 We're smaller, we're live, we're live on the air peoples. Oh my goodness, I'm looking at the wrong episode notes. We're ready to start this show? So ready. So ready, looks like the chat room has given us the cue. Time to start in three, two, this is twist. This week in science episode number 676, recorded on Wednesday, June 20th, 2018. Let's call this the science solstice. Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Keke, and today we are going to fill your heads with stressed out bees, mood microbes, and caffeine. But first. Disclamer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The world is safe. Well, not safe maybe, but the world is not nearly as dangerous as it imaginably could be. Picture for a moment a supernatural earth, one in which vampires are real, and not the shiny, well-mannered, sophisticated type vampires full of charm and biting wit, but a world in which intelligent, immortal bloodthirsty fiends begin hunting humans as soon as the sun goes down. In this world, working the late shift might have more consequences than the ill effects of a disrupted circadian rhythm. Day drinking would be the norm as bars and clubs close at dusk to avoid the additional dangers of draculas with high blood alcohol levels. And even fairy tales would have new twists as Cinderella hurries home, not to avoid turning into a pumpkin, but to avoid being torn limb from limb by a plasma-pounding predator. Yes, the world could be much less safe than it is if such monsters were real, or worse, it could be less intelligent. If it wasn't for this week in science, coming up next. It's gonna have to wait a minute. This, I didn't do. I knew I was forgetting something. I forgot my microphone and you forgot the music. We're two for three. Apparently I forgot to pay the power bill. I was going to have a cup of coffee earlier and I didn't and I'm thinking to myself that was a mistake. Nope, nope, nope. Music, not there. We go. Okay, gotta get to the place where. Fix it in post. Why isn't it working? Are you still trying to get the music or should I just lead into the rest of the show? No, why is it not working now? Wait. The more light I put on, the darker it looks. Yeah, you're a vampire. I'm going to start that over again. Sorry, everybody. We're going to rewind. You're just going to pretend coming up next. This week in science. Coming up next. The kind of mind that can't get enough. I want to learn everything 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 want to 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. Good science to you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back here again in our very different places, all coming together for the common goal of talking about science. That's right. We are all going to talk about the things that were fun and amazing in the past week of science. You guys, great show last week. Sorry I wasn't around. I did enjoy my little night off to go see a concert. That was fun. Thank you for covering the bases for me. I appreciate that. Our pleasure, but we missed you. No. I'm back. I missed you guys. I could have just been like, I'm done. No, I love this too much. We are back again. And on tonight's show, I have stories about Life on Mars. The spinning top that is Venus and caffeine for diabetics. Blair, what do you have? I have ballooning spiders. I have stressed out bees. And I have some VR news. Very exciting. Justin, what's in your corner? I've got moody microbes, new food for my food to eat, how religion might lead to bad drug choices and why dinos were more polite than you think. They had manners, I guess. We'll find that out as we come up. Polite dinos coming up on this week in science as we jump into the show. I want to remind everyone that if you have not subscribed to us, you can do that. There are places that you can subscribe all over good places where podcasts are, but just go to twist.org and find the subscribe button if that's what you're interested in. We are also on YouTube and Facebook. You can look for this week in science. Okay, time for the science. I brought it. I did. Yet again. This one, I want to start with an update. Doot, doot, doot, doot, doot, doot, National Ignition Facility. Does that name ring any bells? Sounds like it has to do with fire. Good old Nif. Good old Nif, that's right. National Ignition Facility out in Livermore, California. We have covered the Nif facility off and on for years and about a decade ago, it was very exciting news. They were going to use laser beams to create power from fusion. This is sounding familiar. Yes. Yes, and so they had the big, powerful laser beam and they had what's called a hole room, which is a cage made out of gold to hold some deuterium tritium fuel. And by heating the hole room, the lasers would then lead to the heating and the atoms would fuse and, but you know, that really has never worked out exactly the way that they planned on the timeline that they had expected. But now the Nif facility researchers have published a new paper and they have reported that they have made some iterative increases. So after falling short of ignition in 2014, they created some newly shaped laser pulses and those yielded about 17 kilojoules of fusion energy and later on they got up to 26 kilojoules and that was a pretty good increase. So now they have also modified these pulses yet again so that the laser pulses, it's not just one long sustained laser blast, it's little tiny, very, very, very quick split second pulses and the pulses actually have a shape and they have modified that shape to make it more efficient and better. They've also changed the composition of the outer layer of the hole room. I don't know why I have to say the name of that. It's perfect. I'm sorry. You're just clearing your throat for later, it's fine. Yeah, the outer layer of these capsules from plastic to carbon. They've got a new material and this material is three times as dense as some plastic that they were using which means that since it's denser, laser pulses with a third of the duration so shorter pulses can give it the same kinetic kick leading to little implosions. So they are using less helium gas in their situation as well and it's making for more stable implosions within the hole room and so this is good. So in 2017, the researchers obtained 54 kilojoules of fusion energy and now they have published again that they believe with where they are going right now that they will require a fusion energy of about 150 kilojoules and they are much closer to that threshold than they were before. So they're changing the parameters, moving things around and although this is not a huge gigantic step forward it is an iterative scientific approach step by step finding out what works, changing parameters, the duration of the laser pulses, the shape of the laser pulses, the materials that they're using to enable them to create eventual ignition, laser ignition that will output more energy than is put in. But again, it's not yet and there are probably other experiments on the table that might get there first. So it's all still in the running, oh physics. I like the idea that in these experiments the ones where they need elements made out of gold that they don't actually need to be made out of gold that the scientists just really want bling in their lab. They're like, what is that gold? We just gotta get something out of gold. That's right, they gotta get the bling in there. Let's see, moving on. Australia has been working on researchers at the Australian National University have been working with research institutions in Italy, France and the United Kingdom to support London's Imperial College in a study of bacteria to find out it's this idea what bacteria may potentially exist on a place like Mars. How could bacteria make that work? How could extreme environments, how could bacteria adapt to extreme environments to exist in such a place where the atmosphere is thin, where potentially in the cracks of the rocks the sunlight is less, how could they create energy? Could photosynthetic organisms exist on Mars? Could we send photosynthetic organisms to Mars? And if we did, would they survive? That's what I was wondering if they were trying to figure out what they could send there or what they might find, is it both? It's both because yeah, it's if there is life currently existing on Mars. I mean, as we've talked about a couple of weeks ago, there is a periodic seasonal signal of methane, which could be biological in origin, could also be chemical, could be chemical processes, not biologic processes. And there are other indications that there are organic molecules in the surface of Mars. And so these organic molecules could be indications of life that once lived on Mars or even that still is living on Mars. And so the question is, if bacteria could live there, what would they need to be able to do it? And these researchers, they published in Science this last week, Professor Krause, a co-author on the paper says, this might sound like science fiction, but space agencies and private companies around the world are actively trying to turn this aspiration into reality in the not too distant future. And the one possibility is to terraform Mars. Could we send photosynthetic bacteria to Mars? Could we harness photosynthesis to create air? Oxygenate, yeah, let's see. Best destiny, people. Right, yeah. As Kim Stanley Robinson wrote about this idea in his red, green, blue Mars trilogy, the idea of terraforming kid, very popular after he wrote those science fiction novels. And so they've been looking at light adapted organisms, cyanobacteria. There are very specific cyanobacteria that are adapted to growing in very low light conditions. And they have been discovered in Antarctica, the Mojave Desert, and some cyanobacteria, extremophiles to the max survived living on the outside of the International Space Station. So they turned into spores to survive it, of course. They weren't just active bacteria out there in the quote unquote vacuum of space, but still they could survive. So researchers were looking at what these cyanobacteria, photosynthesizing bacteria had, specifically the ones that were in low light conditions, as opposed to say cyanobacteria that exist out in the oceans or in other areas where there's lots of light for photosynthesis. And they found that there are very specific red chlorophylls. And these are the critical components for the low light conditions. And these red chlorophylls, they're important because of the wavelengths of light that they absorb, which would be low light, darker conditions. And so these chlorophylls provide clues to where life might be found on other planets. So they're saying that one of the researchers says, searching for the signature fluorescence from these pigments could help identify extraterrestrial life. So now that we know that these red chlorophyll pigments are important to low light photosynthesis here on Earth, we look at what, how they fluoresce or how they emit light in certain conditions. And we can look for those signals on other planets like Mars to see if those kinds of bacteria or those pigments already exist there. Huh. In the light signature, which is very exciting. Researchers also say this work redefines the minimum energy needed in light to drive photosynthesis. And this type of low light photosynthesis might may well be happening in your garden under a rock even. But what if the life isn't like life we have here and have categorized? Well, well, first of all, first of all, that's a great thing that comes up over and over again, right? But one of the things is the way that life constructs itself and stabilizes itself through DNA, through this chain, or the double helix, not a chain, it's a double helix. You can't pull it lengthways or apart by the forces that it endures. So chances are that anything that has survived as life has DNA at the basis. Just because it's such a powerful, strong system. It would be, might not be, you might not be our base pairs that we're used to. Could be something slightly different, I suppose. But if there is life, it's likely very similar. And I also keep going back to this. We keep looking for bacteria. That's like going to another planet and looking for dinosaurs, right? And if we don't see any dinosaurs, we go, there's no life here. We gotta go back more. Slow down, let's go. We should be looking for viruses. I mean, if you're looking for the basic building blocks of life, chances are that's gonna be in the form of a virus. And that's something that I guess we're not really looking at. Yeah, I mean, that is still the question. It's debated at this point. The RNA life, virus life hypothesis has very strong evidence behind it, but people are debating whether or not life did proceed that way. Viruses, yes, maybe they were first, but you know, probably, you know, chicken egg, archaea bacteria, viruses, they were probably battling each other. Right, but then you have to ask yourself if viruses may or may not be categorized as life anyway. And then if they're precursor to life, then they are not necessarily life. It's a whole, but I think the way that science works, right, is in many ways, process of elimination. You can only prove a negative. So while we're looking at potential sources of life on other planets, it makes sense. We would start with the known. I get that, it makes sense. But there also is this part of me, every single time we read a story like this, that goes, yeah, but why would it be like that and not something new? Because we know the chemical makeup of our solar system, because we know the chemical, we've seen the chemical makeup even beyond our solar system. We see the clouds of amino acids. We see organic molecules floating in space. We know how organic chemistry works and we know how molecules, how atoms and elements are going to interact with each other. And the likelihood of them interacting in a different way that leads to this replicating model that is life is from what we have seen, not likely. Yeah, that's a really good point. And I love that. I think that's a really important thing to remember. Absolutely. Also because it's, I think the path of least resistance in a way. Like if you look at the structure, it's very sound, very strong structure. It's made up of very simple components. Like you put these things together and you would have to really go out of your way to design life in a better way. But yeah, I think that's a really important reminder. I emphasize another kind of life. This isn't just let's look for what we have. This is, in theory, this is what we are most likely to find. Because this is how chemistry works and this is what we know works. Which is why I think of virus or something like a virus, which is, I think, the more permanent on a chain. But in some ways can be simpler. But even if there were no microbes on Mars, but we found that viruses flourished in the soil. Then we now have cropland for bacteria failure. And then we have fear and we never go to that planet ever. No, no, no fear, no fear. But now we have something that bacteria might be able to survive on for nutrients. We have, I don't know, viruses are not the organisms. This is going way out of this conversation really, but viruses are not primary producers. Viruses are users. Incorrect, you did not listen to last week's story. When I was talking about how they discovered that the Pandora virus, the giant viruses, are basically DNA factories, that they're generating code. And this is why I'm thinking now that they're probably the precursor, generating code, throwing it out there, introducing it into other genes. But you don't just need code to work. You need nutrients. You need the basic elements. There are needs for, I mean, who knows? Maybe it is just viral life, fine. Creating code, information, transfer, whatever, but yeah, for it to get more complex than that, more is needed. Yes, you have to have the building, you have to build the foundation first. Yeah, okay, all right. Well, that foundation definitely, well, maybe, I don't know, Venus, inhospitable. There's probably less likelihood of life in the way that we know it. I mean, we've talked about stuff in the clouds of Venus possibly on previous episodes, but Venus, it's hot. We like to call it the planet that is most similar to our own, except with the runaway greenhouse effect cloaked in greenhouse gases that make the planet completely inhospitable to life. Yeah, closer every day. Yeah, closer every, we don't need to go there. But anyway, Venus is an intriguing place. And so researchers have been keeping an eye on it. In 2015, the Japanese Space Agency sent a spacecraft called Akatsuki that took a look at Venus and discovered a 10,000 kilometer long wave in Venus' cloud tops, so wave. And here on Earth, when the atmosphere rolls over the tops of some high mountains, the mountains themselves can create waves in the atmosphere here on Earth. And so they're like, oh, what's going on there? And so researchers have been taking a peek more closely into Venus and doing some modeling and publishing this last week in Nature Geosciences. They have determined that the atmosphere of Venus is actually interacting with the mountains, at least one large mountain on the surface of, mountain range on the surface of Venus in a very intriguing way. So Venus rotates on its axis once every 243 Earth days. So it's almost like two thirds of a year before it makes it all the way around a single day, right? The Venus day is two thirds of our year. Yikes. However, its atmosphere is rotating around the Earth once every four days. So the atmosphere is just whipping around the surface of Venus. And Venus is like, do do do, I'm taking my time turning around, all this craziness around me but I'm keeping my cool. Turns out though, this whipping atmosphere possibly influences the rotation of the planet itself. And according to their modeling experiments, they determined that this 100 meter per second wind that the atmosphere has pushes enough on mountains on one side of the mountains. It creates, I guess, a gap in the air. So there's a suction force on the other side of the mountains that the push and the pull, the push on one side of the mountain range, the pull on the other side of the mountain range, actually speeds up the planet's rotation by about two minutes every Venusian day. So not much in the large scale of things, but if you're a sucker and you took that $10,000 a day job Venus, you're making a little more every year. That's right, just a little bit more. Yeah, so they think that the atmosphere of Venus is influencing the rotation of the planet itself along with possibly gravitational influences from the sun that the sun maybe slows it back down again. The atmosphere speeds it up, the sun slows it down and there's a push pull of the atmosphere and the push pull of the sun and Venus. An interesting place not to visit. Yeah, that's yikes, that's a long day. Yeah, would really make you hate Mondays. That's right, I don't like Mondays and hopefully they will be sending a lander to Venus to actually make some more discoveries about its rotation, its atmosphere and other aspects of the interior of the gassy planet in the next few years. Fingers crossed. We can only hope we can learn more about this mysterious earthen sister. What you got, Justin? This is researchers at Jocelyn Diabetes Center, demonstrated a potential contributor to negative feelings of depression and anxiety and they discovered it could be from bacteria in your gut. Studying mice that became obese when put on a high fat diaper, Jocelyn scientists found that these mice showed significantly more signs of anxiety, depression and obsessive behavior than animals on standard diets. Quoty voice, this is C. Ronald Kahn, MD of integrative physiology and metabolism at Jocelyn and also a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. But all of these behaviors are reversed or improved when antibiotics that change the gut microbiome were given with the high fat diet. So one group of mice, they get the high fat diet, they show these signs of anxiety and depression. Another is given the same diet but with a cocktail of antibiotics that sort of changed the gut microbiome overall and they're not affected, but they didn't stop there. They also took the gut microbes of these mice, both the ones who were giving the high fat with antibiotic and the high fat without it and they transferred the gut microbes into other mice and they found the behaviors and conditions continued. So even just having, not just eating what you're eating but having the microbes from those animals that were eating the other mice showed the same condition. Interesting though, so they're focused mostly on diabetes and related metabolic diseases. They were able to reverse a condition of this depressive anxiety by giving antibiotics after the fact with drinking water from which also altered the microbiome. But why? They wanted to know why this was taking place. So they looked for clues in two areas of the brain, the hypothalamus and the nucleus accumbens and this is two areas. One that controls the whole body metabolism and other the accumbens, which is important for mood and behavior. We demonstrated that just like other tissues of the body these areas of the brain become insulin resistant in mice on high fat diets, con says. And this response to the high fat diet is partly and in some cases almost completely reversed by putting the animals on the antibiotics. Again, this response is transferable. They take the nutrients for the gut microbiome, biome for mice in a high fat diet to mice that are germ free. They lack their own microbiome. And the insulin resistance in the brain is mediated at least in part by these factors coming from the microbiome. Wow. I like his quote at the end here. At the end here is understanding one area of biology like diabetes and metabolism can often give new and different perspectives in another field like psychiatric or behavioral disorders, he says. Even if that's not what you started out to do. We didn't start looking at this, but this is where we ended up. Yeah, and then Blair, you sent me why I couldn't get to, there was a study by the Mayo Clinic or a project in the Mayo Clinic where they're creating a genetically engineered bacteria to introduce to the gut microbiome that would assist with constipation. But I wonder how that's gonna make the patients feel. So you haven't looked at that. That's the whole, you gotta, now you've gotta look and see what the psychological effects are. What are the psychological effects of your anti-constipation treatment? Well, what are the psychological effects of the like atom bomb style constipation treatments that are currently on the market? Probably worse. Yeah, yeah. So also we've talked time to time on the show about the serious environmental impacts of raising livestock, raising animals for food, deforestation is a thing greenhouse gas emissions are high from this segment of the industry. Biodiversity loss takes place when they replace what was maybe rainforest with cattle land. There's nitrogen pollution from all the farms that we're using to raise crops to feed these animals. Agricultural feed cultivation, which is the segment of industry that creates the food that my food eats comes with tremendous impacts of the environment and climate. And yet I seem unwilling to change my eating habits. Enter science, new study published by the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology estimates the economic environmental potential of feeding microbial protein to pigs, cattle, and chicken by removing crop lands and then instead cultivating farm feed in industrial labs, we could alleviate or at least mitigate to some degree the impact of using agriculture to feed. Researchers find that by replacing only 2% of livestock feed by protein rich microbes, pressure on deforestation, agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, nitrogen loss from crop land could be decreased. 6% for global crop land area used, 7% of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions and 8% for global nitrogen losses. Chicken, pigs, and cattle munch away about half the protein feed cultivated on crop, global crop lands. That's across the world. It says Benjamin Leon Bodersky author of the study from Postman Institute for Climate Impact Research. Without drastic changes to the agro-food system, the rising food and animal feed demand that comes with our meat-based diets lead to continuous deforestation, biodiversity loss, nutrient pollution, climate-impacting emissions. Microbes can be cultivated to produce protein powders to then fed instead of soybeans to animals. Studies did some of their calculations based on computers, simulations that assess the economic potential and environmental impacts of microbes and microbial protein production going out to mid-century. So, this is apparently not a new idea. They're saying this idea was originally developed for space travel. Because long-term, I guess, space travel makes it hard for cows to graze naturally. We were coming up with ways to feed astronauts in space. I guess, unless you've got artificial gravity, I mean, which way does the grass grow? Which way does the grass grow? And then you got these cows floating around. Floating in cows, floating in space. So, yeah, they came up with a bunch of different ways to breed microbes in theory. By using natural gas or hydrogen, feed production could be completely decoupled from cultivating cropland. But they're also using fuels that may not actually fix the whole impact of the emissions. But it is a pretty, you know, a small amount, that 2% change making 6%, 7%, and 8% differences in environmental impact. It is a pretty huge conversion. And so this might be something to look at going forward. They think that the biggest problem is the agro-food system is going to be, is sort of locked into its ways of the way that they do things already. But if they can make it cheaper, an alternative food source that's cheaper for farmers that would likely take off pretty quickly. So, yeah, they're working on it. I think, you know, it's a really interesting question because I'm not just for cows, but how much of these bacteria can we make use of? You know, for cattle feed, for agricultural purposes. Also, I mean, can we use bacteria to replace something like palm oil, which really is leading to deforestation. You know, our uses of the palm oil we've talked about many times, there's deforestation for these large tracts of palm plantations, not just cattle ranching or chicken or swine ranching. It's all a huge problem. And what can we do sustainably that will take up less space, use fewer resources and allow us to exist on this planet without killing ourselves off? Right, well, according to the co-author of this study, Alexander Popp, and this study is, you know, by researchers who are looking at this as a potential thing that they could do to, you know, save the planet, his statement's kind of interesting here. Our findings clearly highlight that the switch to microbial protein alone will not be enough to sustainably transform our agriculture, produce the environment impact in the food supply chain, major structural changes to the agro-food system are required as well as changes in human dietary patterns towards more vegetables. And climate as well as our own health. It might actually be another considerable option to reduce or even skip the livestock ingredient in the food supply chain. After further advances in technology, microbial protein could also become a direct part of the human diet, using space, food for people's own nutrition. Cause that's sort of like closing like, oh yes, we can create this protein that could be edible and be nutritious and we can give it to cows over here so that they can eat that instead of the other stuff that we're growing, defeating them. And then we can eat them later with, wait, why didn't we? Why don't we just- Why are you bypassing that? It does sound like a precursor to silent green though, doesn't it? But with soiled- Normal silent green, not the stuff that's people, the other stuff. The other one says it's not called soiled green, it's just called soylent. And the problem with it actually is that the bacteria that they're using, people who have shellfish allergies have allergies to soylent in some cases. I don't know if they have reformulated their production method or the ingredients that they've used, but there were allergic reactions for a while based on proteins that are found commonly in shellfish and also, oh, who knew? These bacteria or the algae, it wasn't bacteria, it's algae that they were using for their protein source. I had some chirps today, which are chips with cricket protein in them. That sounds cute. And it came in my friend's imperfect produce box. She got a bag of chirps and it does say on it that if you have a shellfish allergy, you need to use caution because a lot of times when you need mealworm or cricket-based food, the shellfish allergy is a problem. There's a similar keratinoid in their shell as in shellfish. If you live on a diet of microbial protein, are you still a carnivore? So that's a good question. Technically, no. We have to create a new category? Bacteria vor. Right. It's not an herbivore, it's not a carnivore, it's a microbivore. Yeah, microbivore. Insectivore, microbivore, yes. Yeah, somebody asked me recently if I was allowed to eat insects. And I said, actually, I am because they're closer related to seafood than to vertebrates that I do not eat. Not that I needed to give you that much of an explanation. Right, there you go. I can eat whatever I want to eat, really. But ultimately, it's like I'm eating shrimp. It's no different. But it's an interesting question. People with shellfish allergies, are they going to be the naturally selected against in the future when there is the meatless future? You're just gonna have to survive on colorful. That's it. Oh, there's nuts for you, but I have a nut allergy too. Well, keep lettuce or dye. At some point, yeah. At some point, natural selection is going to be looking very heavily at your food allergy. Hopefully by then, we will have complete control over our immune systems and allergies won't be a problem anymore. We'll be supplementing the immune system with proper parasite treatment plans. And the allergies, there we go. Oh, have we gotten to that point in the show? I think so. It's time to go. No, it's not time to go. It's time for Blair's Animal Corner. Five days with a pet, no pet at all. If you want to hear about this animal, she's your girl. Except for a giant, animal expert, with an upload score of 10. What you got, Blair? I have flying spiders, ah! Yeah, that's terrifying. I have ballooning spiders, or more accurately, spiders that jump into wind with drag lines made of silk. So that's ballooning, as it's called, in the spider research world. This is research from Technisch Universitat in Berlin. There we go. And they looked at ballooning spiders to see exactly how they decided when and where and in which direction to jump. There are lots of spiders that balloon, but usually it happens in juveniles or small adults when they're under three millimeters in length. And this is usually to disperse from their birth site if you've seen the, I think it was the 70s cartoon of Charlotte's web at the very end, all of her babies kind of jumped and rained all over the sky. And it was yucky and terrifying. Anyway, that's ballooning. And they'll also do it sometimes to search for food or mates, or to just get to a new site far away to colonize. So usually, again, it's tiny spiders, it's young spiders, but there are these spiders called crab spiders, zeisticus species, so it's the whole group. So this is the genus, zeisticus. They're actually five millimeters long and they weigh about 25 milligrams. So it's a larger spider but still pretty small. And they balloon as adults. So in this research lab in Berlin and then also out in the field, they did experiments with these spiders, these crab spiders. They used a wind tunnel in the lab and then they just recorded, they did video of the spiders in the wild. They looked at wind conditions and they wanted to see how these spiders reacted to different wind conditions and wind directions. When there were speeds under three meters a second, which is about seven miles per hour, and there were light updrafts, the spiders would spin multiple ballooning silks about three meters long. It's like 10 feet, that's so long before releasing themselves from a separate line that was anchored to a blade of grass. But they didn't do any of that before they had turned to the direction of wind and raised one or both of their front legs and moved to adjust to the wind direction. So the idea is they think actually they were evaluating the speed and direction of the wind with their front legs. It's kind of like licking your finger and going like, oh, which way is it going? So that's what they were doing. And then they would release up to 60 fibers at a time, all of them all over the place. So they think also this is to double check which direction the wind is going. And so these are like the, if you've ever been sailing, they have the colored strings coming off of the main sole so that like you can see which way the wind is blowing. I kind of picture it like that. So they have all these different fibers, but only one is a drag line. So they actually have quite a complex system of sensing the wind and they're not just jumping out at random into the wind which is kind of what they thought before. Yeah, so now I think they should change the name of what they're doing from ballooning to sailing or windsurfing. Parasailing, yeah. Parasailing for sure. Parasailing, yeah. Parasailers. Fang gliding. Yeah, so there we go. The crab spiders are actually evaluating meteorological conditions, I can never say that word, meteorological conditions before they take off. There you go. Now what would be really interesting, really interesting is that they discovered that the spiders wait until the wind is in a specific direction. Yeah. Not just like, okay, the wind's good enough to get me up. Yeah. But actually, you know what, I'm heading east. This wind's no good for me. I'm gonna wait. That's a great question. Yeah, so they would have to figure out how to test it, right? So they'd have to like put a desirable mate or something in one direction or put a bunch of spiders, like it's way too dense over here. There's not a lot over there and kind of move the wind around and wait for it to go the right way. Or they see it. Let's see if there is a preferred direction on top of just the opportune wind condition being the thing. That might be hard to do in a wind tunnel, but I kept thinking, what a fun workplace that is. So what are we doing here? What do we do? I just got guys my first day. Okay, we have a wind tunnel and a bunch of spiders. And we're gonna do some science. Ah, it's so impressive. That's great. Here comes F5, duck. Ah! Ah! Ah! There we go. Flying spiders, sailing spiders. And then next I wanted to talk about stressed out bees. So those spiders, they're just out parasailing. They're having a good time. Bees, all working at no play. They're ballin' nerves. Yeah, they're just, they're working so hard every day just to get that pollen, traveling back and forth, long distances, getting that pollen, getting that nectar, got to work, work, work, work, work all day long. Sometimes there's predators, sometimes there's weather, they sometimes they get lost. There's just so much going on if you're a bee. So a recent study from University of North Carolina at Greensboro looked at maybe perhaps if bees were stressed and how that might affect them. So they found from this recent study that stressful foraging activities actually affects bees' brain function. It affects their ability to solve problems. And it actually specifically, they hypothesize changes the connectivity between neurons in the brain. Wow. So that last part, it makes sense. I mean, we know that stress affects the connectivity in the brains of humans. It affects the connectivity in the brains of mice. It affects connectivity in the brains of primates. I mean, we've seen this in experiments. Now bees do. What? Have you ever seen like a calm bee or relaxed? This is what was surprising to me, right? Like that seems like the bees like normal zone of operation. That was my question exactly going into it was, isn't working hard and running around baseline for a bee? So why would that affect their brain? So in this study, they actually used radio tags. They tracked individual bees and they tested their ability to distinguish between different floral smells. So this is a test of problem solving and learning in bees. So they need to identify flower species, identify which ones are producing nectar or pollen depending on the time of year, depending on the environment. And so they actually have to be able to switch their preference between sense around throughout the year and different locations. So they found that bees at their mental best are able to navigate between flowers and the hive. So there's also this element of way finding. So through this study, they found that bees that had been foraging for longer amounts of time or at high intensities were less able to learn new smells and they think this is due to stress. This is based on a study in mammals that found that stress causes learning difficulties. And then there was another recent study that described stressed bees as poor foragers. So kind of adding those things together, this is the next kind of step in that logic. So they found that also, I thought this was really interesting, foraging was particularly stressful for the younger bees who were less resilient to environmental conditions. So it's kind of like the haggard older bees are used to the level of stress they can get to get through the day. And then those young bees, they're like getting caught up on the fact that it's so hard to order a stapler, they're like, wait till you've been here 40 years. Yeah, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Just come into work, do your job, Leith. So they found that stress induced changes in brain structure affected learning ability. I'm like, totally disassociated you at your older bees are to the actual task providing for that. They're like, I just work here, I'm just trying to make a living. Intense foragers had more connections between brain regions used for processing smells in a region involved in learning and memory, which raises the question of whether in future research you might be able to predict problem-solving abilities by looking at brain structure, which is really cool. They also want to develop more tests for beekeepers to check problem-solving abilities in their hives so they could get a really big sample size going. And it would also help them to identify weaker colonies that are super stressed out before collapse, which would be great for people everywhere. Yeah. So, basically they're looking at the synapses. Like how many synapses do they have and how big are these areas and how do they change based on stress and how are the bees acting? Not so good. Right, so they could see this very clear link between the stress and the changes in the neural connections and the changes in behavior. Right, okay, hang on, can I just pause it? Yeah, yeah. How often do they get to look at the bee's brain? Yeah, well. Once. Once, right. So, are they just discovering that bumbees get stressed out by being a bee? Maybe, it's possible. Yeah. Like the less intelligent bees just have a harder time keeping up with the highly cognitive bees. Interesting. Well, that would be experimental design. That would be giving all bees like a calm experience and then exposing some of them to some massive stressor and seeing what happens to the brain. So, what they did have here was stress and then giving calmness and seeing what happens. And so you have large numbers of bees. Right, so they manipulated their environment which was their way of trying to make them learn new sense, right? So they completely removed the type of flower they were visiting and added a new flower or something of that nature. So they made them have to adapt to a new smell at least in the lab. So, from that, so that was there like manipulating a stressful environment from what I understand. So, in theory, they should know the difference between stress bees and not stress bees because they're making them stress. And they can look at the behavior of the bees in these learning situations before stress or no stress and see if it changes. Does the behavior change? Is that correlated to changes in the brain? So that's the one I think would be the awful preselector though. If they were doing it based on bee behavior or they said, ah, that bee's acting weird. Let's check its brain. Then I'm like, ah, you just found a bee that has a hard time keeping up with the other bees. If they just did the conditions and then did all the bees and found the same effect in all or a really high percentage of all of those bees versus the other control group, then it's a different study. Then I think, yeah, maybe it is showing the changes based on the stress. But if they're selecting based on bee behavior like this one's going to the wrong flower again, let's open its brain, then you've just, you're just picking on the poor. Yeah, so they actually, they pulled bees, they put them on ice, they essentially knocked them out. So then they woke them up, they were in a dark room and they had to follow an odor. Okay, so we're going to kidnap you, knock you out, put you in a cold place, you're freezing. Kidnapping. You wake up and it smells funny. You have to follow the smell to get out. Yeah, and then they had different odors that led them to sucrose. So they had to follow an odor to find sugar. And so they had a different manipulation of that which caused stress, a constant change or lots of changes or unanticipated smells or all sorts of things like that. Or you learn the smell, you find the smell, you get the sucrose. So that's your not stressed out bee despite having been kidnapped. I think bees don't care as much as humans about that because sometimes you know it just, there's a cold snap outside and you wake up later, it's fine. It's all cool. I just, you know, I fell asleep, I woke up. Yeah, seems like a different day. It's okay, it's all right. Yeah. Oh my goodness. There's my stressed out bees. We hope we haven't stressed you out at all and we hope that also you're not napping as you listen to this. I mean, although it could give you some pretty interesting and lucid dreams. Yeah. Oh, science through audio osmosis. That's right. This is This Week in Science. We're going to take a quick break right now and we will be back with more This Week in Science. 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Thank you for your support. Can't explain things you've heard more than intuition Life shows the way to go And we're back with more this weekend science. Yes, we are, and oh my goodness, we're back to talk about, what has science done for me? Lately. Oh, I love that. I don't know why I love it so much, but I really do. This week coming to us is Minyan David Eckerd. David wrote in to say, I have a hearing loss. It was discovered when I was six in 1966, and I struggled to learn to read. I also didn't talk much then. My first grade teacher told my mother that I was retarded. Ah, man. She didn't believe that for a moment because I have done the things, because I haven't done the things retarded children, or I have done things retarded children just don't do. So off to the doctors we went. I don't remember much of the visit. I do remember hearing in great fascination. The noise is coming from a sample hearing aid that was over the ear and had no mold, so it whistled a lot. The family moved that year to State College and I repeated first grade, this time with a hearing aid. For my second time in first grade through eighth grade, I also got speech therapy in Penn State's backyard. They at that time had a terrific hearing center. To this day, I often get noted for good eye contact. The truth is there is no eye contact. I am watching your lips as that therapy was a lot of lip reading, a four inch difference. I wore several analog hearing aids through that time and had a new mold for the ear about every six months. Growing up, you know, a loose mold allows a lot of feedback and whistling. Not that it solved all my problems. I was picked on relentlessly till I got to high school. Like a hearing loss kid is going to be normal. The worst years were junior high, teachers listening to this, paying attention. Just about every child in my grade at that school could easily tell you what my problems were, but in my case, none of the teachers were willing to listen. The problem was, oh, I'm scrolling forward, sorry about that. The problem was just two brothers out of about 180, six classes, about 30 from, but we in the seventies called a broken family. I heard that neither of these boys made it out of their twenties. High school was a private school. The family did that because the local school district had board meetings that got broken up by the police because instead of doing their jobs, they had, they had, sorry, I'm having issues scrolling here for some reason, that got broken up by the police because instead of doing their, wife, they had wife contests. This, the altitude made it all the way, the attitude made it all the way down to the children, about a third of my high school, which had students from six districts were from mine. The environment where I didn't have to watch my back for more on skipping my feet out from under me was wonderful. I also was able to sit up front and actually hear the teachers without worrying about other kids. Over the decades, I never stopped wearing aides. I went from one over the left ear to a pair of them in ear as the technology advanced, the quality improved significantly. Then about four years ago, I moved on to ANR over the ear, and over-the-ear ear pair that is essentially a computer that shapes sound. The amplifier is in a tiny module that has a rubber cone on it that sits in the ear. A wire runs from the computer to the amp. The amp in this link for the, the amp is a tiny module where the clear rubber cone is. They pick colors based on the color of your hair. So minor brown, those rubber cones are disposable. Mine also have not one, but three mics allowing them to eliminate some of the noise. Spensive two, about $5,500 for the pair. Ouch. If I could afford it and wanted it, the dealer as a new model that improves understanding by another 30% or so, they say, but that's another 5,000 on top of that. No insurance for this at all. Yeah, this problem should be insured. So science solves some of my hearing loss. For the record, it is around 50% in both ears. While growing up, it was 60, 40 left, right. So I wore the aid in my left ear. Most of the loss is in the high frequencies. High frequencies are where 90% of your speech understanding is. So try this experiment if you can. Make a sound filter that lowers frequencies at 1,000 Hertz and up by at least 50% and see if you can understand the speech. Well, isn't that the whole, the yawney, laurel thing, right, is about frequency? So that's a great example of how just, that was like a silly, fun, misunderstanding thing. But if that was your entire life, where you're only hearing certain frequencies and people were hearing completely different words or hearing words that you couldn't hear at all, that would be really tough. It would be. And I can imagine growing up as a child not being able to hear and how that lack of understanding, people not understanding that you're just not hearing what they're saying. You're not understanding what they're saying because you can't hear it. How that would affect so much moving forward. Yeah, and technology, engineering has helped us get hearing aids, but then also research and testing groups have allowed us to figure out how to use them and how to apply them. So there's all these different elements of science that are involved with the development of hearing aids, which is pretty cool. And- I'm thankful for David and listen to this show. Yeah. Yes, yes, we're very thankful for that. Thank you for listening to the show. We hope that further advances in hearing aid technology and hopefully coverage through insurance. I mean, this is something that seriously, it's not, this is a problem a lot of people face. We've talked about it a lot of times, the loss of the hair cells in the ears with age due to less damage from loud noises. I've known a lot of drummers. And it's just, it can be painful, like the miscommunications and misunderstandings and everything else can really be invasive. I'm really hoping that you guys will tell me when it's too embarrassing, when I'm not understanding you well enough because of my hearing loss. No. Yeah. How was that concert last week? Can you hear if you wear plugs? Yeah. I went to a teeny tiny concert, which meant that I was right in front of the speakers and it started and went, no, I forgot my plugs. Whoops. You're gonna go deaf now. Oh, for sure. But yeah, but this is a problem that many people will face in their lifetimes. And so the aspect of this not being insured is kind of odd. And I wonder when is this going to be fixed? When are we really gonna fix it with technology but science is working on it? And it's an interesting, exciting question. There was a panel in the last administration of scientists where they were asking them like, find like interesting things that we could solve, like sort of like think, think stuff. And one of the things they came up with is why are hearing aids so expensive? It makes no sense. This technology is not $5,000 for a pair of hearing aids expensive to produce. Why are they this insanely expensive and isn't there an alternative? And so it is one of these industries that is some- Right for disruption. I don't want to call it corrupt, but it doesn't have a fiduciary type health interest as it's forefront. I'll put it that way. David, thank you for writing in and the others out there. Please write in and tell us your stories of what science has done for you lately. Is it a medical device? Is it something with your family? Is it an animal related story? Is it an appreciation of something in nature? Something in the grocery store? I don't know. Tell me a story. We want to keep sharing them with you and with all the other listeners. You can email me kirsten at thisweekinscience.com or send me a message through our Facebook page this week in science. All right. Moving on, Justin, tell me a story. Marijuana use is at an all time high. I get it. Yeah, right. It's an all time high in the United States as legalization sweeps the nation. People turn to cannabis for both medical and recreational relief. Team researchers led by Florida State University professor, Amy Burdett, has found that those who hold strong religious beliefs are staying away from the weed. Yeah, so their team founded individuals to regularly attend church and report that religion is very important in their daily decision making, are less likely to use marijuana both recreationally and medically, and a study is published in the Journal of Drug Issues. This study used data from a 2016 national survey on drug use and health, random sample of the U.S. adult population in that survey. I don't have how big that survey was unfortunately. We know from a quotey voice, we know various forms of substance abuse have increased amongst older adults as well, Burdett says. So we need to know what's going on among people in their 30s, 40s, 50s in terms of their substance use. And that's referencing the fact that past studies you typically focus on like teen use or young adult usage of drugs, but don't really focus on the rest of our society. And the study researchers examined three focal variables, religious salience, religious service, attendance, and self-rated health. Levels of religious attendance ranged from never attending services to attending more than once a week, which is really like really trying to kiss up to God. You go more than once a week. Researchers found that with every level of increased attendance, the odds of being a recreational marijuana user reduced by 13%. Study found the likelihood of recreational marijuana use decreased by 20% as religious salience levels increased. Researchers also examined the association between religious involvement and marijuana use of adults in poor health. They found that religious involvement was less effective in deterring marijuana use amongst sickly adults, whether that was recreational or medically prescribed. This is Burdett. You have two big institutions coming against each other when you're suffering and in poor health. You might have your pastor highly stigmatizing its use, saying it's bad, it's a drug, you shouldn't do this. While your doctor says, try this, it could help your pain and suffering. With the impact of religion and society starting to decline, Burdett said perhaps more people are deferring to a medical authority. Researchers said further study could include personality types and the religious affiliation of individuals. They also noted that the data is based on self-reports and people were potentially more likely to avoid reporting socially undesirable behaviors because it was self-reported. Yeah, and that's a big aspect to all these studies. If it is self-reported that, you know, like what is it, if for alcohol, they double it. Whatever your report, it's probably double that. Yeah, there's still a big stigma even though it's technically not illegal anymore. There's still kind of this fear that workplaces and other places will have issues with it. So I think people are really afraid to talk about it. But I think the question should be is as you become less or more religious, are you less or more likely to falsely self-report your use? Yeah, that's religion that you're talking about. I was also wondering, there's some religions that also discourage alcohol consumption. And I wonder if there's a link there, right? Because I'm guessing that if you're not supposed to drink, like in the Mormon religion, right, you're probably not supposed to smoke either. You're not even supposed to have coffee. You're not supposed to have coffee. I feel like you're probably not supposed to drink today. So religious relationship, this was over, it was religious as a broad subject. Yeah, which there are other sects as well that also discourage substance use of any sort. I'm actually not sure that there's one that encourages it. No, no, not necessarily. Yeah, are they counting Rastafariism? That would be Rastafari, yeah. But I think it is very interesting though, I mean, if you are sickly, if you're in pain, at a certain point, you're going to do whatever, you could do whatever you can to get rid of that pain, right? You're going to do whatever it takes to make yourself feel better. And so it is interesting that that stood out in the study. Well, especially, sorry. But it could also be, like I said, they could be more likely to be willing to talk about it because they're like, I don't feel good and this is where I'm at. Well, and we were just talking about the hearing aids too. Insurance doesn't always cover the drugs that you need. Insurance leads to high priced opioids, things like this. So if there's an alternative out there that's much more affordable, as we often can be. And better for you, it doesn't build up. You don't build up taxes for it. You don't, you know, it doesn't change the way your brain circuitry forms. Well, that, no, it doesn't. Absolutely it does. Not, no, no, no. It doesn't pair connections or limit brain connections. It's a whole other subject. But another story. This is a new study published in the Journal of Scientific Study of Religion. Team of researchers led by Florida State University. Oh, look, it's the associate professor Amy Brunette again. She here examined the correlation or lack thereof between drug use and church attendance for women who are mothers. Research found it had no effect whatsoever. The amount of religiosity and church attendance had no effect on women's misuse of prescription drugs, including prescription opioids. Quoty voice. Religious involvement matters for illegal drug use because religious communities directly condemn this behavior. However, religious communities are just beginning to even discuss the dangers of prescription drug abuse. Specifically, researchers found the probability of engaging in illicit drug use was significantly lower amongst these women who attend church at least once a week compared to those reported attending services a couple of times a year or less, which was true for marijuana use in her hour last story. For that study used, for this study, used data from the fragile families and child well-being study. This is a survey of nearly 5,000 children born between 1998 and 2000 to mostly unmarried parents. The study consisted of interviews with mothers and fathers at the time of the child's birth. And again, when the children were one, three, five, nine, 15 years old, her team, her Dutch team, examined the population of mothers who were primarily single and of low socioeconomic status. Our findings regarding the effects of religious involvement on substance abuse have implications for health and well-being across generations, she says. And this is just fun fact here, is estimated that prescription opioid misuse costs the United States more than 55 billion in expenditures related to healthcare, lost productivity and criminal justice, according to a recent report from the analysis group, a financial strategy consulting firm. It also killed more people than traffic accidents in 2016, which is somewhere upwards of 20,000 people. And whereas the overdoses from marijuana, apparently we're none. Yeah, well, and it's contributing to the homelessness problem, the opioid epidemic and all of that. It's a good thing to look at, especially with legalization happening, right? If that's something that somebody can turn to instead of an opioid, when we know that there's this extreme risk of addiction in those cases, something we should be start talking about. Is it addiction? And it also stops working. Like people report long-term use that they have feelings of being sedated, but they can still feel the pain, right? So that's something that is, even though the medical marijuana usage doesn't impact the pain as much, it's effects don't wear off over time. So if you're talking about a chronic long-term pain that needs to constantly be addressed, it would seem to be an obviously better solution if you were just looking at these two by themselves. Yeah, it's a cultural issue. It's what do we say is bad and what is good. The medical industry says this is good. This is, yeah, it's a cultural issue. We need to shift to the cultural understanding. Yes. Something that is kind of a cultural issue. We drink lots of coffee, right? I love coffee. Oh, I'm against them. I would not be awake right now if it were not for coffee. I really wish I'd said earlier in the show, I really wish that I had had a cup of coffee before the show, but I didn't. But anyway, it's not about, this story is not about coffee for you or me, unless of course you are a diabetic mouse. Not the last time I've checked. I didn't wanna talk about this on the air. Justin, you're a mouse and you're diabetic? I'm just saying, now it's all cards on the table. But yet it's almost as if I always knew. So the researchers, I mean, so far the system, it's they're gonna be testing it and they're gonna be testing in humans. They have a proof of concept in mice, but really so far what they have shown is that they can treat diabetes in cells in a dish with caffeine, with coffee, yeah. So the researchers, researchers have, they're from ETH Zurich in Basel, Switzerland. And they have shown that caffeine can trigger certain genetic circuits, synthetic genetic circuits. So basically the caffeine can be the push the button to turn something on in the body or in the brain. And so these researchers published in Nature Communications that they have created a system in which they have, they're using caffeine to target a substance called a camelid antibody. It's known as acaf VHH. It binds to caffeine and then dimerizes, which means that they're two of them dimers. In other words, it bonds up when it like, it holds onto the caffeine molecule in this R's technical article that says it snuggles the caffeine molecule. And the researchers took advantage of this to be able to put in a system that has a regulator and then gets activated when it dimerizes to start a transcription factor called STAT 3. And we know that transcription factors are important because they start the process of transcribing or up-regulate the transcription, the copying of DNA. It controls gene expression. And so these researchers engineered parts of DNA that STAT 3 matches to and combines with so that they could create this whole enzyme system called SEAP. But anyway, the whole system, the way that it works is basically if you add caffeine, you can turn on this SEAP. And the SEAP is being used to control a human hormone called glucagon-like peptide 1. Oh my God, this is brilliant. You know how brilliant? This means like, it's like, okay, we're gonna tie something that you really like doing to something within your body that can give you a medical benefit. That's right. So your morning cup of coffee, it's going to up-regulate your insulin levels. So that you'll be fine for the morning. Wait, what drink am I drinking? You're just gonna go to bed and come. I'm gonna prescribe you coffee. Yep. Ha, ha, ha. But you have to be very careful about how you measure it out. That is so fantastic. Three tablespoons of grounds and eight ounces of water. Wow. Yeah, it's interesting though. I mean, the idea that you could treat yourself if you've got, say, an implant that lasts in your body for six to nine months, maybe up to a year. And you need to go to the doctor and get the implant put in once a year, twice a year, something like that. The rest of the time, you just drink coffee to regulate your blood sugar. That's great. Yeah. But it could be anything. They just sort of picked coffee, I think, right? Like, like you- Tea. Dark chocolate. Yeah, have a piece of dark chocolate. You need, it has to now, and then don't- Right, right. Anything with caffeine in it, yes? Right. Red bull. Although, wait a second. That'll give you diabetes. Yeah, hang on. We're cross-purposed. Yeah, so the thing that they- The thing is, they picked caffeine, but couldn't it also be like, you need it and it specifically has to be green M&M's. The red ones won't work. You have the green M&M's, at least three of them a day, and that's gonna treat- Something in a dye we've tied to the release, and that's what you now need it. Like, they could pick kind of anything and tie it in, right? They could, but not anything, anything. So some things have negative side effects, and so researchers have been looking for these triggering molecules that could be used to kind of trigger artificial, these artificial circuitry cascades. And so they've looked at antibiotics, but then you could get drug resistance. Food additives can have side effects. Sugar is something that isn't necessary, that could potentially work, but it too has its own side effects. Caffeine, we know that in limited reasonable quantities, it's non-toxic. It's not very expensive to produce. It's really not present in a lot of things. You know, you have to kind of go out of your way to get something with caffeine in it. And if you want a cup of coffee, but don't need your insulin monitor, you can have a decaf cup of coffee. Yeah, the researchers think capitalizing on routine cultural habits, coffee and tea drinking, therapies based on such symptoms should seamlessly integrate into people's lifestyle, and therefore could be a key pillar upon which the new generation of personalized medicine can build. Less pills you have to buy is always good. Absolutely, yeah. Anyway, they didn't see any caffeinated side effects in their mice. So they think this could work in people. So that's up next. Very cool. Justin, what have you got? Anything else? I got a couple more stories. What is glial cells? It looks like glials. They may be active influencers of learning, according to University of California Riverside researchers. They sort of discovered that they do a, this overproduction. They can do an overproduction of F-RIN B1. This is either specifically what is astrocytes can have this F-RIN B1 production. And when this takes place, it can lead to neuro-G generation. But it turns out this is also a normal thing that astrocytes are supposed to do. They're helping prune sort of unwanted synapses. Which is, you know, if you remember everything, every moment, like this, I've met people with photographic memories and I always can't help thinking that must get annoying. I mean, it's a fun parlor trick, but, ah. Yeah, I don't need to know my friend from ninth grade's dog's name. That needs to get out of there. Right, that's actually not what it is, you guys. So the pruning of the synapses, this is a very important part of the strengthening of memories. So you have all of these pathways that signals are going down, but the strongest ones survive. And the weak ones that don't connect very well to other neurons, they get pruned out and die back. And so what I believe would be going on here is that F1 and B1 would be used by the astrocytes to get rid of kind of the unwanted, negative feedback loops that maybe weaken memories that want to be strengthened. So okay, so in the lab, researchers are officially increased levels of F1 and B1, and mice tested them for memory retention. They found that the mice could not remember a behavior they had just learned. In cell culture studies, they added neurons to astrocytes and overexpressed F1 and B1. And we were able to see synapse removal with the astrocytes, air-coatties, eating up the synapses. So excessive loss of synapses could be a problem. So Ethel, who's somebody who's on the study. Ethel came from. The hippocampus in the region of the brain associated primarily with memory is plastic. Here, new neuronal connections are formed when we learn something new, but the hippocampus has limited capacity. Some connections need to go. Make space for new connections, new memories. To learn, we must forget. In contrast to an F1 and B1 increase, when this protein decreases, it results in more synapses and better learning. The astrocytes, in this case, are not able to attach to the synapses themselves. But you don't want to remember anything. This is Amanda Nguyen, Neuroscience graduate program, student working in Ethel's lab and first co-author of the research paper. It's all about maintaining a balance, being able to learn, but also to forget. Advice from the researchers here. Keep the brain and the neurons. Keep your brain and your neurons active, they say. The best advice is to read and solve puzzles. Or listen to this week in science. Or absolutely. Keep thinking. Listen to this week in science is actually better than reading. Yeah, yeah. And it was Irina Ethel, professor of biomedical sciences at the School of Medicine who led this research. Right, there's Ethel. We found her. We found her. We like it. Good work, Irina. Good work. We love the glial cells. They are turning out to be so important to so many things. Researchers publishing in Nature Communications this last week are using light to do biological origami. Yeah, it's really kind of an interesting methodology that they are using. Researchers at an institute called EMBL are basically using optogenetics. They're controlling protein activity with light in the cells. And so by controlling certain protein activity, they are able to change the shape of specific tissues as tissues develop, say, in an embryo. And so they have created various a variety of shapes in embryonic tissue. In kind of a way, the idea is to understand how things like the endoderm are formed. How do we get, how do the tissues form and give rise to our intestines, our stomach, the shapes of the muscles, all the internal tissues, how does that happen? And so the researcher, Lorenzis, who led the study, he said, we've uncoupled the link between the shape and function of a cell. And this allows us, for the first time, to build tissues in certain shapes without affecting the cell's expertise. And so this study, what they're hoping it will do, it will, they're hoping that it will lead them in the direction of reconstruction and direction of tissue development for the building of artificial tissues for regenerative medicine. Mr. Jackson, we have successfully rebuilt your heart. And we did it shape like a heart. Happy Valentine's Day. Let's see, I have other fun stories. Fun, fun, fun. Oh, I got one. Oh, you have another one. Okay, go for it. Okay, last story, it's a quick story. Dinosaurs were more polite than you might have thought. At least the T-Rex was. On account of, he couldn't stick his tongue out at ya. Oh, I thought you were gonna say that he lifted his pinky when he ate. Yeah, it turns out, these are researchers at the University of Texas, Austin, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. We're looking at the hyoid bone. Bones that support and ground the tongue. And they found that most of the dinosaurs they tested were like modern-day crocodiles. And the tongue is fixed to the bottom. That's what I was gonna say, just like a crocodile. Just like a crocodile, yeah. They also found some interesting things. There's a group of plant-eating dinosaurs, which is, what is it? Where's the alkylosaur, the triceratops, and a couple others that have a different morphology. As well as they found this sort of interesting link between flying wizards, I guess you would say. Pterosaurs? Yeah, that have a different morphology more. Which they think might also, there's sort of a connection they found between flight and the evolution of birds and the way the tongue morphology might have had to do with the requirements of breathing while flying. But the kind of the overarching point was if you're eating meat, a tongue doesn't help you hold your food. Right. So you don't really need it. But if you're eating plants, you kind of need to keep manipulating them around a little bit, right? Yeah, but that also means that they're not using their tongue to smell at all. Oh, interesting. Yeah. So I'm sitting right with them. Yeah, maybe they didn't have a great sense of smell using those test receptors. Because they don't have the nasal turbinates of a mammal. They don't have a palate. So if there's that and they can't stick out their tongue, they probably don't have what snakes and lizards have a Jacobson's organ, right? That helps them smell with their tongue. So that's very interesting. That actually is quite telling. Interesting. Very interesting. Which for T-Rex that eats dead things, you would think they'd have a good sense of smell, right? Or maybe maybe just maybe they wouldn't need that. Well, like how much is dead things smell? A lot. And maybe you just want to smell it to know where it is so you can find it. But then when you're eating it, you're going to eat. Like, who wants to smell that? I don't need to smell it anymore. So turkey vultures, for example, excellent sense of smell. So they find it. Absolutely wonderful. Yes. So more on nutrition. Turns out that wonderful Mediterranean diet that we've all been told we should eat. More on nutrition? It's an intro game way to start it. What's the Mediterranean diet? Tomatoes and feta cheese and cucumbers and falafel? That's right. It's like grains, lots of fish and olive oils and yeah. Yes. Okay. Yummy foods that I like a lot. But people have been told that the Mediterranean diet is basically going to make them have good health. That there was a study that looked at a whole bunch of published randomized trials and the results, it was determined. Yes. The Mediterranean diet is going to fix you. It's going to fix your heart. People who eat the Mediterranean diet get healthy. Well, that study has been retracted. Oh. You mean a fat diet, isn't the silver bullet? I'm sure. Wait, not updated? Not nuance-ically? It's nuanced. Yeah, so what happened is some of the study groups and study individuals who are supposed to have been put in particular samples of different types of diets, well, turned out they weren't as randomly assigned as people thought they were. So sometimes it was like, man, your neighbors keep bugging me about how come you get the olive oil and I don't get the olive oil. So I'm just going to give the whole village the olive oil. So the researchers gave in to interpersonal squabbles and pressures to make the study happen at all and to get people on to certain diets. But as a result, it wasn't as cleanly controlled as it was said to be. And so now the finding- This is where we work with mice, people, because of- Yeah, exactly. So now, how instead of the Mediterranean diet causing better health outcomes, they are merely correlated with better health outcomes. And so the nuance now is this is a very important nuance because in science, correlation does not equal causation. And so for a doctor to prescribe a Mediterranean diet now, the significance is not there. Yeah. Correlated. There are a lot of things that are correlated. There are things that are correlated, but then you look at what's in the Mediterranean diet and there's not like- I can't think of any large outliers where it's like, yeah, you eat that without moderation, you will die from. But it's not saying it is now causing bad health outcomes. That's not what it's saying at all. It's just not causing the causative positive health or your heart. That has not been shown. Still not sad. If you're comparing it to the sausage and Red Bull diet, I think it's going to win. If you're going to compare diets then. And don't you have to. Otherwise, what are we talking about? Yeah. So it's kind of like other studies you've talked about today already. Just eat healthier people. Just eat healthier. And maybe have what you eat not contain BPA in any way, study published. What would you do with that? No, don't. It's something that's in the plastic linings of cans. You know, I probably eat a ton of it with my tuna cans. This is the thing I've tried to ignore. Yeah. I mean, it's just this thing, this phenyl A that is in a lot of plastics. And anyway, the previous studies that haven't characterized long-term effects of BPA exposure in grandparents might affect offspring. And this study published in the journal PLOS one out of the University of Missouri found that little mouse pups, not humans. These are mice. No, because they have been all into the olive oil. Wouldn't have even completed this. Exactly. So these little mouse pups whose grandparents, not parents, mind you, grandparents had been exposed to BPA, had differences in their vocalization patterns. And so differences in vocalization patterns, when it comes to the rearing and of offspring, the communication between parent and child, in turn could also affect the amount of parental care received by those offspring. And they believe that this could have relevance to humans. Researcher Cheryl Rosenfeld says rodent pups use vocalizations to communicate with one or both parents, as in the case of biparental species, such as California mice. There are potential concerns that developmental exposure to BPA might increase an infant's risk for autism spectrum disorder. Crying is the infant's earliest communication form and changes in crying vocalization patterns might provide the earliest diagnostic tool for autism spectrum disorders. So it's important to determine whether multi-generational exposure to BPA can alter these pup vocalization patterns. And one of the largest exposures that people have is it's receipts. Right. So I never let anybody give me a receipt anymore. Like if I like, I don't need a receipt. I'll say that walk it in. If you have no receipts is an option. You can email a thing to me if you want. Otherwise I just, but I'm not touching a receipt. Nope. Know that your return policy allows look up my credit card number because otherwise. Triclosan, we know it's bad. Now we really know it's bad. Researchers publishing in a journal called Environment International showed that Triclosan induces heritable multi-drug resistance in E. coli. The oxidative stress that's caused by Triclosan caused mutations in genes in the E. coli bacteria. These mutations led to resistance by upregulating certain enzymes. And so as a result, they conclude we really should not be using Triclosan in our antibacterial soaps. No, we should not. And I think, I think too, like there is enough conversation that I hear at least and hopefully it's taking place other places than immediately around me. People getting a little bit more comfortable living in a microbial filled world. Like the word microbe isn't scary to everyone. In a microbe world, I'm a microbe girl. Microbes. We may end up, we may end up, I think I'm hoping at least that people are, are becoming less of a microbial paranoia and buying less of this antimicrobial everything junk. And that we can get back to a world where like, you know, humans are swimming in microbes and it's okay, Blair. Yeah. You're gonna be okay with that. No, I'm fine. It's okay, just keep taking showers. No, I'm great. I'm, I, now I will sometimes think like, oh man, I didn't wash my hands. I have to eat. Should I use this antibacterial hand sanitizer? Nah. All right. Yeah. If we get Blair, if we get Blair, we got the world. We're going to be fine. Oh my gosh. No diseases are going to spread everywhere. Okay. I, I wash hands when I know I've been in close contact with yucky things. There we go. And the antibacterial hand sanitizers that are like alcohol that kill the bacteria, those are fine because they're just killing things outright. It's things like triclosan that, that actually influence this genetic mutation. Those are the things that we want to watch out for. So the soaps that have the triclosans in them. Get, nope, nope, don't do that. The soaps and the cums. The cums. The mouse pads that they were putting out into everything. We really need to, we need to fix this hole. We need to get it moving on the antibacterial surface structure because I really feel like that's the way to go. It's not the chemical antibacterial. The surface is covered in tons of little tiny knives. Yeah. It's the shark skin. Everything out of shark skin. We need to have like a month where nobody bathes and will eliminate so many diseases. Also eliminate some cubits. Yeah. People won't be talking to each other. Good. And let's see. Yeah. What do I have finally here? Oh yeah. This is, this is a fun one. Something that people are obviously using too much of. Cocaine. It's ending up in the water. And people are dumping cocaine and other drugs into waters. And you know what? This is a problem for the fish. So as a result. To figure out how big of a problem it is. Researchers published a study in science of the total environment. A partial environment. Science of the total environment. In which they, they put European eels in cocaine contaminated water for a couple of months to see what happened. And they got, they got really talkative. And they were asleep. What is it we do around here? We, we take the eels. And we put them in cocaine. We put the eels in it and see what happens. Wow. That's gonna be awesome. My last place we had spiders in the winter. I thought that was cool. This is gonna be amazing. They started rolling up their, their suit jackets up to the elbow. That's right. So, low and behold, they found out that cocaine builds up in the bodies. The changes the muscles, changes the hormones in the eels. And then when the eels are removed from that environment. Oh, it had a lasting effect harming them forever. Well, at least as long as the eels were allowed to live before they were sacrificed in the name of science. Right. Yeah. This is really good. I cannot believe how much I am enjoying this. Right now. This is, I don't even like sushi. Try the sunagi. It's delicious. You should try the sunagi. So, okay. So, that was a slightly more serious question. Is this, is this like how antibiotics get into a waterway? Is it passing through bodies they think? Or is this like law enforcement? Because most, is it law enforcement going, we've confiscated and now the way we get rid of it is we flush it. I don't think most people who are. All of the above. So there are people who are dumping stashes. There are people who are flushing it down the toilets. There are people who are urinating it out of their systems after ingesting the substances. Cocaine is just one of many. This experiment focused on cocaine, but we've talked about it before. We've got hormones from birth control. We have all the pills and medications that people take. So, the bodies don't use all of them. And a lot of them leave our bodies and enter the water ways in fully active form. And it is not always capable, possible to clean the water supply before it goes out into our waterways. So fresh water animals especially are going to be affected a lot. But so, it's a question, you know, it affects us. that, but how is it affecting the animals in the environment where this stuff is ending up? What are the low levels? Yeah, what's the solution to that? I mean, you can try to do better filtration systems, but as you said, when there's a flood or hot heavy rains, a lot of times overspill is bypassed straight to the output. And so yeah, how do you even fix that? You changed disposal systems somehow? I don't know. Yes. This is just, you know, we impact our environment. This is one of the many ways. And so it's good to understand it. And maybe we can find a way to fix it. Some smart person out there is going to figure out how to keep the eels off cocaine. Do you want to hear of another way that humans are altering the environment? Yes, because my disclaimer was entirely based on the story. So mammals are going nocturnal. Why? To avoid humans. So this is from the University of California, Berkeley. They found that animals are all over and across genera, all types of animals, but specifically mammals are adjusting their behavior to make them more nocturnal. They looked at 62 species across six continents, and they found a global shift. There were 1.36 times more nocturnal animals in response to human disturbance. So that means that an animal that naturally split its activity between day and night 5050 increases nighttime activity to 68% when there are people nearby. And this is across different types of human disturbance, hunting, hiking, mountain buying, biking, infrastructure like roads, settlements, residences, agriculture, all these things across the board moved animals to being more nocturnal. So that's shocking in some ways, not so shocking in other ways. And ultimately might actually not be that bad, because this means that they're actually adapting to humans in a way that might reduce conflict with the humans in the long term. So that would be great. But on the flip side, that does mean that there may be in the short term mismatches between environment and animals traits and adaptations. So skin disrupt forging behavior, increased vulnerability to predators, this could heighten competition, reduce sizes and niches. But you know, people will often say that, you know, humans are affecting wildlife, this is a big problem. And I agree with that. But also this is one of those moments here to take step back and remember that humans are also animals. And so if we are altering our environment, animals will adjust to it. And so if this is potentially a way that we can find at least as some species peace. Yeah, we're terrifying so many species that they're choosing to exist in darkness rather than be anywhere we are. Yeah, think about just think about the noise, if nothing else, think about human noise for in nature, where noise can mean death, you have to be quiet, you have to sneak around in everything that you do to get your food to not become food. And there's just human noise everywhere. Noise, noise, noise, noise, noise. So that alone is going to be a huge problem. But yeah, so animals are adjusting. And then my very last story is about VR, virtual reality, which I often kind of make fun of. And I talk about it like it's, you know, potentially dangerous. Well, the University of Maryland has found a huge upside to VR, which is that people learn better through virtual immersive environments than on traditional platforms like desktop computers or handheld tablets. Now, here's the funny thing about that. That's considered the traditional platform, which when I first saw the story, I thought it was going to be, you know, versus like a classroom. But no, this is a limited experience. So VR versus computer or tablet, these immersive environments could offer new pathways for better outcomes in education. And they did this through a memory place. So people recall an object or item by placing it in an imaginary physical location. And then this creates a spatial mnemonic for people. So for example, Abraham Lincoln, Dalai Lama, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Marilyn Monroe, they were all put in places. So an interior room of an ornate palace, an external view of a medieval town. And then they were able to navigate the space for five minutes, either in the VR, just moving around or on the desktop computer, moving around their mouse, right? And then they asked users to memorize the location. And then they were asked to recall it later. After a two minute break, they were asked to, there were boxes with numbers and they had to say who was in each box. By virtually navigating the scene, they could actually determine that, for example, Hillary Clinton was on the top left window about 20 yards away from you. So an 8.8% improvement was shown overall in accuracy using VR headsets. So that was a huge significant change. This leads to the possibility of VR memory palace uses and immersive environments in all sorts of different things, medical training, other things like that. But they did not test it against experiential learning, which is what I would like to see is the VR versus real life. Yeah, like, can you do a simulated operation or what if you tour the brain in VR versus looking at it in a laboratory? You know, when you've got your hands in a wet lab and you're looking at the brain and touching it with your hands, how does that compare? Great question. Yeah. I mean, this is this is an interesting question, especially as a study came out this week, suggesting that students who who watch lectures but don't go to lectures. So when lectures are recorded, and they watch them at different times, they do not perform as well as those students who actually go to lecture. That makes complete sense to me. However, there are various reasons that could underlie this for sure. They still, I would assume, perform better than students that didn't do either. Truth. Yes. So a lot of this, a lot of this, you know, learning by webinar, learning about a surgery virtually is because it's access to more people this way than would be able to be there in person or actually perform the open heart surgery or whatever it would be, right? So so you have to keep in mind it's not as it shouldn't be thought of as the replacement, but an expansion of getting more people closer to or some level or degree of education in a subject that might have otherwise been limited. Yeah. VR is going to be very exciting. I think the opportunities there allowing people to explore the surface of the moon, go to places on earth, you know, that we've only started looking at, you know, doing virtual reality exploration of the Marianas Trench, you know, these kinds of things. You'll never, which one of us, how often are we going to get a chance to do something like that in real life? But in VR, you can. I explored the African savannah in a VR experience a couple of weeks ago. It was breathtaking. Yeah, there you go. Oh, breathtaking science. We have made it to the end of another show. It took us a lot of breath, but we made it. We hope that you are here with us and that you enjoyed our exploration of science of the last couple of weeks. It is time now for me to say thank you to those of you who are out there watching and listening. Thank you for joining us, those of you who are in our chat rooms. Thank you for being in the chat rooms and chatting and being a part of the conversation. If you helped us out in any way, thank you so much. Thank you to Fada for helping out with the show notes and over on YouTube and also helping out with social media. Brandon, thank you for simulcasting us to Facebook and Identity 4. Thank you for recording the show without you. It would be much harder to make the podcast happen, but take me a lot more work. All of you help in your various ways. And on Patreon, those of you who support us on Patreon, thank you very much. 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Because it's this week in science, this week in science, science, 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 that we're not trying to threaten your philosophy. We're just trying to save the world from Japanese. 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, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye. Because it's this week in science, this week in science, science, science, this week in science, science, science, this week in 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. The help, can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one hour a week? This week in science is coming your way. You better just listen to what we say and if you learn anything from the words that we've said, then please just remember it's all in your head. It's this week in science, this week in science, science, 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. We have come to the end of another show. So many microbes, there you go. I'm a microbe girl in a microbe world, made of microbes. I can't think of something that rhymes with that. Made of microbes, making my clothes. So who do we have there? Sonny to Olivia has been listening to the show since about 2010. Awesome. 8am. Yes, that was a KDBS thing. Sonny has been with us since KDBS, huh? You have a very important request for the post show. He has a very important request. Oh, go get my wigs. Post show. Get your wigs. Interesting. It's thunder and lightning in Portland. I just got the weather report. I'm going not too far out from the Bay Area this weekend, but I'm going on a little weekend trip. And the predicted high each day this weekend is 97. And the forecast for Saturday says sizzling sunshine. Semi-colon. Sizzling. Very hot. Somebody's getting snappy. I know. You don't even want to know how hot it's going to be. No. So today was 92. Tomorrow is going to be 75. And there's a thunderstorm and it was 92? Yeah, it was hot today. It was 90s. And then it started getting very muggy. Were you just in the snow a second ago? I know, right? You were, right? Didn't you just post something to social media where you were in snow? I did. Yes, I did post that. I was in the snow because I was near the top of Mount Hood. Yes, I for the weekend went on a family trip to a wonderful place called Sun River, Oregon, which is just delightful. I got to hike in a lava tube. And what else did we do? Oh, yeah. And I found little translucent worms in the lava tube. I was like, yeah, I'm caving and finding biology. That was exciting. But yes, on the way home, we drove up over, past over Mount Hood and drove up to Timberline, Timberline Lodge. I guess there's some shot from the Timberline Lodge that was used in the Shining, very famous old hotel, part of the National Park Service. But it's literally at the Timberline. It's like at the, it's three miles from the peak of Mount Hood. And so there's just people were walking like we drove up and there were people wearing, wearing their snowboarding and skiing clothes and carrying their snowboards around. They had just been, just been shredding at the top of the mountain, at the top of the volcano. Yeah, that was pretty awesome. Oh, we have Aussies meeting each other in the chat room. How cute. Oh, Leek and XXO Bot are both from Australia, but different areas. That's right. Say hello to each other. Okay, what did Sonny Oliveira say? One of my main regrets in life is I don't yet have the show's soundtrack. Please make it so we can buy it again. It is pretty awesome, isn't it? It's very cool. But I can, I believe we have links most of the time in our YouTube show. Yeah, but in our YouTube show notes for not all the songs, but the songs that we use in the show, there are external links to some of those songs. And I do know that Jake Mann, what song is that? So, yeah, Jake Mann, who did first assumptions were correct. I think that song is available, I think through one of the band camp or something like that. I think he's got it available. He's got it registered. And then the twist theme songs, I think those also might be posted somewhere. We've got links for them somewhere, not all the songs, but some of the songs. But yeah, it's funny, I've got this box upstairs in my attic where I've got like 10 or so CDs of all of all the music compilations that we ever made. I've got some extras. You still have a CD player? In my car, yeah, but I also have an iPod hooked up to it. So either one would suffice. Yeah, I think the problem is I would have to try to redo it because it was compilations and these were all different people and they've got the songs registered all over the place. I honestly don't know how I would go about all of the, like, getting the licensing just to put it all together. I'm just talking about me. Just you, yes. I'm just talking about me. We could worry about everybody else later once I've got the tune. Once you've got it. Oh, I know, Sonny, you're like, no. The CDs are amazing. Actually, long time millions may remember this, but for a period of time our theme song was such as it was. And then suddenly we no longer use it and it became the theme song to the Big Bang television show. Yeah, no, it's a song by the Dandy Warholz called Scientists by the Dandy Warholz or We Are Scientists. And we used it for years because we were on noncommercial radio, but then when we went off the radio, we're not noncommercial, even though we don't run commercials, we're technically not noncommercial. So we couldn't legally play it anymore. Bummer. And it got picked up. And we got our home. Apparently people watch this. That must be it. That must be it. Yes. I'm just excited. I'm very excited because we ended up getting our own theme songs from amazing musicians who wrote us these great theme songs and I love them. The music still is good. It still stands up today. I don't know if Neil Shirley is out there, but if Neil Shirley is out there and wants to write us another, if he and his brother want to write us another song, I keep talking about it. I keep talking about doing another music compilation. It just takes work and extra time. And I just need, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just organizational. It doesn't have a lot of fans. Although to your point, I don't know how many people would buy a CD. Well, I don't think it would have to be a CD necessarily. It's a matter of putting songs together in a compilation and having it as a digital download from the website. Oh, from the website. Because I don't even know how you make a compilation in iTunes. That sounds like you don't. You'd have to go through another outlet, not iTunes. Yeah, you'd have to like get published through. It's like you can do it through stuff like Bandcamp and stuff, I think. But it's also great because it's also a good exposure for the artists. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I still have a disc man. Just, you know, that's how I listen to my books on tape, my books on CD. I just, as a present, got the first four Harry Potter books on CD because I was still listening to them on tape and they were getting to the point where they're, then Harry Potter. Why don't you just get it on your phone? Because I don't want to. I didn't know that Harry Potter existed back when there were cassettes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The first four books, I got them when they came out on cassette tape. Yeah, so, Sonny, yes, I could rip the CDs into flak files, but I still, I mean, for a lot of these, I still have the original, I mean, not mastered. I've got the original, I've got the original CDs that were used to run the CD runs. I've got all the things. I've got boxes of things. I'm a pack rat because someday we're going to open a This Week in Science Museum or somebody's going to want to save all these things. Yeah, but we could, the problem is I could rip the CDs into flak files, but I have to get permission and the permissions are the hard part. I don't know. I need somebody to work on the logistics for me. Blayer, no. I'm sorry, isn't that a job for our new intern? For our intern, that's a job for our, oh, my intern is sleeping right now. Is it cat? Yeah, not a great intern kind of does what it wants. Yeah, next thing you know, she'll be on the show. Great emotional support. She'll have her own segment. That's right. Ed from Connecticut is promoting the library ebook and audio book app Libby. Yes, for the library. Yeah, you can get audio books and ebooks from the library through it. It's great. Never go to the library again. No. My local library now has an ATM machine type thing that you walk up to to give the books back. Like you scan them back into the inventory and put them into this thing. Oh, I like that. Yeah, because recently I put some stuff in the drop in the book drop and they told me I never returned it. What? Yeah, I think that's part of like where that came about. They were spending, you know, all of this time trying to track down books that turned out that they already had or something. Yeah, yeah. Human error. Yeah, it's a thing that exists. Yeah, can't type. I am typing when I can just say it out loud. Yes, Bleak, the task I was vaguely shopping around is that if I'm going to make the twist compilation music CDs available for digital download online, I need to get permission again from the artists, from each of the artists on each of the CDs. Actually, I could do that. That's not hard. I could do that. But it's getting permission and then if they, I don't, yeah. But I mean, if I can just, yeah, if I can get permission and then just take the FLAC files and you know, put it on the website and make it available, make them available for free download. Yeah. Not, you know, not for sale. That'd be great. You know, it's like if we were to put it for sale at this point in time, I think I would need to share revenue with the artists, which makes it more complicated. Right. So, yeah. Well, just put it for free download and then you have the same PayPal button at the bottom. Right. So it's free. Oh, well, you're here. Do you want to donate to TWIST? That's different. TWIST, well, you're here. Yeah. Yeah, I need to get, I need to get, I need to clear it. I need to get permission from all of the artists on the difference, the different CDs we had, but four or five of them. Yeah, that was a bunch. Yeah, I can't, I mean. You have contact? Permission for permission. Do you have like email addresses for those people or is that part of the problem is that you, you can't find them? That's a great question. Well, we don't know because nobody has tried. But this is why I'm stepping up. Number one, see if the contact information works. Yeah. Oh my goodness. Yeah, I have one, one computer that probably has all of that old email correspondence on it that from when I, before I started using Gmail and if that computer dies, then all those records go away. I still have an old computer tower that I'm like, there's stuff in there that I should recover one day, but it hasn't been plugged in for. That's like my dissertation. Now I'm like, I don't know if it's compatible with anything. I have an external hair drive, hard drive that has a lot of stuff on it. And I wonder, because it's been a while since I started up, like wonder if that'll even start. Like that was the big idea, right? It was get this external hard drive, just offload all your crap on there. And then it'll be there. It'll be there, right? But who's to say that that external hard drive is even, is it all more reliable than a computer? Or compatible, like we do not recognize this. Right, hot rod, yes, if the hard drive dies. Yes. Hard drive dies, then it's a, yes, all gone, bye-bye. This is why I really like the cloud, even though it's putting my faith in other people. It's like, yeah, but I'm not doing very great on my own. So maybe other people are better to rely on. I have a very good authority that the Raspberry Pi can do anything that you want a computer to do. Pretty much, yeah. If you can figure out a Linux type of language, you can do anything. Burn it, do it, that'll be great. Hot rod saying for the musicians, mail them a twist coffee table cup holder. Even Steven. Table, what is a coffee table cup holder? Is that a coffee table shaped like a cup? It's a coffee table to put all your cups on. Yeah, oh, okay. You know, what I think it is, it's a hole in the coffee table that you put your cup in when you're going sailing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You got it, you got it. Holder, if it's in the cup holder. So the cup holder is actually the hole in the coffee table. Coffee table cup holder. Or is it a cup shaped with coffee tables on it, like pictures of coffee tables? It's a coffee table cup. There is a book holder like that. Coffee table book of the coffee table. Isn't that from the Simpsons? No, Seinfeld, that's what I meant to say. That from the Seinfeld. From the Seinfeld. Yeah. All right, I think it's time. It was silence. Good night, players. Say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. Thanks so much for another fun show. Really did have a good time. I'm glad I was glad to be back. Now, I am glad to go to bed. I hope you all have a wonderful week. Look at that smart guy right there. Yeah, look at that gray Einstein. The Duke again. Look at that just solid gray depiction of Einstein. What's actually kind of cool about this is it's what do you call it? Textured? It looks textured. It's threaded. It's a... It's a technicolor dream coat. What do you call it? What do you call it? It's stitched in. Stitched in. Embroidered. Embroidered. Thank you. There's the word embroidered. We're tired. That took too long to figure out that word. I know. My dad's in the garden, everyone. He's so angry. He's like screaming at the TV right now. It's called embroidery. How many of those have you folded? You learned how to cross stitch when you were seven. All right, everybody. Have a wonderful, wonderful week. Thank you once again for joining us. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Good night. Good night.