 could just keep dancing to the music that is going there. But it is time for us to begin the weekly broadcast of the Twist podcast. We're going to talk about science tonight. Welcome, everyone. We are so glad that you are here, that you've joined us, and we are ready to jump into the show. Make sure you hit those loves and likes and all those things, because the more loves and likes we get, the more the algorithm decides that we're something good to share. So give us the love. We do appreciate it. Ready to start, friends? Let's do a show. Let's do a show. Let's make it go. All right. Science team, activate. All right, starting in three, two, this is Twist. This week in science, episode number 895, recorded on Wednesday, October 5, 2022. Who teaches you science? Hey, everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki. And tonight on the show, we are going to fill your heads with AI, ATP, and better banana beer, but first. Disclamer, disclaimer, disclaimer. As Florida recovers from a destructive hurricane, the conversation about climate change hangs in the air like a wispy cloud of foreboding. Barely noticeable in the aftermath of a massive storm, and it is mostly being ignored by media and politicians and even by people directly affected by the damage. But there are questions that need to be answered. Is climate change to blame? If so, to what degree? Can we do anything about it? We know Florida will be hit again. We know it wasn't prepared this time. Lack of water, lack of emergency power, substandard building codes, and a lack of evacuation support. And we know more people will die as a result of future storms. So should the devastated areas even be rebuilt? If so, should they be built to withstand hurricane winds, flying debris, severe flooding? Is that even possible? Ultimately, we'll be up to Floridians to decide in a state that is in political denial of climate change and its implications for increased hurricane precipitation, sea level rise, and storm intensity. They will likely repeat the same manmade disaster we saw this past week. Meanwhile, the greater manmade disaster looms. This climate change threatens to make Floridians of us all. But for those of us looking to overcome our inner Floridians, there is hope. Climate can be predicted, mitigation can be achieved, and all we really need to write out the storm of the future is a good supply of this week in science. Coming up next. ["I've Got The Kind Of Mime"] I've got the kind of mime I can't get enough. I wanna learn it. Discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I wanna know. Thanks to Kiki and Blair. Oh, Kiki, you're muted. And a good science to you too, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week In Science. We are back again to talk about all the science that's fit to podcast. That's right. We're gonna do that like we do every week. I have stories about this year's Nobel Prize winners, ATP origins, that banana beer I mentioned a moment ago, and a consciousness hypothesis for y'all. What do you have, Justin? I've got orcas versus sharks. I've got an asteroid creating a mile high tsunami wave. Yikes. Goodness. Ooh, something we might be able to do to protect the painted ladies of California and an unexpected Nobel Prize. Thank you. Unexpected, yeah. We're gonna talk about that, those Nobel Prizes in just a couple of seconds. But Blair, what is in the animal corner this week? I'm so glad you asked. I am gonna talk about how AI is gonna take your job if you're a whale scientist. Also, we're gonna talk about some great ape friends, great grape friends. I don't know. There's something there. Yeah. There's something there. And then I'm gonna talk about some red kites. Ooh, I like kite flying. That's nice. Yeah, this is the animal called a kite. Oh, the bird. Bird kite. Fantastic. Well, as anyone who is currently viewing or listening can see or hear, there is a fantastic show ahead. So we will jump right into it. But first, I do want to remind you that if you have not yet subscribed to This Week in Science, you can find us all places podcasts are found. All of them pretty much just look for This Week in Science, Twis. You can find us also broadcasting live streaming weekly on YouTube, Facebook and Twitch at 8 p.m. Pacific Time on Wednesdays. That's right. It's not daylight savings. It's not the time change hasn't happened yet. And the time is always... Oh, is that happening still? I thought we got rid of that. It's like a month from now. Yeah, so it's happening. But anyway, yeah, no time changing yet. We're all good here. And if you like to follow us on the social medias, we're on Twitter and Instagram as at Twis Science. You know, and if there's all the complications of remembering this stuff, just remember our website, twis.org. Thank you for your attention. It's now time for the science. Okay, we are gonna talk about those Nobel Prizes right about now. Right about now. The science is so amazing. Every year, the Nobel Prize is awarded for a number of subjects. And in the sciences, we get to have chemistry, physics, and physiology, and medicine. So for chemistry... Oh, it's physiology or medicine. Or medicine, okay. Or it's very... Which I think is a very, yeah, I think it's a very silly named category, but somebody decided, which one should we do? Nobody decided before they went to print. And so it's both, but it's an or in the title of the prize. Or, whichever one, it's fine. That one, maybe two. All right, so chemistry. Chemistry was awarded to Carolyn R. Bertosi, Morton Meldahl, and Kay Berry Sharpless for the development of click chemistry and bio-orthogonal chemistry. You know what that is? No, I was hoping you'd tell us. Origami in chemistry. The click, yeah, it's not origami exactly, but kind of molecules are made up of little pieces that fit together based on physics, right? How they're attracted to each other or repelled by each other. And this click chemistry enables segments of molecules to click together like a seatbelt that two ends just snap together. So it makes it a lot easier for researchers, for pharmaceutical developers, for all sorts of people working on a variety of different molecular chemical solutions to problems. They're able to more easily put these molecules together. So the click chemistry has been very useful. That was Berry Sharpless and Morton Meldahl who spearheaded that research. However, Carolyn Bertosi is the one who took it bio-orthogonally. And that really means taking the click chemistry and applying it to cells and figuring out where different molecules are in cells. And it could potentially contribute and is currently contributing to targeted cancer research and could lead to lots of other treatments for different diseases. So basically taking underlying aspects of chemistry using them to our advantage and making it a little simpler. I feel like so often the Nobel Prize is awarded to a new theory or method or something that has like quote unquote lots of promise for future application. But this is really cool that they kind of did both. They were like, here's this new methodology and also here's how you can use it and we already started doing that. Yeah, so anyway, it's otherwise known as it's functional chemistry. It's chemistry that has function. It's gonna go do things. It's great, it's great. Anyway, moving on because we could talk about this stuff all night long, the building blocks of things. Yes, we don't need to do that all night long. We can move on to physics and the Nobel Prize in physics this year has been awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clouser and Anton Zeilinger. They demonstrated the potential to investigate and control particles that are entangled. So quantum entanglement got the physics Nobel Prize this year. This is really, this is an important area of physics as spooky action at a distance as it was considered a possibility once upon a time. Einstein didn't think it really worked and then it did and then he lost a bet and, you know. He also discovered it, which is also kind of, which is great. Here's the thing I discussed, like Einstein was the first one to come up with a, try to come up with crackpot physics to debunk an Einstein thing. Yeah, he's like, ah, my ideas are wrong. I can't, I gotta get rid of that. Yeah. But anyway, so this entanglement, the idea that particles can be connected over very large, long distances. This is laying the foundation for quantum communications for crypto, not crypto, for a little baby crypto stuff also for a blockchain type security, but security applications as well because of, but anyway, really the information technology side of things is honestly, who knows where it's gonna go? Like we can come up like Dr. Steven Novella said last week, like we can imagine as far as what we know currently in our real world and it's the next iterations that will lead to the next creations, right? The next imaginings, but yes, so physics entanglement and then, and then Justin, who got for physiology or medicine? And this doesn't really seem like it falls under physiology or medicine, but it does. It absolutely does. So I'll just go ahead and do the final thing. So there was a PhD project in 1985 looking for DNA in Egyptian mummies. It got published in the journal Nature, which is a pretty big coup for a PhD project. To get published. And then really soon after it was called into question because its findings were likely just contamination of modern DNA getting into the experiment. So the young researcher who authored it gave up on science. No, no, they didn't. They didn't give up on science actually after the public failure, but instead refocus their efforts on developing techniques to minimize contamination during sampling and to be able to differentiate between ancient molecules from modern ones. 37 years later, that young researcher is now being awarded with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on ancient DNA. Geneticist Svante Pabu, whose research we have talked about quite a lot over the years. He was the first to successfully retrieve and sequence bits of ancient DNA from Neanderthals. This is also back when sequencing was insanely difficult. Currently today, computers, servers bogged down to process the data to reconstruct genomes. Back then they basically did it by hand. They had post-it notes of bits of sequence scattered out across the lab and were literally by hand trying to put bits together that seemed to overlap. They went on to sequence Neanderthal genome in 2009, the complete genome. A year later, they did the complete Denisovan genome. So a lot of progress there. Pabu's interest in ancient DNA originated from childhood fascination with Egypt. He was a student at Uppsala University, which is, I believe, in Sweden. Shifted his focus from archaeology to medicine following the footsteps of his father, who was a biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. That's enough, you're cut off. No more. No more in that family. No, but there's really... Spread the bone. He got the first samples of Neanderthal bones from the museum in Germany and successfully got sequencing out of him, which was a huge deal back in 1997, and then went on to go and start to collect things out. There were the bone fragments from a sub-Aryan cave, which is what led to the Denisovan discovery, and he's gone on to do much, much more. Plus, one of the things that was mentioned in talking about his contributions to science was that he himself initiated a lot of these techniques in lab, but there are spin-off labs and spin-off labs and departments at universities across the world that are now using his ancient DNA techniques and producing scientific papers and drugs. And it's a huge part of what we've covered on the show in terms of ancient DNA. So yeah, so the genetic results also have offered some insights into modern human populations showing some of the adaptations that current modern humans have as originating in our cousins. And I think that's where it really dives into Svante Pavo being given this Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine that this has, what he's discovered about what exists in our DNA from our ancient cousins, it does have implications for human health. For instance, immune responses of certain portions of the population are potentially dictated by some aspects of our Neanderthal DNA. There are other DNA that can impact certain people to have higher risk of depression or anxiety. There are issues. Fertility things there are links to Neanderthal. Yeah, there's a ton of that. And also most importantly, tremendous amount of content for this show. Most importantly, of the techniques in recovering ancient DNA. Which, yes, so very important. Okay, not ancient, but something brand new moving on from the Nobel Prizes. We would like to congratulate all the scientists that have been awarded these prestigious awards who will probably no longer be available for interviews on this show moving forward because they're now famous. But beyond that, as always, just wanna mention, it would be nice to see more women in that list of awardees of champions of science, but at least we had one in there, but yeah. Anyway, progress takes time. Justin, tell us about the progress of what we have learned about Sharks versus Orcas. I mean, honestly, this is the grudge match to end all grudge matches, right? Well, you would think so, although it's exceedingly one-sided. Orca wins every time, basically is how this works. But this is dramatic video out as part of a paper published in Ecological Society of America's Journal Ecology. It shows Orcas killing white sharks in South Africa. This is caught both by drone footage and by helicopter. Snippets of this, I had seen previously, were out on YouTube. Some of the drone footage was released. A few minutes of it anyway. Apparently they have hours of attacks of Orcas on sharks by the helicopter footage. And it's part of this paper that they've published. Researchers believe that there may have been as many as three other sharks also killed around the same time of the footage. The clip of this hour-long hunt of multiple sharks in this paper is pretty amazing. Like immediately after watching this, I haven't seen anything in the paper that talked about this yet, but it's eerily similar to the white shark attacks by Orca off the coast of California. It is very interesting that the techniques these Orcas are using seem to be the same. This behavior has never been witnessed in this detail before and certainly never from the era, such as the lead author Allison Towner, Senior Shark Scientist and Marine Dynamics Academy in Gansby, South Africa. One of those whales was observed in a new footage, which is one of the whales that was observed was suspected of having killed sharks in the past. It had been at the sites of where sharks had been killed, but this is the first time they've actually seen the hunt from the air. There's California footage out there of Orcas that have already killed, made a kill on a great white. There is boat footage of an attack taking place, but it's from a boat so you don't really have a very good video. This is a top-down video where you can really see it taking place. In the video, we see sharks attempt to evade capture by Orcas. So what's happening is the Orcas are circling, but the sharks are circling around the Orca. They're staying close and they're circling around them and they're kind of in sync circling each other, one Orca and one shark. What's interesting about this is this is the same evasion technique that seals and turtles use when a great white shark is approaching them. You try to stay close and keep an eye on them and keep circling out of the kill zone of the mouth. The problem is Orcas are social creatures, they hunt in packs. What basically happens is the shark then is just staying in one place while another Orca comes into view and then goes in for the kill. What I found really fascinating is if you look at this video, it looks like the shark is being flipped onto its backside. Now, when a shark gets flipped onto its backside, it goes into a paralysis mode or a ketatonic immobility mode where a shark basically goes to sleep, puts up no resistance. They don't move anymore. They're like. It's not moving. Gets rolled over and it's backed by the second Orca and then they remove its liver, devour that and off they go again. Just go for the liver first. That's just, I mean. So the liver apparently is high in nutrients, lots of fat and the Orcas only have a little bit of time to feed because the Orcas then is going to start to sink and there's all the little scavenger fish and everything else is going to start moving in and the rest of the shark just probably not is worth the time there. So. Amazing. What was also, so what was very interesting was the witness that Orca attack in California, they suspected that the Orca there had been hunting rays off the coast of Baja, Mexico, rays are relative to the sharks and they have the same catatonic state that they go into when they get flipped upside down because Orcas don't go around flipping everything upside down. They do this. They've been seen doing this to sharks and to rays which go into this catatonic state. So they thought, okay, this is a technique that was either that these Orcas had either used or had learned from a pod that hunts rays because we know that Orcas are communal learners. They can share information. Either way, it's interesting because this is many many, this is on a different continent in another hemisphere, completely unrelated pod, similar strategy, similar results flipping to catatonic in a group hunting situation and then eating the liver and being gone again. Well, we've seen in other studies how whale song can move across the entire world over enough time and whales have been around for a while. Sharks have been around even longer than that. So it's possible that this originated in one place but even with that, it could travel socially across the whole planet. It could, but I don't know how much because here's the thing though, Orcas pods tend to be very specific types of hunters. Like you can have Orca in the same region, some are going after plucking tuna off of fishing hooks and some don't go after tuna at all. Right, but they weren't eating the shark for food. They were just getting the liver and scooting. But that's food, that's food, that's good. Yes, but it's not the same as picking off fish or having a specialization in a particular, this is a specialized task. This is not just them eating sharks. Oh, I think it is. Oh, that's interesting. It's an interesting interpretation Blair. I think another point that we have also seen from the Puget Sound whales, Orca pods is that you have the pods that are locals who just stay in Puget Sound and really don't move out of it very much. And then you, and those are more of the fish eaters that we're aware of in Puget Sound. And then you have the migrant pods. And those pods come from Alaska, they come from a broad region and they're more of the mammal eaters. So there's also interesting questions I think as to the, like Blair was talking about the traveling pods, the interaction between different pods and then maybe the learning that takes place between them. And there are definitely gonna be situations because of mating, these pods don't just stay together. There has to be genetic mixing. And so you have individuals that, especially the males that head on out to find new pods and places to live. And they take their knowledge with them. Yeah, also think about like if your two options are eating fish or marine mammals for the most part, right? What is a shark? It's a fish. In size though, what's it like a marine mammal? Yeah, it's a sharp teeth if it's a great white. Yeah, yeah. But it really doesn't seem to be a problem. So here's another thing that overlapped between the California and the South African attacks. They had a bunch of boats and when it put the people in the little cage underneath and they were doing all this shark spotting in the area. And they'd seen sharks every day during their surveys. There was several sharks spotted the days of these attacks. However, in the 45 days after the predation events, they only saw a single white shark anywhere in the area. They left the region, the great white sharks en masse left the region. And this happened in California too when they saw the orcas attacking sharks at the coast of Monterey. The great whites left the coast of California and were gone for, again, like I think a month or two, they didn't come back. Shark sharks, yep. So there's some, and they believe it's a- It's preservation, it's good. The chemical of a shark being eviscerated in this way is enough to alert all the other sharks in the region. They have, they smell really good I guess or have a good sense of smell. At least I've never smelled a shark. They, if there's an apex predator that's killing one of the apex predators, we should just awfully immediately. And that's what they do, that's the, they just run. Oh, I can say is whether you're a shark or a human, don't trust the orcas, the orcas. Nope. Nope, don't trust them. But I think it also brings into question some of the communal learning because if they're doing this different hemisphere, different continent far away, same techniques, they can just figure it out wherever they are. They don't necessarily have the pod that was attacking off the coast, the shark off the coast of California. Didn't necessarily have to learn it from ones that were flipping rays in Baja. You don't know that though. They've been around. We don't know any of this. Thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years. You don't know this just happened. And it's also been seen in New Zealand. So when I'm saying it's a global, it's a global technique. It's a global shark flipping cabal. That's, this is what it is. It brings up like a genetic memory thing too. Is it just an innovative thing? Hey, yeah. I mean, it's what's instinct versus memory versus, it's a technique that's only being used on one type of prey that's susceptible to it. It's very interesting. But Blair, humans are going to be susceptible to a greater predator at some point. Oh my gosh. Let's please not call AI a predator. That is the last thing that AI needs to hear. Shh, don't do this. So this is a study looking at AI to help scientists, whale scientists do their research. They use machine learning. This is a team from the Australian Antarctic Division. The K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at Cornell University and Curtin University. They all trained an algorithm to detect blue whale decalls in sound recordings. And they found that the AI had greater accuracy and speed than human experts. So technology, this technology will allow scientists to more easily analyze hundreds of thousands of hours of recordings of these whales to better understand trends and populations, mainly as they recover from the catastrophe that is and was whaling, still a problem. So decalls I mentioned are the social calls made by male and female whales on feeding grounds. They are not like songs which have a regular and predictable pattern. Decalls are highly variable across individual whales and across seasons and across years. And therefore it makes it really hard for people to identify the calls unless they have a really well-trained ear. And therefore it makes automation of the recording analysis way harder because there's such little consistency. So they trained the algorithm. They had a library of about 5,000 decalls. They captured 2,000 hours of sound recorded in sites in the wild. And they had six different human analysts go through and identify or annotate the decalls. And then rather than analyzing the sound, they turned the sounds into spectrograms or visual representations of the call and had the algorithm train itself to identify the calls from 85% of the data. Then they use the remaining 15% to validate itself and improve. So basically like here's the pattern. This is what it looks like. And then use this 15% to figure out how you can identify it and get better as you look at each one, right? That's how AI learns. So then they wanted to test it. They gave them a test data set of 187 hours and an independent human judge determined when there were disagreements between the humans and the AI, which one was right. So still it came down to a human judge, but this was an expert. The AI found about 90% of the calls and the human found about 70. And what's more exciting is that it took about 10 hours for humans to annotate the test data set but took the AI, guess? How long? A minute. 30 seconds. Less than a minute. Jeez. 1200 times faster. So they've made their AI available to other whale researchers around the world, which is great to train that AI on whale sounds and soundscapes and of course to them later use it. And so their next step is to build more recording sites, build bigger recording networks, then be able to go through that data en masse to develop a long-term monitoring project to look at trends in blue whales and other species. So in this case, it's not quite putting researchers out of a job so much as speeding up their collection process quite a bit. For now. So isn't that getting into the, you're speeding up the collection process, but then it's gonna get into that forever problem of now they have so much data to deal with. Well, I guess actually it's not speeding up the collection, it's speeding up the analysis. So I guess at one point you'll run headfirst into a wall of I have no more data to look at, but that means then you can draw conclusions and write papers, so that's good. And so we've been trying to decipher whale language. There's been dreams of one day being able to communicate on a more sentient level with whales. True. We may not be the ones to do it. Oh yeah, it'll be the AI for sure. So the AI can analyze, maybe it can also then talk. Just don't tell the AI about whaling. Do not tell the AI about whaling. You don't tell the way. No, it's already got access to the internet. It knows every filthy human secret. This AI doesn't have access to the internet yet. Yeah, they will eventually. No, it's just not telling you. It's just not telling you. When it goes on that server, what do you think it does in the downtime? You think it took a whole 30 seconds? No, it took 10 seconds. The other 20 seconds it was watching YouTube videos. Surfing the internet, right? There you go. And at a really fast speed too. So then what do we do when the AI begins to have direct communication with the whales? And finds it to be them to be as intelligent and interesting as us? Why would it preference human intelligence to interact with? The whales will use the AI to interpret our sounds. Don't let the orcas have the AI. The AI won't have any sort of preferential decision. Like, oh, I like this intelligent life form versus that one that I can analyze and break down the communications and talk to in some touring-esque fashion. Why not talk to the whales? Hey, you know what? I'm gonna focus on birds equally as long as humans. I think the future could be actually the opposite of dystopian. What would it like a non-dystopian AI that's like, I'm going to preference all nature's needs and wants. Oh, that would be dystopian, wouldn't it? That would be, oh, gosh. For humans. Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, it depends on what animals get in first. It just depends your perspective. Don't touch the coffee if you had, Justin. That's what I want to know. This is a good question. How much cold medicine? Do they actually sell cold medicine in Denmark? There's no medicine in Denmark. They don't allow anybody to have painkillers or cold medicine or anything. Or fire extinguishers. You can't buy fire extinguishers. That's where my fan, the Scandinavia, that's where my grandmother got it. Fight through it. Anyway, moving on from AI, let's jump into ATP. Oh, I have a trouble headache. Take a headache pill. No. Okay, from AI, let's jump into ATP. Where did ATP come from? Where do you think? The mitochondria. The mitochondria. Right, right. Mitochondria. They're making ATP. The powerhouse of the cell. Yes, this is what we know. Then we know that there's this cool chemical of reaction that uses ADP, adenoside diphosphate and adds a phosphate and it uses ATP to power the process to create more ATP. And it actually takes like six ATP to create a new ATP. Like, there's- Like one electron at a time or something going on. Yeah, one electron at a time. Yes, exactly, Justin. And the whole process is, it's a lot. And so some researchers were like, hey, we wanna know exactly where ATP came from. And they were like, yeah, it's gotta be a pretty simple answer and then they're like, whoa, this is circular. Where did the ATP come from to start the process to make the ATP? Because it has to be in there somewhere. Anyway, a few years ago, they had a study where they determined that there was some very interesting prebiotic chemistry going on. And they looked at a two-carbon compound called acetylphosphate, ACP. And this ACP is present today in bacteria, in archaebacteria, and it's a metabolic intermediate. And so it's also been shown to phosphorylate ADP to ATP in water, but only when there are iron ions present. And so they went, let's look at what we've seen in this old stuff and really dig into it and try and do the disproving all the other alternatives process. And what they did is they did a lot of experiments to explore all the various questions that got to the bottom of it. And yes, indeed, what they're able to infer is that in prebiotic life, the process that led to the arrival of ATP was not just ADP phosphorylation that you had to have a very specific set of conditions, water, iron ions, and this ACP acetylphosphate. And the acetylphosphate and phosphate ions then could work together to catalyze ATP formation. And it's the only way it works. And it has a just right chemistry. And it's only when you have water and iron, acetylphosphate and other phosphate ions, and they only, it's a very just right geometry. Where would you find that? You would find that in hot volcanic pools. You would find that in primordial ooze, deep undersea vents, the hot deep undersea vents, places where iron would be coming up out of the rich crust. Yeah. Which is also one of those prevailing theory ideas of how life started, too. That's kind of it. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, so it's a very, I don't know, very exciting open access paper, prebiotic basis for ATP as the universal energy currency. It only happened in a special time, in a special place on our special planet. And the paper is in plus biology this last week. And I think you brought up a story recently, Kiki, or maybe it was a number of decades ago, about the thermal vents, the clay, sort of the porousness of the clay, being able to trap sort of micro environments in it that would allow, not only if this process is taking place, but sort of create the analog of a cell structure to contain these things. So it's... Yeah, and suddenly you have an energetic enzyme, this, you know, this, you've got this, not enzyme, energetic molecule that when broken down releases a ton of energy, and then other chemicals, molecules in that little tiny micro cell are like, ooh, let's take advantage of this, and then it's like, let's make RNA, and let's make DNA, and ooh, we're so fancy and we're multicellular, and all of a sudden we're on land, wee. And then we got eaten by an orca, boom. Yes. This is the history of life in my brain. And moving on from that, aside from being, I don't know, maybe scared of orcas, we should be afraid of asteroids like the one that killed the dinosaurs. Justin, what did this asteroid, what did it do to our planet? So it's famous for having killed nearly all the dinosaurs, but it also killed three quarters of the planet's plants and other animal species. Fish included, like, it killed most of everything that was on the planet. Dinosaurs were just the biggest, most reliant on the food web at the end of the day. But according to this research here out of University of Michigan led the study, it also triggered a tsunami with mile-high waves that churned ocean floors thousands and thousands of miles away from the impact site on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. This study is published in the journal AGU Advances in a global simulation of the impact tsunami they were reviewed geological records at more than a hundred sites worldwide found evidence that supported their models predictions of these tsunamis path and power. So basically what they are looking at is soil sediments at the bottom of seas and oceans. And if there is a disturbance at around the KP mass extinction event, which closed out the Cretaceous period, they say, aha, this looks like it has been part of that massive tsunami that disturbed the sea floor when it rolled through the world's oceans. So powerful was this. The study authors calculated the initial energy and the tsunami was 30,000, let me say that again, 30,000 times larger than the energy in the December 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake tsunami which killed more than 230,000 people and was one of the largest most destructive tsunamis in modern record. The team simulations show that the impact tsunami radiated mainly to the East and Northeast into the North Atlantic Ocean and to the Southwest through the Central American Seaway which used to separate North and South America into the, to get into the Pacific Ocean. Oh, this thing is, by the way, do you guys know how big this thing is? The asteroid that became the one that slammed into us? It was big. Yeah, according to this, it was 14 kilometers in diameter, 8.7 miles. This thing was massive. That's massive. This is really big and it was moving at about 20, that was the sound it made too. It was moving at about 27,000 miles per hour when it struck. Anyway, they look at all this, they did a couple of simulations that showed these massive mile high waves, tsunami waves that really created a ring shape, propagated outward. They kind of looked at what their modeling said it would go and then they compared it to sea floor records and it's a pretty good, they found a pretty good match. According to the team simulations, one hour after impact, the tsunami had spread outside of the Gulf of Mexico into the North Atlantic. Four hours after the impact, waves had passed through the Central American Seaway into the Pacific. 24 hours after impact, waves had crossed most of the Pacific from the East and most of the Atlantic from the West and entered the Indian Ocean from both sides. And 48 hours after impact, significant tsunami waves had reached most of the world's coastlines. Big waves, big waves. That's a lot. So most of they think the open ocean wave heights would have been about 328 feet, which isn't quite a mile, but that's an in open ocean. When those come on shore, as we know waves, they come on shore, they gain in height. So these were massive. They know that this scoured the bottoms of a bunch of the world's ocean, which researchers have been finding for years. Like, you know, this seems all jumbled up here. There's stuff missing here. They found it out as far as New Zealand. And New Zealand had this whole theory of plate tectonics was involved and why their seafloor disruption from certain ages was hard to figure. Oh, it looks like it actually fits quite well with this model. New Zealand's coast got affected by this giant tsunami. They don't even know this was just looking at ocean floor. So they haven't even really looked at or researched yet what the onshore effects would be. How much erosion? Hey, maybe, you know, maybe the earth had a lot more land once upon a time. You put a mile high tsunami everywhere and some of it might be gone. Was one aspect of this study though, is not the land masses where they are today because this was 66 million years ago, right? So this is land masses. This is kind of going back in time to where the land masses were at that period in time and then doing the modeling based off of what we've seen with our land masses today. So it's like this taking from today, going backwards in time and putting it all together and kind of forensically figuring it out with their model. Yeah, I don't know that it's changed that much. Okay, so things were scrunched a little closer together the Atlantic side. Pacific Ocean was bigger, Atlantic Ocean side, things were closer, but you can still see kind of the outlines of a lot of the other things. Let me see if I've got the right year on this map that I'm trying to see here. I'm also wondering if this is why we find fossils of sea creatures in the middle of the desert. Part of it looks big. It got sloshed on the land. So no, no, no, because I mean, I don't think that's right. I think those are just reclaimed, worse sea land now or in the oceans. Of course, I mean, that's the party line. I'm just saying this is an extra piece that we have not considered in that. No, we haven't, but I think it would have been, well, I guess it's possible because if it's moving that much ocean floor on the land and depositing it, it could look like natural deposits. Yeah, it all depends on where it is in the strata, right? The timelines of everything. The strata would be all messed up. But this does all fall in line, kind of with the hypothesis about the one location in what, the North Dakota that they've been working on for years where the fish are all jumbled up and there's, you know, there are volcanic bits of glass and like all sorts of pieces of asteroid and little like everything is a big mushy mess. And they said, well, there's this riverbed, this river system that a big tsunami wall of mud just pushed right on through it. And that's what they've been talking about. So this is now really modeling what that would have been like. Yeah, yeah. Big bada wave. Wait, okay. Moving on from- Oh, so yeah, that dark mission. Would you have more for this one? No, no, I'm done. But that dark mission now sounds really important. That whole running into an asteroid and seeing if you get it. Hey, try it on that little one. But boy, if there's one eight miles across, I can do a mile high tsunami around the globe. We should probably do something about it. Yeah. You know, I'm looking at the maps right now. This is just a total aside. Hard to find a good map. I just, I'm looking at a good map right now. So I have to bring it up here. And it's a very interesting period of time when North and South America were not connected, which I think is very interesting in our interpretations also of what exactly happened and how that would have influenced the reverberations of the impact. And so in the modeling that is, that's part of it. Very, very interesting. Yeah, so yeah, the paper is available through the associate AGU publication. Oh, just go to our website. There's the link. Yeah, we'll have the link. You can click it. Click it. I'm very excited. Like those molecules. Anyway. Click, click, click. Okay, now moving on to a story about cancer. And Justin, I think you brought something up about this recently. Researchers have been investigating other species of cells within our cancer tumors. And this week in cell, the journal cell, there were a couple of studies that were published that specifically looked at the existence of fungi within tumors. They, one study was released on the 29th. They dusted for the genetic fingerprints of fungi and 35 different cancer types by looking at more than 17,000 tissue, blood and plasma samples from cancer patients. They didn't all test positive for fungus, which implies that sometimes there might have been because these were samples collected broadly and were publicly available databases, means there might have been some amount of fungal contamination in some of the samples. But what it does suggest is that they did find fungi in all 35 cancer types that they assessed. So there were fungal cells in all 35 of them. And this group out of the Weitzman Institute of Science and Rehobot Israel, said that they estimated they have one fungal cell for every 1,000 to 10,000 cancer cells. And so when you think about a tumor being about a billion or so cancer cells, you've got a significant proportion of, not huge, but there's a significant proportion of fungal cells that are in there. We know also that fungal cells are kind of found to interact with bacterial cells in our bodies. We don't know exactly what's going on there. This is where there's this second cell study that looks specifically at gastrointestinal, lung, and breast tumors. And this study they found that in each of those three cancer types tended to host fungal genuses, Candida, blastomyces, and malassezia, respectively. So kind of the different tumors seemed to be favored by or seemed to create environments that favored specific fungal genuses. And so the question now is, are the fungi responsible in some way for the tumors? Or is it an environment in the body that is conducive to the growth of funguses? And that's in the question of, especially when we find them working in conjunction with bacterial cells, what's going on there that is creating that little environment? But then if fungi are driving poorer outcomes or making cancers more aggressive, if we can then treat the fungi, then that might also aid in the treatment of the cancers themselves. Not so simple. Not so simple. It's just, it's fascinating to think that, you think, I mean, we talk all the time about our microbiome and all the cells, but you think of it as like, oh, they're just in my gut or use microbial. I inhale them sometimes, but of course, I just spit them right back out in my mucus. But no, you get, we get these fungi, these bacteria, they are in us. And so sometimes they end up places they shouldn't be. And what does that do? So these are very interesting questions that will help us moving forward, especially as fungi are the future, everyone. Yeah, they, bless me, I think this is making a good point in the chat room. Fungus and tumors is expected. Tumors modulate the immune system, allowing them to evade detection and fungus's height out there. It could be something just like that, where there's the cancer cells are living in a rogue state and they're not taking out the trash. And so you get an accumulation. Because fungus are, they get into the blood system, they get around within the body, they're going to be in there. The causational idea behind it is not shown. It's intriguing because there's nothing more terrifying than the idea that all fungus can give you cancer, not like, ah, there are more things that give you cancer. Stop, you gotta put a limit on it somewhere. But if it's affecting aggressiveness or how it comes to things like that, it'd be, I'd be much more, this is, if it sounds to me like, forget all of that, you now have, if you have preferential fungi showing up in certain types of tumors, you now have a drug delivery system. That's very interesting, yep. You now have, you know how, you now have an invited guest into the enemy camp. Anyway. Yeah, that's a very interesting point. Yeah, but this is, as you were sharing from Dave and talking about, this is your immune system. We know that if you can get the HPV vaccine, that's gonna stop a virus from starting a cancer. And so there, you know, this is, our body is working with the stuff in our environment all the time. We just wanna figure out how it works with the stuff in our environment so it can be healthier, longer. But one of the things that makes us happier, longer, is drinking good beer. At least some of us, not everybody. Not everybody likes good beer. Some people like bad beer. But researchers, microbiologists, have been trying to make beer better. Did you know that in the 1970s, when a lot of the large scale manufacturing of beer led to using large closed vessels, these cans that are pressurized for brewing large volumes of beer, that it changed the flavor of our drinks? So, I didn't realize that. I didn't realize that we were brewing beer in open air containers up until the 1970s. That's actually the surprising part. Yeah, so the exciting part is that, yeah, we were brewing beers in big open vats. Beer was Belgian beers and other big open vats. We were just letting that natural carbonation take place. But these closed vessels led to higher amounts of carbonation, which is great because you've got a nice piece of flavor. Yeah. But it also, because of the higher amount of carbonation, it makes it not taste as good because the molecules that affect flavor are also affected by the carbonation. Huh. So, these microbiologists have been looking, trying to find bacteria or yeast species that might be more conducive to better beer flavor in these carbonated situations. And so, what they have discovered is that, well, I mean, I think this is a personal kind of thing because I don't know, some people like bottingtons and that kind of banana-ish flavor that you get with a good bottingtons. But apparently banana flavor is quality for beer. And I don't know that I agree with this. Ew. But one of the flavor profiles is banana-ish. Absolutely not. No, cancel it. Yeah, I know. Reject the science. Revoke their doctrine. I don't want it anymore. This is unacceptable. Are these researchers over 70 years old and are like, I haven't had a good beer since before 1970. Like who's judging? And this is probably Sours or something. Anyway, it's not even a hoppy beer like you get in California soon. Yeah, the idea that everybody who likes beer in the last 50 years doesn't know what a good beer tastes like, could end up being like the old beer was terrible. And you just made me so sad. At least to the modern palette, right? Banana. Banana flavor doesn't sound nice. Yeah, so what they have discovered is a single mutation in a gene called the MDS3 gene, which codes for a regulator apparently involved in the production of isoamyl acetate, which is the source of banana-like flavor that is, and this mutation in this gene is also responsible for pressure tolerance in the yeast strain. So they're looking at you. They have, they did use CRISPR-Cas9 to put this mutated MDS3 gene into other yeast species. And so more banana flavor and better pressure tolerance for beer. I really hope that they find some other genes because I don't like the banana flavor. Mm-mm, mm-mm. But you know, all Bonneton's lovers out there, I just, I apologize. But you don't know how it fits into the overall flavor profile once it, I mean, like, would you drink tobacco flavor wine? You probably have had it. Yeah, maybe. And liked it. Because, because it's, when they, when they... No, but banana, it's, once you want something tastes like banana, it only tastes like banana and everything you eat before and after tastes like banana. It might be much more subtle than that. It might be much, much more subtle. But they're not putting bananas in their beer. Although you could probably get those now because they're making all kinds of weird fruity beers. This is coming from the idea that like a beer should taste kind of like, not exactly fruity, but like have a fruit-adjacent taste, but there's this whole other world of beers that tastes almost like tea that's herbal, like hoppy, right? Like what you were saying, Justin, but like it's a completely different world if you think about herbal beers. It is, but then the malts might have a chocolate aspect to them or someplace. There's a lot of flavor compounds that... And all these flavors, can we make them stronger? Not isolated, you might not even recognize. So it's, I think it's interesting to try it. I don't know if they need to be stronger. That's the other thing that I think is crazy. Like if you look at what adult beverages are popular right now, it's like white claw. It's like a beverage that's basically water with a whisper of a taste in it, right? Nobody said American adults had any sense of taste. Yeah. So that's what I'm saying is like generally. From what, from where do we decide that more taste is better? More taste is not necessarily better. Well, I love the idea of trying to recover an ancient flavor profile. Yeah, which was created to mask the barely drinkable water that the beer was made out of because that was safer than drinking actual water. And I'm sure it tasted terrible. So they were like, how do we need to cover up this taste? Well, no, but like people, we were talking 1970s. Like, is it, was it everywhere? Because does that mean like people drinking can of beer watching the football game in the 1960s that that beer was brewed in an open vessel? Like now I'm curious. Like how, you know. Well, think about how ale was made during the Renaissance, right? You're talking about the Renaissance. I know, but I'm saying in 1970, wasn't the Renaissance. It was a time-honored tradition. I know for you. It continued on. I know. Don't make an age joke. Nope. I know for you, millennials. Nope. The 1970s and the medieval era seemed like they could have been at the same time, but there's a sizable gap. So the one thing that we're also forgetting is so the advent of cans, aluminum cans, for the canning of beer, but there's also the vessels that the actual brewing takes place in. And so now we've got like the big, big vats, right? They look like giant cans, yeah. They're big, giant cans, not little cans. Big cans. Also, I have to say all of this is just unnecessary steps. We can have, you could have just done this with the flavor molecules being produced in yeast without having a yeast that produces it. You could have just said, ah, we'll just have this thing and then we'll add it into the beer later. You can make any flavor profile that way. Oh, hey, did we just get rated over on Twitch? Thank, Graylark. Yeah, we don't want to drink the white claw. Well, maybe I will this summer. It's a summer drink. Anyway, banana beer. Have no fear. Banana beer is here, everyone. And this is This Week in Science. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode. We are happy that you are here wherever you're joining us. Whether you are watching us live on YouTube, Twitch or on Facebook, that is wonderful. Or if you are listening to us right now as a podcast, thank you for being a part of our audience. We just absolutely appreciate you being here. If you love the show, please tell a friend today. Right now we're gonna come on back to that previously known part of the show as the COVID update, which I don't really wanna think of it as the COVID update anymore, okay? COVID's over. COVID's over, according to everybody except COVID. What? So what we're potentially, what I am proposing here is that we are moving into the preparing for the future segment of the show, where we have scientific stories that give us some kind of technology or science understanding of how we can maybe survive some of these infectious diseases, viruses, microbes in the future. And my story for this particular section has to do with far ultraviolet LED lights. We all love LED lights. LED lights are fantastic. Oh, I'll stop sharing that particular screen. I don't need to do that anymore. But yes, far LED lights. Far LED lights are interesting, because we all know LEDs. LEDs have started to very strongly replace fluorescence and traditional light bulbs for efficiency all around. They're in your ring light for your TikToks. Yes, I mean, I've got a ring light right now. There's LEDs all up in there. Yes, LEDs are fantastic. The particular type of LED, the frequency of the light, however, we have learned can be used to sanitize. We know that ultraviolet light, the sun, lots of ultraviolet light kills bugs, right? Kills, viruses, kills microbes. It's fantastic. However, it also leads to mutations in those under layers of our skin that are very important so that we end up with problems like skin cancer. So you can't have the sanitizing LED ultraviolet LED lights in the same place as you have people. And very often, you can have the LED lights in some kind of an air filtration system, an HVAC system that can be used for hospitals, hotels for big installations very often. But what if you just want to have these far LED lights maybe out at an event? Maybe you want to have them available where just about anybody can have the light, shine down upon them, right? If you're in an event, you want to clean the air potentially, you don't wanna hurt people. So Japanese researchers at Reichen University have been working on this problem, balancing the issue of the specific frequency of the light with the efficiency of the light itself. So the power usage and the light that's given out by the LED and they've gotten to a place where they have significantly increased their output. They have found a way to make a frequency of far ultraviolet light with their LED setup that does not harm humans, but does kill microbes. Very good, very good, yes. And they are convinced that they will be able to have further improvements to their technology. And so in a very reasonable amount of time, not like tomorrow, but in a reasonable amount of time, we will be seeing these kinds of technological solutions to some of our sanitation needs. Now you wouldn't wanna replace all light bulbs with this because some microbes are good. So you don't destroy all microbes. However, it'll be cool if, for example, you had a switch in your bathroom, you could flip on the UV switch after you take a shower so the mold wouldn't grow in your shower. That would be great, right? That would be wonderful. You have, or you have a far ultraviolet LED light that just you turn on in your bathroom. Maybe your friends go in there, you go in. Yeah, maybe I could just keep your bathroom air clean. It seems great to me. Airplanes, movie theaters. I could go on. The list goes on. Yeah. Your toothbrush. Anyway. Yeah, so the idea is they're working on the chemistry of the situation, different proportions of aluminum with little bits of silicon, magnesium, and working on their technology. We'll see where it goes. We'll see where it goes. But future, future proof ourselves. What can we do for the future? So on occasion, this section of the show will be back. Because COVID's over, everybody. I would love to see it. Can they put that in all of the touchscreens that we have to use in public now? Yeah, that would be fantastic. Back lit up? Yeah, that would be smart. Thank you. That would be wonderful. Oh, but enough about technology. I think it's time for us to move on to another part of the show. It's much more soft and cuddly. I don't know if it's soft and cuddly today. Maybe a little soft and cuddly. Some of it's soft. I don't know if it's cuddly. We'll talk about it. Ground with claws and teeth. Yes, it's time for Blair's Animal Corner. With Blair! Preacher, great at small. Biped, milliped, no pet at all. You want to hear about animals. She's your girl. Except for giant pandas. That's girl. What's up, Blair? Well, I'm going to start with the bad news, and then we can have some fun after that. OK. So yet another impact of climate change. No surprise. Last week, Justin brought a story about how climate change is impacting birds in general. Today, I wanted to bring a short story about the red kite, which is a UK bird that has had some trouble. They're a bird of prey. And birds of prey have had a rough century, I will say. However, assessments made between 2005 and 2019 classified them as near-threatened. But in 2020, they were bumped up to least concern. So their population is growing throughout huge swaths of the UK. And they're doing better and better. There's many being reintroduced to parts of England and Scotland. That's been going on since 1989. DDT is not around. I'm sure that has something to do with it. Hunting them has been outlawed. There's all sorts of things that has helped bring these birds of prey back. But a new study wanted to look at how climate change could pose a new risk to the red kite. That's a bit of a hidden threat, because it's actually the longitudinal impact of droughts when they are chicks. So what they found was that drought conditions, which obviously restrict water, food, and therefore nutrition, specifically for babies, that forces animals to work harder to meet their basic needs, to remain healthy. And if they are babies, it makes it harder for them to grow big and strong. So they were able to look at data from as far back as 1970 to look at how the red kites hatched during drought did later on. They had tagged nestlings with unique leg rings and monitored them over many, many years. So they were really able to see, if you're born in a drought year, does that impact you for the rest of your life? It does. Some chicks born during a drought year continue to face the consequences of malnutrition throughout their adult life. It might be because they were permanently impaired in their development due to a failure to meet nutritional needs. That makes them smaller. It makes them more vulnerable to disease or predation, less capable of hunting, less capable of fighting mates. There's lots of things that can come with just being smaller than most of your species. So why do I bring this up other than to just be like, yeah, climate change is added again? It's because this is an example, and I talk about this with sea turtles all the time, of there just being so many pressures on a species that one more is too many. So as I mentioned, red kites were previously considered vermin. So they weren't just being hunted for sport, but they were also being hunted and picked off by gamekeepers and farmers. They were shot. They were poisoned. They were trapped because they thought that they were harmful to livestock and to game. They're still being illegally hunted that way. The numbers are much, much lower because it is illegal. But this is still a problem. As well as being hunted, they also will get poisoned because they feed on animal carcasses. So this will be accidental. There will be environmental poisons. An animal will die. They'll go, oh, look, an easy meal. And they will eat that dead animal. And they will get secondarily poisoned from mice, rats, whatever, for toxic substances and poisons that are put out for those individuals. They also have problems with wind turbines. And so on top of all of that, the more frequent and severe droughts as a result of climate change support the idea that this could be a really big impact because it's just one more thing on a stressed population. So recognizing that, there's things you can do. Of course, there's lots that we can do to help as a community turn the tide on climate change in general. But what conservationists can do that are working directly with the red kites is if they know that a drought year is coming, then they can actually put shade over nests. They can provide extra water in the area and then they can potentially push back against the negative impact of that drought that could last for an entire generation. So this is an interesting situation where like, just because an animal goes off the endangered species list doesn't mean you can take your hands off the wheel kind of thing because there's still lots of other pressures on these species. And this is an excellent example of studying a species since the 1970s. You can really see how they were doing way better and then climate change re-designed so much. Yeah, and now it's time to kind of get back to business. Yeah, well, honestly, the work of not just watching one species but maybe looking at a species like this as we look at others as indicators for ecosystems. If ecosystems are being impacted by climate change then much, much more than just the species are going to be downstream getting the brunt of it. Absolutely, yeah. It's a big job. If we want to be stewards, if we want to, oh, we're gonna grow our food, we're gonna do this stuff. We're gonna, oh, yeah, we're taking care of that. We really have to take care of it. Yep, try it. Yeah, absolutely. And now on to some fun news. Yes, thank you. Do you want to hear about chimps and gorillas playing together in the wild? Yes, please. Yeah, this is a long-term study from Washington University in St. Louis. St. Louis, I guess, no, St. Louis better. Anyway, this reveals the first evidence of lasting social relationships between chimps and gorillas in the wild. Yes, there have already been observations and documentation of social ties between chimps and gorillas, but that's basically just because their habitats overlap a lot. So they're in the same area a lot of the time. But in this research, looking at over 20 years of observations at, and I'm gonna get this wrong, and I am so sorry, Nwabale Ndoki National Park in Republic of Congo, the researchers documented these social ties not just between chimps and gorillas, but between individuals of chimps and individual gorillas that persisted over years and across different contexts. So I'm gonna read more of this in a minute, but what that means is Fred the Chimp goes over to talk to Oscar the Gorilla. They do that to play. Then tomorrow or next year, Oscar goes over and shares a meal with Fred. Is that what I said his name was? I don't remember. Fred's the Chimp. Oscar's the Gorilla. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there we go. So anyway, the point is different contexts, different activities, different timelines. Individuals recognized each other and interacted. Ambassadors of their species towards one another. Oh yeah, I mean, and it's happening. It's not just a one in a one. It's not just Fred and Oscar. It's like Brittany also came over to talk to Angela. Like it's everything, right? So it's a really, it's a common thing that's happening between these chimps and these gorillas. A lot of people don't realize that the majority of remaining wild gorillas and chimps live together. They're the parts of the Congo basin that are a conservation stronghold, the only place these animals can live. Yeah, they have to get along. Yeah, exactly. That's all that's left. Yeah, so that's also where there's elephants. There's leopards. There's lots of endangered species that that's the last bastion for the Congo basin. So they're constantly being pushed into each other and they're not having as much conflict. Instead, they seem to be interacting. I think it would be a lot of conflict. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so there are few, if any studies of interactions between primate species that have been able to take the identity of individuals into account. Exactly what I was talking about, that the specificity of these two individuals are friends. And so that really makes this specifically interesting. One individual traveling through a group of the other species to seek out a particular individual to interact with. So this was a review of published reports combined with a synthesis of previously unpublished data. So they had their published data and their unpublished raw data from about 1999 to 2020. And they documented eight species engaging in a wide range of social interactions ranging from play to aggression. So there were some arguments involved but there was lots of positive interactions as well. They investigated possible benefits from their rendezvous. The most common one that they looked at was protection because as I mentioned, there's leopards in this area as well. But based on all of the synthesis that they did, so the social interactions they saw could not be chalked up to the reduction of a threat. They found very little support for that idea because there wasn't a decrease in leopard snake or raptor predation attempts when they did this. So it was not helping them stay safe. But the number of chimpanzees in daily subgroups that they saw that were kind of bleeding in to gorilla areas were very small and gorillas within groups often have their silverback with them. So if they're already in small groups and they do pretty well on their own, the chimps, they don't need extra predation help. And if the gorillas have their silverback, that is their protector. So there's really no reason for them to be doing this for safety. Instead, they think that this is enhancing their foraging opportunities. So when they were co-feeding at the same tree, there were about 34% of the associations that they documented where that was happening or they were just kind of eating next to each other. It's like parallel play with toddlers if anyone's familiar with that. And then another 18% of observations involved apes foraging in close spatial proximity but on different foods. So sometimes they weren't even eating the same plant next to each other. They were just eating near each other. So it seemed to help with their foraging in one way or another. Maybe like, oh, there's a bunch of chimps over there. Maybe there's something good to eat. And these relationships persisted over years. So a couple of things with this. One, of course, we can't assume that an apes social landscape is entirely occupied by members of their own species. That is very clear. Right, clearly. So this is part, you know, we like bird watching. We're aware of all sorts of dogs and cats and all sorts of animals in our environment. Yeah, and I mean, I have a dog in my family unit, but also I look for, recognize and enjoy my time spent with other people's pets. They're my friends. I know it sounds weird to say, but it's totally true, right? If you talk to anyone who works with wild animals, you recognize your individuals that you work with and they recognize you. There is a recognition across species. So it's not a huge leap here. But the other thing that this is so interesting that the researchers kind of drew a parallel from this to paleoanthropology, there is a huge assumption that early hominins would exclude each other from using the same resources from the same areas. But as we know, they were breeding together. So it would follow that there was a lot more braided stream action between these different hominins than kind of this strict exclusion of the Neanderthals are over here, the Nenisevins are over here, the, you know, whatever. So this is a good kind of potential personification of that as well. And if modern day observations with non-humanates can kind of inform what we think about early modern humans, that means that there could be interactions between different types of hominins in tolerant social context. And as much as like we look at ourselves, like the reason that we think that there's always gonna be conflict between different species, it's like we look at predator-prey interactions and we think of ourselves. Humans, we're always going to war. The reality is we are collaborating, we're cooperating, we are being social with others for most of the time. Yeah, it's the violence that actually is not as often the thing. And so if we look at it from that perspective, the benefits being a huge driver and not just the costs. Yeah. That's, this is great. I love it. Yeah, but this is, we gotta keep in mind that this is also a sort of forced closeness between groups. Yeah, just forced into an area. So it's one of the things that when we were talking about the archaic human interactions, one of the things that, one of the possibilities of why Neanderthals disappeared from areas that were occupied by humans is that they just left. They just said, ah, there's other competitors for the resources. We'll just go somewhere where there's not humans. Oh yeah, so Justin, you're right, they're in a smaller space, but there's also way less of them. So before we messed everything up and the Congo was much larger, there were also way more chimps and way more gorillas. So they still would have been bumping into each other. And while I... And they really recognized neighbors. Oh, absolutely. Would it be like, ooh, stranger danger, it would have been, oh, we've met a couple of times. There was a lot of that in those dense jungle environments too where one bird call of a jaguar is present, is alerting maybe the monkeys in the jungle. Other species are reacting off of that intercommunication jungle web of information that's out there. So I love this because this is also another good strike against the, what was it, the aggressive ape or the angry, what were the, that idea that all of humanity's ills when it comes to warfare and violence. So basal ape. Basal ape brain that maybe turns out there. Angry chimpanzees are always evidence of that. They're always mean. Well, apparently not, they hang out with gorillas. Well, before we close the animal corner, I want to put a quick shout out into the ether for fat bear week. Woo-hoo. Isn't that time again? Oh my goodness. Voting started today. You missed today's bracket already, but don't worry. Their voting continues through October 11th. So you can go to explore.org slash fat bear dash week and you can vote for the Chonki is bears. So real quick, besides this just being very, very fun, the point to this is that this is all taking place in the Brooks River in Katmai National Park, Alaska. And this is to raise awareness about bears and bear conservation. This is the time of year when brown bears are their fattest. And it's because that salmon, yes, they're about to go into hibernation. And so we celebrate the bears that have been left alone and have had enough resources to be able to grow big and fat to survive the winter. And so a fat bear is a healthy bear for hibernation. And that means that they will succeed and make it through to the other side of their hibernation. So, so far, this is where we're at. This is the bracket. This is the bracket. And you can see there was already some winners. So 164-1 over 335, 164 was my choice. And then 747-1 over 856, that was definitely the internet favorite, 747, a Chonki Chonki boy. So, go check it out, vote, learn about brown bears, enjoy the silly Twitter that exists because of Fat Bear Week, NPRs tweeting crazy, silly stuff because of Fat Bear. Everybody gets it on it. It's very fun. And it's an excellent time to learn about bears and celebrate bear conservation. And also, if you need a few moments just to relax and need some sort of content on the internet that isn't gonna stress you out. This is it! They have 24-hour, basically, coverage on Explore of different parks. You can actually watch the bears all year long, basically sitting in that river eating. That's kind of what they do on those cameras all day long. Sometimes there's a little bit of drama. Oh, one bear gets into another bear's fishing hole and they kind of argue over it for a second. And there's a lot of swiping and missing it fish and yawning and wandering around with new bear cubs at the beginning of the season. It's actually very therapeutic and fun. My favorite is if I'm having trouble sleeping, I go to the Rhino Cam and dial it back to when the rhinos are going to bed. And they all come in. There's like six of them, I think. The six or seven of them. And they all go in at the same time and hunker down and sleep next to each other. And they snuggle off. They snuggle in there a bunch of snuggly rhinos when they go to sleep. If you've got that feed, you can probably back it up to scan back to the inside. Oh, I think you have to be on the inside cam though. Anyway, but it's Fat Bear Week. And it's Fat Bear Week, but there's tons of content on this site aside from the Fat Bear. That's a great site. You can watch Savannah's that are being filmed. They've got tons of live streaming cameras from wildlife parks around the world, always available. Good content. This is the content we came to the internet for. They have orca cams too. They have orca cams. I don't want an orca cam. No, I don't want to be privy to whatever orcas are getting up to. Playing mostly. Hey, Justin, do you have a science? I have some a little bit here. This is a story. They've documented hundreds of favored nectar plants for painted ladies. That's a major North American butterfly species. This is mostly in the California area. They're worried about them. Southern California is experiencing. I thought you were talking about those San Francisco houses. The painted ladies. So this is the butterfly painted lady. Thank you. Very iconic. I couldn't tell this from a monarch butterfly. Honestly, they look the same. It is a migrating butterfly. They start down in Mexico. They work their way up through California. The study identified 195 new nectar plants for the species which it has published in the journal Environmental Entomology. This is according to Julien Saldivar, UC Riverside ecologist who led the effort. The lack of rainfall in Southern California likely impacts the butterfly's ability to move through the state, potentially decreasing nectar sources and causing them to die without reproducing. There's so much to be learned about these butterflies before drought and climate change damaged them irreparably. So what they've basically done is they come up with a pretty good list. 10 of the most frequently observed plant species that are being fed on, seven of those are native to California. And they've got a list, including the yellow flowered rubber rabbit brush, blue wild hyacinth, common fiddle neck, three months, pink cushion, black sage, helotropin, desert lavender, bunch of plants that you can put in your garden. They're urging people to plant these as opposed to a non-native species. Although butterfly bush apparently is also a pretty good one, even though it's not native. Justin, that doesn't look like a monarch. I feel like that looks like a monarch. I can't tell the difference. It's the brown one. For our podcast listeners, I just have to stop and say, look up this butterfly. It is very pretty, but it does not look like a monarch. It's the same color as a monarch. It has the orange and the dark brown, black with white, but it's different patterns, very different. It doesn't have the black border around the wing or anything of that. So you're going to be very specific. Apparently, I've probably been seeing monarch butterflies my whole life, or painted ladies my whole life and thinking they were monarchs. Because to me, they kind of look the same. I'm not a great butterfly observer. I don't spend a lot of time. But good to know that there is a list now that has been published. You can find a link to the study, at least on our website, about what you should be planting in California to preserve this native butterfly species. And I guess my final story of the week was talking about Sante Paolo, which we covered in the first half. So I'm out of stories. Oh, all right. Well, that will let me dive right in to my stories. But before I do, I just want to remind everyone, this is this week in science. And if you have not yet signed up to become a patron, you are how we keep our show going. We keep our show going through our patron sponsors. You produce this show by giving us the funds we need to make it happen. You keep us going and keep us podcasting. Keep us live streaming with all of your support. Head over to twist.org, click on the Patreon link and choose your level of support, $10 and more per month. And we will thank you by name at the end of the show. All right, everybody. It is this week in science. I've got a couple of stories before we close out the show. First up, first up, let's talk brain technology. Blair, as you move into the future, do you want to meld with the AI? Are you looking for a brain computer interface that will help you mind meld? No. And be one with the AI? No, you're not. I'm sorry, I don't. I just want my brain to go in a jar or something so that it can live forever, but I just want to be me. But hey, you know what? I will compromise. If this is how I get to live forever, I will take it. Okay. Well, researchers are working on better electrodes. So the key to a good brain computer interface is a great connection to the brain. I mean, you also need the interface part which converts all those electrical signals collected by the electrodes into something that a machine learning algorithm can kind of figure out that can turn it into behavior and all the computerized stuff. But the first step is having a good connection to the brain, to the neurons. And so we are currently limited in the silicon electrodes that are created now. Created now. They can pretty much only be a set length and they can only really be like a set dimension. So they can only get because of the printing technology and the way that they've been created currently out of like the historical, the Utah Array, they are limited in the number and the size of the array that can be created. Carnegie Mellon researchers have now created what they're calling the CMU array, which is a nano printed electrode array that is an ultra high density array of micro electrodes. So it's 3D printed at nano scale that allows it to be customized. And the idea that they did in their study putting it all together was pretty much trying to print electrodes, all sorts of lengths, shove them together in smaller spaces, put them in larger spaces, spell letters and numbers with them. They just were like, let's do proof of concept. What can we do? And can we make electrodes go, basically do whatever we want them to do, print them however we want them to be printed. And they did, they determined that yes indeed they could create electrode arrays that were customizable using 3D printing technology, which is really cool that allows these arrays to be just about whatever length, which is important because if you want to get the signals from the brain, maybe you want deeper neurons. Maybe you want neurons that are closer to the surface. Maybe you want to change the geometry of the array to be able to collect a different electrical sample because really wherever the electrode is it's going to be collecting a number of signals from the nearby neurons. And so the way that that array is created is going to have a big impact on its function. They're able to create these little teeny, teeny, tiny electrode arrays to make them even smaller than they've ever been before. And they think that this is going to usher in an entire new era of brain-computer interfaces. But don't worry, they're probably not going to get to human testing for about another five years. And then after that, it's still a number of years before it gets into real things. So we're looking at the outside maybe, you know, 10 years or so before you really see the benefits of this. But it's like the only thing that's first. My first reaction is like, do I really need a brain-computer interface? No, using a touchscreen is just fine. But of course, there are applications for folks who would very much benefit from having a chip in their brain, if you will. There's potential there if that interface can become seamless enough to work around blindness. That can be a physical barrier of eyes, right? Or deafness, which is a physical barrier of the instrument through which you're hearing, because everything gets converted into and becomes electrical signal at some point anyway. That's what we're based on, which is the electron at a time of the ADP all the way up. It's an electrical system. Yep, yeah. And maybe to control the mecha suit that you're wearing. I mean, you know, who knows? There are not many reasons. I don't know. Many reasons. What, you don't want a mecha suit? I don't want a mecha suit, not really not. That is the least of all the visions of the future. Yeah, we're gonna put you into a mecha suit so you can clunk, clunk around. Yeah, thanks. Maybe we're throwing your back out. Oh, you know what? Now that you mentioned it, that sounds awesome. Yeah. Yeah, I need a mecha suit. Oh, that would be fantastic. Yeah, or maybe you know that you're the boy in the bubble and you just have, you know, you have your, your self-contained atmosphere, your self-contained environment, but it's a mecha suit so that you can go out places and don't have to be the bubble inside the house. Maybe you can get out and go places, you know? Mecha suit. Smelling, my mom lost the ability to smell baby cancer surgery, says in the chat room. Oh, I never, you know, for all of the senses that I always discount smell it. You mean like, oh, somebody's lost their sense of smell. It's like, oh, yeah. It's not like going blind or deaf or something like this where there's a bunch of other obstacles now in your way. You lose your sense of smell, minimal impact, but yeah. Taste is impacted by losing your sense of smell too. It is. It's a bummer. It is, but, but yeah, that's, well, that's one. I didn't even think about, of course, you could do that as well. Yeah, but anyway, there, we are humans with creativity and so really any need, whether it's therapeutic or adding to our abilities, you know, these bring computer interfaces are going to be a big, they're going to play a big role in that. And so better technologies and technologies that can be specifically suited to specific uses will also be very useful. It's gonna be, it's gonna be really interesting. So anyway, new devices, they work. It's very exciting. We'll see where we are. We'll do an update in the next five or 10 years and let you know what's going on. Yeah, when we've got the AI with the whale communication linked into the brain chip and the whale riders of the Pacific Ocean. The whale riders. I love it. I love it. Geez, if we're gonna do avatar in any way, I mean, that would be cool. Hey, we could have interspecies friendships. We know that doesn't have to be, you know, a bad situation. It's just like, all the things go bad on land. Have a whale riding society. Oh gosh. Okay, moving on from a whale riding society. We're talking about all our senses and Justin, you're bringing up, you know, like sight and touch and sound and all these things that could be affected by using brain computer interfaces. But, you know, what use is it if you're not really conscious, right? Consciousness is that thing that we think of as also being very human defining. Our consciousness is our awareness of our time, place, space, where we are, who we are. We can describe it in detail. What is it? Researchers have come up with quantum explanations that are coming up with, you know, chemical, neurochemical explanations, but there's a new hypothesis that has just been published in, that was just published in, I believe it's science advances and this, oh no, cognitive and behavioral neurology, apologies, and the idea that's been put forward by a couple of researchers at Boston University, Andrew Budson, Kenneth Richmond, and Elizabeth Kensinger is that consciousness is a memory system and that we don't actually have real-time consciousness. Our consciousness is about a quarter of a second behind and we know, we've heard before, that our awareness of stuff is behind what's going on in our unconscious brain and so these researchers have developed this new idea using evidence such as the timing of different neural signals in our unconscious and conscious brains and have developed this theory that basically consciousness is a memory system and so we are conscious, but it's a fast memory system. So our consciousness is our memory of a quarter second ago. So we're not really conscious, we just have a good memory system. It's like, I don't know, a rapid access memory, maybe. Well, I mean, there's people without memory, access, running memory, short-term memory loss, this sort of thing, still conscious, still conscious. So, but the idea that, I mean, if we eliminated all memory, then what would you make of a conscious? You'd just be a reactionary organism. Right, right. So it plays a role. And if you're only reactionary, then you can't be conscious. I feel like consciousness runs by the same rules as an improv stage act. You get a suggestion from the audience and you've got to run with it. The sketch that you're, the things unfolding on the stage may change, they may evolve with time, but you've got to still run with the theme that you were given, you can't just, so that's sort of what consciousness is. It's just running with whatever memory suggestion you've been given to begin with. Right, and so that's actually- While you're on stage. And when you leave stage- And you're not far. Yeah, you're not far off of that either. And because, yeah, what they're saying though is so they say that unconsciously, the decisions and actions are already made behind the scenes. Like your brain has already figured everything out for you. And then we are fooling ourselves into believing that we consciously made this decision because we're not aware of the decision that we made until after that decision has already been made and then we are acting on it. We are actually like behind the present time. Like it's very, very, this is a very fudgy system. Anyway, the researchers say that this explains like, oh, a lot of behavioral issues that we may have, self-control issues that we may have, we were, oh, I'm just gonna have one spoonful of ice cream. And then, oh my gosh, we ate the entire container because our conscious mind was not in charge. But if our unconscious mind is in charge, then that takes care of it. I mean, part of this, these kinds of- It sounds like blame shifting. Yeah, I kind of feel like that a little bit. Yeah, I agree with you there. But this does, they say in their paper, they're trying to provide a roadmap using this idea, considering neurologic psychiatric developmental disorders to be disorders of consciousness, including Alzheimer's disease and other dementias, delirium, migraines, schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder, certain types of autism and more, and that this paper can provide a roadmap for clinicians, educators, and individuals to improve their behavior and gain knowledge by using methods that are shaped in memory system as opposed to, for the conscious and unconscious mind, as opposed to, oh, it's quantum, whatever, entanglement that made me do it. If you eat that entire thing of ice cream in the split second between memory and conscious awareness, then yeah, it was the subconscious's fault. But if within that split second, you only had the one spoonful, you can totally stop. Yeah. So the animal question I have then is there's kind of a constant debate about whether certain species have consciousness and are self-aware and all these sorts of things. But by this measure, if they have memory systems, then they are conscious, right? Memory systems are not just the delay. Yeah, not just, yeah, that could be the delay there, yeah. So what they suggest is that it is the cerebral cortex that is the conscious, that's in charge of the conscious mind, and so are animals that have more of a cerebral cortex than would have that possibility of being more sentient, having that access to that kind of memory. A little bit of quality control on the, yeah. But we also don't know that all animal brains are not the same. Absolutely, there are different formulations, different architectures, we could say, right. But there are analogous structures that we're learning about. So yeah, I don't know, I think it's really, it's an interesting idea. And yeah, the thing that you always, so alcohol, it caused blackouts. You're still functioning, you don't experience it, you're not conscious of it, you don't remember it. You are not at the wheel anymore. You're not at the wheel anymore, you're still, but you're still functioning, like Justin said, that reactionary system. Your brain is still going based on all the information it has in it and the inputs that are coming in, but that memory system, to allow you to be conscious, is not turned on anymore. So I think that's instances like that, where if we can delve into how that switch occurs and what happens, I think those are the kinds of instances where we can learn a lot more about our consciousness, going to sleep, right? Conscious, unconscious. Anyway. I'm very conscious while I sleep. I'm still... All the time. Yeah. The lucid dreaming thing is kind of crazy because then it brings up whether or not you've actually, like, but I like to do that delay that split second delay. Being the quality control, I do like being like, this is not just allowing consciousness to be the animal brain, like giving us a little bit of time to reflect on the decisions that we're making that maybe the animal kingdom does not. Yeah, animal brain, how do you know though? You can't know that. No, well, you could, I suppose. Do a similar type of experiments that were done on humans to find this subconscious reaction before the action. And I'm sure they've been done. I don't know what the results are. So now I wanna know, I wanna know that. Yeah, it's just, I mean, there are lots of studies where animals have sense of self. They have like an understanding of consequence and they make logical decisions and they do all sorts of things that they don't understand. They do all sorts of things that could stack up to this existing in the animal kingdom. Right, but yeah, we have to compare these things. We need to, we need to. I'm definitely not making the image that they're not conscious. I'm talking about the little separation that we call sentience, that sort of reflective aspect of decision making that I would say takes place in humans much more so to have much greater degree than anywhere else in the animal kingdom. Well, I think you need to listen to this week in science because there are many, many, many, many studies about sentience in the animal kingdom. Truth, so anyway, so anyway. But it's in the lack of memory storage that a lot. You know what's gonna give us more memory storage? Finishing this show and going to sleep. Justin, I know you're, it's your morning and you're very conscious right now. More conscious, I got you, all right. Yeah, like you knew it. I can't tell. Knew it. Super necessary. Ah, all right, everyone. I think we've made it to the end of the show. I hope you're still conscious. And I'm pretty sure I am, but you'd have to test it to really know. Thank you so much for joining us. We're so glad that you've been here, whether for a short time, the whole time, we love that you've joined us. Thank you too, a few people I wanna shout out to. Thank you to Fada, thank you for help with the show notes and on social media, all that work. Really appreciate the work that you do. Identity four, thank you for recording the show every week. So helpful. Rachel, thank you for editing the show every week. I love that. And I would like to thank Gord and Goldezator and who else are in law, others who help keep the chat room healthy and happy and nice in there. And our Patreon sponsors, I definitely must thank our Patreon sponsors for their help in bringing you this show this evening. Thank you too. 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Just search for this week in science of our podcast or found. If you enjoyed the show, get your friends to subscribe as well. For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes and links to stories are available on our website, www.twist.org, where if you like, you can even sign up for a newsletter or click a link to find some brewery merch. You can also contact us directly. Email Kirsten at Kirsten at thisweekinscience.com, Justin at twistminginatgmail.com or me, Blair, at BlairBazz at twist.org. Just be sure to put twist, T-W-I-S in the subject line. Your email will be spam filtered into, I guess next year's Nobel Prize fondue, the after party. And for the time being, you can still find us on the Twitter where we are at twist.science, at Dr. Kiki, at Jackson Fly, and at Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback. If there's a topic you would like us to cover or address, a suggestion for an interview, a haiku that comes to in the night, please let us know. We'll be back here next week, and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news. And if you've learned anything from the show, remember. It's all in your head. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science is the end of the world. So I'm setting up shop, got my banner unfurled. It says the scientist is in, I'm gonna sell my advice. I'll show them how to stop their robots with a simple device. I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand. And all this is coming your way. So everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientific method. This Week in Science. Science. Science. Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Science. Science. Science. I've got one disclaimer, and it shouldn't be news. That's what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations and I've got them. It's the after show. Everyone, we made it to the end of the show. To the after show. Yeah, R and lower. Self-driving cars so that you can go places after you have had wine. That's nice. That's also why currently it's great because we have like Caxi's, Uber's, Lyft's. We need more, we need more delivery. But yes, but if you, if you have to go drive somewhere. Thank you all for joining us. I hope you enjoyed the show. It has become the after. Yes, Paul. Here, I'm putting in the link to the consciousness paper because I just find it very interesting. It certainly is. Very fascinating, all the different concepts that they bring up in the, they put a little thought into their idea. It's not the end all be all. You've thought about it a little bit. I put it in the discord if you guys want it in there or so. Sounds like people are awake in the upstairs world. Is that bad? Well, if it is my child, it's bad because it's 10 o'clock and he has school tomorrow. That is bad. That is bad. I mean, he's getting older and every year, it's a little bit older. He's still not old enough to be up until 10 o'clock on a school night, but he pushes and he pushes and he pushes and he says, I really like, he just manipulates. Children, they're the masters of manipulation when it comes to bedtime. Children, you say it is time for bed and they go, oh, but I must pet the cat. And look at how cute the cat is and look at how cute I am while I'm petting the cat. Oh my God. That's great, go to bed. But I have to look at my fish now and look at my wonderful fish. And I have three frogs. Stop buying him pets. Is the answer? I want to see two frogs. Gosh. You've got too many pets, he has to say goodnight to. Maybe that's it, maybe that's part of it. Problem solved, see, you're welcome. No more pets. No more pets, Kai. It's where he comes down to. Yeah, that's it. Do you have tricks for getting children to bed, Justin? Yeah, it's not working. Well, yours is pre-verbal, so that's part of the problem right there. He's talking now. Little one for you. Has a blanket and a bank. And you walk around and you sing songs for about 45 minutes to an hour. And then he'll sleep for like half an hour and wake up screaming because the bank fell out or the blanket's too far away and then you go and you fix that and then we were up between three and four in the morning a couple of days ago. I was like, he was like, well, I woke up and was just like, let's start today. I'm like, no, he got him out, got him up and went over to the window and looked out and see, it's all dark, it's nighttime. Yeah, all the birds are sleeping. He's a bird watcher, he loves. Take him to the zoo, take him to the zoo. There's lions, there's polar bears. There's also the elephants. You know what he's looking at? All the birds that are at the zoo. It's the most interesting thing to him. It's watching birds, he doesn't care about anything else. My birds, they go, they jump between the trees and they flap their wings and they're flying and like birds are so fascinating. And then the animal whose name I always mess up because I can never remember what it is. It's, they have either, it's either meek rat or meerkat. There's no such thing as a meek rat. Oh my gosh. He likes those too, he talks to those at the zoo. He'll babble at them for endlessly. We're one day past zookeeper day so you had to, you had to get in a zookeeper. What? Patience, I can't hear you so far away from you. Yeah, we can't hear you. Elephants are big so he puts his hands up in here and shows how big he is too. Elephant. Like an elephant. Very nice zoo here by the way in the lovely city of Copenhagen. I see the zoo. I bet. It is phenomenal. We will put together a zoo. Good night Fada and yes, thank you for Greilark for the raid and thanks for helping engineer that Fada. That's awesome. Can somebody explain to the old person what you're talking about? So on Twitch, when somebody has a channel and is streaming and either, you know, doing whatever they do on their channel, creating their content, whether it's talking about science like us or DJing, playing music or playing video games, you know, they're doing their Twitch stuff. They finish their stream, but they send their viewers to another channel so that their viewers aren't just left with nothing. And so the raid is when that channel ends and all those people come into your program unannounced. Oh. They come into the chat room and usually they come into the chat room and they're like, hey, what's going on here? Blah, blah, blah. Nice. Because it's very community chat oriented and it's pretty cool. Okay. So what's a Twitch? So Twitch, you know Twitch. A Twitch, what's a Twitch? It's like a muscle spasm. So this is fun fact. I don't know anything about what's going on in social media stuff. Oh, I know. You know, the Twitch was the thing that was around a while ago and I didn't know it was still there. That's good to know. Yeah, so it was just in TV and then it became Twitch TV. Oh, that's what that was. I remember that because it had my name in it. Yeah, so it was all the live streamers doing all their stuff and then just in TV kind of ended but it was bought by Twitch TV and so that became a thing that turned into Twitch TV. And then it was really for gaming and like that's where a lot of people were doing there but then they decided let's do lots of other things and they started getting other live streamers and creative pursuits there and during the pandemic it became massive for DJs. And so yeah, so music has been a big one. I love watching. I watch a lot of DJs over on Twitch. Erlen or Funer fact, Justin could have just stopped at I don't know anything and just left it. I know some things. I know some things. You do, you know a lot of things actually. That's right and Gord streams on Twitch so our long time listener viewer Gord is on Twitch gaming a lot, doing a lot of things Thursday to Monday, 11 p.m. to 4 a.m. Gord, you're up all night. You are a night owl. How fascinating. Yeah, so Mark, Mepi Man, as you're saying there, Twitch does a lot of gamification to get money out of people and that's because we're streaming all at the same time to different channels and we're a podcast and that's what we are broadcasting like our talk show. So the idea of stopping and doing a lot of the prompting and the gamification kind of things that have been baked into the Twitch model, I just don't see that working really well for us. Hey, but if you're missing out. People, I know I am, but if people want to subscribe to us on Twitch, you can and then you can buy people's subs and you can get by bits, I guess. I guess that's the thing that they say hey, get some bitties, that's what the, I don't know, there's a DJ and I'll just. Hey, if you're afraid of missing out, you've been missing out on this show and we have also things that should concern you and then products you can buy that would alleviate those concerns to some degree that you should just buy those from us and we don't have any of that. No, but if people start, what is it? They could make a hype train right now. Is that a new streaming thing? It's a Twitch, but yes, bits and subs and things. You could do that over on Twitch and if you do that, I will bring Cappy up here and she'll look at you and she'll hate me for picking her up. What are you talking about? Bits and subs, come here, you're happy. What are we talking about? Did we get any bits and subs? I don't know, but you've got a kitty cat. Oh yeah, and if you're not a long time listener and you're really into crypto, this is not a show that talks about that at all. Sorry. We don't talk about crypto at all. Blair is saying another way that you could support us is going to our Zazzle store. You making pillows? Oh, we do have cool stuff. Cool. Merch. We don't have gaming. We just have sizing. We have a lot of merch that is not specifically show branded and we have some that is. Yes. It's true. The back of my heart. You can put it on your white decorative chair. Oh, OK. Just have a moment. Actually, because I have that chair. Why are quote unquote accent chairs so expensive? Dude. I'm like, I need a chair. I need a couple chairs. And I'm looking around at chairs. Chairs are really expensive. Oh, my gosh. How do people just buy chairs? And they're like, look, I got chairs. You don't just go buy chairs. You have to think about buying chairs. If you only need one. So there's actually a really cool thing that I saw a whole bunch of chairs that I really liked and was told I couldn't have any of them. And they were very cheap. So there's a recycling center, a short drive, from anywhere in Copenhagen. And the recycling center is cool because they got the bins are set out there. You can throw the wood over here, your metal over there. If it's ceramics, there's a place. If there's whatever it is, you've got cardboard, plastic. You can throw it all on the things. Adjacent to that, combined with that recycling center is an upcycling center. So people bring all kinds of furniture that they're like, ah, I'm done with this. I'm going to just recycle it. And they can kind of show it to the folks that work there. And be like, I have these chairs. Should I throw them in the wood bin? Or do you want to put them in their upcycle store? And so there's all this actually pretty fantastic furniture. Yeah, it's a little thread bear here and there. And you know, it's got the typical secondhand store charm to it. But it's built into their recycling center that useful household items and stuff that might have a second life gets to go in and then people can shop in as well. So there's also the danger of getting rid of the old furniture and coming home with other old furniture. But I found so many cool chairs with being in Europe, all sorts of accents, like all of the accents were present. And these chairs. But I wasn't allowed to take any of them. I like Paul Disney's question. Why are accent chairs? I think that is a more fundamental question. I think you're right, Paul. And yes, Eric Knapp, you pay extra for the accent. It's true. Oh, yeah, Eric Knapp, Habitat for Humanity restores. Those are fantastic. Especially if you need a door. The rebuilding center is fantastic for that. Also, we've got a place called the Rebuilding Center, where it's just like windows and doors and trim, things that have been ripped out of houses. I've been to a restore. It was pretty awesome. I mean, really, tons of really funky cool furniture and stuff like that. But the thing that impressed me was walls upon walls of this warehouse of just doors. They had all of the doors. If you need a door, go to a humanity restore store to get your door. Because they have all the doors there that you could possibly ever need. All the doors. I like to open doors. I have an open door policy. Yeah, I mean, really, the idea, it's hard. You want to buy pretty nice things. But sometimes, it's better to recycle, right? Reuse, recycle, find the things that have already been made as opposed, and give them a second life as opposed to buying something brand new. Sometimes, the brand new things are great if you know that you're going to use them for a very long time. Mark Meppy Man, did you miss all the science talk? Very possible, I think. But I think we recorded it. We did, I think we recorded it a few places, yes. You're good. You're good. It's all, it's all reviewable. In fact, I think we may have, if you want to go back through the chat, there may be thousands of hours of sexy talk available at this point. Thousands of hours. It's true. Yeah, noodles. The prices are up on everything these days. Inflation's real, yo. Noam Sain says, where's our Lego calendar fix of the week, Blair? I don't have anything new, but I can share with everyone. I'm going to do a bunch this weekend, but OK. Do I have any requests from the previous set? I don't have anything new. I'm just trying to make iPhone cases with my art right now. That's all. But we need Legos, Blair. I hear you. Animals. I didn't get them done. I worked a 12 hour day on Saturday. I'm not pushing you. I'm sorry. No, that's OK. I get to work another 12 hour day this Saturday. Yeah, that's a lot. Yeah, it's event season. Look at this. Oh, look at this. Got to look at. Oh, wait, I got to scroll down here. There we go. Add to stream. Think about this. A guinea pig iPhone case. Make him a little bigger. Yes, you know, guinea. That's pretty cool. Paul's been doing the trouble. That's no fun. There we go. That'll do it, I think. Lego is like sheep. That's been true. Robot cats on bicycles. Is this the science Lego that you're requesting, Lauren? Are you going to make sure it fits? I know. But OK, so you're depending on the photos that you're doing and I know how you had said you were going to maybe put them in some realistic environments or maybe do some. What are those boxes that you put them in? Shadow boxes. Yes, shadow boxes, put the animals in boxes, Blair. Yes, no, saying is saying Blair, tell us how the Lego animals will interact for photos. Maybe we can do some extra special photos of different animals. Oh, yes. Interacting because you'll have physical structures that you can. Yeah, they can play with each other. I think it could be great. Yeah, no, that's perfect. This iPhone case looks great. I'm going to add it to our thing. Put it up there. Yeah, the Dart mission, the asteroid that NASA hit. Left a trail of debris 10,000 kilometers long. I know earlier this week, it was 6,000 kilometers long and that number's just gotten bigger. It's 6,000 miles. 6,000 miles, 10,000 kilometers. And if you're not familiar with kilometers, that's approximately a million meters. It's a lot. That's a big trail. But did it move the moonlet? This is what I mean. I don't care. And apparently we've still got to wait some months to know if it's moved. I guess we didn't move it much if we did. Otherwise, it would be more noticeable. It's just a nudge, just a nudge in space. Nudge in space, like nudging. Blair, who would like to know if you, if once you get the phone case created, if the phone case can be altered based on the phone that a person has. So can you be like, oh, I would like this phone case, but I want it as an Android or whatever. Yes, and if, yes, but it doesn't, it's not very smart. So if you change it and the gutters are wrong or it cuts off the face of the guinea pig with the camera hole or anything like that, just email me or Twitter me, and I'll make one for whatever case you need. Yeah, great, awesome. That would be great. If it doesn't work for you, ask Blair. I'll do it. I just want to know. Two months, I don't want to wait two months, but I just want to know, did we nudge it? Did we move it? Because that is what we need to know so that we don't have a mile high, kilometer high, was it kilometer high waves hitting our shores. Oh my goodness. I don't want that. Oh my goodness, yeah. That is wild. And it's not the asteroids that we can see that I'm worried about. It isn't, that's the ones I'm worried about. I think we would see the eight mile diameter one. It's the dark ones, the ones that are dark that are hiding in the dark and we haven't seen them yet. Those are the ones. So there's always like, I guess it was pretty much the plot of don't look up or the situation for don't look up, but there is some reality to spotting something of that size heading our direction, having no ready mission to intercept into a just course and having, depending on how far out they see it, six, eight months a year maybe as the thing gets ever closer and humanity is faced with timeline. I don't want a timeline. I don't want to see those talk shows. I don't want to hear the conspiracy. Nope, nope, nope. But now based on your knowledge that you gained today from listening to the twist, you know that you got to get away from the coast. It's most likely gonna hit the water. Yeah, that's true. So get yourself to a high elevation somewhere away from the coast and maybe a mile up. I live on a hill now, but I don't think it's high enough. Oh, and you live in a highly tectonic area anyway. You'll have earthquakes and tsunamis going on all over the place there. Somewhere will be safe. And so spread out humans. Go everywhere and, you know, but avoid the coast. That's what you need to do. Avoid the coast. The coast is so pretty. But it does also make you wonder about the quality of the archaeological record of being affected by that event. I mean, there's a lot that we must have just lost that can't be recovered from that event. Well, from that event, not much archaeological in terms of people, but paleontological. Paleontological, thank you. Yeah. The origin of life stuff. What did they just find? They found, what was it? Was it in Scotland? What did they find? It's someplace strange. The predecessor of pterosaurs, a little wingless lizard-like creature, fast-running little reptiles. They find it, I don't know where they found it. I don't know how, I've got the slow internet on the setting on apparently. Slow loading. My computer must be doing something. I must be training something. I know you're doing AI art right now, aren't you? No, Lauren Gifford, I have not tried AI art myself. I have appreciated the art that other people have been creating. It's very fun. It's a whole thing. It's a whole thing. Hey Blair, maybe that's what the calendar should be next year. What? AI art? You could use AI art to create the animals. All right, I'll take a year off. Is that what you're saying? Sounds like you're telling me to take a year off. No. Yeah, right? I mean, that is if you accept the AI art as final creations that don't need any further tinkering from your human creativity. Right, that whole nonsense. That whole thing. That whole thing. Yeah, the little lizard was found in Scotland apparently a hundred years ago, over a hundred years ago. And it was probably sitting there in a museum box somewhere. It's been connected as an ancestor of terrasaurus. Cool. But my internet is in full fail mode right now. Is it? My heater is on full fail mode. I don't have a heater controller here. Do you hear it in the background? Nope. My cat is so cute. She just brought me a toy fish. And she dropped a fish. It's wonderful. All right, Blair, is it time? It's time. I'm just finishing up a Japanese mossy frog beach towel. So, that's going to be in the store in a minute. in a minute. Oh wait I actually know I don't know what a Japanese mossy frog is. I'm only familiar with the Vietnamese variety. Mossy frog. But that is a that is a very if it's anything like the Vietnamese mossy frog. It's really cool. That's what I meant. Come on that's what I meant. Oh well I don't know. I'm just checking there could be more than one mossy frog in the world. I'm doing so many things at once right now. Moss moss frog. Moss frog. There it is. There it is. Got the calendar right here. 2022 calendar with the mossy frog. This is going to be a beach towel. Yeah I'm almost done. Give me one second I'll share. Ready. That's a background blender. I've never seen one. Yeah here we go. Here we go. I love the frog mouth. My interwebs. This is Tony frog mouth is one of my favorites. It's uh it's Brian's favorite that's why he saw I was making that towel and he was like buy that. Common snapping turtle. This year's calendar. So many wonderful animals. The giddy pig can now be on your phone. He fit well. Smile Adon with September this year. Yeah for Species Requiem Day. Yep. Uh I'm gonna I'm gonna uh in my segment a little early. And just by saying uh real quickly uh say good night Blair. Yeah I'm trying to share a picture of the towel. The internet's broken. Oh sorry I didn't see it. There it is. There's the towel. It's there for you. All right good night. Say say say good morning Justin. I don't remember. Good morning Justin. Good night. Good night. Good night everyone. Thank you for joining us for another episode of This Week in Science. We love that you've been here. Make sure you hit those subscribe buttons and the likes and the loves and the up arrows and all that kind of stuff that's on the positive side of things. Get those algorithms liking us more. Good night. Good morning wherever you are. Stay safe. Stay healthy. Stay curious. We will see you again next week. Good night.