger and better. It's budget got a lot bigger. But it's supposed to launch October 31st of this year, but for multiple reasons, they have to get the telescope packaged and all the way down to French Guiana. They have to- Can't find large enough mirrors. It's a whole thing. It's a whole thing, COVID. This isn't just like one of those don't-let-the-perfect-to-be-the-obstacle-of-the-good or whatever the thing. Like I get that the thing that you designed in the 2000s, early 2000s, isn't as great and powerful and amazing as the thing you could design in the mid-2010. No, they've added to it. It's like it's got other updated bits. It's pretty exciting. But it's like we can send another thing sometime. Just send what you've got now. Otherwise, it's just you can keep building the better version. Well, just imagine though, just imagine if somebody was building you a cell phone, right, in 2007. Right, it's gonna take them two years. And then, no, but I'm saying now, they try to hand you the cell phone that they started making in 2007. Yeah. What am I gonna do with this? So there is, I understand what you're saying, but I also think they have to adapt a little bit because what they started with is obsolete. Right, no, it is, and it's funny. How quickly we accelerate with our technology now. But at this point, the web is, it is going to take the place of the Hubble Space Telescope. It's going to be bigger, better, give us more amazing pictures of the universe. And wouldn't it be awful if the rocket that we were using, that the fairings failed and the whole James Webb Space Telescope like vision just boomed at this point? Like you don't want explosions at this point. They might have a backup, but yeah. They want everything to be right because at this point, we don't want to lose what we've built. Yes, that's, I don't wanna be holding the joystick on that one. They've said maybe it'll only be delayed for a couple of weeks, but you know, you never know, never know with the James Webb. I know it's NASA and I know they go have some extreme elements that they have to deal with and the engineering and the design and everything else. But then when it comes down to the manufacturing aspect, can't you just build two at that point? And it's just... They might have. Sometimes they do build two. Yeah, it seems like it'd be easy enough. This one is big, big, big, big. So I don't know if they've been able to. It's all engineering thinkering that goes on before that. Anyway, the James Webb can't re-engineer itself, but Justin, you have some regeneration news possibly? Oh, it's limb regeneration or tissue regeneration, organ regeneration, whatever you want. Whatever you want, we can do it now. Whatever I want. I want to do the jar of stem cells, is that the idea? Just how's this gonna work? So a limb regeneration generally is not a thing that people think too much about. Like, we're not like, ah, I can't regenerate my limbs. Until you lose one. And then you probably think about it quite a bit more. It's the thing that makes salamanders more advanced than humans that I'm gonna mess it up again. Axolotl? Yeah. Axolotl salamanders can regenerate pretty much anything that makes up an axolotl. The brain can regenerate. Heart, limbs, jaws, all the rest of it. Spinal cord, skin, tail, that's easy stuff. Any of it. So there's a team of scientists led by James. Godwin, MDI Biological Laboratory, Bar Harbor, Maine. And it's got an idea that's got some legs to it about how we might be taking a step closer to. Maybe how, a thing out wide is that we can't regenerate. And maybe how we can in the future. So instead of regenerating, what mammals do is we get scars when something gets damaged, tissue the, what do you call it? The macrophage signaling. Macrophage being some, it's the phagocyte system, the white blood cell part of the immune system that goes in and kind of fixes some stuff up and tells it, okay, you're gonna be a scar. But an axolotl don't scar. They instead generate. And it seems like they have macrophage involved too. So what they did is they checked axolotl with mice. And mice can actually do some level of regeneration. And they exposed them to pathogens, bacteria, funguses, viruses, this sort of thing. And they looked to see what the white blood cell macrophage did. And its response was similar in both. It seemed to have the same types of responses. Then they induced injury. And that's when the macrophage signaling became very different. And axolotl, it promoted growth of new tissue immediately while on the mouse, it began promoting scarring tissue. This is quoting Godwin, our research shows that humans have untapped potential for regeneration. If we can solve the problem of scar formation, we may be able to unlock our latent regenerative potential. Axolotls don't scar, which is what allows regeneration to take place. But once a scar is formed, it's game over in terms of regeneration. If we could prevent scarring in humans, we could enhance quality of life in so many people. Seems like a stretch, but there are instances of human regeneration. It's like the liver does some weird stuff. But embryos can regenerate. Human infants can regenerate heart tissue. Children can even regenerate their fingertips, which is the thing I did not know, but do not suggest anyone trying at home. Yes, so if I can interrupt really quickly, I was hoping you were gonna bring that up because the thing about the axolotl that I think is really important to point out here is what makes them look so weird and different and special is that they are essentially a salamander that is stuck in the juvenile phase. So salamanders have gills when they're babies and they stay under water the whole time. And then salamanders come out onto land and the gills, they lose them when they get older. They metamorphose. So these guys are what's called pedomorphic or pedomorphic. And so basically they're stuck in this juvenile phase. So scientists have always thought that that has something to do with it. No, that might be a part of it. That might be a part of it, absolutely. Specifically, this paper did go down into mechanism a little bit. They reported the signaling response was in a class of proteins called troll-like receptors, TLRs, which allowed macrophages to recognize a threat, such as infection or tissue injury, and induce the pro-inflammatory response. And that's where it became very divergent in that response between axolotl and mouse. So the thing is if there's that mechanism is in a mammal and it's in this juvenile axolotl, it may be that it's still accessible after a bit of tinkering or perhaps with a bit of fakery, some sort of pharmaceutical-induced chemical-induced something. So quoting Godwin, we are getting closer understanding how axolotl macrophages primed for regeneration, which will bring us closer to being able to pull the levers of regeneration in humans. For instance, I envision being able to use a topical hydrogel at the site of a wound that is laced with a modulator that changes the behavior of human macrophages to be more like those of axolotl. I mean, maybe we'll get rid of more scars, but I mean, I don't know if this is a maintaining juvenile traits, is that meaning that if you lose an arm and try to regrow an arm, you're just gonna have a baby arm? No. Yeah. Is it going, that is the question. I mean, how long will it take to regrow? What are all the details? There's nerve connections that need to be made with the brain, and there is so much more that is beyond just fixing the growth part. But I mean, I guess you figure out one step and you can sort them all together. But if we can get the dermal regenerator from Star Trek, I think that would be very helpful. Very helpful. But if it's also though, if this is also something that can be utilized in organ tissues, then you're talking about getting away from every sort of transplant, like all of this world of technology that has been going down those lines, trying to perfect that, if we can just get the body to fix itself, because it has the plants. The body knows where everything is located. And the blueprint. It's got the blueprint. It's got the materials to do the building with. Blair, what do you have up next? Yeah, I have a real quick story just about YouTube and how it's bad. No, it's exactly- Do not mock our digital overlord. No, no, no. It's actually something that I often yell at my phone about when I'm scrolling on YouTube or Instagram or any number of social media profiles or platforms. But it's about sharing videos of exotic animals put in a pet trade setting. So this is from the University of Adelaide. They wanted to look at the reactions of people on videos on YouTube. They did choose YouTube because it is, it has the most number of these videos and is covered in all six continents. And they wanted to analyze reactions to 346 popular videos starring exotic wild cats and primates in quote, free handling situations. It just means humans are in contact with them. There's no barrier between them. And they looked at views between 2006 and 2019. And the long and short of it is the majority of reactions were positive. They were positive emojis. They were comments like, isn't that cute? And then other indicators that they wanted to be close to the animal and that they wanted to have similar interactions of their own. And this is a good pulse checker for how people feel, but it also promotes, it's kind of like that echo chamber, right? It promotes this narrative that exotic animals are cute and could potentially be good pets. As we know, most exotic animals in the pet trade are taken straight out of the wild. They're not even bred in captivity. A lot of them die in the process of getting put into captivity and wild animals are not pets. They are not domesticated, they are not suited for it. And so not only is it affecting wild populations, but a lot of the time they are not well suited. The only kind of positive thing that I will throw in here is that they did see a dip in positive comments in 2015 and they think it was related to the tickling is torture campaign. So if you've seen videos of slow loruses, you might see people tickling them and they put their hands up and it looks like they're smiling. They're actually grimacing, they're not enjoying it. And slow loruses die in captivity often from stress. Their stress hormones are off the charts if you check it out, it's not a good situation. And so when they promote, when there was an active social media campaign called tickling is torture in 2015, these dropped. So the long and short of it is if you just put cute videos out, people are gonna like it and it's going to glamorize the process. But if you can pair it with education, it can actually go a long way. And the other thing they noticed was that these policies in social media don't cover exotic animals as pets as a banable or censorable subject. And that is a problem because if you don't have rules that prevent something akin to animal cruelty, you can ban videos for animal cruelty, but they don't count exotic animals as pets as animal cruelty. So that is another area of improvement here. And I'm one of those people, I'll tell you right now, people watching might hate me for it, but I report every one of those videos that I see because if you look at the comments, they're all, I want one, I want one, I want one. Where did you get it? Where can I get one? So this is an important moment to remember that even the silliest social media video has a moral obligation to make sure that it's not harmful. I think that's a really important point. There are a lot of accounts on Twitter, on Instagram, on TikTok that just copy cute videos and share them or cute images and share them. And people are like, yay, I love that. Yes, let's, yeah. But as a science communicator, if we can get the message across that if you're sharing a video like this, maybe put the reality of the situation. This is a wild animal and maybe post things not only in the description, but actually if you're making the video in the video itself so that it's something that can't be overlooked if somebody thinks it's cute. You think it's cute? But this is a wild animal. You don't want one of these at home. Yeah. Yeah, so algorithms could be better. AI could be trained to kind of flag and double check these things. So yeah. This is a little bit of a wrong direction for the show. But did you see the footage of the girl pushing the bear off the fence to protect her dog? Yeah, yep. That was amazing. But that is the length too that I think if... That could be paired with some excellent language about how to protect yourself, your pets and your loved ones from bears and how to act when you see a bear in the wild. Shave, charge at them and shove them? That was insane. Nobody's talking about the, you really should not do this. Yeah. If she was watching outside with a pot and a pan and banged them together, the bear would have left also. So there is a certain amount of public information that's not getting out in these areas where people live with bears. So this is an opportunity to have a good conversation about that. Millions of people have watched a video of a girl running up and shoving a bear, which was busy perching itself on a fence for one thing, or a wall, whatever it was. Do not go out and try to push a bear. Just because you've seen something on the YouTubes doesn't mean you should try it next time you see a bear. Yeah, there's a quote from Park Rangers that has made the rounds of media, which is that there is quite an overlap between the smartest bears that come into campgrounds and the dumbest people. Yes. You don't wanna be part of that. Anyway, protect yourselves. We are gonna move out of our first opening stories and into our interview in just one moment. Yes, I wanna remind everyone, this is This Week in Science. And if you are really enjoying the show. Really? Are you really? Please tell a friend. Share it with someone else today. Okay, it is my pleasure to have our guests join us tonight, our guests tonight on the show, Dr. Kate Clancy and Dr. Catherine Lee. Dr. Clancy is a biological anthropologist who specializes in reproductive health at the University of Illinois in the Department of Anthropology. Her additional research and policy advocacy work focuses on sexual harassment in science and academia. Dr. Lee is an NIH-funded postdoctoral research scholar in the Division of Public Health Sciences at Washington University School of Medicine at St. Louis, who also works as a biological anthropologist, but with a focus on reproductive bone health. Thank you, both of you, for joining us on the show tonight. Thanks for having us. Yeah, it's great to have you here. So for the conversation tonight, I told everyone last week that I was inviting you here so that we could talk about women's reproductive health and also the COVID vaccine and its effects on menstruation and whether or not there's anything known about that. But before we dive in, Dr. Clancy, can you just give us a brief overview of what is biological anthropology? And in your website, you also say that you focus on reproductive ecology. Can you talk about these fields and how they work together? Sure, biological anthropology is a pretty large and diverse field with a bunch of sub-disciplines. There are people who study biomechanics and how it is that we move. People like us who study things like hormones and biomarkers and menstrual cycles. We've got folks who dig things up and look at bones and fossils. People who study primates, folks who focus on immune health. But what really unites all of us is that we have at least some evolutionary lens to what it is that we're doing. And so we're taking kind of, even in a lab like ours that studies modern humans and sometimes only cares about, say, 28 days of what's happening in your life. We take a really long view and think about human evolution in a really big way. Reproductive ecology is a field that specifically looks at environmental stressors and how they affect reproductive functioning. And for us, obviously, we care about the specifically among humans. Okay, so it's really digging into how we interact with the environment and the ecosystem. That's fascinating. Dr. Lee, how did you come to become interested in biological anthropology? And how did you, you started working with Dr. Clancy. How did that start happening? Yeah, so I sort of accidentally stumbled into biological anthropology. I just happened to take an anthropology class while I was doing prereqs to apply to medical school because I thought I might wanna be a doctor. And the university that I was at had like, they didn't prorate any of the fees that you have to pay when you register for classes. So I was like, I'm gonna get my money's worth and take an extra class because I'm thrifty like that. And so I took an introduction to anthropology class and a lot of this stuff in the biological anthropology section really struck me as the way that I wanted to think about health more broadly, thinking about the ways that the ecosystems around us impact our health, thinking about it through evolutionary lenses and comparative lenses and the different ways that culture can interact with biology even. And so I took that class and then I still had more prereqs to go. So I just kept taking more anthropology classes focusing on bioanth. And I ended up applying to work with Dr. Clancy for my PhD and seven years later, defended it last year. That's amazing. Yeah, I understand those, this chance classes that you take and suddenly you're like, wait a minute, this is really something amazing. How did you, Dr. Clancy, how did you get interested in biological anthropology and what you do? A really similar story. I was taking a Gen Ed course called Science B29 and students loosely just called it sex because usually it was taught by two men, two white men who would say really essentialist and problematic things about humans. But I was like, I got to take these, this B core curriculum. So I got to take this class and I really hated it. Like really hated it. I was there with my boyfriend at the time so I would like go with him and it was just a terrible experience. And it was at the very end of the semester that after dealing with all of this essentialist, sexist, messed up stuff where it's like, boys are like this and girls are like this. The very last class, one of the instructors, the more senior of the two, gave what was this amazingly feminist lecture about the ways in which the academic glass ceiling is enforced with concrete. He talked about problems with public breastfeeding and how breasts and breastfeeding are sort of these normal ways of feeding humans and why is it that we have to find, I mean, he said all these things that basically completely contradicted the jerky that also messed her. And yet it really moved me. I had never, ever had a man stand up in front of me and say anything like strongly feminist or supportive. And so I literally cried, wrote him a super dorky email that was like, I'm gonna be a biological anthropology and women's studies major. And I'm old enough that he looked at my dorm phone number and called me, I don't know why, but he called me and he was like, you should definitely do it. You seem like someone who really cares about the stuff. You should do it, but you should drop that women's studies thing. Which I think- Oh no. Yeah, exactly. So maybe he wasn't the feminist ally that, maybe all of the other classes should have glued me into the fact that he wasn't actually that much of a feminist ally and actually really said hostile things about women's studies in that call. But I did it anyway and I double majored in biological anthropology and women's studies. So that's kind of, that's where I got my start. Wonder, that's a wonderful story. Again, it's like these places, you don't expect that inspiration to come from. That's how you get involved in it. I love the idea, I mean, for anthropology, I think I've always thought of it as going and digging up old pieces of pottery and bits and pieces of the remains of humans, finding out how we have lived or how we live. But I have never really put it together with this biological aspect of how we interrelate with the ecosystem and how that all works together. Can you talk a little bit, Dr. Clancy, about how you're working in your lab now with respect to COVID and how has that changed any of the questions that you're asking and how you ask them? COVID shut down our lab because one of the things that's really important to us is prioritizing people over the science that we do and we really care about the human beings who practice science and the human beings that we engage with as participants. And so early on in the pandemic, we just completely shut down. And we haven't actually really opened back up yet because we have a very small lab and it would be really hard for us to have multiple people in there at once. So we've had some folks in there doing some aliquoting for us to ship samples elsewhere to a lab that's large enough and has the appropriate safety protocols that the samples can be run there. And we do certainly hope in the coming months, we just had a safety audit this week actually that we're slowly going to be, if and when we have samples, which we hope to actually next year, early next year, that we will actually sort of start doing things again. But yeah, we completely shut down a lot of data collection and processing of biological samples. But thankfully we also happened to be at a stage where we were wrapping up a bunch of that kind of work really moving into the analysis and writing stage. So it wasn't actually as hard of a decision as it would be for say a more experimental lab where you have to keep cells alive and running experiments. And if there's a break in that, there can be a real problem for the science that's being done. Yeah, we sort of had a little discussion about that right at the beginning, I think of the shutdown, how this would affect content for the show. And it was sort of like, so a lot of science is going to be shut down, but now there's also a lot of like papers that have been sitting there waiting to get written that'll finally get the attention that they need. Yeah, lots of research also this year on like preserved specimens. Museum collections, something like that. So what are the majority of the types of samples that you work with? So if you're working with phylogenetic analyses, are you working with genetic? Are you working with saliva samples? What are you working with? Personally, I work with a lot of pee. So lots and lots and lots of pee and some blood, but mostly pee. For the studies that I've done with Kate in her lab, it's been a lot of going around and asking strangers if they would like to participate in the study and could you collect your urine every day for a full menstrual cycle and stick it in your freezer and then we'll pick it up later. And so for each person, you end up with somewhere between 20 and 40-ish samples of pee and multiply that by a hundred and something people. And that's how I spent the last few years of my grad career. Thank you, thank you, pee. It's better than spit though. It is, pee. Spit is so much, for my dissertation, most of my work was spit, only a little bit was urine and oh my gosh, it's morning breath is like, it is a thing and it is when you go and yeah, and it's floppy. You have to vortex it to get all the particulate to the bottom and then the morning breath smell when you uncap it and it's actually way worse than pee, I think. Whoa, that's mind blowing, but also makes a lot of sense. Yes. Scientific horror stories. The research that has to happen. Ooh, that person just had a spurious moment in any of your research since you worked with so much more pee than me. I've had this person was probably out drinking, they're really dehydrated, few samples. No judgment, just science, just doing the work. Let me just write this page in a letter. You need to drink more water. So you're working with, Dr. Lee, you're working with urine samples or you did work with urine samples. Is this looking for hormone levels? What are you trying to, what are you mostly working with? So part of it was to look at hormone levels for things like estrogen metabolites and progesterones, those like ovarian hormones that vary across the menstrual cycle. But also we looked at daily values for a lot of inflammatory biomarkers and a couple of energetic biomarkers. And then a couple of days I looked at some markers of bone turnover. So thinking about bone metabolism, but that wasn't an everyday, it was just a specific couple of days. Okay. Are you doing the same kinds of analyses, Dr. Clancy? I don't, I'm sort of at the, I get to write things stage of my career. So I haven't had to smell pee or spit in a really long time. And in fact, the statistics that my students now run exceeds my own capabilities because they tend to program in R and I never really learned R. So I'm more, I get to do more of the big picture stuff. So a lot of my work is, in terms of the research questions, yes, a lot of my work focuses on inflammation and the ways in which inflammation in the immune system and immune challenges are sort of, can affect things in the menstrual cycle. And then we also have a lot of work because of, as Dr. Lee pointed out, even though sort of there's this big picture question around evolution within biological anthropology, the other big question is obviously culture is something that becomes biology in all sorts of very real ways. Systemic oppression affects the body, sexism, racism. These are things that actually become embodied in very real ways. And so understanding and studying structures and culture is actually a really big part of our lab too. And so that's a lot of what we've been doing a lot these days as well, studying science cultures, but also trying to better understand psychosocial stressors and the ways in which systemic or structural oppression can affect psychosocial stressors. And then those in turn might play a role in affecting the menstrual cycle as well. Oh, there's so many layers to peel back to determine how things work together. As a trained physiologist, I'm like just tell the body works, the system of the body itself. But now you're taking that this additional step and adding environment stress, how that influences the hormones, how that influences the body. And I imagine that would also influence back into the society itself as a feedback loop of if individuals are chronically stressed and chronically if their immune systems are chronically under stress, then they're going to be more sick, maybe have worse responses to stressors, to inflammation, to other things and end up in the hospital more often or maybe responding differently to medicines. There are, oh my goodness, so many different layers. So this brings us to COVID and the study that you're currently working on is this question of whether or not, not COVID-19 itself, but the COVID vaccine or vaccines, whether or not they affect the menstrual cycle. Can you tell us how you came to start thinking about this question and start looking at it and designing your study? I, it started from sort of personal experience. For me, for a friend that I was in close contact with who got vaccinated the exact same day as me. And we were just sort of in conversation about, oh, how sore is your arm? Do you have a headache? Did you get a fever? And then a couple of days later, we were both like, I'm having like period symptoms that are way worse than I would normally have. And the other one was having the same response. And so I reached out to several other people that I knew were nurses or something like that who would have been vaccinated on the earlier end and just asked if they'd noticed anything. And then I reached out to Kate to see if she'd heard anything or had any thoughts about specific mechanisms for either the vaccines or inflammatory processes associated with vaccines. And she sort of said, nope, I haven't heard anything and shelved it until she had her shot. And then I'm sure you've seen the Twitter thread that she wrote about her experience. And so then that day, we started talking back and forth on Slack and drafted the first version of the survey and went through some revisions and human subjects and got it up in April. Do you want to add anything, Dr. Clancy? Just that I think it's important that this was something that I'm trying to figure out like a nice way to put it, but just that I guess kind of the angry part of me would say there are ways in which the lived experiences of people who menstruate or people who have menstruated in the past are historically overlooked. And it takes people who have those lived experiences sometimes and then also happen to have that scientific expertise to notice things happening in their bodies. And so what I think is really remarkable about what Katie first observed, what Katie brought to her colleagues and brought to me is that sometimes it takes actually having those bodies that can have these specific things happening to them for it to occur to you to study it because there are no menstruation questions asked or menstrual cycle questions asked in any American vaccine trials. And in fact, vaccine trials historically remind women, I mean, women have only been a part of vaccine trials since the 90s anyway, but now that they allow women in vaccine trials, they advise them to try not to get pregnant. And so usually they are advised to potentially get on hormonal contraception, which is also then potentially going to mask menstrual side effects. That's fascinating, it's fascinating to me. I mean, that nobody, no doctors at any point have asked, did you have any menstrual symptoms or any changes? You know, that question has never been asked since the 90s when we were allowed into menstrual vaccine studies. It hasn't been asked or studied. There was a little bit about the HPV vaccine. So my understanding of most of that is that larger scale studies showed no real effect there, though by no means an expert, but certainly, and Katie, you can speak to this too, we spent a lot of time looking at the literature trying to find anything on this and we found a lot of inferences we could make, especially because of our expertise, literally studying inflammation in the menstrual cycle. And there's a huge literature on, well, there's a small literature on vaccines and how they affect bleeding. There's a decent sized literature on bleeding changes and how they affect heavy menstrual bleeding. And there's a decent literature on how inflammation affects menstrual cycle. So there's a lot of pieces you could put together that with just a little bit of expertise, you can immediately notice that there's actually something going on here, but no actual study that we could find that actually looked at these things together. Yeah, and there was an article in The Scientist that went on to, I think it quoted Jen Gunter saying in her sub-stack newsletter, the COVID-19 vaccine is not capable of exerting reproductive control via proxy, nothing is. So I read that and I kind of was like, wait a minute, but the immune system doesn't, and the stress cycle and so many things do have an impact on the menstrual cycle. And so by proxy, a vaccine could. And so I was just really kind of taken at this kind of blanket statement that there's no way it could have an effect. Can you tell us a bit of the work that has been done or some of the evidence that, how does inflammation affect the menstrual cycle? Sure, so the main thing is that the uterus is a site of tissue remodeling. So speaking of, you know, you were talking about axolotls earlier, right? We have out of our lab, we have four papers with a collaborator that actually looks at tissue remodeling and the endometrium. This is another thing that we do actually study in our lab. And one of the things that's fascinating about this work is that, you know, think about the one place in the body where stuff is constantly grown, differentiated and shed, and then you do it again. And again and again, about 400 times over the course of your life. And also that happens to be a tissue that makes human beings. And yet, until like maybe 10 years ago, most tissue engineers, it didn't occur to them to ever study the uterus as maybe a means through which we could better understand tissue regeneration, you know, angiogenesis, vasculature, all the kind of stuff that's really relevant. Vascularization. Yeah, you'd think the corpus luteum, which is that yellow body left behind after ovulation that is the most rapidly vascularizing tissue in the entire body would be something that some tissue engineer once upon a time would study. That's a free dissertation for you, because nobody's looked at it yet from a tissue engineering perspective. So that's really the biggest thing is that tissue remodeling is inherently an inflammatory process, right? There's all sorts of cytokines and chemokines and MMPs and all sorts of, I could throw a lot of acronyms, but what's more important is just understanding that you can imagine that when remodeling has to happen, there are both pro and anti-inflammatory mechanisms at play that are allowing that tissue to grow and differentiate and modify into something useful for the body. And so we, you know, these are things, this is a very well understood process for that's been known for multiple decades. There are lots of people who've been studying this and studying sort of trophoblast invasion, right? The processes of fertilization and pregnancy. And so, you know, there are a lot of ways by which during the growth phase, during the differentiation phase and during the sloughing off phase in the endometrium that you might expect that a major immune challenge that exerts a, that creates a large inflammatory response might in some way affect the communication happening in that system at the same time. And is it just that, is it an ongoing thing or is it just during that sort of recovery from the immune system adjusting and coping with the vaccine? So we don't know yet because we're still designing the follow-up studies that would allow us to look at sort of three months out, six months out, but certainly anecdotally, I would say that this is a one to two menstrual cycle thing from what we can see. Just because that's how, I mean, if you think about it, that's kind of, it makes sense that the body would work that way that a current acute stressor would have an acute effect on the body, but that it would not be long-term. Because if that were the case, then any time we had an immune challenge, it would have some kind of permanent effect on our menstrual cycle. And we know that's not the case, right? Except in like very major chronic issues, like an autoimmune disease or something like that. Maybe there's a connection there, but in a short-term acute immune challenge, you're going to see a short-term acute effect. So I guess the thing that I think is really challenging here and I think part of the reason that Jennifer Gunter kind of said what she said in that article is that I feel like we have these two kind of fighting sides dealing with a public that doesn't fully understand women's bodies. Yeah, just basically, right? So you have this awesome thing that you're studying that's really interesting. But then on the other side, you have a misinformation campaign telling people that the COVID vaccine will make them infertile. So I think how do you bring this to the public? And I saw both of you are pretty active on Twitter, right? You're trying to bring stuff to the public related to women's health and administration and your current research consistently, right? So how do you bring this to the public without accidentally fueling this misinformation machine? Because I could see how this headline could be run with in the wrong direction. Katherine, I've been talking a lot. Do you want to say anything? I think largely being very respectful of the public and meeting them with kindness when they have these fears. Like I would think a lot of people think about their menstrual cycle as something that is a sign of their ability to get pregnant, even if maybe that cycle, they didn't want to get pregnant anyway. And sometimes a lot of messaging around fertility and menstruation isn't maybe the most accurate. So people think that like disrupting the menstrual cycles, one, like we said, we think it's very temporary. But people think, oh no, it's going to impact them forever. And that's just not likely to be the case in any way, shape or form. And I think a lot of the pushback that people like Jen Gunter has been trying to mediate and navigate is the fact that, yes, there are mechanisms where we would expect to see a change in a menstrual cycle, but it is not affecting your reproductive capability in any way, shape or form. We've had people contact us to say, my period was late, it was so late. Oh, I got pregnant, nevermind. More than once. That'll do it, yeah. About our study where they were just like, I would like to let you know, it's not that my period was late because of the vaccine. But I think just being kind, trying not to make people feel dumb or ridiculed, but bringing the information to people who are just trying to make sense of their body and understand what's happening is just a huge amount of work and labor, but I think it's really worth it to be able to make that difference. It's sort of interesting though, I kept thinking like, wow, it's because everything was rushed out that these trials happened so fast and then it was such an emergency situation that we would have known about this a long time ago if it wasn't rushed out. But from what I'm also hearing, no, no, we would not have, we would still. In fact, in fact, if it wasn't so many people getting it at the same time, we might not know at all. Because I can tell you, I was in a vaccine trial and there were no questions about my period whatsoever. So it's just the way that it is. And we've heard from people who've tried to, they've participated in vaccine trials, tried to get it so that they like have said that to the person they're meeting with, hey, I'm having these side effects. My period is like bananas or whatever their thing is. And they just say, oh, you're just dressed out and then don't report it. They don't put it in. Just fanatical woman. But yeah, no, this would not, if it hadn't rolled out the way that it did, this would still have just been a bunch of one-off people's experiences that they were kept to themselves and not included in the larger dataset. That's very, very interesting. Yeah, so you've got your survey that's out now and you're probably getting a bunch of responses. What is the plan for the study and how you're going to collect all the data and then what you're gonna do with it? And when can we find out whether these anecdotes, all of these little pieces of personal information might tell a story or not? We are at, Katie, over 113,000 plus responses today. Amazing. And we are hoping this summer to write one, if not two papers on some of the early weeks of data, just so that we can get some information out there as quickly as possible. The thing that's tricky is that we did not anticipate when Katie and I first were writing the IRB for this, there's this little box where you have to put in like about how many participants do you expect and we put in like 500 thinking that was really ambitious and we hit 500 within the first couple of hours of this survey. So one of the things that's, one of the challenges we're facing is that this dataset is far larger than we expected and there's a very interested participant base who feel very urgent about the answers for this. So even with us doing as much as we can to push our many other projects and other paying jobs aside, it still makes it really hard to get this work done. So we were lucky enough, the University of Illinois gave us a small grant to help us pay for some research assistantships. So those will be starting in just a few weeks. So we'll have a few more people joining the team. The National Institute of Health has actually put out a call for supplements for people who already have NIH awards who could use that data to, who could leverage that into a supplement proposal to actually study the effects of the COVID-19 vaccine on menstruation. So the other thing that's really cool is our research literally led to the NIH deciding to make money to fund this so that more people would actually study this. So we are of course applying for that money, but also other people will too, which means multiple people will now put some of their amazing expertise on this question. Yeah, it sounds like you need to get those R-coders doing some automation. Katie, Katie can tell you all about that. She is an R expert. I mean, one of the things is we knew that there's a lot of experiential stuff that people would want to tell us. So we purposefully wrote the survey with all of these text boxes so that people could share whatever they wanted to about their experience. So things like people experiencing increased breast tenderness as part of their cycle that time or extra cramps or comparing it to earlier times. So we have this really rich text data that is a lot more time consuming to go through and really think through than just the ones that are like, I took this survey or this vaccine and it was earlier or later or heavier or lighter or- Right, right. Or it's number based or percentage based in some way, yeah. Handled with 500. You could have sorted through 500 at the most. But now, what was it, 118,000 something? 113,000. 113,000. Is there any opportunity for people who might be interested in volunteering to help with the data management in any way? Or I mean, for this kind of information, I'm sure there are reasons for ways to keep it secure, but I'm just wondering if there's any room for people to help if they want to. There are a lot of ethical approvals you have to go through to engage with the data set. But we do have a great team at this point. It just took a little while. Once we suddenly were like, again, three hours in, we went, crap, we just hit our participant goal. Now what? And then our inboxes have been flooded in. And again, to Katie's point earlier, we really prioritize moving away from a deficit model of science communication towards a listening model, where we really try to improve trust and transparency by listening. So we're spending a ton of time on email and DMs and things like that, engaging directly with people who have questions and concerns. So that kind of thing is taking up a lot of our time, but we now have multiple grad student RAs, three undergrad RAs, a team of postdoc and professors who have amazing expertise in this area. So we are finally at that point where it's like now we can actually hit the ground running. Also the semester's finally over because a lot of our team was engaged in taking classes, teaching classes, grading, end of semester, all of those types of things that wrap up at the end of the year, trying to celebrate the people who've graduated that we work with. Those things that are important for like just being people in science and recognizing that there's no way you could just, or we shouldn't burn out trying to do this because it's important that it's done well. It is important it's done well, but you also can't lose yourself in that. And I mean, this year especially with the pandemic and all of the university people that I know have said this is one of the hardest academic years that they have ever had, teaching online, doing remote work, everything has been a struggle. And so yeah, yeah, you have to make the room and take the time and you have a team. And it's summer now, it's time. And maybe when you get it done, it will get done. What are you finding things as you're listening? I find that really interesting of not just collecting the data and going, great, thanks a lot, we're gonna write our study now but hearing people. I'm wondering, do you think you might find things in this listening that might lead to new questions that might inform the way that you approach future questions into reproductive health? Yeah, some of the things that I don't think we set out with the intention to be able to hear these experiences but we didn't realize how common they would be were things around people who were having breakthrough bleeding who normally don't menstruate. So getting spotting or having a period and they normally don't including people like trans men, people who are on long acting hormonal, long acting reversible contraceptives. So they normally would have menstrual suppression from it. People who are postmenopausal, who are having some bleeding after the vaccine as well. And I think if we had set out with a very narrow scope, we only wanna hear from people who are not on birth control who are not perimenopausal, who are not on any sort of hormones at all. We would have missed all of these experiences and quite frankly, they're the experiences that are probably the most important to address with some of this work because they're the people who've been left out even more from the existing research. So I think setting out with the listening mode really helped us hear from people who normally don't feel heard. And I know that it's been propagating and our survey has been shared and propagating through a lot of different social media spaces that we would normally not know about or be invited to but sort of being put forth as, hey, here's this experience that you might have, here's a group that's looking into it. Yeah. It seems like people who are using hormonal contraceptives or who are on hormones for any reason whatsoever that if they've been potentially left out of vaccine trials historically or if that hasn't been asked as to what their status is during the trials, that there could be a lot of information that's really missed and that there could be reactions or certain, there could be things that would result that we need to know and we need to know how people are going to respond in different cases. And that's, yeah, it's amazing. I don't wanna keep you up super late. I know it's getting late where you are. I'd love to keep talking about all these various topics, but so that- Can I ask one more question before? Yes, if so, yeah. So let's wrap this up here. So I think it's really important since whenever we talk about women's health and cycles and stuff like that on the show, our listeners are really good at reminding me of terminology. And so I'm just curious if the field of women's health has had the larger conversation about calling it something else because I'm often reminded and I appreciate the reminders because it's, I'm rewriting plus years of learning and how to call things, what I've called them historically. And when you should talk about people who menstruate, we should talk about women who menstruate and when you should talk about things in different ways, but when we talk about women's health, it's a group of people that have been marginalized in a very specific way. And we want to give voice and honor that need for women's health and women's health research and women's health support, right? Is that conversation happening kind of where is it at? Because I don't want to alienate anyone. I want to use the right words, but I also want to focus on this really important issue that I'm really passionate about. The term menstruators is one that's been around for quite some time. I first sought with Planned Parenthood, but I actually have recently, I don't think they actually were the first to start using that term. And then people have also advocated for a more person first language. So people who bleed or people who menstruate is language that can be useful. I don't know honestly among, like women's health is often a public health or a medical field. And we are not public health people or clinicians or medical professionals. And in fact, often our work is actually explicitly critical of those paradigms. So I don't know the conversations that are happening over there, but I would say for us, and Katie can speak to this too, we spent a lot of time really trying to work on the inclusive language of our survey because it was so important to us that we invite and listen to many people who menstruate now, as well as people who've menstruated in the past. I would say that there is that like big public health infrastructure that focuses on women's health. But a lot of that focus isn't actually on women. It tends to be on women as far as they can carry a baby. So we don't actually care about like anything other than the reproductive potentiality when you look at a lot of the women's health work as a field. And I think it's really important, like the average US woman has between two to three children in her lifetime. And so we focus on those components of women's health, but we exclude every other menstrual cycle that she has ever had or he has ever had. And we ignore all of the work about people who maybe never wanted to have kids. We don't think about all of the different ways that gendered experiences shape our health. And it's not about the biology of being a woman or having a uterus. It's about the way you move through the world and you experience things differently and you have different pressures than someone who is not a man. But I think separating out what is biology and what is the gender is really complicated. But if we're going to think about women's health, then I would argue we should be thinking about the experiential gendered effects. And otherwise we should be talking about things like the actual systems that we're talking about. We don't normally talk about men's health and mean like just like having sperm and impregnating somebody. Like that's not what men's health is. And so- Have you ever read men's health magazine? I kind of think that's kind of the major focus. It's been your box of facts, right? Yeah, but it's like it's how to attract a mate and then it's just, it's all still reproductive. It's the whole. Right, but what about all of the other components? So I think there is a need to have the conversation but a lot of the overarching structures and the way we've organized the way we do research on certain types of bodies is just really siloed in the US system. I mean, we're going through the National Institute of Child and Human Development for our periods project because that's who's funding it. And so they don't get nearly as much money as a institute compared to other places at the NIH like the National Cancer Institute. So when we divide people into these body parts or we decide to use social categories to examine health, it's really muddying our understanding in a lot of really important ways. Thank you both for joining us tonight. This has just been a wonderful conversation and I wanna keep talking with you all night long because there are so many more places to go but I wanna respect your time. So as a final question, just can each of you let us know where people can find you and find out more about your work. So Catherine, if you wanna start. Sure, I'm on Twitter at resourcefulsqrl. Most people would say resourceful squirrel but you're not allowed to have that many letters. And I can be found, I'm not really active on other social media. So basically just there or through my Washington University website or through Kate's website, which I actually do most of the maintenance on at this point anyway. Fantastic. She still does, like she's graduated and she still helps me with all that stuff and does all that stuff. So yeah, my lab you can find which is where you can find stuff from Katie and me and many other people in our lab is clancylabs.com. My own personal website is cakeclancy.com and yeah, I'm most active on Twitter where you can find me at Kate Clancy. I've been trying to do more on Instagram cause I've noticed there's an awful lot of period stuff happening over there, a lot more there frankly than happening on Twitter. So on Instagram, I'm klancy underscore Kate. Fantastic. I will make sure to follow you on Instagram. I'm already following both of you on Twitter I think. And I hope that all of our listeners do as well. And I can't wait to find out the results of your work but I will be patient. Have your summers, have your lives, do what needs to be done. But I know there are many, many people who are interested to find out not just where this particular study goes but where this ends up going for vaccine health in the future and future studies related to this. So have a wonderful night. Thank you once again. This was just fantastic. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks. All right, everybody. This is This Week in Science and we are going to take a quick break right now before we come back for Blair's Animal Court. Oh, Justin, you have something to say. No, I'll be right back. You'll be right back. Okay. We're gonna take a quick break before we head into Blair's Animal Corner. And I just want to remind everyone that this is This Week in Science. Yes, it is This Week in Science, the weekly science program that we'd love to bring you and we hope that you enjoy as well. And if you enjoy This Week in Science, please consider supporting us. You can head over to twist.org and click on the Patreon links over there. The Patreon button, click on it. It will take you to the Patreon community where you can choose your level of support, $10 and more a month, and we will thank you by name at the end of the show. We've got a great list of people that seems to be continually growing and I cannot thank all of them enough. And I hope to include you in that list as well. We really can't do this without you. Thank you for your support. Alrighty. We're gonna come right back right now, right? Aren't we? We're gonna come right back. We're gonna come right back. And it's time for the wonderful, the incredible Animal Field. Blair's Animal Corner with Blair. By the millipede, no pet at all. You are here about animals, she's your girl. Except for giant pandas that grow in an uproar. What you got, Blair? Oh, I have a story about meaningful pauses. And how that pause may be dramatic and give extra emphasis to a very particular point. And how that same thing can be employed by electric fish. We pause before we say something to give drama, to kind of give emphasis, but also to give the brain space to share something meaningful. Pauses prime sensory systems to receive new and important information. And so there have been studies on humans looking at this, seeing that human auditory systems respond more strongly to words that come right after a pause. They recognize words better and that effective speakers tend to insert pauses right before something that they wanna have a significant impact. And that this, in fact, from this new study, parallel to something you see in electric fish. This is some Washington University in St. Louis. And so this is actually- That's funny. Yeah, I know. It's very interesting coincidence, I didn't even know that. But it was looking at electric fish and how they indeed pause before they give some vital information using electric discharges. This is an electric fish called, it's a type called a morimid, mor-mor-mor-morid, sorry, take two, mor-morid. They use these weak electric discharges or pulses to locate prey, but also to communicate with one another. So scientists tracked the banter between fish. They were housed in different conditions. Electric fish that were alone in their tanks hummed along without stopping very much. They produced fewer and shorter pulses than fish that were in pairs. And that fish also in pairs produced high-frequency bursts or pulses right after they paused. Then they tried the experiment where they inserted artificial pauses into ongoing communication and found that the fish receiving a pause, the listeners increased their own rates of signaling just after the artificially inserted pause. They're like, what were you gonna say? I had to find out. The pauses were meaningful to the listeners. And so they wanted to see what's happening in the brain, which is where this gets extra interesting. They applied stimulation to electro-sensory neurons in the mid-brain and observed that continually stimulated neurons produced weaker and weaker responses. They're just being barraged with information. But progressive weakness, so this kind of phenomenon is referred to as short-term synaptic depression. So just like if you're doing it over and over, it's gonna be weaker and weaker. But when they inserted the pause into continuous stimulation, they saw that the pauses as short as about one second, even one second pause was enough to allow the synapses to recover from short-term depression from just getting bombarded with information and increase the response of photosynaptic neurons to stimuli afterwards. So this is essentially a reset of the brain. And so this kind of plays into, I was thinking about when I was in school, and I would be taking notes and I'd be like listening to the lecture and I'd be hurriedly trying to keep up and I'd be so happy when they would pause because I could finish the sentence I was writing. And then I could be a more active listener from that point forward, right? And so that's mechanically what I was doing, but I feel like that's kind of what your brain is doing too, right? And so your brain is trying to process the words coming at you, but if you take a pause, then it can process and like take a deep breath and then catch back up to real time. And so this is something we're seeing across from fish to humans. And so they expect that the same mechanism more or less plays a role in communication in other animals, which would make sense, right? Yeah, I think we have talked previously about the way that, I think Justin had a story a couple of years ago actually about the way that pauses in conversations actually influence how people understand what we're saying. And if you pause too long, then listeners are like, I'm gonna go away right now. I'm not listening to you anymore. My brain's gonna enter it. But if you don't pause at all, it doesn't, the ideas, it doesn't give the brain enough time to process ideas. So it's not just in the communicator, communicate or, but it's also in the receiver, that the pauses are important for the production and also the reception. That might've been a story I did or it might've been, I worked with somebody who must've had a really slow processor because they would take the longest pauses. They would be saying something and then silence for several beats. And what was funny is being me, I would mad lib, I would like throw in words, I would finish sentences. But the person never, like it was as if they were offline. Like they didn't ever hear me inserting the word in the pauses. It was like- So this is a really interesting point because this is kind of what I wanted to ask is this to increase comprehension or is it because the communicator is taking a pause to figure out how best to communicate this most important information? And is this a by-product of that? And also if anyone who takes a public speaking course or has any sort of training in it knows that it's better to take a pause than to fill the pause with an uh or an um or a thn or a right or any of these things. First training I got when we started at KVS. First training piece of advice that I was giving at KVS is go listen to your first shows. Go listen to your first like- Count your likes, count your us. The us, ums, likes or like count them all up Oh my goodness. Yeah it was just riddled all the way through with that stuff. Yeah one of my first gigs taking animals to schools they did the same thing to me and that is an important lesson because this is exactly what's happening aside from it just maybe being annoying. It's giving space to help somebody's processor catch up and take in what you're saying. Fish do it. Electric fish do it but I think the you know the the important thing for this also is it has to do with the the power of the the pulse from the electric fish as well but the electric fish needs to pause to build up the power. They sure do. We're out of haggling, I'm gonna steal it. Yeah the William Shatner effect. This is exactly. About William Shatner he also emphasizes like the last syllable of the things he'd say. At least it's the last word. This is something I noticed oddly in my time in Denmark they will emphasize like a random word in the middle of the sentence. It'd be like as if I was going to tell you something but then it for no reason. Tell was like louder than for no apparent. It's a very monotonous language sort of to begin with but there'll be an emphasis on a word for apparently no reason. Like somewhere in the middle. We like emphasis. Yeah. Things. Emphasis. Blair. Yeah. Let's not have another pause. What's your next story? Yes. Well just like you need to be a good orator to be a good performer. Also sometimes it helps if you know magic I guess. So this is a study looking at Eurasian Js and if they can be fooled by a common magic trick this is from the University of Cambridge looking at whether Eurasian Js are equally tricked by sleight of hand. Over the past several years researchers have turned to magic tricks to learn more about blind spots that existed human perception. And so these in this new piece of research they sought to compare blind spots and perception between humans and animals. And of course they chose some of the smartest animals the Eurasian Js which are a Corbid. They're in the Corbid A family. And so obviously they're wicked smart. And they live in many parts of Western Europe Northern Africa and India. And they also are known to use trickery to keep other animals from stealing their food. So all that to say a good place to start to see if they can catch magic tricks. To test their perceptual blind spots researchers taught six of them to peg it on a human fist that had the treat. So then they were doing sleight of hand where the treat could change hands. So they show which hand the treat is in and do some sort of sleight of hand and they'd have to see if the J was tricked and if they picked the correct hand for the treat. So they use three well-known magic tricks all designed to move an object discreetly from one hand to the other. The first is the palm transfer. And that works by hiding the object in the palm as the transfer takes place. The French drop. Oh, so here we go. So we're watching them. So palm transfer. So let's see how this works. Did it stop? I think it stopped. I don't know if they can see anything. Yeah, it stopped. So it's, yeah, so it moves from one hand to the other. The palm, that was the palm transfer. The French drop work is by making it appear as if it falls from one hand to the other. So they'll drop it into the other hand but then it's actually still in the first hand. And then the fast pass is passing the object so quickly between hands that an observer loses track of it. So just passing them back and forth if you don't know which one is it. And they ran the magic tricks on birds multiple times. They kept track of how often they were able to find which one had the treat. And then they ran the same test with human volunteers. Here is the big asterisk. They did this with humans online. So there is a pretty big difference in this one variable here. In this, in the video we're watching right now, the magician is working with the J in real time in 3D, but their human counterparts were doing it in 2D online. And I do think that is a big difference as someone who really loves the magic tricks. I used to watch a lot of shows about magic tricks and stuff like that. Having the 2D versus the 3D is a pretty big difference but regardless, it's a good starting point I would say for this research. And so they looked at the data, they compared the birds with humans and they found that the birds were actually better at keeping track of the treats during French drops and palming but scored nearly equally on the fast pass. So, so first thing is that in studies with birds, we know that birds can smell. They're working with worms that the birds like and maybe the birds can smell them. So was there any kind of, I mean, where's the control for the stinky stuff? Really good question, right? Really you have to train them to pick something that isn't a treat for a treat reward, right? That would be the best way to do it is pick the Lego or something that doesn't smell and then you get, yeah. Yeah, that's a really good point. Yeah, so you have to get them to pick something that has no other contextual cues for and maybe also can you do it like a pigeon training where pigeons are trained to do, to tap a touch screen and can you get the birds to tap a touch screen after watching a video of the palm transfer or the fast pass, which would be similar to the video presentation that the humans would be experiencing. So I think that because they're 3D, like you mentioned that 3D 2D paradigm, it makes a completely different, completely different experience. But all that to say also, corvids are really smart. I'm not denying that, right? This is their whole thing is being able to hide stuff and trick other animals and also birds, a lot of birds have really good eyesight for fast moving things. And so I think there is something there that this isn't necessarily a measure of intelligence that we know they're smart. It could just be that they have better equipment to be able to kind of suss this thing out than we have, a little more slow to process. So who knows, we also are maybe are better at kind of the abstract side of magic which requires you to suspend disbelief a little bit and question yourself, which maybe the wild animals don't do as much. There's lots of things here, but I think it is very cool that this research is happening and I want more of it because I think, I think this is a really good thing. Magic is a really good thing, yes. Yeah, it's beside just being very fun. I think it is a really good way to suss out something that is difficult to do without sharing language with another species, which is, did you see what I saw? Yeah, do you have the same perceptions? Do you perceive what I perceive? And magic is a great way to investigate that. I think their conclusions, I think we're probably right on with just that the birds are looking for different things. These birds are hiding things themselves, they're looking for other trickery. We're not always looking for trickery in what we're looking for. We're gullible. The greatest magic trick. I saw the greatest magic trick on one of the iterations of a Brian Brushwood show where he had a guest in who was gonna demonstrate this card trick and it had to do with like, it was a little bit of a setup but he hands it over to the person and they shuffle it and then they have a third person pick a number and then he dealt out that many cards and flipped it over and it was the right card. And Brushwood is there trying to figure it out and he's just running down, he's like, you didn't touch, he had to hold the cards, that guy just picked a number. You don't, unless you know him and this is a scam on me, then I have no idea how this trick and it turned out that that's not the end of the trick. The end of the trick is, oh, that's not your right, the right card. Oh, well, what's written on my chest? Kind of one of those kind of sticks, right? But because it happened once out of, you know, 2% of the time, it's gonna happen to, and it just happened to be that card. The right card. There was no explanation for it and it was like the most amazing magic trick ever. Like, how did you do that? You're like, I didn't mean to. That was like one in a million. Or one in 52. Yeah, it was one in 52, which isn't that bad of odds but it wasn't supposed to be the end of the trick. But of course you stop right there. You just stop like, ah, I'm not good. And just pull that off. Yeah, magic. Magic. Yeah, and in the chat, there's the question, Kev B is asking what's the refresh rate of birds' eyes and birds do actually see at a higher frequency than other vertebrates. And some birds see even faster, they have a faster refresh rate than other birds even. So there's a, from the Audubon Society, the pied flycatchers in Europe can detect cycles at 145 Hertz, which is about 40 Hertz faster than anything else. So birds. Speedy vision. Speedy, speedy, speedy, speedy. You can't trick them. Nope. You gotta be faster than fast. Yeah. That's right. The magic castle for the J's wouldn't have any fun. No fun at all. Oh my goodness, this is This Week in Science. Woohoo, you're here with us. Thank you for joining the show. And if you'd like some awesome twist merchandise, please head over to twist.org and click on our Zazzle link. Blair made some new cool twist jogger pants. We've got some cool tank tops for summer. There's some really neat stuff in there in our Zazzle store. So please go check that out. Hey Justin, what else you got for us? Conservatives, more susceptible to believing falsehoods. In a new segment that I just created for this story called, did we really need a study to tell us that? Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. It's not as good as you thought it would be. I'm making up the. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. Yeah, conservatives, politically conservative folk are less able to distinguish truths from falsehoods than liberals. Caveat, as long as they think the content is political. This is actually, this first is just sort of like, ha ha, knew that. But at the other hand, this might come handy for a future trying to convince people of things. So the study had a few elements to it. It was done over six months a year. It was a year ago but it was a six-month study with 1,200 people. Each week they would give them ten real stories and ten fake stories that were sort of trending in the social media and in the news media and they would sort of have them evaluate it. So researchers found that both liberals and conservatives, this is all in the United States, tended to believe claims that conformed with their political views, not too surprising. But in doing so this more often led conservatives to accept falsehoods and reject true stories. So researchers also asked participants a series of question of 20 statements that were based on those stories. In the end they had like what 240 statements then each different beliefs are pretty stark. A true statement, poor conditions in several Texas migrant facilities including extreme overcrowding and serious health risks, showed 54% of Democrats correctly said that the statement is definitely true as opposed to only 18% of Republicans. False statement for political target Hillary Clinton polluted with Russia selling 20% of US's uranium supply to Russia in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation. That was a fake story. 2% of Democrats actually thought it was definitely true. 41% of Republicans thought it was true. The story was totally false. One of the major issues identifying the story is the way these widely shared truths and falsehoods have different implications for them. So a separate group of people who were recruited online were surveyed to do a rating system to determine whether the claims made in any of the statements of the stories would sort of politically favor liberals, politically favor conservatives, or if they were just neutral. If they were just a news story. So two-thirds of the high engagement true stories were characterized as benefiting liberals. Only 10% of accurate claims in those were considered beneficial to conservatives. So part of it is also if you're conservative, most of the information that you're getting fed, it seems like contains falsehoods. And there's very little accurate information being presented to you as part of your political ideology. Also, okay, so here's where it gets very interesting though. When they looked at just the conservatives and liberals were equally good at detecting truths and falsehoods when the stories were politically neutral. So when the stories were labeled politically in advance and they said, hey, these are going to be political, the conservatives didn't improve. They stayed the same, believe in a lot of the untruth ones. But the liberal side sort of got better. Once they knew it was political, they could sess out some, even if they agreed with their political ideology, they could sort of still sess them out as not being true once they realized that they were being, you know, specifically politically targeted. But the fact that they, when it was just neutral information news stories that they could equally detect, which was true and which wasn't, kind of showed a truth bias on things that they believe is connected to their ideology amongst conservatives. This was done at Ohio State University. Kelly Garrett was the co-author and professor of communications there at that university saying, that's a problem because some of the claims were outlandish. There should have been no ambiguity about whether or not they were true, he said. We show that media environment is shaping people's ability to do this very basic fundamental task. Democracy depends on people being able to tell the difference between what is true and false, and it falters when people have difficulty agreeing on what is real. Yeah, I mean, if truth and reality are debatable or we're living in different ones, how can we have a common democracy? Democracy is a shared system. It breaks down. Yeah, so this is essential. A couple of things that I was pointing out is that first of all, it's really tough for conservatives to have a good compass for what is a truth story and what is a false story, because the majority of the diet that the conservative media is feeding them tends to be false and misleading. Yeah. The other thing it tells us. Or contain false and misleading information, maybe nuggets of truth, but then, yeah. The other thing that this tells us is that if you can separate something like global warming from political ideology, if you could separate something like the response to a pandemic from political, that they would be right there with the liberals and being able to tell what's a real story and what's a fake story. If it's just news, they have the same rationing ability. It's just they get this weird truth bias for stories that they think is conservative, which is what the entire, this is why now that now, I mean, if you were saying this ahead of the pandemic, we could be like, oh, well, maybe that's true. What are you talking about taxes? What are you talking about? Global warming, it might be true, but maybe it's awesome. And then look what happened with the pandemic. What happened with the people who rated the capital thinking who had been told that the election had been stolen? Like look at the if you see it in the real world, it is just absolutely this was actually this whole study took place before the assault on the capital. So it's really, this is like two issues. So one, how do you train the general public to be skeptical and identify truth, right? Apparently, we're already pretty good at it pretty decently. We're not in particular cases. So how do you make that universal, right? So the second piece to that is, how do you change the way political information is put out there? Because the problem is that we're all being bombarded all day every day. And it's very difficult to identify what is political and what is not. So, so, but the thing is, we're just showing up really late to the game Blair, what what what's already been figured out. It's how to make everything political is how to make every issue that you want to get through political, regardless of it's not labeled, right? So like, your brain is doing the heavy lifting of connecting something and creating a bias because it's political. But it's being delivered to you as a news article. And so you then think it is truth. Well, but that's that's the difference. So if it was just a news article, you would be able to differentiate better when you're told that there's a political element to it. That's when that's when the change is happening. So what then this is what's especially interesting that I read a transcript from Tucker Carlson's program from last week. And it was a science episode. And so yeah, he but they talked about COVID related science, they talked about science communication, they talked about diversity in science, they talked about climate change, all the very issues. But the way he framed it and the way that the reporting and big air quotes here was done was done in such a way that what the first thing that they did was it was a twist science. So the liberals are treating science as politics. The liberals are treating science as belief. The liberals are in we know better, we know what's true. We know what's right. And so there was this very interesting framing right from the get go that Hi, we're on a team. And we know what's right. And we know science isn't political. But this other group is making science political. And that's where and that's how it started and it got worse from there. And so it this is the framing you're talking about just this is what's happening in in a lot of quote unquote news, it's not news. And that's why they're why people are being well, it can be so easily misdirected. Yes. And I think that the key part of this is that's why when you look at a thing like Fox News, that's why they're getting away from the they're getting rid of the news segments is because those aren't effective at getting propaganda pushed through what you need is something that says it's propaganda. No, you need the thing that that's what it's if you need to tell people that this is political propaganda. I mean, you need to present it almost as like baseless political propaganda for it to be believed by conservatives. That that's it's the weirdest thing like you think it wouldn't work but they've tapped into it because it's what it works really well on them. So now we have to figure out something else to get people paying more attention and figuring out when they're being manipulated because you know what? And you know there are people out there who would be like, twist is manipulating people. Of course we are. I'd like you to like information. That's how you know what? I'm not going to be stopped by the Green New Deal. I'm going to try to put an end to global warming because that's what we need to do as a country. Not this Green New Deal. I mean, not these not these liberals, not this liberal assault on science. What we need is carbon taxes, new technologies, new sustainable technologies. There's new technologies. Okay. I'd like to talk about more science so that we can finish the show before it gets to be too late. Did you have any more stories, Justin? Well, there was one. I guess it doesn't matter. It's just it's just it doesn't matter. It's a team of researchers University of Aviero and University of Porto both in both in Portugal University of Birmingham in the UK found that for humans, and this is also reminding me of the our guests a little bit, the brain and testes have the highest number of common proteins. And their paper published in the Journal Royal Society Open Biology. The group describes the huge amount of protein similarities between the two tissues. And Meena made me wonder, did they even study vaginas? Why bother? I mean, that's a big question, right? I mean, or not vaginas, let's not let's not. If not vaginas, then the ovaries. Yeah, because if they're talking about all the vagina parts, don't, don't talking about the testes. Let's talk about the ovaries. Is that what the equivalent? Yes. Okay. Well, you learn something new. Oh, my God. I'm just kidding. No, no, I'm just kidding. But they they say that the it was the just keep my mouth shut on this is just the finding was not surprising. Considering that proteins from both organs consume high amounts of fuel, one to process thinking the other to produce millions of sperm every day. Again, the menstrual cycle is probably doing a lot of work. That's not being covered in this. So it sort of also fits with also noted they also note that testes and nerve cells are both involved in moving material created inside of them to an outside environment. sperm sales move fertilization factors and neurons move neurotransmitters. So they also have some similarities there. Yeah, I'd love to find out where there are other similarities. But that's interesting. The highest protonaceous similarities. You know what might be similar? It's like, can you really tell the difference between a black hole and dark matter? I know I can't really get really close. But then it's too late. That is too late, right? So this is a very interesting question being asked by astrophysicists right now publishing in the journal monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters. A group of researchers at the International Center for Relativistic Astrophysics are suggesting that the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A that lives at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is in fact not a black hole, but a mass of dark matter. What? Yeah. So I mean, the question really is like, if you have a big mass, whether that mass is compressed down and imploded and sucked into inner space like a black hole, or whether it's just a big mass that's got the same masses as a black hole, wouldn't you really be able to tell if it had the same Schwartz child radius limits if it had the same gravitational effects if things acted in the same way? What they're saying their evidence is they looked at a bunch of star clusters and they all everybody's been like, Oh, look at they act gravitationally correct everything. It's like predicted for a black hole. So it should be a black hole. Well, they looked at a gas cloud that got really close to sagae. And they said, Okay, that should have been devoured should have just been eaten right up by that black hole. And it wasn't. It passed right through. So is it not a black hole? Is it just a mass of dark matter? And if it is a mass of dark matter, what does that mean for black hole formation and big galaxies? And could it be that there is a certain point at which enough dark matter accumulates that it creates a black hole finally? There are so many questions and so many things we don't know. But this, of course, will be debated within the astrophysics community. I mean, do black holes even exist? Who knows? Who knows? Our math says they do. Yeah, no, they do. But but we took a picture of one. The argument, the argument would be that you have a much more, a much larger, you don't have a singularity. So you have a larger area that's containing this mass that hasn't collapsed on itself. And what would be able to do that with that much? I guess maybe the dark matter could do that. Yeah. And I hadn't realized it, but researchers are calling the stuff that would be in dark matter now, darkinos. Oh, don't give it a particley thing yet. They're giving it a particley name. Darkinos belong to the same group group as fermions. Yeah, I don't know about that. But anyway, moving moving on from dark matter, who here wants super hearing? Do you want to hear bats? You can hear the little high pitched super high frequency 20,000 Hertz sounds that bats make? Do you want to hear that? Yeah, I'd also just like my hearing back from before I went to too many concerts. That also would be good. Well, yeah, there is that as well. My original hearing back. But yes, bat hearing would be great also. I would like that original hearing back as well. Researchers have published in nature in scientific reports this week, superhuman spatial hearing technology for ultrasonic frequencies. They have created a wonderful device that you strap to your head. And as you strap it to your head, then it can collect here, it can hear the sounds that you can't. And then that is connected to computer and can then filter the sounds, make turn them into the frequencies that we are within our audible range, and then give us a sound that you that we can hear. And that is directional so that you can pinpoint where it comes from. All of this processing happens within about 44 milliseconds, which is just shy of where we lose our spatial resolution. So I'm gonna show you. I'm gonna show this picture to everybody who's here. Yes, so this device, it's a it's a ball. It looks like he has antenna. It's like antenna. It's like an apical antenna, right? It's just a single antenna that is wired sticks out from a wire from the top of the head and is attached to a headphone array. And they put a lot of they put a number of volunteers in a an enclosed audio room, a quiet room where they were played these sounds. And they were able to prove prove a concept that this device could allow people ultrasonic hearing, you're not really hearing ultrasound, they're just turning the ultrasound into a sound that you can hear, but could be useful for people who are trying to locate high pitched frequencies and the sources of those high pitched frequencies. Where'd that come from? So it's kind of like turning a blacklight on to see UV, right? I mean, you're, you're, you're basically adjusting what you're perceiving to perceive something that other animals can perceive on their own. They can perceive it on their own. Yeah. It's just but using technology to enable that perception. And the researchers say that the technique, in addition to just being kind of cool and allowing this perception that we wouldn't normally have. It's the other idea there are other possibilities of real world applications. The researchers say finding sources of ultrasonic sound is useful in situations like finding leaks in pressurized gas pipes. Minor pipe leaks often produce strong ultrasound emissions that aren't detected by normal hearing. It can also allow us to spot the sound source quickly. Also damaged electrical equipment emit ultrasound and so the device could be used for locating faulty equipment in places like data centers. So there are some real world uses for more than just bat researchers. Go out and look at bats. Whoop, whoop. What's that? Physics, physics police just pulled me over. It says dark matter has to be made out of particles. There's no other possibility without throwing out all of the standard model. Well, it's particles, but I think they just made up. I mean, everything's made up but dark eye on dark eons. Come on. Because it's well, the problem then then is just like it should go to the person who discovers something at some point, but they haven't discovered it yet. Name it in advance. They haven't yet. I'm just Justinians. Yeah. Justinian particles. You got to be the one that finds it. Okay, I want everybody to look. This is this this study is going to lead everybody to look into their eyes. Look into the eyes of people around you. How big are the how big are the pupils in those people? How big? Do you ever notice how big people's pupils are on a regular basis aside from Oh, it's really dark in here and your pupils or their concussed or concussions or I'm checking your pupils for concussions. Well, there is a study out this week that suggests that our pupil size is correlated with intelligence. Do they really vary that much though? Oh, so it does vary. Pupil size our pupil size varies all the time. And so the researchers looked at another number of studies that had been done previously to kind of somebody with big pupils. It's not so the pupils can normally range from around two to eight millimeters in size and the iris is responsible for controlling the pupils. And so the there have been a number of studies that test fluid intelligence and working memory. And while the studies have been done, researchers have noticed that there have been differences. They have people staring at screens for a long time and doing eye tracking and they have collected data on pupil size and they noticed this correlation. So they started looking for a more specific relationship because our pupils are also related to a lot of emotion. So how how I guess attentive you are, it's been used in lie detector tests, whether or not your pupils change size, right? Well, yes and no. Yes and no, you can train yourself out of it. If you know to be to train but test itself is unreliable on scientific and your pupils are a sign of arousal. And we do know that pupils opening and being a little bit more dilated that occurs when people are attracted to each other. There is a connection between human behavior and pupil size. And so these researchers found that there is a larger the larger the baseline pupil size not related to how much it varies all over the place. But that the baseline the larger the baseline that's correlated with a greater fluid intelligence, better ability to control your attention, and also working memory capacity but not quite to as much of an extent. They also connected it to an area of the brain called the locus, so early us. And this is in the upper brainstem. And it's kind of an entry point to a lot of other areas in the brain. It regulates a bunch of processes like perception, attention, learning and memory. So it's connected in that way. And, and so they need to really figure out this relationship more. But pupil size is related to activity level in this brain nucleus. So there's stuff going on and they don't understand it completely. But there may be a connection between said you want the size of your pupils, you want a bigger pupil? Is that the smarter people? Yeah, you want a little bit bigger. You want a bigger pupil baseline. Not you don't want to be dilated all the time, because then you're going to just have issues. But but it's interesting, they did also find that there is a negative correlation between age and intelligence. So as you get older, it's like your pupils get smaller. And so there's aging affects affects your pupil size, or is it affecting your intelligence? I don't know. There are some other factors that need to be dealt into. You need to control this for specific subsets. You need to look at pupil size across women, then you need to look at pupil size across men, and then you need to look at pupil size across ages, and then you need to look at pupil size across like iris color, and then you you know, there's so much going on. It's correlation. Yeah, it's you need to look at it across people with a astigmatism, because now you're also talking about a physical sunny day. What if it's a poorly, that's not what they're talking about. But it's there are a lot of factors that go into the shape and size and features within your physical eyeball. Yeah, like they're not you're a cat. Yeah. Yeah, because then your pupils really short in one direction, but really long and long and directed. It's going to throw all of it sideways and sheepling a little bar. And you're creepy. I'm not a fan of goats. Oh, yeah, it's a space goat. And the various plans to take over. All right, I have one final study for the show tonight. And it turns out if you starve yourself, your memory is going to be better. Not exactly starving yourself. So in this study, researchers looked at intermittent fasting versus caloric restriction. Both of them were matched to an average about eight 10% dietary caloric reduction. And they found that after three months, this is of course not in humans in mice, mice on the intermittent fasting had an increase in adult hippocampal neurogenesis. That means more brain cells in the hippocampus in the adults than the caloric restriction group. And they had better long term retention of tasks that they had been learning. They did some analysis of the what was going on in the hippocampus, what was getting turned on molecularly. And there's a gene, longevity gene that gets turned on in the intermittent fasting that does not get turned on with caloric restriction called Clotho. Clotho gets turned on up regulates the neurogenesis and potentially facilitates long term memory consolidation. Who knows intermittent fasting one day on one day off one day on one day off, starve yourself, you will remember things if you're you also might have liver damage or other problems. So keep that in mind. Take that into account. Yeah, intermittent fasting in 10 years. We're gonna really know if it was a good idea or a really terrible idea. That's like Atkins, right? It was a thing that was all the rage. And now everybody knows it's actually really bad for you. It's something that I I'm very I'm very curious to see what what the science says with intermittent fasting is done. It's interesting. There's a potential for it to have some good side effects as well. Yeah, what what is it? What is it going to be doing? I could I could I could almost suss out a mechanism within the microbiota of the microbiota being like they haven't sent us anything for a while. Do you think did they forget where food is? Let's go send them some reminders of where food is. Let's boost that memory system. So remember where it put food where the last time it's except I can tell you when I am hungry, I cannot focus. So I feel like that's the hard part here is brain need food. You're also gonna be if you're hungry, you're gonna be more motivated to find food and remember food. It's a survival tactic. So if these are food related tasks, which most definitely they were, you're talking about Morris water maize. Yeah, even if they're not like specifically food related. Yeah, that's what the brain is built for. Your brain is mostly built to feed you to tell you to go find food, get food, feed yourself. All the other things that we're doing are just hijacking a system that was there just to find food in the first place. That's all it was there to do and then reproduce. Yeah. Yeah, reproduce, find food, reproduce, find food, reproduce, find food, reproduce, find food, reproduce, I can't say that fast. Find food, reproduce, sleep, find food, you try it. It's hard. I shan't. Yeah, well, we're not mice. But of course, this is going to lead the researchers to looking at more deeply. Clotho has already been identified as a longevity gene. Is this the kind of gene that could be targeted with a with a drug with a medication with with something gene therapy who knows to enable better memory into old age? Is this something that we'll find maybe we don't have to fast intermittently as we age to keep our memory fresh. Maybe we can just pop a pill. Or as Justin is is suggesting, update our microbiome, or you know, maybe there are things that we can do to give our body the messages that it needs to keep us keep us healthy and stronger longer. Have we made it to the end of another show? I do believe we have. Oh, here we are. So many stories and we made it. We did it everyone. That's a good time. They had a great time everyone. Do we have any? Um, no, no news is good news at the end of the show. I would like to say thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you for listening. Thank you all for joining us. Thank you to our guests this evening. Doctors Kate Clancy and Catherine Lee for joining us to talk with us about women's reproductive health and the and vaccines. It's really an interesting area of study that I hadn't considered in quite the way that they brought it to us this evening. So it's always nice to be be struck by a new way of thinking about something. Shout outs to Fada for your help with social media with show notes. Gord, thank you for manning the chat room. Thank you to everyone who's in the Twitch chat room right now. Hope everyone's having a good time in there. People in our discord in a discord talking. Thank you for joining us in discord also and in YouTube in our chat room and on Facebook in our chat room. Thank you for being with us during the show. Thank you identity for for recording the show and thank you, Rachel for your wonderful assistance. I would also love to thank our Patreon sponsors for their wonderful support of twists. I can't hit the buttons fast enough. Thank you to Pierre Ralph E. 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So everybody listen and I'll broadcast my appliance. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. Science. Science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news that what I say may not represent your views but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan if you listen to the science you may just get understand that we're not trying to threaten your philosophy in science. This week in science. Science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. Science. On a 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. This week in science. Science. Science. Science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. Science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. We can science. We have to show where'd they go? They all disappeared. Everyone's out of here, huh? But they're still there. Technically. We made it to the end of another show. What was that everyone? Thank you for joining us. That was a good time. Good interview. Good fun. Good time had by all. Yay! I like the clapping hands. Yes clap, clap, clap. We had fun. That was a good one. Got some good stories in. Thank you all for joining us. It's the after show. There's Blair. Bring her back now. Where'd you go? I just have to say goodbye to my healthcare worker on his way out the door. Nice. Yeah. Oh, interesting study that didn't come to the show this week that you might be interested in. I was annoyed with the words used to describe and explain things. Okay. Abstract to the study, but at the same time it's very interesting. They started trying to apply chronotypes to shift workers in their study. They didn't look at health outcomes, but they did. They had people wear activity trackers who worked in shift work and then applied that to whether or not they were early birds or night owls and so how much tried to figure out how much sleep they got and when they slept based on when their shift was and what their chronotype was. So, this is very interesting. This is kind of pertinent because he's been dealing with some interesting stuff lately. So, for most of our relationship, he has been able to switch to be diurnal on his longer weekends, but he acts pretty tired sometimes, especially on those first couple days, right? Which wouldn't anyone, right? Yeah. But that's been he's listening to me talking about it. He's like, wait a minute. What you talking about? So, that was the beginning and then for a while he was, you have to leave though. He's like, but this is about me. Hold on. Go mend people. Go. But then for a while, he's been really good at like completely switching to diurnal, just like drop of a hat. But then the last couple weeks he's been sleeping amazingly during the day and having a harder time being awake during the day. So, like I've been very curious about this. Like, is this something that can change with you as a person seasonally as different kind of like as you age? Like, are these all different things that can happen? Because even, you know, in the five years I've known him, he's had very different responses to shift work and it's never been to fall asleep at work, which I think is really funny. He's really good at working at night and being awake in the middle of the night, but it's how he adjusts to trying to be a normal human on other days that changes. Yeah. But so, I see this team link shift worker sleep to chronotype. This is probably what you're talking about. Yep. That's what I was talking about. Yeah. Like they didn't, they haven't, they haven't linked it to health yet, but they said that's their next step is to actually look into this population and see whether it has any impact on health. Identity four, I did get your messages about turning off discord noises. So, now I don't hear anything, which is good. I just have to watch the stream to see if people are tagging me in the discord stream. Yeah. Okay. So, relationship between chronotype and sleep behavior and shift workers during morning, evening and night shifts to investigate the relationship. They tracked police officers as they worked their usual shifts. Close to a month, they wore a watch like device. Okay. Yeah. There's also, I remember, I had a, I remember, you can tell I'm getting tired. I remember. I remember. I remember things. I remember I had a professor in college who was my evolutionary physiology teacher. And so, we talked a lot about like torpor and sleep systems and of course, many other systems in the body, but he, he really enjoyed saying that this whole idea of eight hours a night is totally BS. Basically, like every body is different and every sleep cycle is different and every, ooh, somebody's got the zoomies. Oh my gosh. Okay. Where are you doing? Go, Sadie. Sadie. Can I help you? Anyway, he only slept four hours a night. Ever. Ever. He didn't need, he didn't need more. That was it. So, perhaps that's it. That's not just when you wake up or when you go to sleep. So, there's the early bird or night owl, but maybe there's the different chronotype for how much sleep you need. Yes. Right? Yes. 100%. People who don't need much sleep, maybe they have, maybe they have a different, maybe they have like a different, a dinosign metabolism speed, which, you know, maybe there are molecular processing speeds that are faster or slower and different people for the turnover and, because there's one thought that there's this build up of, and I, and I want to say it's a dinosign, adenosine, adenosine, that builds up during the day and then basically at night, what happens is your brain has to clean it all out and process through it. And so, it's like that determines how tired you get and how much sleep you need. Right. That's one hypothesis. Yeah. No, that's very interesting. That would be genetically based. Yeah, but I also do think it's going to change depending on where you are in your life cycle, because like we know, for example, that teenagers actually need way more sleep than adults, but also that they sleep at different hours. So, teenagers want, are hardwired to sleep from like 2am to 10am. Yeah. So, the fact that we make them go to school at seven is ridiculous. But anyway, I would be interesting to see, for example, when Brian started shift work, he was in his 20s. Right. And now he's in his 30s, is there a difference with how his body reacts to shift work because of that? Well, you know, like, what is it, 30, 35? You're basically, you're basically dead. Well, then he's already dead and I'm about to join him. So, well, that's just a no. Yeah. It's the idea that at quote unquote, 30, you stop developing and then it's at 35 that you start falling apart. In my experience, it was at 35. I think it was 31 for me, is when it all started happening. The back and the knees and the shoulders and the memory and the memory and the hurting my back from laying in bed. That's a thing that happens now. It's all so great. I love it. Sorry, Frumpy B. I didn't mean to let you know this way. Anyway, yeah, that's very interesting. I think, I mean, that's definitely true. There are definitely things. There are night owls and early birds. That is a thing. Yeah. I can't really see 7am at the absolute latest. I know that Kiki, you have a very different reality. Yes. In fact, I'm happier. I have a better day if I wake up between 5.30 and 6.30. That is the time that my body wants to wake up. But that also means my body likes to go to sleep between 9.30 and 10.30. So, Wednesdays are tough for me. Yeah, because I'm asking you to stay up. This is your shift work. Yeah. Don't let him hear you say that. I'm glad he's on. Players one night of shift work a week. I think there are so many questions. Again, it's like all the layers of the onion. When you start digging into what could possibly explain various things, it's like, oh, there's a lot of factors involved. There are a lot of pieces. How are you doing with jet lag, Justin? No, I can't hear you. I'm muted. Yeah, I was doing pretty good. I've been doing reasonable. Coming this way is a lot easier. Yeah. A lot easier than going the other direction. It seems to turn around in that, oh, the first three or four days and I'm usually fine. The other way can easily take 10 days before I'm feeling it. I feel like whenever I came back, it was always the first 48 hours, I was fine. And then the jet lag lasted for close to two weeks. Hey, Kevvie is pointing out that we have not shouted out our discord. Yes, our discord, we have a link to it. You can get a link easily by becoming a patron. If you are a patron on Patreon, you can get in the discord. But because we are moving away, have moved, but I tried to get into the free node site and it wouldn't let me in tonight. Yeah, it does that once in a while. I tried and it said, no, your robots are bad. So so my robots were bad tonight. I couldn't get into the free node. But Justin, you weren't here last week and we had a whole big thing because there's been a kerfuffle. Oh, no. Oh, not that both. Yeah, one week. Not good at the free node. And so the kerfuffle above has led people to want to consider moving other places. There is another chat site that I think Thunderbeaver had had set up and had saved for us on Libera, I think is the chat site. So there's a chat site Libera, but I forgot about that until just right now. And so I'm honest about that. I forgot to go to it. So yeah, we've got YouTube, we've got Facebook, we've got Twitch, and we also have discord. And the discord is good because it's kind of like an all the time thing kind of like another like a like the free node could have been we're setting it up with different different rooms so that you can recommend stories and interviews and other things. It's personally I really enjoyed not having to watch an extra window tonight. That was really nice. I felt off balance because I didn't have the window there. And then I was confused by the discord and then I was like, I need to be watching twitch and then I'm like, no, because I can watch the twitch with the YouTube and every I was watching it all right here. So it's fine. Yeah. Yeah, I just was I was very off balance for a moment. But I can learn new things. It can happen. We're doing it. Yeah, we're doing it. Yeah, so the discord. For those of you, I can invite again, again, I have to be in another place because I'm on two different computers, two different screens. How do I invite you to a month now? I didn't know that. What did that happen? Invite people. There it is. Search for friends. I can invite people. I can write that down. I don't know. Do we make do we make the discord public for anybody and then just manage people in the discord and have a private discord room for Patreon people? This might be an unpopular opinion, but I say no, they can go to Twitch. It's nice to have a place just for the Patreon people, I think. I think that's really nice. It is. I think but I think there are a lot of people who would also like to have conversations with us throughout the week. Maybe that's Patreon, huh? I mean, that's the please help. Yeah, maybe that makes sense. I mean, there's enough other places to find us. We're on Twitter. We're on Facebook. There's other ways to talk to us. I feel like if you want to if you want to have a direct connect to like basically a text message thread with us, you need to be on Patreon for like $3 a month. I've got people, Gord and identity 4 saying there are a lot of people who do discord public with a section specifically for Patreon. I don't know what discord is. It's just it's a chat room. It's a chat room app. Basically, I don't know. I don't really have enough of that. Actually, this is my thing. I'm trying to go there if I don't want. I'm trying. This is why I I'd rather not add in was it Liberia because I just I feel like we have enough and I feel like it's nice. It's nice to be moderated, right? And I don't want to stretch our moderators too thin. You know, it's I feel like there are more shows than not where somebody has to get booted or at least reminded of the rules. So I want to be cognizant of that. And I don't want there to be weird drift happening with spaces that we are quote unquote hosting. Yeah. And like everyone was saying last week, really, people people would like to be where we are for the chat. So wherever we will be to talk during the show, whether that is the Twitch chat room or Discord or for me, I can I can respond to all of the chat rooms already. There's already like a big go. Can be Justin would love discord got your gamers saying tell Justin to join Twitch. I got to choose between million requests for where I'm going to be. This is what I'm saying. I think we should just use Twitch slash YouTube slash Facebook, but really just Twitch for the live show. And we can use discord for the not live show. That's my opinion. So the reason I would say if you can you can just do discord because do I have to come up with another another username? Yeah, another password. Just do the same one again. But yes. Yeah, you need a password. So hard. It's so hard. Oh my gosh. Yes. Why are we going to say discord just for Justin or for everything? Well, as I was starting to set it up and you managed it wonderfully during the show tonight, but you have to remember to turn off the Twitch stream so that you're only talking in the chat and not broadcasting the audio. That would be weird. Yes. But it's not an issue if you remember here. I'm going to tell you can pop out and chat is how I did it. So I actually, I don't even have the stream open on Twitch. I closed that window. I just have the Twitch chat room open because you can pop it out. I'm going to sit my butt down. Don't mind me. There, Justin, I put the discord in our private chat if you want to try joining. Well, it's just a link to the thing, right? It's the invitation link to go to discord if you haven't gotten into discord before. Identity 4 says you can rock, paper, scissors forum, but Blair gets Twitch. You have to be invited. Blair gets it. Yep, grouchy gamer. Password. That's easy. Exactly. Easy to get in. There we go. I know noodles. I'm used to free node too. And honestly, I've tried, I just tried again to log in and it said capture invalid. Seriously, it doesn't like my robots anymore. I think it's just not liking me tonight. I don't know why. No free node. No free node. Yep, lots of people do Patreon only discord as well right now. I know that we have concerns. Does a Patreon only discord. Oh, it booted me out. I already booted you. Something's going on here. All right, it already broke. Okay. Yeah, each one of us could monitor a chat. That's one thing. We could just pick our places. I just kind of try and watch the whole stream go by. The only way it would really be a huge issue is if we suddenly got rated by a massive number of people who decided they had to chat a lot. And then there was no way I would be able to keep up with the chat, but our chat is wonderful. Yeah. I mean, as it is, I don't look at the chat at all while I'm reporting a story, obviously. So I have to like go back afterwards. Afterwards. Yeah, but Twitch takes your ram. Are you gonna be my mod? Ooh, a science island channel for patrons. Yes. Justin will like discord. He'll love. Oh, Jacksonfly landed. And then he got kicked out. Yeah, rival factions. You're right, Dave Shorty. Somebody took your collar off your naked. I mean, really, Dave Shorty, what I'm trying to do is use all the things to steer people to download the podcast. I mean, the video first is awesome, but the podcast is the... That's the thing. That's the Britain, but that's the thing. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So if you are on Twitch or discord, we need emotes, right? No, not discord. Does discord do emotes? No. Yes. I'm confused, but I know on Twitch, they do emotes and that would be a lot of fun. We need disembodied floating head emotes for Twitch. Of us or what? Yeah, of us. We need one of Sadie. We need a Sadie emotes. Yes, definitely. That'd be great. Yeah, we need a Sadie emotes. We need like a science emotes. Oh, we need a whole bunch of fun Twitch emotes. I don't know how to do that stuff, but that sounds great. Yes, please. It'll be so fun. I know. What's in the moat? Oh, Gord's thinking about it. Oh, and discord integrates with the Twitch emotes. Very cool. Justin's giving up. He's like, ah. Yeah, it didn't work. I tried. You did try. Tried once. Tried once. That's it. Flying out. Yep. No emotes in IRC. That's true. No emotes in IRC. Says, whoops, unable to accept invite. Oh, maybe it didn't work because I didn't copy and paste it. I don't know. Maybe I can. It shows him there, but you know what? It's fine. I'll just create an account and then try to find it. I don't even understand. It said you landed, though. Yeah, it said you came in. Then it wanted my phone number, then it wanted my email, and then it booted me out again. So I got all my information and then it ghosted me. Did it say that you needed to check your email to verify yourself? No, it didn't. It wanted to do the phone, and then I did a phone verification. It's fine. I'll just try it some other time. Justin has to be on Patreon. Maybe. Oh, oh, maybe that's it. I don't think so, because I had to make a discord and then link it with the Patreon, so I don't think so. I didn't have to do that though. All right. Yeah, Justin, Harad's saying that you just have to validate your email. So if you open your email, they're going to say like, and that does sound familiar to me. I think you have to like- Justin needs to validate it yourself. Click a link from your email that says, yep, I'm real. There's no email link. No, it actually asked for my phone number. I gave it to it. It asked for a code, popped up on my phone. I put the code in. Then it asked me to verify email. I put in the email and then it wanted a password. Now, unless it's asking for my email's password, which I'm not giving it, I put in the password that I had me come up with for the discord earlier. That didn't work. So, uh, yeah, I don't know. You give up so easy. Yeah, I was enough. I'm done. One less thing I have to worry about. I want to chat with people. You guys have not looked at any of the UAP, whatever they're calling it. I've heard about it. I didn't really know. I didn't even look at it. Nope. Wow. No. I wasn't interested. I'm pretty awesome. It's pretty awesome. Yeah. Very much. Oh gosh, what's his name? Now I'm forgetting. Who's our Astro Space Junk Satellite Tracker guy? Oh, yeah. Yeah. What about him? I want to talk to him about it. About the UAPs. I think it's Space Junk. I think it's re-entering Space Junk. Because if you look at it, this is the interesting thing. If you look at it, they're using infrared and it is, depending on which mode they have it in, super dark or super bright, but whatever, it means that the thing is really, really, really cold. Oh yeah. This just looks like trash. Yeah. It's trash floating down. So, so the backstory of this is there's a ship that has been tracking hundreds of things that they are saying you're falling from like falling like snow over the course of a week, starting at like 80,000 feet, which is sort of the range of their, I guess their detectors, right? And this stuff is coming down, but they don't know what it is. So they call these planes in that are flying a training mission nearby to come look and they say, Hey, are you guys armed? And they go, no. And they go, great, come check, take a look. But the ones who are flying are like, they're asking us if we're armed, we better be on. Like we're not armed, but let's go check it out. But they're fighter pilots. They're getting called in to see something that somebody else has already seen. They are thinking vehicle. They're thinking plane, missile, drone, something. This is how they're attacking. So of course, what they are saying that they think is they're saying is a vehicle because that's all they're trained to see. Meanwhile, the guy is talking about, yeah, it was like way down below and then it disappeared. Disappeared means he lost contact with it because they're doing everything through this. They're not eyeballing out. They're not leaning out of the plane looking. This is all on the sensors. So the thing loses track of it. And then suddenly, secondly, boom, it's at 80,000 feet. It moved that far that fast. They don't know that the ship is reported that they've been tracking hundreds of objects. So they lose one object. They see another one up there, assumes it's the same object. Later when they lose track of that one, they find another plane picks it up 60 miles away. Again, they're assuming it's the same object. But the boat, they called them in. That's an interesting point. Yeah. It's tracked at least 100 objects already from what they could see. Now, if you look at the picture, the things moving, all this report about change of direction or whatever, none of that's caught on the data on the footage. All you see there is the things is moving linearly. It's just going in a direction. And it looks like if all of these things are coming across and they say there was multiple of these objects that were sort of flying through, they can be very small, but very cold. And what's the thing? Anything that comes in from space is really, really, really cold. Meteorites that hit the earth don't hit smoldering in that pile of steamy anything like you see in the movies. They come in really, really cold because they've been out in space. All those objects are colder than anything on earth. So the fact of this thing. They get heated up by the atmosphere though. No, not really. I mean, if you, if you're big enough and you re-enter at the wrong angles and you're coming really fast, then yeah, you're going to have this heat up thing. But still the core of it is it's, that's brief. The core of the object is going to be cold. Meteorites are coming in cold. They land cold. They don't land hot. This thing's really cold, which tells you, I mean, it's up up there with airplanes up, whatever. It's really, really freezing cold up there anyway. But yeah, it makes it look like this is just space debris that's on re-entry because the re-entry thing isn't also going to come straight down. It's going to come in and be moving as if it's like a plane or something flying. It's going to come in as though it's flying because it's been doing these loops and then the loop gets pulled in and now it's coming down, but it's kind of still going across. It's not just going to plummet. And it should be moving. One of the things I'm seeing too is that there's visual, there's optical illusions related to taking videos of things while you're flying. So it's two things. The plane is flying and the camera is moving while tracking the thing. That's how it looks stable there. The camera on there is moving. And when you have all those things moving, the water might look like it's moving faster too. So it could be a slower moving object. I kind of believe that it's faster moving than that. But the size of the object, because they're just doing it, they're only visualizing it in infrared, is however cold or hot it is. And this object is very, very, very cold. Publicity stunt? I like the idea of it being space trash. It doesn't seem like, get better cameras and then go to press. Well, so here's the other thing. Here's the other thing that's about it. So one guy is saying they see this almost every day. They have objects like this almost every day. We have so much space debris raining down. That like, yeah, it could just be space debris raining down there. And we're not tracking it. And that's part of the whole story there is that we're not tracking it. We don't know all the things that people, different countries have put up in space. Not everything's been reported. These could be CubeSats coming down. Really? We tossed up the CubeSats and now they're coming down. Because they just don't go way out there. They end up in a low orbit thing anyway. And the fact that you're getting clusters of them sounds like an object that has deteriorated and is coming through in the same sort of window of time and space. The other aspect of it is that they've seen lots of these. This probably isn't the only two that are recorded. They're the only two that have been leaked. Maybe it's because they're the only two where the camera work when the excitement of the pilots is such that they're not going, oh, look, another piece of space debris. Yeah, I see that every day. Like, if the pilots are saying that, then it has no truck. The people who were working on this supposedly investigating this for the government and a program that cost $22 million are the ones who eventually were responsible for the circumventingly leaking this. Two videos. Getting two declassified. All the undeclassified ones are probably a lot more boring. Well, also, so Stephen Reyn in the chat room in YouTube brings a really good point up, which is that there are top secret projects in space from different countries, from lots of countries. Yeah. So it could be trash. It could also be something that's taken off or landing and we didn't know about it or... Yeah, it looks too small. It looks like debris. It doesn't look like it's powered at all. It looks like a cold thing falling from low earth orbit. So it looks like a little bit of space trash. None of the footage shows it darting around or doing any of the moving things that the, you know, visually is the only time we've gotten a report that it did something wonky like that. Yeah. So I'm not impressed. I don't have, I don't have... Not impressed. Yeah. Yet you were upset that we hadn't looked. Which one am I talking about? Physics please. I'm mostly talking about the tic-tac, whatever, tic-tac one. There's a follow-up to the tic-tac, which is they say is the same object seconds away, 60 miles, but it could be a different object because they didn't have continuous traceability chain because of the contact with the thing. Oh, I think, I mean, okay, what's really... There are multiple conversations that need to be had about what we're putting up in space. Physics police is also bringing up Starlink. And there's so many articles. I mean, so it's number one, we don't know everything that every country is putting up. So there's a bunch of stuff going up there and potentially coming down as trash and that's, so it's going to get crowded out there pretty quickly. Number two, Starlink is going up and it and other reflective satellites are creating visual, visual trash. It's like, you know, so no more dark skies. There was a, a report that... Space station just got hit. You know, space station just got hit by something. Yeah, but beyond that, astronomers, even just people who want to look at the sky, there was a, an analysis of the various satellites that are going up into the sky, various latitudes on the earth and then times of day when people would be able to have no occlude, no none of their sky occluded by like satellites, by reflective satellites, if you were observing say at you know, a giant telescope or something and doing observations. And it turns out there's like very, it's turning into very little parts of the earth. It's like every, the only spaces now are below 30 degrees in the southern hemisphere that have unoccluded skies and it's only from like maybe, I think it was from, from three to six a.m. or something like that. It was like, it was just, it's kind of crazy when you start actually mapping out as this, these researchers have done what in our skies is being covered and Starlink is a huge driver of that visual trash and it's really going to affect astronomy, visual astronomy. So there's space trash, there's astronomy, there's all sorts of things that we need to be talking about how we're freaking using our space because people are just using it because there's so much of it and then it's going to be gone. But if they are, if they are advanced craft, if they are, if they are, I still stick to there from the future and the reason that we keep finding them off the coast and and then now going into the water maybe they're looking for baby sharks because the future doesn't have baby sharks and the planet's losing the oxygen because nothing can keep fertilizing the coral reefs properly. So they're coming back for to steal the baby sharks which do breed off the coast of Southern California. No, it's not for that reason. It's just because they like the song. Oh boy. I mean, it's obviously not aliens because as you mentioned, our planet is surrounded by literal garbage. So they're going to pull up. Who's flying that? Yeah, it's like pulling off under the freeway. You make a wrong turn and you just see nothing but garbage. You're like, throw up please. It's like that. It's like the aliens pull off. They see just a planet surrounded by floating garbage and they're like, keep going, keep going. My cat really wanted some screeches, screeches. I think this time of year it's not that they want scratches. It's that they want help shedding. I am a shedding assistant for my animals. They have to cover the whole house. Oh, physics police, because you put it in all caps. I really want to. Please don't. Yeah, I will go. Cutting out the internet is getting earthquakey. I think we should probably head out anyway. Fun talking about aliens, baby sharks, space trash, chronotypes and shift work, shedding animals. Yes, and then Blair will get sleep and be able to wake up and not be tired tomorrow. Oh, I'll be tired for that. Okay. Yeah. Alarm goes off in seven hours. Yeah, I gotta go too. Are you going to bed? Or are you staying up? I have to stay up a little bit longer, but not for too much. Yeah. All right. Say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. Thank you for joining us. We will see you again next week. We look forward to seeing you once again for more fantastic science. Have a science week filled with science goodness and fabulousness. Stay safe. Stay well. We'll see you then. Bye.