 This is TWIS, this week in Science episode number 575, recorded on Wednesday, July 13th, 2016. Science, like sharks, keeps moving. Hey everyone, I am Dr. Kiki, and tonight on this week in Science, we are going to fill your head with shifting clouds, blind mice, and monkey smarts, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, think for a moment that this is your last moment, that however it happens, whatever the cause, suddenly this is to be your last moment alive. Pause it here. Rewind the week, the month, even the year. How would you live it differently in this frame of time, knowing the precise moment in which all moments will end? You can't, of course, live productive lives thinking this way, but when given reason to reflect, we should make space for it, because nothing is guaranteed, and death makes meaningless all work, not done out of love, and all time spent on uninspired efforts away from those we love. So eat, drink, and be merry, me hearties, for it's this week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I wanna learn everything. I wanna fill it all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I wanna know what's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in Science. What's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in Science. Science to Kiki and Blair. And good science to you, Justin Blair, and everyone out there. I do hope this is not the last moment, but at least you spent it with us. Yeah, Justin, do you have something to tell us? Listening to this week in Science. After the show, maybe. Ooh. All right, everyone, I hope you are here to join us for another fun-filled, frolicking evening of Science. We've got so many stories coming your way for the evening. I have stories all about brains, brains and more brains. Woo! And then some clouds and other things, but a lot of brains. A lot of brains. Yeah, Justin, what'd you bring? I've got three, no, make it two blind mice, a microbiota story, and possibly some Neanderthal cannibalism. Yummy. Blair, what do you have? I have invertebrate sex. I have good scavengers and other facts about corvids. And then I have monkey brains on theme with the day. All right, monkey brains. You. You're a monkey brain. Yeah. I like to be an ape brain. Thank you very much. Yeah. I'm an ape. You're a pride of monkey. Prime ape brain. Prime ape brain. Not just any ape. I have a great ape brain, just so you know. It is great. Super great. Super great, great. So not so great news. This week, research that was published by researchers from, wait, where is it? From Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego, California. Joel Norris is an atmospheric scientist who took a look at information from geostationary satellites from 1983 to 2009 to look at cloud cover. And so cloud cover is this funny thing when we're trying to determine what the clouds are doing. Because there's the issue of the clouds at certain levels. They reflect light, and they cool the planet, and then clouds at other levels when you're talking about climate, can help to trap heat and to keep the planet warm. And so different clouds are important for different reasons. And then we also have the satellites that observe them that we're not necessarily meant to observe them in the first place, but have been enabling atmospheric scientists to look at clouds. They can end up drifting in their orbits, and so make taking specific time point measurements so that they can do correlations from day to day, week to week, year to year, very difficult. So Norris and his team systematically went about correcting their data for cloud cover from the time period that I said. And they published the results in Nature this week that, hey, good news, the climate models seem to be right when it comes to predicting what clouds are doing. Is that really good news? The climate models are working when it comes to clouds. That's so great. People complain about the climate models all the time, and they, oh, we don't have accurate enough models. But hey, they totally predicted the movement of clouds. And what are the clouds doing? Well, they are moving away from the equator, and they are moving more toward the poles, which is kind of not good, because the majority of radiation comes to the Earth at the equator, and it's much better for us to have reflective cloud cover around the equator if we don't want the Earth to warm. So having clouds around the poles might make for sunnier equatorial vacations, but it's not really great for climate in the long run. Secondarily, storm clouds are getting taller. They're reaching higher through the atmosphere. They're getting fluffier and bigger, and maybe it makes for good viewing out of airplane windows. But at the same time, it can also lead to worse storms than we have seen historically. So it's not necessarily good that the water vapor is getting caught up into these high cloud tops. Additionally, higher cloud tops create more of a blanketing greenhouse effect, as opposed to a reflective anti-greenhouse effect. So you're saying is, hooray, we were right, we're doomed. We're doomed. We were right, we're doomed. Some of the stuff within the data, there were a couple of earthquake, and not earthquake, volcanic eruptions during the time period. And so the data could be a little bit conflicted, skewed, because of the ash and smoke that ended up in the air as a result of Pinatubo in 1991 and El Chichon in 1982. But overall, the analysis of these records pretty much show consistency between the climate models from the IPCC that the IPCC is using and the observation of what clouds are doing. Yeah, so there are other questions that still need to be looked at. And we don't know everything about clouds by any means yet. And so it would be wonderful to find out which types of clouds are really changing. So are there low-lying clouds over different areas? What kind of clouds are building up more and where? Can we get better data on different clouds in different levels of the atmosphere and what they're doing to really find out what effects they're going to have? But yeah, so far, so good. For cloud cover, yeah. But in some good news that I want to bring back, people are awesome. We build cool things. We sent Juno to Jupiter. Arrived last week, got into orbit. And Juno has sent back the full first image. The first images are returning from Juno already. And they're going to start trickling in slowly over the next days to months. They're not coming in quickly by any means. But we're going to start seeing some beautiful pictures. And so the view, we saw a picture that Juno had taken on approach. And there was an animation created from Juno's approach to Jupiter. But Juno was not yet in orbit. And this is the first JunoCam picture that was taken after Juno reached orbit. It's a picture of Jupiter. Half in shadow, half not, with the brilliant red spot. And in the darkness of the night sky, you can see the moon's Io, Europa, and Ganymede. So our eyes are on the skies, which is pretty, pretty cool. Let's keep looking at space. It's pretty fun stuff. And this week in Science, Justin, what do you have? This is an experiments conducted under the leadership of a Stanford University School of Medicine investigator. Have succeeded for the first time, which would be the first time in all of human history, mind you, in restoring multiple key aspects of vision in mammals. In experiments in mice, the scientists coaxed optic nerve cables into regenerating after they had been completely severed. Optic nerve cables are responsible for conveying visual information from the eye to the brain, although I think technically they're both part of the brain. I think it's all brain, all the way forward. Researchers found that they could retrace the former routes and re-establish connections with the appropriate parts of the brain. Unprecedented, just partial restoration, here could pave the way to future work that enables blind people to see again. That would be intense, right? So the animal's condition prior to the scientist's efforts to regrow the eye-brain connection resembled glaucoma, which is the second leading cause of blindness. After you get cataracts, cataracts is something you can have surgery for. Glaucoma has no cure, but can get you a recreational card. Says to study senior author, misquote slightly, Andrew Huberman, PhD associate professor of neurobiology. He's a senior author in the study. Says glaucoma is caused by excessive pressure on the optic nerve. It affects nearly 70 million people worldwide. Vision loss due to optic nerve damage can also accrue from injuries, retinal detachment, tumors, various brain cancers, other sources. This is a thin sheet of cells, the retina. A thin sheet of cells no more than half as thick as a credit card. That's the light sensing part of the eye. That's what you got to work with. A little tiny bit. Says here, if the nerve cells were offices, this tiny patch of tissue would be Manhattan. It's very, very hard to drive a car. Yeah. Very congested. No place to park. Yeah. And these photoreceptors cells in the back of the retina react to different wavelengths of light by sending electrically coded information to other cells in the retina called the retinal ganglion cells, of which there are more than 30 types. So each of these little cells is sort of specialized. Some of it is color generated. Some of it is looking for upward motion. Some of it is looking for different side to side motion. And when they all work together, you can tell the difference between a squirrel running across your path and a car coming right at you. So it's very nice that they do this job. Somehow the brain can interpret these electrical signals and say, wow, that's the car coming. I better get back onto the sidewalk, says Uwe-Man. More than a third of the human brain is dedicated to processing visual information. I had no idea it was that big. Oh, yeah. We're very visual animals. A large, large portion of our brain is dedicated to vision. Yep. Wow. Large part of our cognition. If a third of your brain, then it's sort of like, I know it works, and I know people talk about this all the time when they do visualization, where a gymnast or something will be visualizing themselves doing a routine, or an athlete visualizes themselves making the shot, or whatever it is. And that's a big part of preparation nowadays for professional athletes. Now that I know, a third of your brain is doing that. And probably in that visualization, there's motor, what do they call it? The mirror, what is it? Mirror neurons. Motor, mirror, mirror. The mirror neurons. The mirror neurons are probably getting activated in your own re-visualization. So you're actually getting a lot involved there. But yeah, so there isn't actually natural regeneration that takes place in nature. You can do that with your sense of smell. Your sense of smell can get killed off, and can kind of regenerate itself. But your vision doesn't have a natural way to do this. Yeah. So much of our vision, I mean, our eyes are just they're the lens that we see the world through. But our vision is actually due to our brain. That's our brain is what allows us to see. If we just had eyes, we wouldn't be seeing anything. So in the study, adult mice in which the optic nerve in one eye had been crushed were treated with either a regime of intensive daily exposure to high contrast visual stimulation in the form of constant images of moving black and white across a grid or biochemical manipulations that kicked the M-T-O-R pathway within the retinal ganglion cells back in the high gear, or both. The mice were tested three weeks later for their ability to respond to certain visual stimuli, and their brains were examined to see if any actual regrowth had occurred. Importantly, while retinal ganglion cells axions in the crushed optic nerve had been obliterated, the frontline photoreceptor cells and those cells' connections to the retinal ganglion cells and the damaged eye did remain intact. And the successful version of this was the combined approach actually had the best outcome. And they say here that somehow the retinal ganglion axions retained their own GPS system. They went to the right places, and they did not go to the wrong places. So they sort of knew where they were meant to connect to. That's always fascinating. It's one of those questions in cell biology, developmental biology, or even regenerative biology. What are the molecular instructions that the cells are following? How do they know? How do these growing cells, when they're re-growing, how do they know what to connect to? Why don't they go to the wrong place? And so that's fascinating. They knew exactly where to go. Yeah, it was reaching ganglion cells in the same eye and being conveyed to the appropriate downstream brain structures, essentially processing that visual input. So this is another one of those. You heard it here first, folks. Blindness may be a thing of the past in the future. Or at least blindness that occurs over time. So blindness that you're not necessarily born with, that's congenital, but blindness that's from causes like glaucoma, diabetes, others, that maybe we can fix it possibly in the future. Yeah, but then again, every piece of that puzzle, you may be carrying other forms of blindness later on. Yeah, that's cool. I hope so. That would be amazing. It would be amazing. Although I have a story later about why people who are blind do have some leg up on the rest of us in a certain way. We've talked about it before on the show, but I have a new study about it. But before we get there in the second half of the show, do you know what time it is? What time is it? It's time for Blair's Animal Corner. Change your mind. Except for giant pandalas. What you got, Blair? Oh, well, what is the sound of a cicada make you want to do, Justin? Sleep. Oh, interesting. Well, if you're a cicada, it makes you want to get down. And that's kind of the point. The males make their fancy sound to attract female cicadas. Yeah, tell them it's time to get busy. But there are other animals that respond to this sound as well. And it's sarcophagate flies. Sarcophagate flies are a bit of a parasite to the cicada. The female, pregnant sarcophagate flies deposit maggots onto the cicada. The maggots burrow inside the cicada. Of course, they always do stuff like that when invertebrates. And they feed on its insides until they eat their way out. The cicada dies in this process. So if the sarcophagate flies hear this sound and they know it's time to come lay their maggots in or on these cicadas, then it should just be pregnant female flies that show up as well as female cicadas. But it turns out both male and female flies show up at the cicada. And some of those females are not yet pregnant. So actually, what's happening? What's going on? The sound of the cicada is a call to arms for these flies, that it's time to either lay your eggs and have your maggots eat the cicada. Or if you are not yet pregnant, it's time to get down. So the male flies that are at the cicada, they repeatedly attempt to mate with other arriving flies, whether they be males, pregnant females, or non-pregnant females. All of them will, they're everybody's fair game. And there is a fair amount of success. So in a study where they captured all of the flies showing up to these cicadas, this is a study done by the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida. They caught 110 flies by playing cicada sound, about 75% were females, and some of them were not even carrying larvae. The rest of them were males. So this is an interesting situation where you see a mating call and you see who shows up to that mating call. And you assume that that mating call has a singular use. But in this case, other species have learned to hear that call and use it as a signal, not only to lay their eggs, but also to find each other. That it's time, that the cicadas are out, so it is time. What is the time, I wonder what the time period between copulation and the egg laying? Great question. Yeah. It might be a good thing to find out, because if it's within the couple of weeks that the cicadas are out, then the flies probably don't live that long. Yeah, that's good. They live a couple of days, yeah. It says it's only about 24 hours. Yeah, so the flies, it's a signal for them to start reproducing because the cicadas are there. Yeah, absolutely. So an interesting situation where I wonder if in a couple hundred years, the cicadas will figure this out and have to change their sound, find a way to signal each other without the classic cicada sound, because it sounds like it's time to start an arms race here, if you ask me. It might be, especially if it's a lot of flies and they're drastically impacting the cicada population, which it would be. Yeah, I mean, evolution just is one big arms race, isn't it? What was that? Is that the cicadas? That's a cicada song, if that isn't the sound of love. Oh yeah, what is? Oh. Turn a little off. That's like a crazy cicada berry white going on right there. Oh yeah, in the mood. Yeah, so that's the cicadas. Now, they provide a service to these flies without even realizing it. Turns out our good friend, the crow, also providing a very important public service. Do you know what that is? They're scavengers. Yes. So they clean things up, right? Carion eaters. Yes, and I was very surprised to hear from this new study out of the University of Exeter at Cornwall that a survey via motion-activated cameras in and around Falmouth at the university's campus found they were putting out rat carcasses and surveying who showed up to eat this, quote, trash to clean up the space. And they found animals, animals, animals like this, magpies, badgers, gulls, all these animals taking away rat carcasses. What I found particularly interesting is that 98% of the carcasses getting taken away, taken away by crows. Wow. So that is a pretty big impact on an ecosystem. Yeah, is that the crows are responsible for pretty much almost all of the cleanup happening in this urban environment. So that's one thing I do want to mention. It's an urban environment. It's one environment. It could be a crow-friendly area. We don't know. Maybe there's not enough cover for some of these other animals. But what we know is that in this particular space, 98% of carrion cleanup is happening by crows. So it's an important reminder that crows are really beneficial. They are also really smart. And we've talked time and time again about how adaptable they are to new environments and how they recognize threats. So they're animals that we want to make sure are healthy and happy, because we want them to stay in our urban environments if they are going to be our very important cleanup crew. Yeah, well, let's see. If you think about urban environments, and who the scavengers are, we have rats. We have crows. Maybe you have raccoons. You don't have all of the carrion eaters that you have when you get outside of the wild, the urban environment, into the wild. And crows are very prolific and have taken to urban environments. They're one of the species that has adapted very well to urban environments. So yeah. Yeah, and as I mentioned, very smart, very good at learning and adapting. And they're close cousins. Ravens, a new story in the news this week, Ravens have specific strategies when it comes to learning from one another. So cognitive biologists from the University of Vienna with Princeton University and Leeds University looked at how Ravens learn. And they found that Ravens learn best from their affiliates. What that means is that they're animals that they respond closely to, that they are bonded to, that they have some social relationship to. So sometimes those are siblings or family members, but it's not always. It's pretty much always though, animals that they show some sort of what I would call bonding behavior with. They would allow closer proximity than under other individuals. They would groom or preen each other. Those individuals are the ones that they would then go close to when learning new tactics and learn directly from. Which makes sense that you learn better when you have better proximity. And the Ravens that would allow proximity would be ones that are comfortable with this Raven who's learning. But it's interesting. Or lurking, whatever it is. Lurking. But it's interesting that they won't go very close even to learn valuable information if it's not a close individual. If it's not an individual they're comfortable with. And that they still need that social affiliation to be able to learn valuable skills to learn about their environments, to get food, to learn how to make tools. All those things count on strong social relationships. So take from that what you will. I think it's interesting. Intelligent social animals do, I believe, have these closer social bonds. And in that maybe have greater capacity for learning from other individuals. If you think about primates and grooming each other and looking at different animals with different levels of intelligence. What level, you know. Yeah, and I think it's interesting, an animal that is so bent on learning new tasks and associating specific individuals with good or bad. Knowing to warn one another of specific individuals of their same species or other species. Communicating with one another where food is. All this stuff that we know corvids can do and are really good at. The fact that social connections still have such a huge part to play in all of that, I find really fascinating. Yeah, absolutely. And especially family connections. That they're so closely related to each other. We're not all that far away from ravens, are we, when it comes down to it? We're all just kind of bird brains, aren't we? We're all just kind of bird brains, we are. Well, we have run through our stories for the first half of the show. Excuse me. But we will have more stories coming up after a very short break with some extremely important messages. Stay tuned, this is This Week in Science. With more than intuition the line of reason shows the way. Hey everybody, thank you for listening to Twist. We really appreciate that you spend your time every week with us learning about what's happening in the world of science and that you appreciate the way that we deliver it to you conversationally and with the dash of opinionology here and there. 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If miracle wonders were held in their looks, why waste precious time and try selling their books for our sins and the ways for your publishing? And we are back with more of this week in science. Yes, we are. Justin, tell me a story. All right, I'm gonna do a quick mic adjustment. Mic. Okay, so Neanderthals. There's a bit of Neander news out there this week. Neanderthals, we know from examples in Spain and in France that they occasionally buried their dad. But there's some pretty clear indications that these individuals were specifically interred because they had died and they had sort of offerings left with them, bits of jewelry, some burnt herbs and some not so burnt herbs. They had sort of made offerings to them too. So we get this sense that our Neanderthal cousins cared for their dad much as we do today. There are also examples though, and also France and Spain, where they may not have taken that much care with the dad, where they may have really liked them a lot so much so that they ate them. Well, you don't wanna waste anything. Well, you know, so before we too much project, oh, Neanderthal behavior, right? Like humans do this in various parts of the world in our history and currently. And eating some of the flesh of a departed loved one in some cultures is a way of honoring the ancestor, making them part of you. So let's not go too far and say that they were just cannibalizing one another. They may have died of natural causes first. We really don't know. The new study, and there's just sort of a couple of examples of this, right? Has discovered that the largest number of Neanderthal human remains in northern Europe, which is sort of rare, they're sort of mid to southern, but typically, but this is Belgium. But they say it's not only large in the number of remains, but it's also in the number of individuals represented. So we have a total here of five, four adolescents or adults in one child. And this, I can't talk Belgium anything, but I have no idea, it's in Guaya, Belgium, look it up. Third of the Neanderthal remains on the site. It's like cut marks and many remains bear percussion marks. Cosmon bones were crushed to extract marrow. Comparison of the Neanderthal remains with other remains of fauna recovered on the site, which were horses and reindeer, suggests that three species were consumed and that all three were consumed in a similar way. This discover re-enables a range of known Neanderthal behavior in northern Europe with respect to the dead, needs to be, that's now being expanded. What is more, five Neanderthal remains display signs of having been used as soft precursors, so they were actually used as tools to sharpen other bones into tools. So this is, you know, and it's not yet, they've seen examples of them doing this before with like antlers or something. So it's not, they're just sort of doing to nature, with nature, what they were doing with their fellow Neanderthal after they passed. So far, there have been three sites in which Neanderthals are known to have used bones of a fellow Neanderthal to shape stone tools. What's sort of also interesting here, so the places here are like places like Croatia, France, now also Belgium, really fascinating part of this though, aside from this behavior, it was also possible to date this collection to living between 40,000, 45,000 years ago. And because of the exceptional preservation of the collection, it allowed mitochondrial DNA of the remains to be recovered, which when compared to that of other Neanderthals, reveals that genetically the Neanderthals in Belgium, Germany, Croatia, Spain, had great genetic uniformity. So despite their geographical distances, the overall population inhabiting Europe was pretty closely related. That's fascinating. And from what we can tell, again, it's sort of tough because we're finding our Neanderthals, we find mostly in caves with that level of preservation. So there could be, it could be Neanderthals lost on the surface are, you know, could be a much larger population than we actually think it is today, but chances are, especially once you see this lack of genetic diversity, chances are the population was pretty small and stayed pretty small the entire time they inhabited Europe. Once you get into larger populations, you know, even if they're pretty genetically similar, I think you can start to run into more and more differentiation. Yeah, you get more of those single nucleotide polymorphisms when you have a larger population, you have a little bit more time between individuals with larger populations to have time, that opportunity for differentiation to occur, for different alleles to become, to increase their frequency in the population. But yeah, once you go through it, once you're starting to break down and go through that population bottleneck where the population size is so small you don't have any diversity. Yeah. But just to go a side note, if we got a slight posture, if I should die, let's please not use me as a tool. Unless you really are like, his femur would be really handy to sharpen something. Well, I'm an organ donor. Isn't that using me as something once I die? So, okay, that's a fantastic example. So maybe this is just sort of like a very advanced form of organ donation. Let no part of your neighbor go to waste. Be a good neighbor. Get rid of your organs. Organ farm is here. Then there's also like the whole like, you know, my work, next year's working on a project, you know, means a lot to them. And they just busted their favorite bone sharpening tool. And then they kind of give you that sideways glance. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Don't look at me. I'll be looking at me. Go find a deer, come on. Yeah. Well, when you are thinking about being social or not social, whether you're gonna go to a party or you're like, ah, I just wanna stay home, do you ever consider your immune system in those decisions? No. Yeah, right? Why would you? What? I mean, except maybe you're like, oh, I'm getting a cold, so maybe I shouldn't go out. But no, it's not like you go, oh, my immune system's telling me to stay in tonight. But you know what? It might be. What? Ah, yeah. So a few months back, actually last year, we reported on this really interesting new find. It's like one of these finds that, it doesn't happen that often because we've pretty much found all the structures and systems in the human body. But we reported and other outlets reported on this meningical drainage system that basically was a pathway between the lymphatic system of the body and the brain. And this system was these meningial vessels, actually basically overturned the entire history of teaching about the brain and the blood-brain barrier and how the brain was totally separate from the immune system and the rest of the body. And so now we've got this system through which immune, from the lymphatic system to the brain or from the brain to the lymphatic system, which is a part of the immune system, through which communication can occur. And so the same team from the University of Virginia Center for Brain and Immunology, Anglia, the same team has now gone and looked at this crazy question of how the immune system might control or affect social behavior. So in mice, they blocked a single type of immune molecule. And when they blocked that molecule in the mice, this is a molecule from the immune system called interferon gamma. We've heard of interferons before probably talking about the immune system. It seems like other research, not just these researchers, but they and other researchers have shown that interferon gamma is important in a bunch of different creatures. Flies, zebrafish, mice, rats, whatever, these interferon gamma gets upregulated when they're social. So this is a molecule that is a response to infection. When bacteria or other infectious agents get into these animals' bodies, our bodies also, interferon gamma, is activated and it helps to activate the immune system. But what they found is that blocking the molecule using genetic modification, it made regions of the brain kind of go crazy, go haywire, go hyperactive and try and there was too much information going around and the mice became less social. And then when they restored the molecule, it actually restored normal brain connectivity and it restored normal social behavior. And so, yeah, so they found for the first time that an immune system molecule has a very, very quote, profound role in maintaining proper social function. And so, yeah, go ahead, no, go ahead. Yeah, so the idea is that the researchers who Anthony Filiano, who's a PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab said, so the hypothesis is that when organisms come together, you have a higher propensity to spread infection, so you need to be social, but in doing so, you have a higher chance of spreading pathogens. The idea is that interferon gamma in evolution has been used as a more efficient way to both boost social behavior while boosting an anti-pathogen response. Yeah, and then, okay, so this is also what, gosh. So this is also what's so wild about this. So what else heavily influences your immune system? Your gut microbiota, right? Right. So maybe this is the channel through which, right? You're being exposed to things, but it's also this transfer of new gut microbiota as you become social, right? So this is, I got two stories here. One is, this is a guy who's been studying Alzheimer's. This is David Pearlmutter. Pearlmutter, University of Miami School of Medicine. He's talking about how Alzheimer's, research into Alzheimer's disease, which has been a very brain-centric, brain-focused line of research, is now looking at the underlying causes of diseases to the gut. They're finding that really the cure for Alzheimer's may not be anywhere in the brain, but might start with the gut, and in fact- Fascinating. They're doing treatments where they're sort of doing the fecal transplants to restore the integrity of bacterial composition in the intestines to fight ALS. I mean, this is where- Interesting. We've got to get away from the redlining of the brain because of the blood-brain barrier, understanding that that immune system can have effects to the brain, and understanding what's driving that immune system, what's really affecting that immune system is what's going on in your gut, and that it's sort of ALS coming back and pointing to microbiota. There's another study in rheumatoid arthritis where they're saying that using genome sequencing technology where we'll pin down some gut microbes that were normally rare, and low abundance in healthy individuals, but that these were expanded in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, and so they're saying that you can actually see this as a biomarker, like if you detect this as a spike in somebody's gut microbe before the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis even show up, you can predict that the patients are going to be susceptible to this going forward. So more and more focus throughout a lot of what we've talked about over the years is now circling right back to the gut. Yeah, it is coming back around to the gut. I mean, we don't know, I mean, they're probably with social dysfunction aspect of the study I was talking about as well. There may be a gut microbiota influence in that as well. We don't know that, because that's not what this study looked at, but the fact that there is this connection between the immune system and the brain that we haven't investigated because there was never the pathway for it. We never knew this pathway was there, and now we do, and so now we can ask questions like the ones that this group from the University of Virginia are asking. Yeah, so who knows? Let's get more people working on this stuff. Then I had another brain, a cool brain study that I just thought was fascinating. This is out of the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute from Columbia University, and the researchers who are involved in this study have been looking at how rats are or they're looking hopefully to find out mammals in general, people, but how the hippocampus, the area of the brain that's responsible for memory and also letting us remember locations so to help us with navigation through space, how the hippocampus is set up to do this. And there have been some tales, people talking about, okay, well, we've got these two different layers to the hippocampus, there is a deep layer, and there's also a superficial layer, so these two different layers, and people have had evidence that suggests that they encode information differently, that they work a little bit differently when it comes to actually telling the story of your navigation, remembering how to get from your house to the grocery store. How do you remember that? How do you remember when you go for a walk through your neighborhood, how do you know where things are? How does your brain remember that? So these researchers took a fascinating slant on this by using a tool that allowed them to record, it's a two-photon microscope, so photons, two photons of light. These are shooting these photons of light to get differences of activation, basically taking these pictures using two photons in a microscope. They're using this two-photon microscope to observe individual activity of cells in the mouse hippocampus, so they're basically looking at the hippocampus while they've got mice on a treadmill with a microscope in their heads, taking pictures of cells as they are encoding information about the environment around them. Wow, yeah, so this is super neat what they did. And so knowing that there were these distinct sublayers of cells and that they had this deep layer and this superficial layer, that's what they were really trying to look at within the hippocampus. And so they put mice on treadmills and the treadmills had distinct colors and textures and smells, so that the mice' brains would be stimulated by the novel environment and all the information coming in. And they monitored this cellular activity in the hippocampus, this region of the hippocampus called CA1. And then one task, the mice ran on the treadmill, just experiencing it, not having to learn or remember anything. They just ran on the treadmill and were like, oh, look at that, that's a pretty color. Oh, look at that, that's a pretty color. Oh, that smells nice. Oh, okay, I'm just running on a treadmill. Look into the world go by, you know? Nothing special about it really. And then the second, they were supposed to find a water reward that was placed at a very specific but unmarked location on the treadmill. So they had to find it and then they had to learn where that was. And they repeated these experiments and monitored the cells and then of course, you know, using multiple individuals and multiple recording instances, they were able to replicate, do lots of replications to be able to see what was happening. Basically what they found is that the superficial layer of the hippocampus, the CA1, creates the internal map that doesn't really change it. Basically, all the cells are just kind of active in the same way from session to session to session, those cells are always just like stable in the way they act. Certain cells respond at certain times and in certain amounts to specific activation. The deep sub-layer had a similar kind of map, but that map was dynamic and it changed every time. So it was like every time the rats went through the maze or the mice, every time the mice ran on the treadmill, that top layer, the superficial layer, was super stable, cells active. And here we are on the treadmill. Yeah, and the bottom layer is like, doop, doop, doop, doop, and then the next time, the bottom layer was like, beep, beep, beep, beep, like acting differently to the same stuff. But during the task where they had to learn and remember, the deep sub-layer became more stable and it became a lot less dynamic. And so they actually think that this sub-layer, this deep layer is what's linked to the ability to find a reward. It's like the superficial layer creates the map of the world. And then the deep layer is like, it's like in Photoshop, if you were to have a map of the world, a pirate's map of the world, and you wanted to put a layer with an X where the treasure was, that would be what the deep layer was doing. So the deep layer is the layer that puts the X on the map. And if the location of something moved or a new location of something needed to be encoded, the dynamics of that layer would change accordingly. So it's, okay, so it becomes more stable as it's gotten goal-oriented. And before, as you're just, it's treadmill, it's just sort of like, left, right, what's over here, nothing, man, nothing over here, nothing. Nothing that we really need to sort of lock in on. That's really fascinating. Yeah, sort of. They can, I mean, it's fascinating by itself, but it's also fascinating that we can see it. Yeah, and so they don't know necessarily if this is what's happening in the human hippocampus, but the human hippocampus has the same structure as the mouse hippocampus. The mammalian hippocampus in general is structured in the same way. So it's, our brains could be acting in this manner where the hippocampus becomes active. And the researcher says, Danielson says, if you're walking down the street looking for something specific, say your favorite restaurant, your brain needs to find, first needs a map of the neighborhood in general, but then you need to assign importance or salience to the specific location where the restaurant is. And so in the sense, it's the brain's way of marking a location on a map with a giant X. So as you look for that restaurant, you need both the map and the X. Our findings suggest that in the brain, these distinct types of information are conveyed by the distinct sub-layers within the hippocampus. From now on, whenever I find the location I'm looking for, I'm gonna go, R, R-Shi-Bei. R-Shi-Bei, X marks the spot in my brain. And then the other really super cool brain-y study that I had thought was pretty awesome this week. Do you guys know Daredevil, right? The blind superhero? Blind superhero. He catches criminals by smelling them out. Yeah, it's like he's like, he's echo locating, right? He's basically using sound to figure out his environment. And we have talked before on the show about people who use echo location to navigate. There are videos online of people who are blind, riding bicycles or going on hikes learning. There are groups of people who actually, Batman, yeah, but there are groups of people who are actively learning how to use those clicks and how to echo locate to navigate. Yes, and so these researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Durham University in the United Kingdom have been looking at echo location in people, but not really, they didn't first look at echo location. They took sighted participants to listen to distinct sounds while they were being, their brain's activity was being measured by magnetoencephalogram, which basically is magnets that are used to measure the brain's electrical activity. And so they had two sounds that were presented back to back while the brains were being recorded from and the participants had to say whether this, whether the sounds sounded the same or different. And then they had to determine whether or not they were, let's see, yeah, yeah. So they basically just had to say as quickly as they could whether or not the sounds were the same or different. And the researchers found that they're not brilliant at it, but listening to the sound of say a hand clap versus a ball bounce, people could tell the difference between about 75 and 100%. So accuracy in determining what kind of a sound it was and the differences between sounds was about 70 to 100%. But when people were asked to tell the difference between the size of rooms, they could tell the difference between the small and medium rooms, 55% of the time, medium and large rooms, 70% of the time, and the small and large rooms, 90% of the time. And so yeah, and so the MEG recordings, the magneto and cephalogram recordings showed that the brains handled the source differently than the task involving the size of the room. So the brain responded, regions involved in visual and auditory processing, the brain's temporal lobe responded to hand claps and ball bounces and sounds of that sort after about 130 milliseconds after hearing the sound. When they were responding for whether or not the sound of things happening in different rooms were the same or different, the brains spiked at 386 milliseconds. So the processing in the brain is happening differently than for the understanding of space than it is for what an object is, deciding what an object is. And so what they think is that they found a neural signature of the brain decoding the size of space. And so the researcher Tang thinks that the answer is echoes and so the brain might be gauging how long it takes for a sound bouncing off of walls to trail off and a bigger room produces a larger echo that lasts longer and the brain can figure that out. Well, and if you're using the visual, what's normally dedicated to visual processing, which I now know is about a third of the brain, and the brain has been dedicated to this task for a while, in a way I'm surprised this isn't more common because then you've got less information than you have to deal with visually. Visually there's so much data and information coming in at once, but now you're just tracking things like echo, sound of the room, you know, maybe there's some, yeah, some temperature based stuff too. You can really, I can see how the brain can say, okay, this is what I got to work with. I've got all these neurons that are sitting on their axions. I'm gonna get them to work. Yeah, but I think the really interesting thing is that the brain is decoding this information. It takes different amounts of time for the brain to decode and encode this information, which is. So in other words, daredevil is real. Daredevil is real, yeah, our brains have that capacity, yeah. And so now the experiments need to be done looking at people who do not have sight versus sight and see how their brains respond to these, how accurate they are, how fast they respond, how well tuned their brains are to this kind of information versus people who are sighted. So it's just fascinating, fascinating, brainy step forward. Hey Blair, you got some monsters for us. Yeah, so monkeys have been using tools for a pretty long time. Recent fossil discoveries let us know that in Brazil, capuchin monkeys have been using tools to crack open cashew nuts for at least 700 years, which predates Europeans arriving in Brazil. So there's a really good documentation of them doing that today, but they found fossils of these rocks that were smushed and smoothed like they had been banging on pistachios and after testing some of the residue on these fossils, yes indeed, that is pistachio goo. There we go. And we may have therefore figured out how to eat pistachios from these monkeys. Oh, interesting. So, so they're suggesting that because of, because of the tools that we learned how to do this, because of the fossils, we learned how to do this from monkeys. Because we probably saw them doing it, yeah. So when we came to Brazil, most likely we saw these monkeys smacking pistachios with the rocks, going, oh, I wonder what these things coming off the trees are that the monkeys are eating. This is all conjecture. Well we know for sure. It is, because here's what's more like it. Pistachios with tools for at least 700 years. Right. That's a really long time. Yeah, but people have been in South America for 13,000 years. So isn't it more likely that monkeys were like, what are those humans doing? Yeah. Smashing pistachios with rocks. Oh, I get it. There's food in there. Let me copy the human hand. It is possible. We may never know. Difficult to say. As long as we're using, I mean I could be up injecture though. I like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So 700 years monkeys have been using tools in Brazil. Also, monkeys know when they don't know something. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. No, I have no idea. So a research study in psychological science that came out last week tells us that resists monkeys know when they don't know something. So they are capable of metacognition, which means they immediately know if they have the information to conquer a task or not, which is something that we do, but we haven't been able to observe in a lot of animals. Well, it'd be something that would be hard, difficult to observe experimentally. How do you get them to tell you what they don't know versus where it's much easier to get them to demonstrate what they do know? Yeah, so in this study, they gave monkeys the opportunity to search for food placed in one of two cylinders that were in a V shape. In some of the experiments, the monkeys saw which cylinder the food went into, then they quickly ran to that spot and grabbed the food. But when monkeys didn't get to see where it dropped into, they ran to the junction of the two cylinders to examine where it went. So they didn't try to reach into anything until they looked, which means they immediately, there was no hesitation. They immediately ran to the point which they could examine where the food went, but didn't do that if they saw where it went. Got it, yep. So they know what they don't know. Why would I go there? Why would I go there? I don't need to go there. There you go. There you go. How about some really cool robotics? Yeah? That's always good, yeah. Yeah, so have you heard about the robo-ray from Harvard University? No, did you tell? A robotic ray, like skates and rays, how they... Oh, I'm thinking like robots with lasers, but this is a robotic shark ray thing. Yeah, so rays and skates have a very flat design and they use undulation of their wing-like structures to propel them forward through water. They are, undulation is common throughout bacterial and even animal kingdom for propulsion. And researchers in bioengineering at Harvard University decided to take this creature, make a creature, and this creature that they created, it has an elastic body that's made out of plastic and then they made a gold metal skeleton that can kind of pop in and out, so there's electricity that's used to move it forward and attract it and then it pops back into shape. Then they took rat cardiomyocytes, and rat cardiomyocytes are this, or cardiomyocytes in general. Their neat function is that when they are built together, when they connect to each other, they don't just, if one gets stimulated, the ion channels connect through all of the myocytes or muscle cells so that the entire structure will have a flood of calcium and the entire structure will shift through contraction. So your heart cells do this, so when a stimulus comes into your right atrium, it'll stimulate a few cells, those cells then blast the stimulation through the rest of the heart and there's a wave of contraction through the heart because of the way myocytes, muscle, cardiomyocytes, because of the way myocytes share their, because of the way they share their stimulation. So the really cool thing about this is they've got muscle cells, actual muscle cells that they grew on this robot that actually contract because they put the robot in a bath of salt water. So the muscle cells are getting all the sodium and potassium and calcium that they need to contract. And then they engineered these cells so that they have light sensitive ion channels. So this is a technique that came from optogenetics. We've talked about optogenetics before being able to use blue light to be able to stimulate neurons in the brain. Well, they put them in these rat cardiomyocytes and then whenever they blast blue light at these little bioengineered rays, the muscles contract in an undulating fashion and propel the robot forward. And this little robot is able to propel forward at a fairly good rate. It can swim pretty well, one or two millimeters per second and so by deviating which side of the ray that gets more or less light, they're actually able to guide it and make it turn and move directions. And yeah, well, actual application of this and taking it out of a salt water tank and putting it somewhere and it's questionable. It's really amazing. That's just making that is freaking awesome. You don't have to do anything else but exist at this point. This is all it needs to do. It is a hybrid creation. It is live cells and technology. Put together. Just please don't give it a reproductive system. Wait, I was just gonna go there. Like that is the next step. That's the next thing we have to do with this, right? Yeah, the robot ray is very, very cool. It's super tiny. But yeah, rat cells, gold plastic and it flies like, or it flies. It swims like a little, like a real ray. So this is very cool. Yeah, the researcher, Kevin Kitt Parker who was involved in this, I think after, I mean, basically he and his postdoc, they're gonna be able to do whatever they want. Do I wanna work somewhere else? No, I'm at Harvard, but I can go where I want. I can do what I want. Tour de force of science, right? Pretty sweet. Super sweet, it's super sweet. All right, I'm about tapped out. How about you guys? Justin, do you have any more? I'm good for this week in science. Very funny. All right, well, I guess that brings us to the end of the show. I think this is one of our shorter shows in a while. Good job, kids. We've come to the end of the show and I would like to take this opportunity to thank our Patreon sponsors. 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Just Google this week in Science in your iTunes directory, or if you have a mobile device that is of an Android make, you can go to twist.org. That's twist.org, app in the Android marketplace, or simply look for this week in Science in anything Apple Marketplace-y. For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes will be available on our website. That's at www.twist.org, where you can also make comments and start conversations with the hosts as well as other listeners. Yeah, or you can hit us up directly, email kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinScience.com, Justin at twistminion at gmail.com, or Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org. Just be sure to put twist, T-W-I-S, somewhere in the subject line, or your email will be spam-filtered into oblivion. You can also hit us up on the Twitter where we are at twist.science, at DrGeeGee, at Jacksonfly, and at Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback. 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It's this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science, this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science, science. I've got one disclaimer, and it shouldn't be news that what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science, you may just get to understand it, but we're not trying to threaten your philosophy, we're just trying to save the world from jeopardy. And this week in science is coming your way. So everybody listen to everything we say, and if you use our methods to roll and die, we may rid the world of toxoplasma, got the eye. Because it's this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science, science, this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science, science. I've got a laundry list of items I want to address, from stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness. I'm trying to promote more rational thought, and I'll try to answer any question you've got. So how can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one? This week in science is coming your way. This week in science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science, this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science, this week in science, this week in science, This Week in Science, this Week in Science, this Week in Science, this Week in Science, this Week in Science, this Week in Science. Tinky Tinky Tinky Tinky Tinky Tinky Tinky Tinky, enjoy that show. Oh yeah, 8 track carts. I grew up with 8 tracks. And my dad's old beat up green GMC pickup. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, I hit the wrong button. Ah, now I have a lower third. What I have, I do not have an old tape recorder. At one point in time I used to have these things, but then people told me to throw them away or give them away or whatever, so they went away. What I have is a really old MacBook Air that I am hoping will survive, continue to survive indefinitely because all I use it for is playing music on show. Sure I could use other things to do that, but it's really useful just for doing this. You could get like a zoom and use that. Right. Yeah, just something, I mean I just need something with the music on it plugged in. Oh my God, strength. The board, right? Yeah, I'm old enough to have owned cassette tapes. No you're not. I didn't get a CD player till I was in high school. I know. No, I was on the bus in high school with my little Walkman, with my Sony Walkman that played cassette tapes. I had cassette tapes for so long. Seriously, we recorded this show on cassette tapes. Oh yeah, I was still giving, I still was making mix tapes in high school in the beginning of college, I mean mix tapes. I recorded songs off the radio and stuff. Yeah, I have to go back to my, I was for a while putting on Spotify. I was taking a few of my old mix tapes and taking the track list and turning them into playlists on Spotify. I need to get back to doing that because there are some good mixes. I tell ya. Look I have a cassette tape right here. Right there you have one more. Des chansons préférées. Did you keep your cassette tapes from high school French? Yes, we have. I think I still have some of mine too. I think up here is Télé Français, Télé Français. Bonjour. Allo. Salut. Télé Français, Télé Français. Chanson. I don't remember. One song that I loved, it was, I can't remember the name of the band. I wish I could remember the name of the band. I think it's a Spanish band, but they actually did a song in French that we listened to all the time. It was Ijo de la Luna. Ijo de la Luna. It's a beautiful song. Check out my sweet disc man you guys. Oh yeah, I could Linux it. Oh and a disc man. During my move I found, and tossed, and maybe should have kept just for archival sake, but I've got too much junk. A cassette tape that was a Star Trek like book on tape kind of thing. And I know, but I don't have any technology to play it. And a floppy disc. It was the floppy disc, but in the plastic where you could like lock it so it couldn't be overwritten by moving the little switch to the side. Crazy that I still had that thing. I got to go. Yeah, so everybody in the chat room, Jackson Fly, moved this week, which is why he was like. I'm filming from my bathtub. Yes, with the bathtub. That was a nice addition there. This song is so good. I've got, are you guys going to hang out for some after show here? Well, I'm not feeling awesome, so I'm thinking about just talking about it. We're going to have a really early night tonight I guess. I think so. And I've got to tell you something in the after show too. You're going to after, after we stop the broadcast. I just have to share the tele-français song in the chat. Yeah, that's what I was going to. I have to do Iho de la Luna, but in French. Mechano Iho de la Luna French. There we go. 14 second long ad. 3.5 floppy hot rod. Yeah, I found one of those. And you know, I'm pretty sure it had like, whatever's on it was so important that I could never throw it away, even though I have long since forgotten what it was, and have no way of playing it, or retrieving the data. I mean, yeah, there's always a way, but better to toss it. This was one of my favorite songs from high school French class. There it is. Idiot qui n'a comprend pas. La légion qui comme ça. T'es con, j'ai tant d'emplois. That's a pretty song. I used to listen to it all the time. What? Why is that face? Why that face, Blair? What face? You had this. Haha, your face. Oh, sorry. You had like a face. I don't know. I think it means it's time to go. Oh, Russian. I want to learn Russian. I've been wanting to do it for years. I still want to learn Russian. I want to learn all the things. That's right, French exit. All right, so we're going to go. Where did Justin go? Today, I've been short. I've been like leaning down. I have my microphone down here. So I've been like hiding behind my lower third all the whole show. Send me to Russia. Thanks, Dave. I can never win. I can never win in this crowd. I can never win in this crowd. I'm just going to listen to my song. I'm going to go get in bed. You're good. But I'm supposed to... Where'd Justin go? Oh, there he is. Oh, there he is. All right, everyone. We're going to head out. Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of This Week in Science. I hope that you go learn some French words, Russian words, Spanish words. I don't know. But come back and learn some science again next week. Let's science together next Wednesday, 8 p.m. Pacific time. Thanks so much. Yeah, we will see you again soon. Thank you. And don't forget to try and check out the Science Minion Hangout tomorrow night, scienceisland.org.